What is theology?

     Theology is the study of God and religion.  Christian theology then is the study of the Christian God and the Christian religion.  I really like the way Alister McGrath further develops the definition of theology in "Christian Theology: An Introduction"; he does so by including four stages to the study of theology: sources, development, relationship and application.  Sources may include the Bible, natural revelation, the Church or the church fathers.  Development deals with the way in which theology develops, i.e. its evolutionary history into what it is today.   This is a lot like historical theology in its approach to new ideas.  Relationship is how Christian ideas relate with each other and their total coherence.  Finally, application is about theology’s pragmatic value to believers and theologians.  (McGrath, 2011)  McGrath’s definition gives a good foundation for studying God and religion because it gives us four places to begin our study.  (You can checkout part of his book in the links.)  We must start with the revelation, watch the idea develop, watch the relation of the idea to others and finally check its applicability.  I will attempt to use this structure in discussing theology.

  An important question related to the first things…

  “How do we study theology?  What tools should we bring to the table to further our understanding?”  Many wide and varied suggestions have been made.  Indeed, this is quite possibly one of the seminal questions facing modern theology.  Some have argued that we must look at theology in a completely scientific way.  Others have suggested that we must attack the questions with only logic.   Both of these approaches come down to a basic idea that theology must be some kind of scientific study of religion. 

I believe this approach has many problems – one of which is focus. 

      For example, while science may be able to study the way civilizations think about God, it doesn’t have anything to do with the metaphysical relationship people have with a spiritual world.  To think that science is a necessary prerequisite to studying theology is arbitrary, not only because it isn’t pragmatic, but also because it means that religion must somehow subjugate itself to science.  Which ultimately means that we are studying religion under a microscope (like studying an ancient text) and that we have closed our eyes to anything outside of our visual stimuli.  This, I think, most theologians would reject because religion isn’t like any other subject; it is tied to something deeper than the mere flesh and bones that make up our body, it is tied to our being.  Many theologians have sold their metaphorical souls for legitimization of theology in the eyes of others and by doing so they have put blinders over the study of theology.

    I believe that this approach is wrong; my suggestion is that we approach theology with an open heart and mind.  We must approach it not merely as scholars but as believers. What I mean is that we must use all available paths to understand more about God and religion.  In this way, I guess I’m like Søren Kierkegaard, we live in a society that wants to study religion with a microscope, but we cannot study spirituality with anything but an open heart.

McGrath, A.E. (2011). Christian theology: an introduction. Chichester, West Sussex, UK: John Wiley & Sons.