Читать книгу New & Enlarged Handbook of Christian Theology - Donald W. Musser - Страница 37

Theology comes from the Greek words theos (deity) and logos (discourse). In its simplest form, then, theology seeks to answer the question of the existence and nature of God. More broadly speaking, however, theology is the endeavor to think about every aspect of religious belief. Theology thus takes as many forms as faith itself. Indeed, theology need not be limited to reflection on Christianity, especially since the source of faith for many people is increasingly an eclectic assortment of religious traditions. Nevertheless, theology is most frequently associated with the Christian faith, and if it is to be a disciplined form of thought that is distinguished from a more generic philosophy of religion, it must be developed in continuity with its historical roots.

Another way to define theology is to refer to the classical phrase of “faith seeking understanding.” Unlike philosophy, which begins with skepticism in order to discern what human beliefs can be shown to be most certain and clear, theology begins with faith. Since Christian faith emerges from a community of witnesses to the salvation offered by God in Jesus Christ, its exposition is an ongoing process. Faith is the first step in a religious journey that leads to many intellectual quandaries. Although religious questions can complicate and even destroy an innocent or naïve piety, theology seeks to deepen and strengthen faith by absorbing the dynamic of doubt into the process of spiritual maturation. Theology attempts to give an account of faith that will respond to the questions of religious believers and skeptics alike. Theology does this by drawing from a wide array of philosophical and secular resources, while remaining loyal to the initial insights afforded by faith.

Theology is more like a journey with false starts, confusing detours, and delayed destinations than a recipe book with a single set of instructions. The study of theology can be intensely personal—so much so that every religious person can be said to have her or his own theology—but it is never merely private. The fact that theology involves an individual’s most passionate and ultimate beliefs does not mean that it is a subjective and relativistic form of thought. The creative insights of every theology are born of a personal experience that is nurtured and shaped by the great religious traditions and thinkers of the past.

That theology is a mixed genre balancing a variety of discourses is especially evident in the case in Christianity, which early in its development began borrowing from the philosophical culture of Greek thought in order to elaborate and explain its faith. The decision of the church to utilize philosophy on its own behalf was one of the most remarkable—and unlikely—events in Western history. Israel worshiped a God who was involved in history, reacting with love and impatience to the people God chose to lead. The greatest philosophers of Greece had spoken about God as an unchanging principle, without emotion, and unmoved by anything beyond itself. Against all probability, Christian theology came to identify these two as the same God. Although many theologians today see this as a problematic move at best, the practical implications were immense. Theologians were given a license to adopt the rich heritage of philosophical speculation as their own. The church thus preserved ancient learning throughout the ancient and medieval periods, until philosophy once again gained its independence from theology in the modern world.

Theology, with the aid of philosophy, was one part of the church’s witness to its faith in Jesus Christ. Theology is essentially responsive, in the sense that it responds to the grace of God as well as the quotidian details of life in the Christian community. From the beginning, the practice of theology was related to questions of church authority, the proper reading of scripture, and the ongoing interpretation of the faith. As ecclesial conversation, theology is governed by a complex set of rules arising from rituals, creeds, and Scripture. Determining what those rules are, what weight they carry, and how they can best be understood today is one of the chief tasks of theological reflection. Theology is thus a self-reflective discipline in the sense that its self-interrogation is essential to its purpose and mission.

Theologians do not examine the past merely for its own sake. They engage the past in order to speak to the present. Theology thus consists of two kinds of conversation occurring simultaneously, one with the past and one with the present. One way to sort out the different kinds of theology is to ask what relative weight they give to these two foci. Some theologians are primarily interested in contemporary issues and problems, and they draw on traditional resources carefully and critically. They are concerned to establish the intelligibility and credibility of Christian faith in the modern, secular world. This effort is called constructive theology. Theology that is more interested in recovering the religious life of the past is called historical theology. Historical theology is motivated by a need to pay the debt all Christians have to the saints who have preceded us.

For practical purposes, the study of theology in seminaries, colleges, and graduate schools often encourages students to focus on either the constructive or the historical aspects of theology, but it is doubtful whether the two can ever be fully disentangled. A constructive theology that is not adequate to the patterns of faith established throughout church history runs the risk of stretching Christian faith to the breaking point. Likewise, theologies that retrieve voices from the past must be aware of why we need to listen to those voices today.

Beyond this basic twofold division, the study of theology is often organized according to three distinct and yet interrelated forms. These forms—fundamental, systematic, and practical—can be analyzed according to their methodology and their social location. Fundamental or philosophical theology concerns the intellectual credibility of Christian belief. This theology engages various philosophical methods in order to develop criteria to test the viability of the truth claims presupposed by faith. Fundamental theology is most likely to be found in secular universities and colleges, where religion is put on trial and therefore must prove its relevance to a skeptical public.

