Introduction to Theology

Third Edition

Owen C. Thomas, Ellen K. Wondra

• Publisher: Morehouse Publishing
• Year: 2002
• Print ISBN: 9780819218971
• eBook ISBN: 9780819225450
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Denominations

An accessible primer to theology through the prospective of Anglicanism.

Organized around the topics of systematic theology, Introduction to Theology begins with an exploration of Scripture, then moves through history and tradition to contemporary debates and reconstructions. As a textbook for introductory courses in seminaries of the Episcopal Church, this book also includes references to The Book of Common Prayer, which Anglicans consider a primary source for theology.

This edition pays detailed attention to the many developments in theology since its last revision: the emergence of new perspectives such as womanist, mujerista, narrative, and post-modern theology; the shift in theological methods to incorporate the human sciences, recent critical philosophies, and recent developments in the physical sciences; the ongoing revisions of The Book of Common Prayer and resultant shifts in Anglican identity; and the globalization of theological education, specifically the focus on the Episcopal Church as part of the worldwide Anglican Communion.

1. Introduction

Before we dig into the details of Christian theology, we should remind ourselves that we are not discussing detached theoretical propositions but the story of the Bible—the concrete, dramatic narrative of God and the people of God, the history of Israel, the events in which God is revealed for our salvation. The Bible is the story of creation, the rebellion of humanity, the election and covenant with Israel, the coming of the Messiah, the reconciliation of God and humanity, the birth of the church as God's instrument in the divine mission to the world, and the gift of the Spirit as the promise of final fulfillment. The Christian gospel and the Christian faith are based in these stories, and Christian theology attempts to understand and interpret these stories of what God has done and is doing.

Nature and Necessity of Theology

Systematic or dogmatic theology has many angles of approach, each casting a different light on Christian faith. In the classical approach still favored by many European and North American theologians, theology is the methodical investigation and interpretation of the content of Christian faith, the orderly clarification and explanation of what the Christian message affirms. From another angle, theology is an activity or function of the Christian church carried out by members of the church. It is faith seeking understanding, through which the church in every age reflects on the basis of its existence and the content of its message. From yet another angle, theology is “faith seeking the clarity of its cause.”¹ That is, it is reflection on Christian life amid struggles for freedom or liberation, for the full humanity of all persons, and for the transformation of human persons and societies as manifestations of and in expectation of the reign of God.²

Christians and the church have to reflect on their faith and message in every age, so that the faith can be interpreted and presented, understood and affirmed in each new period. If the church tries too hard to make its message relevant, it may lose the message and become simply a sanctification of the culture around it. But the church may also be so concerned to maintain the purity of its message that the message becomes unintelligible to the contemporary age. To put this in another way, the church has a mission to speak about God to the world. It uses language about God in all of its activities, in worship, preaching, instruction, social action, pastoral care, prayer, and everyday life. The function and task of theology is to test, criticize, and revise the language that the church uses about God, to test it by its norm—namely, God's self-disclosure, to which the Bible gives testimony. This testing is necessary, because the church's language about God is fallible and can fall into error and confusion. This testing is possible, because God has promised that the Holy Spirit will preserve and lead the church into all truth. Furthermore, the church's understanding of God and the gospel is always being expanded and deepened. Finally, human language itself is constantly changing in meaning and thus must be revised regularly in order to maintain continuity. Therefore, theology is not a luxury or an academic game for those specially inclined. It is necessary in the life of the church.

Some object that theology moves away from the directness and simplicity of faith and gets overly intellectual, lost in subtle distinctions and abstractions. Such objections fail to recognize that every Christian is a theologian. Every Christian thinks about her faith and decides how it relates to a particular situation—from choosing a career to deciding what theater performance to see on a Friday night. Every Christian struggles with how his faith helps him understand life's challenges and joys—from unjust suffering on a large scale to the birth of a longed-for child. All Christians express their faith in word, deed, and manner of life. Each of these activities is theological, because theology, at heart, is reflection on what we believe and on how it shapes our lives.³

Beyond this first level of theology, but connected to it, is a second level at which the Christian faith is considered in a more disciplined manner. (This is the level covered in this book.) At this second level, the insights and practices of the Christian life are informed by and inform the formal study of Scripture, history, philosophy and theology, the human and natural sciences, and other disciplines. The purpose of this second level (or second-order) theology is basically the same as the first: the interpretation and application of the Christian faith in a particular time and place, with the context's own challenges and insights. This basic task is, at the second level, pursued with greater precision and greater resources. But the task is always pursued with attention to what it means for the thinking, praying, and living of everyday Christian life.

What, then, does second-order theology contribute to the life of the church? First, the Bible as the main source and standard of Christian teaching is not uniform. It does not present a unity of teaching but rather a multiplicity of different approaches that must be addressed by critical reflection, by theological work. Biblical scholars, making theological judgments, do some of this work. Some work is done by theologians, using methods of biblical study. Furthermore, the thought-categories, stories, and symbols in the Bible must be interpreted and recast into categories, narratives, and symbols accessible in the present. Our understanding of ourselves, our language and concepts, the issues we face, and the questions we raise about Christian faith change from age to age. Therefore, the work of theology is a continuing necessity in the life of the church.

