We live in an age of staggering self-absorption. If you walk into any secular bookstore—or, truth be told, almost any Christian boutique—the shelves groan under the weight of books dedicated to the self. We are obsessed with our personalities, our trauma, our productivity, our potential, and our platform. Even within the church, the gravity of the culture constantly pulls us toward a therapeutic horizon. Sermons are frequently evaluated not by how magnificently they display the character of God, but by how immediately practical they are for our Tuesday morning board meetings or our relational anxieties.
When we do peer into the deeper waters of doctrine, we often carry this self-centered paradigm in our back pockets. We treat systematic theology as a sort of divine user manual, designed primarily to explain how we get saved, how we should organize our families, or how we can win debates against our cultural rivals on the internet.
But if we are to recover a truly Reformed, classical understanding of our faith, we must undergo a radical Copernican revolution of the mind.
To help us make this shift, we return to the second clause of the classic scholastic maxim we introduced last week: Theologia a Deo docetur, Deum docet, et ad Deum ducit. Having established that theology is taught by God, we must now confront the reality that theology teaches God (Deum docet).
Because God is the primary and formal object of theology, every theological locus—from anthropology to eschatology—must be studied not as an independent human interest, but strictly in relation to Him, correcting our natural tendency to domesticate the divine and drag the transcendent down to the level of therapeutic utility.
The Formal Object of the Science
To understand what it means to say that theology teaches God, we must grapple with how a “science” or discipline defines its subject matter. The medieval and Protestant scholastics, possessing an intellectual rigor we desperately need to reclaim, made a vital distinction when defining the scope of any academic discipline: they distinguished between the material object (objectum materiale) and the formal object (objectum formale).
The material object of a science is the broad, raw material that the discipline examines. For example, both a biologist and a theologian might look at a human being. The human being is part of the material object of both sciences. However, what distinguishes biology from theology is their respective formal objects. The formal object is the specific angle, light, or aspect under which that raw material is studied. The biologist studies the human being under the aspect of physical life, cellular structure, and evolutionary adaptation. The theologian, however, studies the human being under the aspect of his relation to his Creator.
The Meaning of Sub Ratione Dei
When we apply this distinction to systematic theology, we find that the material object of our study is incredibly vast. Theology touches upon the cosmos, history, human nature, sin, covenants, salvation, the church, and the consummation of all things. There is virtually nothing in all of reality that theology does not, at some point, analyze.
But how can a single discipline study both the molecular structure of the universe and the salvation of a human soul without becoming a chaotic, disorganized mess?
The answer lies in the formal object of theology. Classical Reformed theology asserts that the formal object of theology is God Himself, and all other things are studied only sub ratione Dei—that is, “under the aspect of God,” or in relation to Him. This insight is not an innovation of the Protestant era, but a robust continuation of classical Christian thought. As Thomas Aquinas famously argued: “In sacred science all things are treated of under the aspect of God; either because they are God Himself; or because they refer to God as their beginning and end. Hence it follows that God is in very truth the object of this science.”[1]
As the great Italian-Reformed scholastic Francis Turretin wrote, theology “may be termed the science which is originally from God, objectively treats concerning and terminatively flows into and leads to him.”[2]
When we study sin (hamartiology), we are not merely studying human dysfunction or sociological deviance; we are studying rebellion against God. When we study salvation (soteriology), we are not merely studying psychological relief or human liberation; we are studying the covenantal rescue accomplished by God for His own glory. When we study the church (ecclesiology), we are not analyzing a voluntary social club; we are examining the body of Christ, built by God as a temple for His dwelling.
If we detach any theological topic from this formal object, it ceases to be theology. It becomes a cheap imitation—religious sociology, moral philosophy, or baptized psychology.
The Great Anthropocentric Hijacking
In my own theological journey, I have seen that the greatest threat to sound doctrine is rarely a frontal assault by blatant heresy. Far more dangerous is the slow, imperceptible drift where the focus of our study shifts from God to ourselves.
This is what I call the “Anthropocentric Hijacking” of theology. It began in earnest during the Enlightenment and found its peak in the nineteenth-century theological liberalism of Friedrich Schleiermacher, who famously redefined theology not as the study of God’s self-revelation, but as the systematic analysis of human religious feeling.
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Instead of theology teaching of God, theology became the study of humanity talking about God.
While we might recoil at Schleiermacher’s overt liberalism, we must ask ourselves if we have not fallen into a conservative version of the very same trap.
We live in a pragmatic culture that demands immediate utility. We want three steps to a better marriage, five keys to financial blessing, or four ways to build a strong community. We want a theology that serves us.
But Deum docet stands as a massive, unyielding sentinel against this pragmatism. It reminds us that the universe does not spin around the axis of human happiness. God is not a supporting actor in our personal dramas; we are characters in His grand epic.
