Do You Have to Be a Scholar to Understand Theology?

You do not have to be a scholar to understand theology. Theology is careful, orderly thinking about what Scripture says about God, and one of the clearest proofs that ordinary believers can do it comes from a man most Christians have never heard of. Charles Octavius Boothe was born enslaved in 1845. He learned to read from letters etched into a tin plate, and he later wrote a systematic theology for sharecroppers. This guide puts that history in your hands, shows you how to tell what the record actually says from what people assume about it, and then asks you to do the same work Boothe expected of his readers.

You can work through it alone across a week or with a group over two or three sessions. Each section ends with something to do: sort evidence, read a passage closely, or write. Do the activities instead of skimming past them. The history is meant to give you footing, and the footing only matters if you then stand on it.

Start with what the record can bear

The history here rests almost entirely on one witness. In a Jude 3 Project conversation with Lisa Fields, Dr. Walter Strickland, a theology professor at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary who brought Boothe’s Plain Theology for Plain People back into print, explained how little survives. Most of what he knows came from a few pages of autobiography at the start of Boothe’s encyclopedia of Black Baptist churches in Alabama. Of that material he said, “It is all that’s out there.” He described Boothe this way: “it’s kind of a ghost in history. There’s little traces of him.”

That matters for how you hold the story. A thin record does not mean a small life. It does mean you should know which claims rest on Boothe’s own account, which rest on Strickland’s summary, and which are Strickland’s careful guesses. He models this himself. When he tried to name the year Boothe started Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, he admitted the year escaped him. When he explained why Boothe went north, he reported that the slow pace of change drove him to despair, and then he offered other reasons Boothe might have gone. He marked those as possibilities, not findings.

Try this first. On a sheet of paper, draw three columns: What happened, Who says so, and What it means. As you read the next section, place each item in the right column. Keep the first two columns plain. Save every judgment for the third.

One life in sequence

Follow the order of events as Strickland gave them, because the order is where the argument lives.

1. 1845. Boothe is born into slavery in Alabama. Teachers staying on the plantation, working at night, “taught him how to read on the etchings of that tin plate,” as Strickland put it.
2. Before emancipation. He is hired to work for a judge, a job that required reading. Strickland notes that the legal reasoning of the time drew on Scripture, including Paul’s writings. Boothe read the Bible to do his work, “But in doing so, he actually came to a saving knowledge of Christ.”
3. After emancipation. He sets out to equip sharecroppers and plain people, in Strickland’s words, “to read the Bible, to have an orderly account of the Christian faith.” He starts churches, including Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, helps found Selma University, works with Booker T. Washington, and helps originate the Colored Baptists of Alabama.
4. The teaching work. He asks Southern Baptists in Alabama to help him train rural pastors. He travels to teaching sites and writes Plain Theology for Plain People as the resource he hands out and teaches through.
5. The Great Migration. Frustrated by slow change, he moves to Detroit. He dies there in 1924. Strickland says no one knows where he is buried.
6. The recovery. Generations later, Strickland hears Boothe’s name while writing his dissertation. He searches for the book, and no one can tell him where to find it. A copy finally reaches him as a Word document, passed along by someone unsure who held the copyright.

Look at what the sequence shows. Boothe’s theology did not begin in a classroom. It began with a man reading Scripture because his job demanded it and finding Christ there. His systematic theology came later, and it came out of a need: rural pastors and lay people wanted an orderly grasp of the faith, and he wrote one for them.

The sequence also exposes a backward projection. Because Boothe’s book was hard to find a century later, a reader might assume it was never important. Strickland gives a different cause. He says Black Christians were often discriminated against in the presses, so much of what they produced fell out of circulation. Disappearance is a fact about what happened to the book afterward. It is not evidence about the quality of the thinking inside it.

Check your columns. Did “the book was weak” or “the book was suppressed” end up in the first column? Neither belongs there. The first column holds only that the book became hard to find. Strickland’s explanation of why goes in the third column with his name beside it. You can find his explanation persuasive and still file it correctly.

Read three passages before reading about Boothe’s method

Boothe’s readers met the Bible before they met any theory about it, so do the same. Read each passage slowly, twice, and answer the prompt before moving on.

Luke opens his Gospel by describing his own method: “It seemed good to me also, having had perfect understanding of all things from the very first, to write unto thee in order, most excellent Theophilus” (Luke 1:3). Many modern translations render the phrase in order as “an orderly account.” Luke is describing why he wrote, not commanding readers to write. Still, notice what he values. What does Luke think a person needs in order to be confident about what they have been taught? What does he do to supply it?

Luke later describes a synagogue in Berea: “These were more noble than those in Thessalonica, in that they received the word with all readiness of mind, and searched the scriptures daily, whether those things were so” (Acts 17:11). This is narrative. It describes the Bereans rather than issuing a rule, but Luke clearly approves. Who did the checking in this scene? Whom were they checking? What did they check against?

Paul writes to Timothy: “Study to shew thyself approved unto God, a workman that needeth not to be ashamed, rightly dividing the word of truth” (2 Timothy 2:15). In older English, study carries the sense of being diligent or doing your best, and rightly dividing points to handling the word accurately. Paul addresses a church leader here, so apply it to yourself with care. What kind of work does this verse picture? Is it work only an expert could do, or work anyone could be faithful in?

