Theological Method: A Guide for the Perplexed

Paul L. Allen

• Publisher: T&T Clark
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9780567119087
• eBook ISBN: 9780567145727
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Theology

Theological Method: A Guide for the Perplexed is a book that introduces the reader to the practice of doing theology. It provides a historical survey of key figures and concepts that bear on an understanding of difficult methodological issues in Christian theology. Beginning with a description of philosophical themes that affect the way theology is done today, it summarizes the various theological methods deployed by theologians and churches over two millennia of Christian thought. The book uncovers patterns in the theological task of relating biblical texts with beliefs and doctrines, according to historically conditioned theological and cultural priorities. The book's highlights include a discussion of Augustine's epoch-making De doctrina Christiana. Also receiving close attention is the relationship between philosophy and theology during the Middle Ages, the meaning of sola scriptura for the Protestant Reformers, the methods of key interpreters of doctrine in the nineteenth century and the theological priorities of the 'Radical Orthodoxy' movement.

Chapter One

Paul the theologian

In the field of biblical studies, one viewpoint, sometimes still heard, is that ‘in scripture there is not a line of theology’.¹ While this may be a plausible interpretation of some of the biblical books, it is difficult to square this assessment with the life and writings of Paul in the New Testament. Paul was a theologian, albeit not a ‘professional’, ‘scholastic’ or an ‘academic’. He is not a very sophisticated exponent of Christian philosophy – a hybrid literature that would emerge in later centuries. Yet, in our day, a major contemporary philosophical academic movement studies Paul as a philosopher. However, when it is time to identify Paul, most scholars do not hesitate. Noted biblical scholar Joseph Fitzmyer terms Paul ‘the first Christian theologian’, and F. F. Bruce claims that Paul is the Christian church’s ‘greatest theologian’.² Yet, as the church’s ‘first theologian’, Paul was often portrayed in contrast, or even in opposition to, the pure ‘religious posture of Jesus’.³

Certainly, Paul is an interpreter of Jesus, the interpreter of Jesus par excellence. First and foremost, Paul is the author of what were later established as canonical letters. While he is an interpreter of Jesus, he is also a reader of the biblical books of the Old Testament. He is a convert whose faith is therefore hermeneutical. That is, Paul interprets his faith through scripture and he interprets the scriptures through faith. His faith is informed by an interpreted experience of Christ’s death and resurrection, which is his way of ‘reading’ the Jewish scriptures. There is a circular interdependence of scripture and experience through which Paul’s own theological method becomes clear. Or, at least, this is the outline of a Pauline method. I shall argue in this chapter that Paul’s method is basically a method that is hermeneutical with regards to Israel’s scriptures and to Christ, while it is apostolic (or communicative) with regards to the church. These two adjectives – hermeneutical and apostolic – capture the thrust of Paul’s theological method by and large. Such adjectives are sufficiently general to take into consideration the contingent occasions for which he develops theological arguments, yet they are specific enough to rule out the idea that Paul is only an occasional writer with no concern for coherence.

A comprehensive approach to scripture developed slowly within the Christian church from the middle of the second century onwards. New Testament texts are cited by early churchmen, such as Ignatius of Antioch, alongside texts from what would later become known as the Old Testament, and were henceforth regarded as wholly authoritative. Paul’s own theology forms the bulk of the New Testament, even if it is technically true that some of the letters attributed to him have been judged by modern scholars to have been written by others. But, as first-person accounts go, his experience of Christ and his interpretation of the Hebrew Bible are unique, partly because of the fusion of distinctive Jewish elements with his Christian faith.

What is undeniably unique with regard to Paul is that methodically speaking, the pivotal point upon which his theology turns is his conversion experience on the road to Damascus, as recounted in the Book of Acts. (I retain the term ‘conversion’ because of its associations with Lonergan’s understanding of conversion as authentic faith, reason and ethics, despite the fact that the guild of New Testament scholars now generally disapprove of it to describe Paul’s apostolic call.) Thereafter, Paul is a preacher and ‘apostle’ of Christ, ‘evangelist to the gentiles’ as tradition identifies him. Yet, in his letters, his prose often comes across as enigmatic or contradictory, and he seems at times taciturn. Paul claims in 1 Corinthians, on the one hand, that ‘I have the Spirit of God’ (7.40), yet he comments in self-reproach later on that ‘I am the least of the apostles, unfit to be called an apostle’ (15.9).