When we turn the study of doctrine into a self-help program, we end up domesticating the wild, transcendent, terrifying God of Holy Scripture. We transform the consuming fire of Hebrews 12:29 into a cosmic therapist whose primary job is to validate our feelings and secure our comfort. We must reject this man-centered drift with every fiber of our theological being.
From Abstract Speculation to Relational Reality
However, in our zeal to defend the truth that theology teaches of God, we must avoid a secondary, equally deadly trap that often snared the very scholastics we admire—and one that easily ensnares intellectually ambitious young men today. That is the danger of turning Deum docet into a cold, clinical dissection of a metaphysical concept.
It is incredibly easy to treat the study of God like a game of high-stakes theological chess. We want to master the attributes of God, debate the finer points of middle knowledge, or parse the distinctions of Trinitarian relations with the detached curiosity of an anatomist dissecting a cadaver. We want to master the “concept” of God so that we can feel intellectually superior.
Loved ones, if our theology is truly taught by God (docetur) and teaches of God (docet), it can never be a merely academic exercise. The God we study is not a passive object waiting to be categorized by our finite minds. He is the living, active, self-revealing Lord of hosts. He is the Triune God—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit—who has folded us into His covenantal love.
To study God truly is to be confronted by His absolute holiness, His staggering majesty, and His unfathomable grace. It is to recognize that we are not the masters of this subject; we are mastered by it.
If your systematic study of Theology Proper does not regularly lead you to shut your books, quiet your mind, and marvel at the sheer, unmerited mercy that the infinite Creator of the ends of the earth should know your name, then you have not yet understood Deum docet. You have merely learned to juggle theological terminology. You have studied the map, but you have never walked the land.
The Practical Posture: The Gravity of God-Centeredness
What, then, is the practical payoff of centering our theology strictly on God? How does Deum docet reform our lives, our churches, and our ministries?
First, it shatters our pride. When the focal point of our study is the infinite, self-existent (a se) God, we are constantly reminded of our own insignificance and dependence. We are forced to reckon with our finitude. We are brought to the place of Job, who, after being confronted by the majesty of God in the whirlwind, could only say, “I lay my hand on my mouth… I despise myself, and repent in dust and ashes” (Job 40:4, 42:6).
Second, it revolutionizes our worship. If theology teaches of God, then our corporate worship services must be designed to put Him on display, not to entertain the consumer. We do not gather on the Lord’s Day to have our felt needs met; we gather to render unto the King of kings the glory due His name. The music, the prayers, and the preaching must be saturated with the weight (kabod) of God’s presence, rather than the trivialities of modern entertainment.
Finally, it anchors our souls in suffering. A man-centered theology is a fair-weather friend. When tragedy strikes—when the cancer diagnosis comes, when the business collapses, or when the grave opens—a therapeutic deity who exists merely for our comfort is exposed as a useless idol.
But a theology that teaches of God—the sovereign, immutable, wise, and good Ruler of the universe—provides an anchor that holds in the wildest storm. We can endure the darkest providences when we know that our lives are held in the hands of a God who is working all things according to the counsel of His own will, for His ultimate glory and our ultimate good (Ephesians 1:11, Romans 8:28).
Conclusion
Therefore, let’s resolve to keep the “Theos” in our theology. As we journey forward into the deep landscapes of doctrine, let us aggressively resist every temptation to make this study about ourselves.
When we pick up our Bibles or our systematic volumes, let us not ask first, “What does this mean for me?” but rather, “What does this reveal about Him?” Let us train our minds to see every doctrine, from the creation of the world to the final judgment, through the lens of God’s character, God’s covenants, and God’s glory.
It is only when we sit quietly under the instruction of the Divine Teacher, fixating our gaze entirely upon the Divine Subject, that we will be prepared for the final, magnificent movement of our systematic journey: being led back to Him in eternal, face-to-face communion.
Key Terms
- Objectum Materiale (Material Object): The broad, objective subject matter or raw material that an academic discipline or science investigates. In theology, this encompasses all of created reality, humanity, history, and salvation.
- Objectum Formale (Formal Object): The specific angle, perspective, or light under which a discipline studies its material object. In systematic theology, the formal object is God Himself, meaning all things are studied in their relation to Him.
- Sub Ratione Dei: A Latin scholastic phrase meaning “under the aspect of God” or “in relation to God.” It denotes the method of studying all created things, historical events, and doctrines specifically as they relate to God’s character, will, and glory.
[1] Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, trans. Fathers of the English Dominican Province (Burns Oats & Washbourne, n.d.), I q.1 a.7 resp.
[2] Francis Turretin, Institutes of Elenctic Theology, ed. James Jr Dennison, trans. George Giger, vol. 1 (P&R Publishing, 1992), 1.1.7.