The question: What is theology?
If we refuse the philosophic a-priorism of the competing religions of Plato and the Enlightenment, a handful of axioms suggest themselves.
1. Theology is simply the thinking of the church in its service to its gospel message that Jesus lives with death behind him.
Theology is the church’s maintenance of the particular evangel, Christ is risen. Because it’s a message, it must be conveyed from one person to another— a speaker must gospel someone. Theology therefore requires a community of tradition and interpretation, i.e., the church. Just as there is no salvation outside the church, there is no theology outside it. “Church” and “Theology” are as mutually determinative terms as “Gospel” and “Theology.”
Clearly, the gospel’s community has no way to copyright her labels for herself and her activity. Some may use the term gospel to describe an alien or variant message while others may purport to be doing theology with an object other than the God who raised Jesus from the dead but this is not theology as the church has defined her practice. As the ancient church has stipulated the rule: lex orandi, lex credendi. That is, our theology (lex credendi) conforms to our liturgy (lex orandi). Thus, what we say of and to God in prayer and praise and petition takes priority in our thinking about God.
Straightforwardly, then, theology cannot be done outside the church.
And because the church is the only proper place from which to do theology, theology can never start from the general, “God,” and move then move to the particular. Theology begins by saying “Jesus Christ.”
2. Theology is hermeneutical not speculative.
Theology is an act of interpretation. As an act of interpretation, theology begins outside of myself, independent of my assumptions and convictions. Theology begins with a received word and issues a new word only on the basis of the old word.
Thus, theology requires that our metaphysics be accommodated to the biblical drama rather than, as happened in the modern era, the reverse.
3. Theology is a communal activity.
Hence, theology is a communal activity. One may deconstruct their received theology but one cannot detach oneself from Christ’s body and still be doing theology.
Theology is for proclamation.
And theology is with precisely those we wish Jesus had not called friends.
4. Theology is neither anthropology nor ethics.
Just as theology revises received philosophical assumptions in order to conform them to the biblical drama, theology (precisely because it is thinking about the message of the Incarnate God) must not make history subservient to being.
What the Greeks called “Ousia” (Being) is not in charge.
For example, early in its mission to transmit the gospel to the part of the ancient world shaped by the religion of Plato, the church hit up against that religion’s commitment to the notion that God is immune to time, incapable of pathos, and uncontainable in the finite world.
But the eternal God of the scriptures, who will be whosoever he will be, is manifestly not a god to whom time does not matter.
As Jewish theologian Peter Ochs notes, the effort to conform the biblical drama to antecedent philosophical assumptions displaces the God of history with the generic study of “religion.” Rather than maintenance of the message of God’s mighty acts in Israel and her servant Jesus, theology thus becomes anthropology and ethics.
This is how the gospel gets perverted into glawspel and Christianity reduced to the golden rule.
5. Theology is normed by the biblical drama.
Virtually every theological sin, says Gerhard Forde, and false formulation of the faith can be traced to the intrusion of the pagan notion of timelessness into the scene. Instead any onto-theological claims (e.g., “God does not act in history” or “God is not a human” or even “God does not wreak weal or create woe”) are derivative of what we already know about God. And we know God only by way of his revelation in historical time called the Old and New Testaments.
Scripture need not be “inerrant” or “infallible” to be nevertheless the means by which the true God identifies himself.
Thus, theology is normed by the biblical drama because we are capable of no true knowledge of God until God reveals himself to us in time and history. And the biblical drama is the memory of those incarnations.
6. Theology is trinitarian discourse.
If theology is normed by the biblical drama, then, just so, theology is trinitarian discourse because God is a colloquy. God’s being is a being in history and this history is a story with a dramatis personnae— what the church father Gregory of Nyssa called God’s “temporal infinity.”
Once again, therefore, God’s being in history— scripture’s narrative of Father, Son, and Spirit— is not derivative to a priori convictions about God’s being. Contrary to all ontological foundationalisms, the true God is known only by self-revelation. And when the true God unveils himself fully, we discover the One is three person’d.
The biblical drama recounts the history by which God identifies himself— the happening of God.
As Gregory of Nyssa put it:
“The triune event is temporal infinity. God in Christ is infinite over the past and infinite over the future. The triune life is God of the past, the present, and the future.”
Thus—
Trinity is not a philosophic construction.
Trinity is a proper name.
Because trinity is a proper name, theology must be trinitarian discourse. A theology which speaks only of “God” in the general or abstract speaks of a god other than the Colloquy that is God.
Because God is triune, God’s identity is inseparable from the story of Israel and, thus, an abstracted, universal theology is an assault on the identity of God. Worse still, if God has not so entered into time and made himself an object in Mary’s arms or in Israel’s temple, neither can he be an object of our knowledge.
7. Theology has more than one audience.
(And one audience is more important than the other.)
Once again the lex orandi, lex credendi.
Theology is maintenance of the church’s message that the God of Israel has raised Jesus from the dead, having first raised the Jews from slavery in Egypt.
Directed outward to the world, this message is the stuff of promise. But the world is not the only hearer to whom we speak— the world is not even primarily the listener we address with gospel. In Jesus Christ, God the Son makes his Father our Father too. We’re invited into the Colloquy that is God.
Directed to the world, the gospel is promise.
Directed to God, the gospel is prayer and praise and petition.
Theology that is not firstly in service to prayer is not theology.
Just so, a theology so deconstructed that prayer no longer does anything, theology that posits a God who is no longer persuadable, is a theology unmoored from the ancient rule, lex orandi, lex credendi.
As Robert Jenson writes:
“When the universal rule from prayer is not followed, theology slips from its object, for it is in the church’s prayer and praise, in their verbal form and in the obtrusively embodied form called sacrifice, that the church’s discourse turns and fastens itself to God as its object. And it is the ineluctably trinitarian pattern of the church’s prayer, its address to the one Jesus called Father, with Jesus who thus made himself the Son, in their common Spirit, by which the church’s discourse grasps the resurrection’s particular God as the object finally given to it.”
8. Theology is a listening as much as an utterance.
Deconstructing conventional Christianity (Christianity accommodated to culture) is holy and good; it is the church reformed, always reforming. Deconstructing— so as to detach from— traditional Christianity (the faith of the church fathers) is destructive; the deposit of the saints just is what God has said and done. If God has not so said and done in the past, we have no reason other than sinful pride to suppose that God speaks or acts amongst us in the present.
In which case, there is no Future.
Therefore—
In theology, the golden rule and greatest commandment apply across the veil of death.
Love of neighbor includes our dead neighbors whom the church calls saints.
I needed this! I was drawn to theology because I was taught that theology is in service to the church. Over the years of being in the academy I became disillusioned because everyone seemed to want to get rid of that which gives theology its life. The same is true in the church. Tear it all down until there is nothing left.
Thank you for this.
Thank you for writing this, I'm going to print it and use as a handy guide to those folks who glaze over when I talk about theology. I'm going to take a pass on my next comment, like maybe what their concept of..... shutting up now. Straight outta Charlottesville.