As a singularly important figure in the Christian tradition, we are justified in asking to what extent Paul actually adopts anything like a theological method. Partly as a consequence of his reference to his conversion, some scholars regard Paul as neither systematic nor consistent.⁴ Others would say that the question about method makes little sense to ask. Indeed, William Wrede alleged that Paul pushed Jesus ‘the greater one, whom he meant to serve, into the background’.⁵ Thus, one could argue that against a methodical perspective, Paul is a freelance genius. As Freud put it, Paul ‘has a gift for religion, in the truest sense of the phrase’.⁶

But if Paul is to be called a theologian, as I believe is justified, what method or methods did he follow? One common way of approaching this question is to examine Paul’s letters from a literary or textual point of view, comparing, for instance, tropes and metaphors as they are developed in different letters. One prominent instance of this approach is through the analysis of similarities and differences in the way that Abraham is treated in the midrashim of Romans and Galatians. Therefore, even if one claims that Paul is not a ‘theologian’ in the proper sense of that word, one could at least affirm that Paul follows a pattern in his writing.

If we adopt a more descriptive approach, we would conclude that Paul is drawing on a variety of sources for constructing his theology. He fuses his own experience, the Jesus tradition of the Christian churches scattered around the Mediterranean, Jewish scripture and philosophical Stoicism. Paul employs various hermeneutical strategies in order to lay out the narrative coherence of his good news for the diverse audiences and recipients of his ministry. This diversity is evident in his letters. Paul identifies himself as ‘called to be an apostle’ (Rom. 1), a form of ministry with a didactic orientation, as distinct from the more passive orientation of (mere) discipleship. There is a psychological dimension to Paul’s self-identity as a teacher and apostle, as one who bears the burden of responsibility. This role clarifies his way of communicating theological insights.

J. C. Beker, a leading scholar of Pauline theology, has thought a great deal about Paul’s methodology and describes Paul’s letters as documentary evidence of a balance struck between ‘contingency’ and ‘coherence’. Contingency characterizes the communicative mode by which Paul conveys the meaning of the gospel on various occasions to different audiences. The coherence of the gospel is a reference to a centre of Paul’s thought that underpins the variety of occasions on which he speaks. Beker is not alone in arguing for a centre to Paul’s theology while fully aware of the variety of theological interpretations of Paul that are attributed to the array of images and concepts Paul uses to convey his faith in Christ. Beker is also aware of the dangers of erring on the side of coherence. He is aware, for instance, of the early Protestant ‘consensus’ on the ‘justification by faith’ doctrine that was taken by Luther and others to be the essence of Paul’s thought. However, as recent scholarship has stressed, this alleged ‘essence’ of Paul’s theology only begins with Luther’s reading of the Books of Galatians and Romans. So, for instance, the eschatological mysticism of Albert Schweitzer (1875–1965) is a reaction to this historic Lutheran interpretation of Paul. Yet Schweitzer ironically established a new theme that he claimed to be the core of Paul’s theology. Such is the trajectory of scholarship in Pauline theology as it waxes and wanes over contested core theological storylines. With the current popularity for ‘nonfoundationalist’ and postmodern ways of interpreting biblical texts, the search for a core of Pauline thought has become somewhat discredited.

In light of the debates that swirl in this theoretical tug-of-war, I argue for a pattern in Paul’s theology comparable to Beker’s framework of contingency and coherence. In this chapter I will take up four key issues which demonstrate an implicit theological method in Paul. Each issue can be understood through the analysis and interpretation of key texts. These issues exemplify Paul’s theological method, though, of course, by no account do they exhaust what that method means. The four issues are as follows.

a) Justification by faith is a doctrine famously attributed to Paul, especially by Lutheran theologians during the Protestant Reformation and thereafter, as already noted. As a means of combating what Protestants viewed as the Catholic Church’s efforts to convey a works-based concept of God’s grace, Luther and his various successors drew on what they perceived as the gospel of grace in Paul’s letters in order to communicate a theology of God’s grace known and won through simple faith. The question that has arisen in the twentieth century is whether such a (Lutheran) doctrine is a misreading of Paul himself.

