Whenever someone dies—whether it is Michael Jackson or your next door neighbor–people tend to speculate about the fate of the person. The questions we ask and the answers we pose depend on our personal theology. Some people reserve the word “theology” to trained religious leaders. But all of us have a working theology of some kind. Any set of assumptions we carry around about God (he, she, or it) or the non-existence of God are building blocks of our theology. We may never have written these ideas down in a clear form, but they nevertheless shape our thinking, our responses to life, and our world view.

Your theology may be a mixture of concepts from Oprah, The Matrix, a junior high biology teacher, a pastor, or an agnostic college professor. It may have been framed by values at your job, painful experiences you have had, or deep friendships you have enjoyed. All of us collect ideas that we value into some kind of blend that acts as a working hypothesis that we use to think about and answer ultimate questions in life.

Our personal theology may be good (based on truth) or bad (built on fantasy or reality) but it will be the lens through which we view life’s core questions. (We may feel that our theology is good, even if it is not built on truth, but that kind of blind devotion will ultimately disappoint us.) Since we do not possess all knowledge, our theology will be dynamic. Ideally, it will grow as we discern the difference between truth and error and discard those ideas that are logically contradictory or otherwise flawed.

For too many people their theology stagnates. They seldom think deeply about the ideas that frame their view of the world. They don’t look for evidence. They don’t ask hard questions. They ignore contradictions and obvious problems. They enthrone their preferences and prejudices as unassailable guideposts for life and arbitrarily dismiss any evidence to the contrary. Sometimes Christians are accused of blindly embracing a set of ideas that cannot stand up in the real world. There are certainly some Christians who do that. But that tendency is not unique to Christians. It can be found among Hindus, Buddhists, Muslims, materialists, atheists, and agnostics.

Paul noted this plethora of views when he came to Athens. Standing at the Areopagus, he said, “Men of Athens! I see that in every way you are very religious. For as I walked around and looked carefully at your objects of worship, I even found an altar with this inscription: ‘To an unknown god.’” (See Acts 17:22-23.) Like our modern religious diversity, the Western world of the first century was an array of diverse views and opinions.

Today in America this diversity has reached new levels. A century ago one might self-identify as a Jew, Catholic, Presbyterian, Baptist, or agnostic. Today it’s more likely to encounter people who claim general loyalty to a way of thinking, but whose personal theology is almost indistinguishable from others in the same group. It’s the Catholic who rejects any pronouncement from the Pope, who is pro-abortion, and who believes that everyone will go to heaven after death. It’s the Jew who does not believe God exists, who doubts the historicity of the Hebrew Old Testament, and who discounts any notion of a messiah. It’s the Lutheran who recoils at Luther’s teaching about man and sin in his Bondage of the Will, and who believes that saving grace is mediated only through infant baptism.

Unchecked, the American passion for individualism would create as many religions as there are people. In Christianity, it results in a widespread dismissal of any classical theological ideas built on a careful study of the Bible. When subjective opinions trump all else, there is no room left for any meaningful dialogue. Thoughtful interaction about objective truth gives way to persuasion and pressure, where the loudest voice or the view that is most popular at the moment wins.

Designer theology only leads to intellectual and theological chaos, as Paul saw in Athens. It’s theoretically possible that all our ideas about ultimate reality—all our theologies—are wrong. But that doesn’t preclude that there is one right way to think that actually matches reality. This is the perspective Paul brought to the Areopagus. He began his interaction by saying, “Now what you worship as something unknown I am going to proclaim to you.”

Paul argued that there is a clear and congruent set of truths that offer an explanation for the world and its form, the nature and problems of man, and for meaning and purpose in life. That is the starting point that God has given mankind in the revelation in Christ and in the Bible. It is an alternative to the subjective intellectual chaos that leads nowhere. In these days Christ-followers need to become men and women like Paul, who understood the world around him, and who could speak carefully into all the diverse perspectives of his day. When we fail to study, think, and speak with wisdom and grace, we join the cacophony of divergent voices instead of bringing needed clarity to our world.