The longer I am in school, the more frequently I find myself
asking definitional questions. The most life changing class I have yet taken
spent a semester examining different answers to the question, “what is history?”
This past semester I took my first formal theology course, taught by Dr. Steven
McKinion. Raised in church and having come to Christ at a young age, I have
heard the term “theology” bandied about for as long as I can remember, yet the
user rarely pauses to explain what exactly he means by it. While a quick
thought on word composition yields the obvious “study of God” definition, I
find such a vague concept unhelpful.
Before moving into my attempt at an answer to the question
posed, a definition of theology has been on my mind lately in contrast to a
group of British theologians in a school of thought called “Radical Orthodoxy.”
They propose some fascinating ideas, yet as I listened to an interview with one
of the leading lights of the movement, I noticed one missing piece in his
discussion of theology – Jesus! He explained, in very eloquent terms, how the
church was the universal redemption of the cosmos by the divine and how all who
are born into the human race are born into the church. As an evangelical, I
reject several of his established church premises, but I was stuck right back
at the beginning. If this scholar is an Oxford University theologian, what then
is theology for a Christian?
With that context in mind, I was reading in I Peter this
morning and could not move past Peter’s greeting. I normally skim through the
introductory material in an epistle, but this one gripped me. Peter writes, “To
those who are elect exiles of the dispersion in Pontus, Cappadocia, Asia, and
Bithynia, according to the foreknowledge of God the Father, in the
sanctification of the Spirit, for obedience to Jesus Christ and for sprinkling
with his blood: May grace and peace be multiplied to you” (I Peter 1:1-2).
Verse two is what caught my attention. I wonder if theology is the attempt to understand
and relate the four headings Paul strings together in this compact sentence.
What if theology, rather than being abstract philosophy for
religiously inclined people, is the attempt to comprehend the foreknowledge of
God working itself out in the redemption of mankind through Jesus Christ and
now in the body of the church? What if the telos of theology, rather than the
increase of abstract knowledge of the minutia of grammar (vital as those are),
is to produce growing sanctification, greater holiness in the believer as he
relates to God and to others?
Peter’s third subject reminds me of how Dr. David Allen
Black began his Greek II course – “Why are you learning New Testament Greek?”
thunders the elderly professor in a thin white beard. “So we can read the New
Testament?” answers the timid student in the third row. “NO! So we can obey it!”
The point of greater knowledge is to increase obedience to Christ. Theological
reflection should result in greater love of God and his creation.
Paul concludes his sentence with “for sprinkling with his
blood.” Part of growth in the Christian life is to understand the importance of
our bloody religion. The author of Hebrews spends much space on the importance
of blood in the Old Covenant sacrificial system, arguing that we needed blood
of a different kind to secure a different, permanent redemption. Perhaps the
essence of theology is articulating the need for the blood, the work of the
blood, and then how we must live as people covered in the blood of the risen
Lamb.
In my limited experience, it seems that theology, like other
disciplines, can get bogged down in terminology, obscure German names, and be
unreadable by ordinary people. If Jesus did not come to establish a race of
scholars but a redeemed community, then the best of theology remains centered upon
the crux of the faith: the knowledge of
God and its’ outworking in the life, death, and resurrection of Christ, the
increasing sanctification of the believer through obedience to the revelation
of God, and the importance of the blood shed on Calvary for our ultimate
redemption.
Joshua: Thanks for the thoughts. You seem to be doing at least three things here: 1. Defining theology "ordinarily" or in a way that is universally accessible. 2. Critiquing elitist theology and the jargon which comes with it. 3. Advocating for what we might call "communal theology" or theology for everyone in the Church. In some ways I agree and in others I do not.
ReplyDelete1. Besides some terminological preferences, I more or less agree with your definition of theology. I would probably rather say theology is engagement with revelation from God, and I would make "revelation" synonymous with the Word or Christ Himself delivered to the Church through the Spirit and witnessed by the Scriptures. Basically, I would define theology in direct reference to John 1. Theology is humanity coming to terms with "the light that shines in the darkness" which we have not understood and who is Christ. "No one has seen God at any time; the only begotten God who is in the bosom of the Father, He has EXPLAINED Him" (John 1:18). In other words, Jesus IS revelation, and therefore the ultimate subject of Christian theology. You are right to make Christ central, and that is perhaps my favorite part of your post.
2. Elitist theology can certainly be problematic if nobody understands it except the author or a few inner circle theologians. We can easily have theology that is purely amplifying the ego of professors. In that sense, I agree. However, in some ways, I think Paul was a bit elitist and had some jargon of his own ("works of law" and "law" and "flesh" for just a few). Peter even says that Paul writes, "some things that are hard to understand, which ignorant and unstable people distort..." (2 Peter 3:16). To some extent jargon is inevitable because some of the best ideas are difficult to understand. In a sense, the closer we get to truth in some respects, the closer we get to ambiguity in other respects. The more we know, the more we know what we don't know.
3. Again, I can agree that at some level everyone is and should be doing theology. However, I wonder if theology is something that is advanced by those, at least in the church, who have the gifts of teaching or preaching or the like. In other words, there is a place for everyone to do theology, and there is also a place for teachers to do theology. In that way, I have no problem with jargon if it is jargon that advances understanding. Understanding Paul's jargon for "works of law" is a worthy pursuit, even if it is confusing and exasperating and not for the average church member. Teachers writing to other teachers, in academia or otherwise, is valuable for the edification of teachers and the Body as a whole.
I doubt many Muslim theologians would agree with any part of your definition, but that's likely out-of-scope for your purposes.
ReplyDeleteThe general notion that seems to drive most of your points is that theology is just as much for the lay person as for the academic. In response to this, I can only ask what made you think otherwise? Academics generally make heavy use of jargon to express their ideas, which usually makes them indecipherable to the uninitiated in their fields. This doesn't mean that math is only for mathematicians, or, in the particular case at hand, that theology is only for the theologians. It simply means that there's a communication barrier between academics and their lay audiences, and it's one that student complain about far too much, and teachers do far too little to mitigate.
Jargon is essentially nothing more than vocabulary. It would be entirely unreasonable to expect someone to learn Spanish without any vocabulary, and you'll find that the field of language is quite similar in this respect to any other field you wish to study (there's some interesting philosophy and neuroscience to this point, but that's a topic for another day). If you want to learn theology, you will, whether you like it or not, have to learn some jargon along the way. Conversely, it is also unreasonable to expect students to learn Spanish when the professor never explains the vocab in their native language.
Not only is jargon par for the course, it's also entirely ubiquitous. You used a decent amount of jargon yourself. While most people with experience in western religion would have at least some notion of what you meant by "foreknowledge of God working itself out in the redemption of mankind through Jesus Christ and now in the body of the church", many wouldn't and I would hazard a guess that a large majority wouldn't be able to expound on the point. It's not that they're unable to understand it, or that they should in some way be relegated to simpler subject matter. It's simply that they don't have the background necessary to pick up on the jargon. This, I think, is more or less the crux of it. There's no fine line between the theologian and the lay person, just as there is no division between theology for the theologian and theology for the common man. You simply have to adapt your language to fit your audience.