Systematic or dogmatic theology is concerned less with proving the truth of faith than with showing its internal coherence. This theology tries to show how the various topics of theological discourse fit together like pieces in a puzzle. Such topics include ecclesiology (the study of the church), eschatology (the study of the end time), Christology (the study of the person and work of Jesus Christ), a theology of culture, and the like. Given so many topics, systematic theology needs an overarching principle or set of criteria to illuminate their various connections, but it usually does not make these connections by employing a philosophical method. Instead, dogmaticians take the risk of reducing the richness of religious faith by focusing on a basic theme or ruling metaphor. Such theologies are often less metaphysical than hermeneutical; that is, they do not appeal to the universal conditions of knowing but instead develop a theory of interpretation. Interpretation is more of an art than a science, and it involves a close and intimate participation in the subject matter. Systematic theology is thus done in and for the church and is most likely to be found in church-related colleges and seminaries.

Practical theology involves reflection on how religion actually functions in specific contexts. Some of this theology is pastoral in the sense that it focuses on the training of ministers and their various tasks and duties. But practical theology also has a wider goal and ambition. Practical theologians are interested in the church’s role in the wider culture. They examine a wide range of essentially moral questions, from the relationship between religion and power to religious interpretations of various public policy issues concerning everything from marriage to the military. Practical theology often draws from the social sciences for its methodologies, especially psychology and sociology. Practical theologians address the church when they examine the nature, growth, and future of religious institutions. They also address the wider public when they illuminate religion’s contributions to various public debates.

Some theologians resist this threefold division. Where, for example, is ethics? If ethics is defined broadly as the witness of the church to an increasingly non-Christian public, then every systematic theology today must be ethical at its core. Indeed, ethical reflection should flow from doctrinal formulations, rather than being treated as an independent topic of reflection. Ethics has become a separate academic discipline only because colleges and universities have moved away from church history and theology courses to the teaching of practical issues with only a vague reference to religious faith.

Other theologians privilege one of the forms as prior to and necessary for the others. Philosophical theology, for example, is often taken as foundational for all other theological work. The argument is that the theologian must defend the epistemological status of religious beliefs before trying to see how they connect with each other and how to apply them to practical problems.

In fact, theology throughout the mid– to late–twentieth century was dominated by methodological problems, and the leading theologians were those who put forth coherent reflections on how theology should proceed. In the wake of the religious confusion of the 1960s, theologians rushed to reconstruct the Christian tradition from the ground up. Most of these theological positions were dependent on a particular philosophical school, which was used to give religious faith a rational foundation. With the emergence in the 1980s of a postmodern ethos and the philosophical movement known as deconstructionism, many philosophers and theologians alike began attacking the notion that rationality can be grounded in clear and distinct ideas and methods. It has become more common to suggest that all rationality is contextual, so that philosophy is no longer portrayed as providing the principles by which each discipline must be practiced.

After these attacks on foundationalism, theology has become more grounded in history than ever before. This change can be formulated by saying that there has been a shift from fundamental to historical-systematic theology. By the 1980s, the assumptions of secularism were not so quickly accepted, and traditional religious belief was gaining more acceptance in educational institutions. Theologians began recovering the rich heritage of the past that constructive theologians frequently ignored or dismissed. Theologians are immersing themselves once again in those ancient thinkers who were speaking to and for the church, not some abstract public of the educated elite. The central debates that have always defined the church now seem much more complex and intriguing than all of the cunning theories theologians used to combat or accommodate secularism in the last decades of the twentieth century.

There are several other ways in which theology can be divided and assessed. Most commonly, theology is often divided into various schools. Thus, there are feminist, liberation, African American, postliberal, postmodern, evangelical, and environmental theologies, to name a few. Each of these schools has its own methods and preoccupations. Liberation theology is perhaps the most prominent of these schools and often serves as a general category under which many other schools can be located, like feminist, African American, and environmental theology. Liberationists emphasize the socio-political dimension to all theological discourse. They analyze the ways in which theology is shaped by oppressive political forces and propose ways in which theology can contribute to progressive social change. Liberation theology began in Latin America as an attempt to make the Christian message more relevant to social and economic inequities. In North America, liberation theology more frequently deals with issues of gender and racial identity, or the problem of the environment. Some commentators have recently suggested that liberation theology has reached its peak and is beginning to lose its previous sense of urgency and mission.

