What's the Point of Theology?

Wisdom, Wellbeing and Wonder

Alister E. McGrath

• Publisher: Zondervan Academic
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9780310152064
• Topic: Theologie & Religion
• Subtopic: Christliche Theologie

Theology is the study of the nature of God and of religious belief. But why should that matter to us?

What's the point of theology?

In this wonderfully accessible book, renowned theologian Alister McGrath answers that question--What's the point of theology?--and explores the depth and breadth theology can bring to our lives. Drawing on insights from his experience of coming to Christianity from atheism, this exhilarating and enlightening volume reveals how theology can help us grow in wisdom, contribute to our wellbeing, spark our innate sense of wonder, and above all, grow in faith and love as we draw ever closer to the divine.

Ideal for new and seasoned Christians who want to engage more deeply with their faith, as well as those who are puzzled by spiritual matters and curious to find out more, What's the Point of Theology? will open your eyes to all that theology has to offer--a wiser understanding of what really matters, a richer vision of the good life, a deeper appreciation of the beauty of nature, and an avenue to strengthen your faith and relationship with God.

Part 1
THEOLOGY: SOME OPENING REFLECTIONS

1
Discovering theology: seeing things in a new way

Theology is pointless. It doesn’t do anything useful. Practical ministry is what really matters. Why waste time teaching future Christian leaders about theology when they could instead feast on the latest theories of church growth, congregational management and counselling skills?

As I know from many conversations, these views are widespread in denominational bureaucracies. I think they are understandable, though I can’t help feeling that they’ve not been properly thought through. Nobody wants to devote time and resources to doing something pointless. But what if theology sustains the vision that lies at the heart of the Christian faith? What if theology has a unique and necessary role to play in keeping this vision alive and thus energizing and sustaining the life, worship and outreach of the Church?

Such questions are relevant not only to Christianity but also to any group, institution or organization with a strong sense of identity and mission. How can we maintain continuity with the past while making sure that we connect up with today’s issues? Some organizations die because what initially inspired them has become irrelevant. But more often, they fade away because they have lost sight of their founding vision and can’t work out how to recover and refresh it.

Churches that fail to take theology seriously risk turning their backs on a rich and invaluable heritage and diminishing their capacity to engage the hearts and captivate the imaginations of a new generation. I’ll be exploring these themes throughout this book, drawing on leading theologians from the past and present to argue that theology is essential to the life, ministry and witness of the Christian churches, and to their engagement with wider culture.

Let’s focus here on why theology matters for individuals and for churches. I’ve suggested that it sets out the vision which lies at the heart of the Christian faith and underlies the worship and life of Christian communities. Theology unpacks the core themes of faith. It tells us how these were developed, illustrates how they may be explained and preached and shows us the difference they make to real life. Above all, theology sets out the Christian understanding of how we can achieve wisdom, enjoy wellbeing and nurture a sense of wonder.

The Christian gospel is like a watering hole in the midst of a desert that attracts people because it offers something Christians believe is both liberating and essential. Christ’s words to the Samaritan woman when they met at Jacob’s well illustrate this point perfectly:

Everyone who drinks this water will be thirsty again, but whoever drinks the water I give them will never thirst. Indeed, the water I give them will become in them a spring of water welling up to eternal life. (John 4.13–14)

Theology sustains and expresses this understanding of what a fulfilled life looks like and how it comes about through the person and work of Christ.

Theology thus captures and puts into words the moral, intellectual and spiritual vision that is the heartbeat of the Christian faith – a way of seeing things that delights and overwhelms us and leads to worship and adoration rather than mere understanding. It wrestles with the question of how Christians can hope to express this defining and compelling vision in words. It helps us to explain what Christianity is fundamentally about and enables us to convey the difference that such an understanding makes to the way in which we comprehend our world and live within it. Theology helps preachers to open up the riches of the Christian faith and apologists to explain and defend its leading themes to a wider culture.

