Theology

Theology (Gk., theos, ‘god’, + logos, ‘discourse’). Reflection on the nature and being of God. Initially, in Greek, the word was reserved for poets such as Hesiod and Homer who wrote about the gods. A distinction was then made between their myth-based theology and the kind of philosophical enquiry undertaken by Aristotle. The term is not natural to the Jewish understanding of God unfolded in scripture (though Philo, with his Greek leanings, called Moses theologos, the spokesman of God). The term was introduced by the Church fathers, but not yet as a separate discipline of human enquiry and reflection. Theologia means more naturally ‘speaking of God’, i.e. praise. The systematic organization of theology began especially with the scholastics, as with the concern of Aquinas to show that revealed truths were not believed unreasonably, and was taken in different (more Bible-controlled) directions by the Protestant reformers. Theology, especially as a university discipline, and systematic theologies became increasingly valued, being, in time, broken up into different disciplines, e.g. dogmatic, doctrinal, systematic, pastoral, historical, biblical, etc. Theology thus developed as a highly coded and formal system, in which rules of appropriateness are generated within the system. Attempts to break out of the circularity (some have said sterility) of such a strongly coded system (e.g. in liberation theology, or plural ‘theologies of … ’) are unlikely to return theology to the human community of knowledge, since they themselves are evaluated from within the circle; but see political theology.

The same is (so far) true of individual attempts to reconnect theology with life, e.g. of K. Rahner, or of T. F. Torrance, who saw in modern science an exemplary way in which truth is achieved or attempted, not by detachment from reality, but by a relationship to reality which evokes new attempts; thus both theology and science begin with faith, understood as a rational, intuitive, but nevertheless cognitive apprehension of what is real. ‘What is real’ in the case of theology is God, who gave himself in an act of grace to be known in the Word made flesh. Theology develops the methods and constructs (e.g. creeds) appropriate to its subject-matter, but it remains integrated to the whole endeavour of human enquiry and wisdom. Outside Christianity, ‘theology’ is not isolated from life in the same way, though kalām in Islam came under suspicion of leading in that direction.