A Modern Introduction to Theology

New Questions for Old Beliefs

Philip Kennedy

• Publisher: I.B. Tauris
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9780857737441
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Teología y religión
• Subtopic: Teología islámica

Philip Kennedy, here, offers the first book that any student - with or without religious convictions - can profitably use to get quickly to grips with the essentials of the Christian religion: its history and its key thinkers, its successes and its failures. Most existing undergraduate textbooks of theology begin from essentially traditional positions on the Bible, doctrine, authority, interpretation, and God. What makes Philip Kennedy's book both singularly important and uniquely different is that it has a completely new starting-point. The author contends that traditional Christian theology must extensively overhaul many of its theses because of a multitude of modern social, historical and intellectual revolutions. Offering a grand historical sweep of the genesis of the modern age, and writing with panache and a magisterial grasp of the relevant debates, conflicts and controversies, "A Modern Introduction to Theology" moves a tired and increasingly incoherent discipline in genuinely fresh and exciting directions, and will be welcomed by students and readers of the subject.

part I

quibbles with tradition

1

theology ancient and modern

If a creature were to comprehend, understand and experience God, he would have to be drawn beyond himself into God and so comprehend God with God. Whoever, then, might know what God is and so inquire into this would do something forbidden and would go mad.

Jan van Ruusbroec (1293–1381)

A Modern Introduction to Theology is a study of opportunities and quandaries confronting Christianity in the modern era. Its main aim is to discuss the way relatively recent intellectual and social sea changes have colluded to question the credibility and liveability of many aspects of traditional orthodox Christian thought and religious customs. It is not so much a systematic survey of what this or that modern theologian has said, but a probing of major modern currents of thought and historical movements that challenge, and in several cases gainsay, traditional theology. The taxing ideas, brilliant individuals and tumultuous cultural transitions encountered in these pages will all be pondered by scrutinizing their specific and constantly altering historical contexts.

This chapter undertakes three tasks. First, it considers the nature of theology. Second, it describes what distinguishes a modern introduction to theology from any other kind of introduction. Third, it sketches core beliefs of the Christian tradition before subsequent chapters explore new questions and challenges posed for the beliefs by modernity.

the nature of theology

What, then, is theology? When did it begin? How is it produced? Can it be practised today with intellectual rigour and integrity? In effect, theology is a human struggle to stammer about God and God’s putative relation with all there is. As such, it sets itself an impossible task – to speak of the unspeakable.

orthodoxy/orthodox/church/churches The word ‘orthodoxy’ in current religious discourse is potentially misleading. In one sense it can connote a self-styled right or correct ecclesiastical teaching, in counterpoise to a heterodox, or false, doctrine. In other circumstances, ‘orthodoxy’ can refer to a cluster of Christian denominations called ‘Orthodoxy’, or ‘Orthodox Churches’. Such churches tend to be nationalistically self-conscious, such as the Greek Orthodox or the Russian Orthodox Churches. In any case, they distinguish themselves from Protestant, Catholic and Anglican Churches. In this book, Orthodoxy spelt with a capital ‘O’ will designate a specific ecclesial community, such as the Georgian Orthodox-Apostolic Church, rather than a teaching that is regarded by some as correct. William Warburton (1698–1779) is recorded as quipping, ‘Orthodoxy is my doxy; heterodoxy is another man’s doxy’! The word ‘Church’ is capitalized in this book when referring to an international community of devotees of Jesus, or to a denomination of Christians, like ‘the Coptic Church’. When not capitalized, ‘church’ refers to a community or building in a particular place, as in ‘The church in Iffley village’.

Not everyone would agree with such a depiction of theology. Professional God-talkers – theologians – do not concur on how best to define theology. Anselm of Canterbury (c. 1033–1209) famously described theology as ‘faith seeking understanding’ (Latin: fides querens intellectum). His description of theology is timeworn. It is also open to the charge of being overly abstract. Whose faith is in question? What constitutes faith? And what does it mean to understand? Nowadays, theologians define theology in quite diverse ways. For David Ford, ‘Theology at its broadest is thinking about questions raised by and about the religions.’ According to Keith Ward, ‘Theology is an enquiry into the being of God and the relation of God to the universe.’¹ Whatever else it might be, theology is at least a discourse about God and God’s professed relation with all there is.

Theology’s apparent success or evident failure depends on what is meant by God. The word ‘God’ is one of the most used and abused terms in human discourse. Contemporary English conversations are regularly peppered with expressions like ‘God help me’, ‘God damn you’, ‘God be praised’, ‘God willing’, ‘Thank God’, ‘for God’s sake’, ‘God save the Queen’, ‘God only knows’, ‘God bless America’, ‘Oh my God’, or ‘God no!’ Yet, when people are pressed as to what they mean when they say ‘God’, they are not always able to present a coherent and credible account of who or what the monosyllabic word ‘God’ might designate.