Without agreeing exactly with the historic Lutheran theology of grace on the basis of Pauline texts, I argue that Paul does develop something like a doctrine of justification. He does so methodologically. He interprets scripture, especially by correlating his own understanding of Jesus with those understandings nascent in the traditions of the ancient Christian church, which are evident in the gospels. What this means, from a twenty-first-century perspective, is that Paul’s way of articulating justification is intentionally aligned with the basic sense of forgiveness that we read about in the parables of Jesus in the gospels. Both the gospel writers and Paul articulate an understanding of salvation based in part on the sense of God’s mercy found in the Old Testament. To that extent, justification is not a doctrine that is Paul’s alone. It is a doctrine, or at least a well-founded idea, that plausibly extends the meaning of Jewish scripture through the prism of Christ. Thus, Paul’s theological method is one which arrives at a doctrine (or a proto-doctrine at least) by interpreting scripture in light of his powerful conversion experience. If there is coherence to Paul’s thought about justification, then that coherence results from methodically thinking about the salvation that is now possible for Gentiles, in unity with Jews. This salvation is made possible by Christ through faith and marked by baptism. Now, justification does not rely upon Israel’s law.⁷

b) Paul’s expression of a holiness ethic stems from an understanding of righteousness, which is the life of faith. For Paul, an ethic of personal and corporate holiness has both communitarian and sexual applications, as we can see from 1 Thess. 4.5 for instance. While Paul refrains from addressing moral issues systematically in the way of Greek philosophers, he nevertheless fosters the spirit of a comprehensive moral view which follows as a consequence of Christian faith. So, for instance, Paul does not advise Philemon to free his slave Onesimus in the Book of Philemon, yet the church was already ‘fully conscious of the inconsistency between this institution [of slavery] and the inner freedom and equality which was the Christian ideal’⁸ a freedom that Paul advocates such that slavery is rendered morally untenable. I will untangle a bit further the methodological steps taken in Paul’s account of Christian holiness, which demonstrates both the coherence and contingency of his theology.

c) On the question of the Fall and original sin, Paul has been both authoritative and controversial. Is Paul’s interpretation of the Genesis account of the fall of Adam an ad hoc doctrine, or is it consistent with Jewish tradition and early Christian belief? When Paul encounters and reflects upon the significance of sin and the first human family in his writing, does he bring to his reflection anything resembling a methodical account of human fallenness? To be more specific, is the Adam/Christ typology of humanity in Rom. 5 an argument that is organized properly? To his credit, I think Paul does bring some consistency to bear on the question, a constructive theological position that serves as an important jumping-off point for subsequent Christian systematic theology.

d) One other theological issue on which Paul demonstrates a methodological disposition is his affirmation of something like the doctrine of the Trinity. Of course, unlike the later, more abstract statements of the church fathers for whom terminological precision became a matter of meticulous debate, Paul is much more interested in settling the kind of experience that justifies talking of God’s threefold disclosure. Paul’s experiential grounding of Trinitarian ideas does not necessarily entail a doctrinal approach. But, his experiential reference points are sufficient grounds for what, in hindsight, I would term a proto-doctrine of the Trinity in Paul. A number of passages in his letters tend to suggest a relationship between experience and doctrinal judgement. Some of this doctrinal judgement is Paul’s. Subsequently, theologians and the church would follow his lead in the dialectical debates that followed in subsequent centuries.

Together, these four examples in Pauline theology lend support for the early church maxim ‘lex orandi lex credendi’. The mediated, doxological experience of God is a key criterion that permeates early Christian theology, notably Pauline thought. Paul expresses, perhaps more than many patristic figures, the trajectory of theology from experience, worship included, to doctrine. The lex orandi expression comes to be formulated in a text of Prosper of Aquitane, a fifth-century monk who assisted Pope Leo the Great as secretary and interpreter of Augustine. It literally means that ‘the law of worship is the rule of faith’. Taking Paul’s conversion experience and his constant exhortations to pray, we see that, for him, the striving to render theological judgments (proto-doctrines, if you will) based on his experience is a prime example of the lex orandi rule in operation.