Postliberal and postmodern theology both criticize the attempt to ground theology in modern philosophical projects, whether they be metaphysical or ethical. Postliberalism emphasizes the need for theology to address the church as a community that stands apart from the world, with its own language and stories. Postliberal theology overlaps with many of the themes of evangelical theology, so that evangelical theology has been gaining in sophistication and thus broadening its acceptance in some academic circles.

Postmodern theology is more interested in exploring the various ways in which theology has become inextricably intertwined with philosophy over the centuries. Some postmodern theologians want to help theology disengage from philosophy, while others want to use postmodern philosophy to demonstrate the internal inconsistencies and ambiguities in theology.

Another theological school that is more loosely structured focuses on theology and the arts. This theological orientation is perhaps the most neglected theological topic. Theology and the arts is a broad field, and it is difficult to get a handle on it. Yet the artistic imagination has become both the dominant way of viewing reality and a major means of trivializing our world. If the Holy Spirit is at work transfiguring the cosmos, then aesthetics has a religious basis that can take seriously both the freedom and the order of God’s creation.

Theology can also be divided according to religious traditions and denominations. Thus, there are Roman Catholic, Methodist, Presbyterian, and Episcopalian theologies, to name but a few of the major churches and denominations. While each church has its own distinctive history, the emphasis on ecumenical dialogue and the increasing mobility among church-goers means that the theological differences between many mainline Christian traditions are diminishing.

Indeed, the topic of religious dialogue has dominated much theological discussion over the past several decades. Theologians not only promote dialogue between Christian churches, they also have developed theoretical reflections on dialogue among the various world religions. Pluralism is the name often given to a kind of theology that wants to recognize the universality of God’s grace and the relative equality of the world religions. While pluralism has been a basic assumption in many theological schools, more recently it has come under increasing attack. To some, pluralism seems to be too much in debt to Enlightenment assumptions about religious faith. Given so many religions, the pluralists ask, how do we figure out a rational way of determining their common features? In the postmodern universe, by contrast, theologians no longer have the ambition of constructing a vantage point from which to view all the world’s religions. Instead, the more modest task of analyzing Christianity’s own internal coherence and historical development seems much more feasible and important. The one religion that Christianity cannot avoid engaging is, of course, Judaism, and some of the most exciting theology in recent years has been written about Christianity’s treatment of Judaism and the role Judaism continues to play in Christian faith.

To return to the theme of an ongoing conversation, it can be said that all Christians comprise theology by joining their voices together in the search for understanding. Some Christians, however, have a vocation that calls them to reflect in more detailed and comprehensive ways about the various issues involved in the life of faith. Nevertheless, what theologians do in academic institutions should not become alien to what every Christian does in times of doubt, curiosity, and meditation. Unfortunately, theological specialization often means that theologians of various schools and methods can hardly talk to each other, let alone to the wider public or laity in the pews. Thus, much intellectual and inspirational leadership on religious issues in North America is conducted by persons who reside outside of academic institutions.

Such specialization is especially devastating for the relationship between theology and biblical studies. Probably for most people, theology simply means a well-informed reflection on the Bible, but in the world of scholarship, the connection between theology and the Bible has become strained. Many New Testament scholars resist the imposition of contemporary theological concerns on the Bible, and many theologians, granting New Testament scholars their territorial rights, refrain from in-depth analysis of biblical texts. Of course, there are still New Testament scholars who deal with theological issues, but the pressures of research and the standards of secular scholarship drive many in the field of biblical studies toward issues and topics that are increasingly remote to contemporary religious concerns. Interestingly, some New Testament scholars have recently revived the quest for the historical Jesus, and while they claim to be operating on purely objective historical criteria, it seems obvious to many observers that they are once again mixing constructive theology and textual criticism. The quest for the historical Jesus, although almost certainly an impossible task on historical grounds alone, is a refreshing reminder that the most important New Testament issues remain within the orbit of theological concerns.

Another way of dealing with the problem of specialization in theological studies is to think about theologians as public intellectuals. Theologians should be willing to address the public issues of the day in language that is relevant and accessible. There are many proposals for turning theology into a more public venture, but nearly insurmountable problems remain in trying to bridge the culture of academic institutions with the wider public. Moreover, some theologians insist that the main public that theologians should worry about addressing is the church, not society at large.

These problems in communication explain why there has been an attempt in recent years to recover the rhetorical dimensions of the theological task. Rhetorical theology can take various forms. It can be a reflection on the rhetorical style of individual theologians. It can give theologians the tools to be more aware of the different kinds of audiences they address and, therefore, the appropriate style for those different contexts. It can also make normative claims about how theology should be practiced. Rhetorical theology will not solve all of theology’s problems, but it is a symptom of the continuing struggle of all theologians to be relevant and helpful to both church and society while explicating the Christian faith.

STEPHEN H. WEBB