Question 5: What is theology?
Past “What is…” Posts:
Question 1: What is the gospel? | Response
Question 2: What is truth? | Response
Question 3: What is evangelism? | Response
Question 4: What is prayer? | Response
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Related posts:
- Theology Pub in Livermore
- Is Theology on Tap Supporting or Limiting Ministry
- Starting up a Theology on Tap in Livermore
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It’s how we talk about how we talk about God.
always wrong, falling short, and missing the point…but still necessary.
Theology is the way in which we put together our faith in God, our knowledge of God, and our experience of God in order to make meaningful statements about who God is (in the fullness of the Trinity) and what God’s creative and salvific purposes are in the world.
I’ll cheat and post my favorite description of theology; from the introduction to David Well’s _No Place for Truth_.
…theology is a knowledge that belongs first and foremost to the people of God and that the proper and primary audience for theology is therefore the Church, not the learned guild…I say this because theology is not simply a philosophical reflection about the nature of things but is rather the cogent articulation of the knowledge of God. Its substance is not drawn from mere human reflection, no matter how brilliant, but from the biblical Word by which it is nurtured and disciplined. And its purpose is not primarily to participate in the conversation of the learned but to nurture the people of God. That is its nature and that is its purpose. It is here in the Church that the circle of knowing-the kind of knowing that has Christ as its object and his service as its end-is to be found. It is here, then, that the audience for theology is to be found. And so it is the community of faith that the theologian addresses fundamentally, because it is only by faith that the knowledge of God is first arrived at and only by faith that it is sustained.
Something whose definition, practically speaking, requires more attention and care than can be provided in 1,500 words or less.
Alright then Kellen, I give you 1,501.
Go.
I’ll agree that theology will always fall short from a complete & accurate description of the God of all creation, but “always wrong” and “missing the point”? I don’t buy it. There is a profound difference between humility in our theology, marked by at least an openness to dialogue and a refusal to try to force our particular view on other people, and the kind of wishy-washy-ness that is nothing but feel-good statements and sentimentality devoid of any real content.
Theology is not just “God-talk”, as Adam has stated many times in the past, because that formulation turns theology into an abstraction, something separate not just from God but also from our lived experience in the church, in prayer and in worship in dialogue with scripture. Theology is the interplay between our relationship with God, the Bible, the church, the world and ourselves. Because of that, some of that theology is “head” stuff – formal propositions or statement on who and what we think God is. But some of that is also “heart” stuff – how do we live out those propositions and the other, non-propositional/relational aspects of our knowledge of God. I’ll side with the ancient church that a theologian is first and foremost someone who knows God personally, not someone who knows a lot about “spiritual” stuff.
As me hearty, Anselm, proposed: theology be faith seeking understanding.
What happened to the “three sentence max” rule? ;)
well if…
Biology = the study of “Bio” (life)
Christology = the study of “Christ”
and
Volcanology = the study of “Volcanoes”
Then
Theology = the study of “THE”
Theology is to religion as art criticism is to art. Thus, one must not reduce religion to mere theology, for we all know that even after reading all the best commentaries on Hamlet, one still needs to actually see the play!
-a brother Shamus, an Irish Monk…
Just as a toddler tries to form sentences, and she can’t quite get her mouth around the words, so it is with us–trying to communicate who God is. But just as I took great delight in hearing my tiny daughter talk about things she could not understand, I imagine God takes pleasure in us, with our halted utterings and incomprehension, trying so hard to grasp the infinite.
Sometimes there seems to be a very high, unreachable pedestal attached to that word.
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