Thinking About God: An Introduction to Christian Theology (3rd Edition)

This is a much enlarged and revised edition of a book first published in 1974 and revised in 1994. It has been widely used as a study book in churches and as a textbook in college and seminary classes.
The word theology is used in several different ways today, and it is a waste of time to argue about how it ought to be used. What I can do is to tell you how I intend to use it. I use it to mean thinking about God. When we are thinking about God, we are doing theology.
All Christians think about God. This means that all Christians have a theology; they all have some ideas about God. This is a good thing because, just as war is too important to be left to the generals, so theology is too important to be left to the academic theologians. We all are entitled to think about God, even if we are amateurs. Of course, just as civilian leaders are wise to consult the generals about war, so all of us are wise to consult the academic theologians about theology.
(from Chapter 1)