Theology

I

Introduction

Theology, a discipline that attempts to express the content of a religious faith as a coherent body of propositions. The word is usually taken to refer to the Christian faith, although it is sometimes extended by analogy to cover other creeds, since Christianity originated the term in its present meaning. Theology is narrower in scope than faith, for whereas faith is a total attitude of the individual, including will and feeling, theology attempts to bring to expression in words the elements of belief that are explicitly or implicitly contained in faith.

Not every verbal expression of faith is theology, however. The first verbalizations of faith were naive and mythological. Theology arose out of reflection upon these first naive utterances. For instance, in the New Testament the disciple Thomas exclaims to Jesus, “My Lord and my God!” but a long process of reflection and speculation came between that simple confession and the theological declaration, made by the Council of Nicaea (325), that Jesus Christ is “one in substance with the Father”. This example demonstrates the tendency to move from concrete language (“Lord”) to conceptual language (“substance”).

Although theology ultimately concerns God, many theologians maintain that concepts of him necessarily fall short. In the Judaeo-Christian tradition, God is often described in such negative terms as invisible or incorporeal. If this negative theology is not to become sheer agnosticism, it has to be supplemented by indirect ways of speaking about God (involving analogy, symbolism, and metaphor) so that the language of theology never becomes purely conceptual, instead retaining some of the imagery from the pretheological stage of belief. A careful analysis of theological language is a necessary prelude to the theological enterprise. It reveals a language that employs both images and concepts and that is both critical and confessional.

II

Theology and Science

Theologians as diverse as the 13th-century Italian St Thomas Aquinas and the 20th-century Swiss theologian Karl Barth have held that theology is a science. Both, however, were careful to point out that sciences are of many sorts. Theology resembles a science to the extent that orderly, critical intellectual procedures are employed in the study of its subject matter, but it differs radically from the natural and even from the human sciences because its ultimate subject matter, God, is not accessible to empirical investigation. The problem of establishing a rigorous way of reasoning about God is therefore crucial in theology. Aquinas began his theological system by offering five proofs for the existence of God as a basis for all his other arguments. Barth, on the other hand, began with God's revelation or communication of himself (the word of God), believing that only thus can one avoid the danger of approaching God as a mere object of investigation. Those who follow Barth's method argue that every science has to begin with some assumptions and that the assumption of a self-communicating God is the correct starting point for theology; those who follow Aquinas's example hold that intellectual integrity demands that the theologian begin with the question of whether God exists. Clearly, in both views theology must be concerned as much with human beings and their capacities as with God. Indeed, Barth has said that theology would be more properly called “theanthropology”, because its subject matter is not God in isolation, but rather the divine and the human as they are related to each other.

III

Sources of Theology

The oldest theology of all—that of the Greek philosophers, who invented the word theology—was based on rational reflection on God, the world, and human life. These philosophers explicitly contrasted the rational theological approach to the problem of God with the mythological stories of the gods told by the Greek poets. The rational approach has continued to have many adherents, such as Aquinas, but the appeal to revelation as the source of religious (and hence theological) truth has also been strong in the Christian, Jewish, Islamic, and several Eastern traditions. These religions are traced back to founders who offered some new and striking insights into the questions of God and human destiny. Subsequent generations of thinkers reflected on the content of these illuminations, drew their implications, applied their insights in new situations, and tested and criticized the interpretations that had been previously offered. The distinctive insights of the founders, whether or not the word revelation is used, have been stamped on the structures of the different religions, and it is a testimony to the depth and richness of these insights that so much has been drawn from them and that they still seem inexhaustible.

A

The Role of Scripture

Most developed religions of the world possess scriptures, or sacred writings. These are usually taken to be the work of the founders themselves or of their earliest disciples. The Torah, long attributed to Moses; the New Testament, much of it attributed to disciples of Jesus; the Koran, attributed to Muhammad; and the voluminous scriptures of Hinduism and Buddhism are all examples of the transmission of original revelations through written documents. Within the various traditions, the status of scripture varies. Among Christians, Jews, and Muslims, scripture is accorded an authority—sometimes as the very word of God—that it does not have in Hinduism or Buddhism. Even in Christianity, however, differences exist between Fundamentalists, for whom the Bible is divinely inspired, and liberals, for whom it is the fallible human attestation of revelation, but not revelation itself. Nonetheless, wherever scriptures exist, they provide an important source for theology, even when modern critical methods are applied.