How Boothe did theology

Strickland describes Boothe’s method by contrast. Many systematic theologies, he says, gather verses and assemble a system from them, almost mechanically. Boothe worked from below. He went to the text and let the doctrines take shape out of his reading. On Christology, the doctrine of Christ, Strickland pictures Boothe “trying to get in and under and through the Bible,” entering the gospel story and asking what it meant for Black life in the 1890s instead of standing at a distance to analyze it.

Boothe’s sense of which questions mattered came from the people he served. Strickland notes that his treatment of last things has none of the date charts found in some textbooks. It asks larger questions about the kingdom and about what awaits each person. Strickland also observed the debates Boothe ignored: “he’s not concerned about those debates of his day. He’s concerned about the Bible and representing the Bible well in an organized manner.”

Lisa Fields connected this to a later moment. She recalled reading about Black preachers in the 1960s who found that young people were not asking the questions their imported approach was built to answer, so they rebuilt their preaching around the questions actually being asked. She called it “not just a top down approach, but a bottom up approach.” Strickland agreed that this is what Boothe was doing.

Now weigh the obvious objection. Boothe was unusually gifted, and Strickland says so. Does one exceptional life prove anything about you? Look at what Boothe lacked: formal schooling, freedom for his first two decades, and easy access to books. Whatever made him a theologian, it was not a credential. The opposite mistake is just as easy. Boothe was no enemy of scholarship. Strickland says Boothe was informed by the academic works of his time, and Strickland himself is a seminary professor who spent years recovering this book. The honest conclusion is narrower. Learning serves the work, but the work belongs to anyone who will read the text carefully and give an account of it.

Boothe also expected a lot of his readers. Strickland says of the republished text, “I didn’t doctor it at all,” and he describes its reading level as closer to what you would expect for high school graduates than for people with elementary schooling. By his estimate, something like 15 to 20 percent of the book is Scripture. Plain did not mean easy. It meant clear.

The practice: write one plain page of theology

This is the center of the guide. Give it at least an hour across the week, or most of one group session.

1. Name a real question. Choose one your own life is asking about God, not one you think sounds impressive. It might be what it means that Jesus was human, or what to expect after death. Write it at the top of the page.
2. Find one passage that speaks to it directly. If you are unsure where to look, ask someone you trust for a passage, but not for an answer. Read the surrounding chapter so you know who is speaking, to whom, and why.
3. Get inside the text. Read it three times. Write down what the passage actually says, using its own words where you can. Note what kind of writing it is: story, letter, poetry or prophecy.
4. Give an orderly account. In five to eight plain sentences, write what this passage teaches about God that bears on your question. Put your points in an order that a friend could follow. Do not use a theological term you could not explain.
5. Do what the Bereans did. Only now, compare your page with a trusted commentary, a study Bible or a mature believer. Mark where you agreed, where you were corrected, and where the passage simply does not answer your question. That last category is honest theology too.

If you are leading a group, have people bring their pages to the next session and read them aloud in pairs. The listener’s only job at first is to restate the page accurately before responding. Some people will feel exposed writing about God. Let anyone keep their page private, and do not grade the pages against one another. If the group drifts into lingering on who got erased from history, give that grief its due, then return to the text. The aim is footing, not resentment.

Questions to talk through

• Before this guide, what picture came to mind when you heard the phrase “doing theology”? Where did that picture come from?
• Look at your three columns. Which claims about Boothe rest on his own account, which on Strickland’s summary, and which on inference? Why does that difference matter if you retell this story to a skeptic?
• Boothe came to faith reading Scripture for a job. What would change if you treated Scripture as something you are able to read closely, rather than only receive through others?
• Luke wrote “in order,” and Boothe wanted his readers to have an orderly account. What is the difference between knowing many true things about God and being able to give an orderly account of them?
• Boothe ignored many debates of his day and focused on the questions his people were carrying. Is there a debate you have absorbed that has crowded out a question your own life is actually asking?
• Where did your written page turn out to be stronger than you expected, and where did checking it against others correct you? What does that suggest about the relationship between personal study and learning from scholars?

Carrying it forward

Boothe died far from the institutions he built, with no way to know what would come of them. Strickland reflected on that ending through Nehemiah, who heard that Jerusalem lay in ruins: “I sat down and wept, and mourned certain days, and fasted, and prayed before the God of heaven” (Nehemiah 1:4). Nehemiah’s response was grief and prayer before it was a building plan. Strickland sees something similar in Boothe, a man looking at the needs around him and asking how God might use him. Speaking to believers now, Strickland added, “we have no idea what our efforts will do, even if we’re discouraged like he was.”

That is a fair word, not a promise of visible results. Boothe never saw the harvest Strickland describes. His book sat nearly lost for a century. Yet it was written, it was faithful to the text, and it was waiting when someone went looking.

Keep your page. Next month, choose another question and write another one. Over time those pages become what Boothe handed his students on the back roads of Alabama: an orderly account of the faith, written by someone the world did not expect to write one.