In order to assess Paul’s theological method through an analysis of these four questions, it is first of all important to underline several crucial factors that characterize his methodical outlook. The contemporary literature dealing with the influences on Paul’s thought and writing is vast. The sheer amount of this scholarly discourse complements the more voluminous material that continues to analyse Paul’s actual theology. Still, both sets of literature dwarf the literature dedicated to a study of his method. Talk of method in Paul can run the risk of making him out to be the logical philosopher that he was not. One thing that nearly all scholars agree upon, however, is that Paul’s faith is rooted in his belonging to the house of Israel, a sense of belonging made tenable in self-consciously Christological terms. The friendship with God, to which he attests time and again, stems from both his Jewish and his Christian identities. This dual identity is the key context to all of his theology. Even if Paul self-consciously alters the terms of his Jewish identity because of what God has done through Jesus Christ, the template of Paul’s theological outlook is still recognizably Jewish.

Also important is Paul’s Hellenistic background, which plays a considerable role in shaping his somewhat limited education. Being from Tarsus in Cilicia, Paul was a Roman citizen according to the Book of Acts – information that is probably trustworthy, despite some lingering doubts over the historicity of certain claims in Acts. He was formed early on in his life by a literary culture. In fact, Strabo claimed that ‘the people at Tarsus have devoted themselves so eagerly, not only to philosophy, but also to the whole round of education in general, that they have surpassed Athens, Alexandria, or any other place that can be named where there have been schools and lectures of philosophers’.⁹ As we are told in Acts 22.3, important segments of Paul’s education came from his learning at the feet of an important Jerusalem rabbi and seer, Gamaliel. This suggests that Paul’s early exposure to the written Torah, poetry and basic Greco-Roman philosophy was complemented by later formation in the ‘oral Torah’ at Jerusalem.

However, an understanding of Paul’s background context, while necessary, is insufficient for determining his theological method. In the field of Pauline studies itself, there is a dialectic that runs between those who emphasize Paul’s background and those who want to focus on the logical patterns of thought and speech that make up the narrative thread of his letters. There is a dialectic between thinking of Paul’s context as determining his theology versus thinking of Paul’s theology as more or less independent of his context. What is evident in this dialectic is a distinction in theological tasks, or ‘functional specialties’, as Lonergan calls them. On the one hand are scholars who are convinced that Paul’s thought is reducible in some way to being an expression of Jewish piety that is historically, rhetorically and psychologically peculiar, even esoteric. Others marry Paul’s Jewish perspective through his understanding of Christ and this is what the so-called New Perspective on Paul brings. In turn, this perspective provides a helpful, and perhaps necessary, corrective to the older, traditional view of Paul’s view of justification. For the New Perspective, it is vital and plausible to retrieve the Jewish context which moulded Paul as a person of faith, action and belief. For the New Perspective, no constructive theology ought to contradict Paul’s Jewish experience of Jesus Christ.

So, there are now more theologians and scholars who want to prioritize the fresh, conceptual and even doctrinal significance of Paul’s thought which emerges from his Jewish outlook. Typically, constructive theologians take it as their task to understand Paul in this sense. According to this analysis, the priority is to understand what it is that Paul wants his hearers or readers to understand. The issue which arises in this second, ‘more theological’ perspective concerns intention: what did Paul and those who were involved in the writing of his letters intend to mean in their choice of particular words, phrases and arguments? Attention to the question of Paul’s intentions brings out the full range of Jewish meanings that he interprets and makes new through Christ.

If it is true that Paul’s letters convey something of a coherent theological perspective, then it is vital to say how this coherence is won. Coherence cannot be claimed if there is little or no evidence for it, and it is the Jewish framework to which the New Perspective has pointed as the most obvious way to understand Paul’s overall message. For instance, there is a tremendous amount written concerning the notions of ‘grace’ and ‘law’ that originate with Paul. For many theologians, not least Martin Luther himself, the concept of grace, interpreted through the phrase ‘justification by faith’, became the central organizing principle of his entire theological system, as it did for many others thereafter. We are right to ask whether Paul thinks methodically about his sources when he speaks about ‘grace’ or ‘law.’ It is certainly true that Paul engages in theological reflection not in an abstract way, but in a ‘rabbinic’ way, since...

Table of contents

• Cover-Page
• Half-Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Preface
• Introduction: Is there a theological epistemology?
• 1 Paul the theologian
• 2 The patristic era
• 3 Augustine and the method of Christian conversion
• 4 Medieval theology – Not just sacred doctrine
• 5 The meaning of sola scriptura
• 6 Early modern theology – The rise of explicit methodology
• 7 Modern theological methods – Correlation and anti-correlation
• 8 Contemporary theological method as wisdom
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index