Second, the Christian message, which is based on the Bible, must be distinguished from the scientific worldview of the first century. The geology, biology, and historiography of the Bible have no binding authority for us and must be distinguished from the faith testimony of the Bible. The same can be said for social arrangements such as slavery, the treatment of women and children as property, and the ordering of community life. The church has recognized this distinction throughout its history in understanding that revelation and Scripture are given for our salvation, which includes social transformation, and should be understood in this way.

Third, the church relies on preaching, teaching, and catechetical instruction to explain what the Christian faith means and requires. These activities and how they are received often raise further questions, which must be answered carefully. Liturgy is full of theological content. So is the simplest teaching of the youngest children. And so is every choice of church program, including the church's engagement with the community in which it is set.

Fourth, theology assists in determining what is essential to the Christian faith and message and what is not essential, what is central and what is peripheral. In a word, theology is necessary in order to determine what is and is not part of Christian faith. Misunderstandings and distortions of Christian faith arise in the church, and it becomes necessary to distinguish true from false worship, belief, doctrine, and practice. The only thing that saved the church from Gnosticism, Arianism, Apollinarianism, and so forth was hard theological work.

Each of these tasks requires that theology move away from the directness of faith toward more abstract conceptions. We can see this process taking place in the Bible. At Caesarea Philippi, Peter says to Jesus, “You are the Christ.” This is direct personal confrontation and encounter, the spontaneous response of faith. In his sermon on the day of Pentecost, Peter says, “He is Lord and Christ.” This is preaching, giving testimony, and it is one step removed from the immediacy of personal encounter. Peter's statement is the beginning of the movement toward theology. His is no longer a spontaneous response but involves some reflection. The next step is answering questions arising from preaching, then baptismal and catechetical instruction, then the training of teachers, and finally the work of theologians. The greater clarity and precision of ideas and expressions is gained only by moving away from the immediacy of conscious personal relationship to God, in order to see it more clearly. It is not possible to worship and to think critically about the object of worship at the same time, but both are necessary to the life of faith. William Temple writes: “For the fullest practice of…the Christian religion, the two sides must be held together as closely as possible. An uncritical surrender will involve an unsanctified intellect; while an unsurrendered criticism will be incapable of worship.”⁴ Theology serves faith through critical clarification, but there is a danger that the critical reflective temper may replace rather than serve the humble openness and expectancy before God. Emil Brunner offers a parable: chemists analyze food for its nourishing value. The food they use is no longer useful for nourishment, but their work serves the aim of nourishment.

Faith can be defined as a person's right relationship to God, a relationship of grateful trust and obedience. Thus, faith necessarily involves understanding the object of faith. Otherwise faith would be blind or unconscious and, thus, not faith. Faith seeks greater understanding of God, greater comprehension and clarity, because it involves the impulse to give testimony, to communicate both within the community of faith and to the world. Second-order theology (the subject of this book) continues this movement toward understanding and greater clarity in its comprehension of its object, God. Theology is the unfolding and elaboration, the explication and clarification of the understanding that is involved in faith. As Anselm put it, theology is fides quaerens intellectum, faith seeking understanding. Anselm's friends asked him for proofs of doctrine, and he writes in Cur Deus Homo, “This they ask, not for the sake of attaining to faith by means of reason, but that they may be gladdened by understanding and meditating on those things which they believe” (1.1). Thus it is faith itself that seeks greater understanding in theology. Theologians have faith, stand in the community of faith, and their work serves faith. So theology is faith moving to a level of clearer and more comprehensive understanding.

From what has been said, it becomes clear that second-order theology is normative and not merely descriptive. That is, it goes beyond saying what Christians believe and do in order to say what beliefs and practices are apt for Christians, and what beliefs are problematic. Theology, in other words, makes judgments. Theology is not simply the combination and commentary on the dogmatic tradition in the form of creeds, conciliar decisions, and confessions, which is what theology has often been in the past. Nor is theology a historical report on the consensus in a classical period, such as the period of the early church, the Reformation, or that of the seventeenth-century Anglican divines; these are historical and not systematic theological studies. Neither is theology the theologian's personal statement of faith, although theology certainly arises from personal faith and reflects it.

Theology is normative in attempting to determine the true Christian faith—to distinguish true doctrine from false doctrine, true practice from false practice, true worship from false worship; to determine what is and what is not part of Christian faith. Thus, one of the functions of theology is to scrutinize, criticize, and, if necessary, reform the church's formulations of its faith in creeds, conciliar decisions, and confessions, and its practices in worship, prayer, mission, and daily life.

Theology and Philosophy

In many regards, theology and philosophy are parallel enterprises.⁵ More specifically, a long-standing tradition dating from the early church sees Christian theology as a species of the genus philosophy. Philosophy in its constructive function is the attempt to organize and interpret the data of human experience in the light of some key category, central image, or organizing principle, such as matter in motion, nature, life, organism, process, mind, or spirit. The key category, image, or organizing principle is chosen by a decision analogous to the decision of faith. The decision provides the philosopher a clear or compelling view of the world, and the first task of the constructive philosopher is to analyze and clarify this pivotal notion. Theology, in one of the ways we have defined it, is the analysis and clarification of the key categories, images, or organizing principles of Christian faith, namely, the rich picture of God, creation, and salvation manifest in the testimony of the Bible.

