Can I love Jesus without caring about theology?

Question 6.

Can I love Jesus without caring about theology is one of the most sincere questions I am asked, and I never want to crush the heart behind it. Usually the person is reacting against something cold they have seen, a Christianity that knew all the right answers and somehow loved no one. I feel the force of that. But I still want to say, gently and firmly, that loving Jesus and caring about theology were never meant to be set against each other.

When someone tells me they would rather just love Jesus and leave the doctrine to others, I hear a good instinct buried under a misunderstanding. The instinct is that devotion matters more than information, and they are right about that. The misunderstanding is the idea that you can love a person you are content not to know.

Caring About Theology Is Knowing the One You Love

Theology, stripped of its intimidating reputation, just means knowing God truly. So when you say you want to love Jesus but you are not bothered about theology, you are really saying you want to love a person you would rather not understand. Put it in human terms and the strain shows at once. Imagine telling your wife that you adore her but you have no interest in who she actually is, what she thinks, or what she cares about. She would not feel loved. She would feel used.

Real love always wants to know its object better. The deeper the love, the deeper the curiosity. I have never met a man genuinely in love who was bored by the details of the woman he loved. Caring about theology is nothing more exotic than that same hunger turned towards Jesus, the longing to know Him as He really is and not as I have lazily imagined Him.

Jesus Asks for the Mind as Well as the Heart

When Jesus was asked for the greatest commandment, He answered that we are to love the Lord our God with all our heart and with all our soul and with all our mind. He did not leave the mind off the list. He named it deliberately. To love God with the mind is to think hard and truly about Him, and that is theology by another name.

I notice that the people who want to retire the mind from worship rarely manage it in any other area of love. They study the things they love. They read about them, talk about them, grow in understanding of them. Why should the Lord Jesus be the one subject where ignorance is treated as a virtue? Caring about theology is how we obey the command to love Him with the mind He gave us.

Think of Mary of Bethany, sitting at the feet of Jesus while her sister bustled in the kitchen. When Martha complained, the Lord gently defended Mary, saying she had chosen the good portion that would not be taken from her. What was Mary doing? She was listening, learning, drinking in His words. That is devotion and theology woven together in a single picture, a woman so in love with Jesus that she could not bear to miss a sentence He spoke. Nobody watching that scene would have accused her of cold intellectualism. She is the very opposite of the caricature people fear. Caring about theology, at its best, looks exactly like Mary at His feet, taking in the truth about her Lord because she loves Him. The hunger to know Him and the joy of loving Him are not two activities competing for her heart. They are one act of worship, and I would gladly take a church full of Marys, people who sit close and listen hard because they are smitten with the Saviour, over a room of busy souls who never pause long enough to learn who He really is.

The Danger of Loving a Jesus You Invented

Here is the quiet danger in setting love against knowledge. If you will not bother to learn who Jesus actually is, you will not stop having a picture of Him. You will simply keep the picture you already have, and there is no guarantee it bears much resemblance to the real Man. Paul warned the Corinthians about receiving another Jesus than the one he preached, and a different spirit, and a different gospel. That swap can happen to sincere people.

I have met warm, affectionate believers who loved a Jesus who would never confront them, never call them to repentance, never disturb their comfort. They loved him deeply. The trouble was that he did not exist. Caring about theology is the discipline that keeps our devotion fastened to the real Jesus of Scripture rather than a softer idol of our own making.

Knowledge Without Love Is Also a Failure

Now I must be fair to the worry that prompts the question, because it is not imaginary. Paul himself said that knowledge puffs up while love builds up, and that a man who understands all mysteries but has not love is nothing. Cold orthodoxy is real, and it is ugly, and Jesus reserved some of His sharpest words for people who had the Scriptures by heart and missed the heart of God entirely.

So I am not asking you to choose knowledge over love. I am asking you to refuse the choice altogether. The answer to cold doctrine is not no doctrine. It is warm doctrine, truth held in a loving heart. Caring about theology and loving Jesus are two hands of the same worship, and you do not honour Him by cutting one of them off.

Caring About Theology Without Going Cold

I understand the fear that caring about theology will turn a warm believer into a cold one, because I have watched it happen. There are people whose study of doctrine seems to have frozen them solid, all precision and no warmth, ready to win every argument and love no one. But when I look closely, the trouble is never that they cared about theology too much. It is that they cared about being right more than they cared about the God the theology describes. Caring about theology in the right way always drives me back to worship, because the more truly I come to know God, the more of Him there is to adore.

Think of how knowledge works in any deep friendship. The longer you know a good friend, the more their history, their character, and even their odd little habits become precious to you. Knowledge there does not kill affection, it deepens it. Caring about theology is meant to work the very same way towards God. Every true thing I learn about His patience, His holiness, and His mercy at the cross becomes fresh fuel for love rather than a replacement for it. Cold orthodoxy is never the fruit of too much knowledge. It is the fruit of knowledge cut off from prayer and wonder.

So the safeguard is not to care less about theology but to refuse to let study and devotion drift apart. Read the doctrine on your knees. Turn what you learn into thanksgiving. When a truth about Jesus grips your mind, let it travel the few inches down into your heart before you ever close the book. That is how caring about theology keeps you warm rather than cooling you, and it is exactly what the apostles modelled when their richest passages of teaching suddenly broke into praise. Paul could trace the deep things of God for eleven chapters of Romans and then burst out, oh, the depth of the riches and wisdom and knowledge of God.

Theology Guards the Treasure

There is a protective work that doctrine does for the very love you are trying to preserve. Peter ends his second letter not with a call to feel more but to grow in the grace and knowledge of our Lord and Saviour Jesus. He sets that growth directly against being carried away by the error of lawless people. Sound theology is the fence around the garden of your devotion.

If you want to see how this fits the bigger picture of why doctrine is for ordinary believers, I have written about what doctrine is and why it matters and about why everyone is already a theologian. Both feed straight into this question, because the same Word that teaches us doctrine is the Word through which we come to know and love the Saviour at all.

So, now what?

If you have been treating love for Jesus and caring about theology as enemies, I want to hand you a better way to see it. Let your love drive your learning. Read the Gospels not to pass an exam but to gaze at the One you love. Let every true thing you discover about Him become fresh fuel for affection rather than a substitute for it.

Start small and start warm. Pick up one Gospel, read it slowly, and ask the Lord to show you Himself as He really is. Knowledge gathered that way never freezes the heart. It sets it on fire. What is one thing about Jesus you have always assumed but never actually checked against Scripture?

But grow in the grace and knowledge of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ. To him be the glory both now and to the day of eternity. Amen.

2 Peter 3:18 (ESV)