Last week, we discussed how a prophet's "soul pain" might affect or color a message from God as it is delivered through His messenger. In the same way, a prophet's personal theology will color or affect a message as well.

Theology? Wait a minute! What does theology have to do with prophets and prophetic words?

Theology is an often misunderstood word among Christians. Some Christians have even been heard to say - "We don't need theology. We just need Jesus." But who is Jesus? Was he just a man? Or is He God as well? If Jesus is not God, then why do we need him? And if He is God, and we believe Him to be so, then, whether we like it or not, we have a theology.

Theology is inescapable in our lives. It is our belief system. Our theology is that which puts personal meaning into the facts of religious history. Jesus died on a cross and rose from the dead. Those are the facts. But through His death He bore the judgment for my sin. And through His resurrection He overcame death itself. That is theology - that which puts meaning into those facts.

Much like the many other "...ologies" we grew up with in school, theology is a science. When we think of biology, for example, we recognize that this field of science catalogues and classifies living things into plant (botany) and animal (zoology) kingdoms. Beyond these broad categories, the study of life is then subdivided into numerous smaller categories. Cytology, histology, anatomy, physiology, and embryology are but a few.

Like the other sciences, theology classifies and separates knowledge about God into categories. Theology catalogues truth. For many centuries, theologians have been culling truth from the Holy Scriptures and neatly organizing it into categories. Open a pure theology book and you will probably find several different areas of concentration:

The study of God

The study of man

The study of sin

The study of Christ's atonement

The study of death and resurrection

The study of heaven and hell

The study of end-time events

The study of the Church

Every Christian operates out of a personal theology - a way of thinking about the topics enumerated above. Our ideas have been formed over time through personal study of scripture, through books and literature we have read, and through messages we have heard. In turn, all that we attempt to communicate, whether verbally or in some other form, is expressed in terms of the way we understand things to be - our personal theology. For our purposes here, we will call it a "theological filter."

Thus, every "prophetic" message delivered by a human messenger has a slant or an angle based upon the prophet's "theological" perspective. Consider the following examples:

Prophet No. 1: This prophet holds the theological view that Christ's return is imminent - probably within the lifetime of most people alive today. So convinced is this individual that Christ is coming soon, that his messages are usually peppered with, and sometimes even prefaced with, language like "in these last days..." Because of this prophet's personal theological filter, the imminency of Christ's return is weighted with the same measure of certainty as more sure gospel elements such as the atonement or the resurrection.