It’s important that people outside the Christian community get a sense of theology’s driving and empowering vision even if they don’t share it. I used to be a Marxist. While I’ve left Marxism behind, I still have a good appreciation of its world view and implications. I no longer think that it’s right, but I can see why it’s important. You don’t need to agree with something to understand it, and understanding it will mean that you’re more clued up about how people try to make sense of our complicated world.

Institutions, including churches, must continually ask themselves these questions: why are we here? What sparked us into existence and empowers us today? In his important study of how institutional visions are developed, articulated and put into practice, Daniel Pekarsky emphasizes the importance of a ‘well-conceived vision’, which he defines as ‘an informing idea that is shared, clear and compelling.’¹ Such visions can easily go out of date due to social and cultural change. Christianity, however, rests on a theological vision statement focusing on God and humanity: on the one hand, we have a loving and personal God who journeys with us through life; on the other, a broken, wounded and damaged humanity in need of love, restoration and hope.

These themes must be articulated in a meaningful way for each new generation. We do not need to make Christianity relevant, but the task of both theologian and preacher is to unpack and unfold the riches of this vision of faith using language, images, stories and concepts that connect with our audience.

There is always a hermeneutical (interpretative) element to a vision statement, simply because its application will vary from one historical period and cultural location to another. We shall explore this long theological tradition of interpreting the gospel – without compromising its identity – to help us meet new challenges and situations. The Swiss Protestant theologian Emil Brunner (1889–1966) sums things up neatly: ‘The gospel remains the same, but our understanding of the gospel must ever be won anew.’² Theology both preserves an identity-giving and life-enhancing vision and provides a toolkit for ensuring that churches can engage with the new challenges they face.

For Christians, I would argue, theology is like a treasure chest: it holds the riches of our faith and invites us to reflect on faith’s value and purpose. Without theology, Christian churches are simply custodians of memories and habits that might once have been meaningful, but now seem outdated and pointless to outsiders – and to some insiders. Theology allows these memories and habits to be revitalized. It provides a bridge between past and present, allowing the riches of the past to connect with the present and transform it. The Christian gospel may be the same for all times and places but theology, while being rooted in the wisdom of the past, must free itself from the particularities of a bygone age and articulate the good news in new situations.

So where shall we start? Let’s begin by thinking about how Christianity enables us to see ourselves, Christ and the world as they truly are. Helpfully, we’ll leave behind deficient and inadequate understandings of reality as we embrace a rich, satisfying and transformative vision.

Theology as a new way of seeing things

When I was a teenager, I enjoyed reading the American writer Henry Miller (1891–1980), largely because many of his works explore how the process of travelling changes people by opening their eyes to new realities. A particular line from his colourful depiction of Big Sur on the Californian coastline caught my attention: ‘One’s destination is never a place, but rather a new way of looking at things.’³

Miller’s neat one-liner came to mean a lot more to me as I began to study the New Testament closely in the original Greek in January 1972, beginning with the Gospel of Mark. I had only just discovered Christianity and wanted to immerse myself in a text that would help me to understand more about it. I was intrigued by the first words spoken by Christ in Mark’s narrative: ‘“The time has come,” he said. “the kingdom of God has come near. Repent and believe the good news!”’ (Mark 1.15). The Greek word metanoia (usually translated as ‘repentance’) actually has a much deeper range of meaning that includes, but is not limited to, this single idea. Metanoia concerns a change in our mindset leading to a transformed vision.

The world did not change when I moved from atheism to Christianity. Yet I changed. Christianity gave me a lens through which everything came into sharper focus and, as a result, I saw the world in a new and very different light. The way I viewed it altered. I then had to work out how I fitted into this new world and how I ought to live on the basis of my new insights. No longer did I see the world as ‘nature’; I saw it as God’s creation. No longer did I see people as socioeconomic units; I saw them as individuals bearing the image of God.

A good example of viewing things differently is the way in which Christians read the Old Testament. Many of my Jewish colleagues at Oxford see the Hebrew Bible as complete in itself, whereas Christians regard it as preparatory and anticipatory. It points beyond itself for its fulfilment. This is why so many New Testament passages pick up on the way in which the history of Jesus Christ can be said to fulfil Old Testament prophecy, developing its storyline in new ways.