Among humans today, there is no agreement as to who or what God might be, or to whether or not there is a God, or several Gods. The word ‘God’ is polyvalent and protean. It has accrued different meanings over time. In Old English, the term ‘God’ denoted a worshipped superhuman being, or deity. The term is also found in Old Frisian, Old Saxon, Old Norse, Old High German, and Old Dutch.² The Latin word for God is Deus (which descends into French as Dieu) and it is related to dies, a Latin noun for ‘day’.³ Light marks a day. So, in a Latin–French linguistic schema, God is light – the source of life. The monosyllable ‘God’ can operate either as a proper noun – that is, as a name – or a common noun referring to the category of a deity. In both instances, the noun ‘God’ as it has evolved over several centuries is like a rope with intertwined threads. The threads represent distinct understandings of the divine that eventually became tessellated with each other.⁴ Within the rambling history of Christianity a particular concept of God eventually became regnant, namely the doctrine of the Trinity (see below). As such, God is also designated as timeless, perfectly powerful, utterly unchangeable, completely good, and incapable of suffering.⁵

It is advisable for Christians nowadays not to equate an understanding of God with the doctrine of the Trinity. Trinitarian theology is one among several possible ways of speaking about God. There is a questionable trend in contemporary anglophone theology to overlook that in Abrahamic religions – that is, in Judaism, Christianity and Islam – God is conceived fundamentally as the free Creator of all that is. When Christians replaced the Jewish celebration of the Sabbath with a celebration of the Resurrection of Jesus Christ, they unwittingly deflected attention from a Creator God, to a Triune God involved in the drama of human redemption.⁶ The Sabbath is a festival during which Jews refrain for a day from doing any work to improve their immediate world. They thereby remind each other that God, not human beings, is the Creator and sustainer of the earth. A fixation on the Trinity, and a neglect of the theology of God the Creator, are amply evident in the recently published Blackwell Companion to Modern Theology. This publication has a chapter devoted to the Trinity, but is devoid of a chapter on creation, even though creation is discussed in various subdivisions of the book. Revealingly, the word ‘God’ does not even appear in the book’s index.⁷

The attributes of God, according to which God is completely powerful and unchanging, stem principally from ancient Greek philosophy in the fifth century BCE. Earlier characterizations of the Gods, represented in the works ascribed to Homer and Hesiod, portray the Gods as badly behaved human beings writ large. According to the earlier tradition, the Gods are mischievous, malevolent, playful, and sexually rapacious. However, from the sixth to the fifth century, Greek thinkers began to describe the Gods in less anthropomorphic and more abstract ways.⁸ Hence the more philosophically advanced tradition of depicting God as perfect, unchanging, and all-powerful. The Roman politician Cicero transmitted developed Hellenistic understandings of deities to a Roman audience with his treatise, De natura deorum (The Nature of the Gods), which was composed around 45–44 BCE.⁹ Greek philosophical concepts of God, whether anthropomorphic or abstract, represent just one thread in the rope, so to speak, of the concept of God. Another strand comes from the Hebrew Bible where God is proclaimed as a fatherly Creator who intervenes in history to kill the enemies of the Israelites, to punish the wicked, and to comfort the downtrodden. A third filament in the God-concept is represented by a style of God-talk that is entirely negative, or, in technical language, apophatic. This thread is clearly represented by the Christian thinker Dionysius the Pseudo-Areopagite (c. 500 CE), who quite rightly rejected all concepts and images of God. For apophatic theologians, one can only say what God is not.

Other enmeshed threads constituting the concept of God emerged during the modern era, and will be encountered in subsequent chapters. All the threads, however, emerged at an extremely late stage of human evolution. Monotheism, the belief that there is only one God, did not evolve in any notable way before the middle Bronze Age (2000–1550 BCE).¹⁰ Its evolution was preceded during the Paleolithic Age (100,000–30,000 BCE) by what appear to have been human beliefs in animal spirits; and during the Neolithic Age (c. 8,000–3,000 BCE) by forms of polytheism, the belief that there are several Gods; as well as by types of henotheism, the acceptance of one God as paramount among several Gods.

The concept of God as a Creator that is common to Judaism, Christianity and Islam is no older than roughly four thousand years. Before the advent of monotheism, language about Gods, in the form of polytheism and henotheism, was evident in several late Neolithic cultures. The people of Sumer in that era venerated a father God called An. He was envisaged as a great bull. His divine female mate was Ki, and his son was called Enlil.¹¹

A study of ancient texts soon reveals that language about divinity is not a Christian or monotheistic invention. Stone tablets discovered since 1929 at Ras Shamra, on the Syrian coast, date from the second half of the second millennium BCE, and reveal a colourful pantheon of deities. These Ugaritic texts speak of the God El, an elderly patriarch; Asherah, a mother-goddess and consort of El; Baal, a young divine warrior; and Anat, the consort of Baal.¹² Pharaonic Egypt could also boast a large pantheon of deities such as Ammut, Aten, Geb, Isis, Osiris, Seth and Tefnut.¹³

As for the word ‘theology’, it comes from Greek philosophy. Plato deploys the original Greek term in his dialogue The Republic. In the course of a conversation in this work, Socrates and Plato’s brother Adeimantus agree that founders of communities need to give guidelines to poets about the appropriate way to talk about the attributes of the Gods. At one point Adeimantus asks: ‘What are these guidelines for talking about the gods?’ To which Socrates replies: ‘Whatever the type of poetry – epic, lyric, or tragic – God must always be portrayed as he really is.’¹⁴ During the ensuing dialogue Plato provides his understanding that God is good, perfect and unchanging. The term Plato deploys for ‘talking about the gods’ is theologias – the Greek equivalent of the English word ‘theologies’. The term he uses for God is ho theos, which means literally ‘the God’. Plato uses a capital theta, the eighth letter of the Greek alphabet, for both words, ‘theologies’ and ‘God’. In this book, I follow his custom of c...