Then the larger task of theology, sometimes called Christian philosophy, is the interpretation of human experience in the light of the central categories, images, and ideas of Christian faith. It must be noted that “human experience” is itself a multifaceted and variable category, encompassing not only what happens to people, but how they interpret these events. Such interpretation arises out of the language and symbols, cultures and worldviews, social and political systems, and understandings of social location (such as gender, race, class, age, ability, sexual orientation) in which each person is immersed. Interpretation is also shaped by what each person makes of these contextual factors, that is, by the person's inner life and all that shapes it.⁶ Thus, the larger task of theology as interpretation of human experience requires theologians to be conversant not only with philosophy, but also with art, literature, and the sciences, each of which presents aspects of human experience in a richly diverse way.

Appreciation of the wealth and diversity of human experience does not, however, relieve theology of its critical function: its responsibility to be clear and precise in its methods, conceptions, interpretations, and evaluations.

Thus theology should be considered in its relation to philosophies such as idealism, naturalism, process philosophy, and so forth. Such study demonstrates relationships among different worldviews, some of which are similar, some of which overlap, and some of which are contradictory. Theologians are free to use any concepts, analyses, or arguments of any philosophy or human science that help them. They do this to some extent simply in the use of language. But there is a danger that concepts imported from another worldview may distort rather than clarify the meaning of the Christian faith, and, in any case, no philosophical or scientific conclusions can be normative for theology.

Theology and Contextualization

A major hallmark of late-twentieth- and early-twenty-first-century theology has been its interest in exploring and presenting how particular sociocultural and racial/ethnic groups experience the Christian faith, and how they express it. There is a growing appreciation that the Christian message is received, appropriated, and conveyed in terms that are apt to faith communities’ particular circumstances and history, and to their relations with other, often dominant communities. Thus, the last several decades have seen the emergence and development of black or African American theology, Asian theology, feminist theology, and many more. In each case, theologians bring many resources to bear—social, political, and economic theories, theories of gender, and so forth—as they reflect on the Christian message and on how their own faith communities understand it.⁷

Theologians taking this approach often are members and participants in communities that have been marginalized, subjugated, and disadvantaged relative to a dominant and dominating culture. These communities, however, do not just suffer under domination: they also are locations of resistance, transformation, and unshakeable hope. Theologies that spring from such contexts generally include a strong, Scripture-based critique of systems of domination and oppression along with a powerful affirmation of a God of love who has special concern for “the least, the last, and the lost.” They are theologies of liberation from dehumanization and for the full humanity evident in Jesus himself and promised to his followers.

African American theologian James Cone has pioneered this approach in the United States in his many books and other writings.⁸ Cone and others begin with the experience and practice of the community of which they are a part, and then clarify and interpret that experience in the community's own terms. Given the strength of the Christian faith in these contexts, these terms are often drawn from or shaped by key scriptural themes, such as the exodus; the prophetic call for a return to justice; and especially Jesus’ life of ministry with and for “the least of these” and his resistance to dominant groups (such as the Romans). On the basis of such thematized experience, theologians also bring to bear methods and findings of the social and human sciences, economics, critical social theory, literature, music, and the arts. The result is second-order theology that arises from and on behalf of the particular community that both articulates and develops the first-order theology already present, and that also nurtures hope, spurs engagement in transformative practice, and shapes further understanding.

An important aspect of these theologies is their close connection with practice of the Christian faith, including the practice of struggle, resistance, and hope. Key sources, then, are not only published studies, but also direct engagement in the life of a community, including advocacy, support, and strategy for transformation. Theologies of liberation often draw on work and reflection with “ordinary people,” including intentional Bible study and discussion.⁹ They also draw on literature, music, and the arts in recognition that these modes of expression are powerful imaginative reflections on the contexts in which they arise. Finally, theologies of liberation often employ a disciplined imagination able to “break the silence of the text”¹⁰ to include unheard voices, and willing to articulate fuller realization of the “beloved community” (Howard Thurman) promised by the Scriptures.

We have much more to say about these theologies throughout this book. What is important to grasp now is that these theologies are statements of faith seeking understanding and effective practice, that they are strongly rooted in Christian life and reflection as found in particular communities, and that they ar...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Preface
• 1. Introduction
• 2. Revelation
• 3. Authority
• 4. Trinity
• 5. God
• 6. Creation
• 7. Providence
• 8. Humanity
• 9. Sin
• 10. Christ
• 11. Salvation
• 12. Justification
• 13. Election and Predestination
• 14. Holy Spirit and Sanctification
• 15. History
• 16. Eschatology
• 17. Church
• 18. Sacraments
• 19. Worship
• 20. Ministry
• Notes
• Selected References
• Index of Names
• Index of Subjects