Augustine of Hippo (354–430) summed up this idea thus: ‘In the Old Testament the New is concealed, in the New, the Old is revealed.’⁴ The point he’s making is that the great themes of the New Testament are already there in the Old Testament, but this early text needs to be interpreted or seen in a certain way for these connections and continuities to be appreciated. The New Testament thus provides a Christian lens through which to read the Old Testament, which differs significantly from the lens used by Jewish readers of the same text.

Many theologians have highlighted the capacity of Christian theology to enable us to see things in a new way. A good example is the English poet-theologian George Herbert (1593–1633), who is noted for his ability to express theological ideas in poetic language. Herbert was an academic who served as Orator at the University of Cambridge before spending the final few years of his short life as a country parson in the village of Bemerton, close to the cathedral city of Salisbury.

I often find myself reflecting on the rich theological vision found in Herbert’s writings, especially in his poem ‘The Elixir’.⁵ In its third verse, Herbert offers us two quite distinct ways of doing theology: looking at theological ideas and looking through them to discover the landscape they disclose:

A man that looks on glasse,
On it may stay his eye;

Or if he pleaseth, through it passe,
And then the heav’n espie.

Herbert’s point is easy to grasp. You can look at Christian doctrines (for example, the doctrine of creation). That’s what I’ve done throughout my career as an academic theologian. I look at this idea, explaining its biblical roots, how it was expressed in the creeds, and how it has been understood by various theologians to my students. Herbert, however, is inviting us to do something additional and rather more interesting. He asks us to look through Christian doctrines, to allow Christian theology to become a window to viewing ourselves and the world. He wants us to use theology so that we can develop a deeper and richer engagement with our world and see it afresh.

Therefore, instead of merely looking at the doctrine of creation, we ought also to look at our world through the lens provided by this doctrine. Marilynne Robinson (b. 1943), one of the world’s most theologically informed contemporary novelists, knows the importance of seeing the natural world properly, for what it really is, through a theological lens: ‘Wherever you turn your eyes the world can shine like transfiguration. You don’t have to bring a thing to it except a little willingness to see.’⁶ We’ll return to explore the importance of this theological attentiveness towards the natural order later in the book.

For now, let’s work the angles of Herbert’s approach to theology. Imagine you are sitting in a room with a single window. You could look at the window, noticing only some irritating and distracting specks of dust or smears on the glass. Or you could look through the window and take delight in the beautiful garden that lies beyond. Or imagine you are looking at a microscope in a medical laboratory. It’s an interesting piece of equipment, but what really matters is that this instrument allows us to examine details of the living world that are completely invisible to the unaided human eye. It extends our vision of reality.

Theology helps us to see things in a new way. However, a habit of engagement is something we need to work at developing. The theologian and psychologist Robert C. Roberts (b. 1942) emphasizes the importance of seeing the world and our experiences in a Christian manner. We must, he suggests, ‘practice seeing things this way. How does one practice seeing? By looking. Looking is active seeing, and as we succeed in seeing what we are looking for, we train our seeing into conforming with our looking.’⁷ A theologian is someone who cultivates the habit of discernment: seeing things rightly, properly and fully.

Imagining the new world of faith

I’ve often suggested to my students that it is helpful to think about the Christian faith as a landscape to be explored. How do we find this world? And then enter and explore it? What does it look like? How does it feel to be there?

The answers to these questions are framed in terms of ‘faith’. Yet this is not the ‘blind faith’ so poorly understood – and crudely parodied – by Richard Dawkins. Where Dawkins thinks of faith as a perverse tendency to believe anything we like, Christians see faith as intellectual and relational trust. It involves embracing an expanded vision of reality that enfolds God and enables a transforming relationship. I can’t prove that this way of looking at the world is right (although I believe it is), which is a problem I share with Dawkins, who belatedly seems to have realized his atheism is not something that can be proved either. It’s a belief, a judgement, a decision to live in a certain way on the basis of what is thought to be true. Dawkins seems to imagine that the Enlightenment marks the watershed when faith was replaced by scientific reason. Yet t...