Everyone’s a theologian?

I’ve heard the comment bantered around often that everyone’s a theologian. I can often see the point that people are trying to make, that everyone has some thought about God, who he is or is not. Yet simply because you have such thoughts or operate in the belief of those, doesn’t really make you a theologian. Just as much as when I use maths to calculate my spending doesn’t make me a mathematician, since every man has an angle on God a doesn’t make them a theologian.

A theologian is someone for whom it’s part of their vocation to study God and his character. Every Christian is also called to pursue a greater knowledge of God but then clearly not everyone is called to be a scholar.

Now on the flipside I’ve seen preachers proclaim, “I’m not a theologian so…”. This is very disconcerting. I know it’s rooted in their attempt to reach out to the crowd and put themselves on the same level so they’re not considered as a distant scholar but it completely undermines the authority of their words. It’s basically like a school science teacher saying “I don’t know anything about physics, chem or biology so…” - their words are no more valuable than one’s own and they will proceed to express their opinion on scripture rather than proclaim it.

It would be better to say that everyone operates in theology in someway and that a few people, especially those in ministry, are called to pursue it in a greater way.