From Topic to Thesis

A Guide to Theological Research

Michael Kibbe

• Publisher: IVP Academic
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9780830899814
• Topic: Teología y religión
• Subtopic: Educación religiosa

While courses in Bible and theology typically require research papers, particularly at the graduate level, very few include training in research. Professors have two options: use valuable class time to teach students as much as they can, or lower their standards with the understanding that students cannot be expected to complete tasks for which they have never been prepared. From Topic to Thesis: A Guide to Theological Research offers a third option. This affordable and accessible tool walks students through the process, focusing on five steps: finding direction, gathering sources, understanding issues, entering discussion and establishing a position. Its goal is to take students directly from a research assignment to a research argument—in other words, from topic to thesis.

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FINDING DIRECTION

Every research paper begins with a broad topic. Your first task is to begin narrowing your topic so that you can keep your project within reasonable limits. The length of time required for this step will depend on two things: the specificity of your original assignment and your prior exposure to the topic. These same two factors will determine whether you begin with your primary sources or with your tertiary sources. If you have a specific topic or are already comfortable with your area of interest, begin with the primary sources and then go to the tertiary sources. If you have a broad topic or are completely new to the field, begin with the tertiary sources and then go to the primary sources.

Keys to Finding Direction

The first key to finding direction is that you should not come into the research process having already decided what your paper is going to argue. The entire task of theological research is to get you to the point of having something to argue. If you choose your argument in advance, you will either ignore the research that pushes against your conclusion or you will run the risk of getting to the day before your paper is due and realizing that you do not have a valid argument. This does not mean that you cannot have a specific idea that you want to consider—it simply means you cannot determine the outcome of your research in advance.

The second key is that research takes time. In the past, you may have been able to write lengthy papers the night before they were due and receive above-average grades on them. This simply cannot be done with a research paper. There is no such thing as good last-minute research. When you walk into a room where a conversation is taking place, it takes more than a few seconds to understand where the conversation is headed. The same is true for research.1

The third key is that in the initial phase of your research, you should not touch a secondary source. If you are researching a text of Scripture, this means no commentaries. If you are researching a historical figure, ignore later evaluations of that figure. If you are doing an in-depth book review, do not read other book reviews. This is not motivated by some mythical objectivism.2 It is for two reasons: (1) to enable you to see the big picture in the tertiary sources before getting lost in the endless details of the secondary literature, and (2) to make sure that the focus of your research remains on the primary sources.

The fourth key to finding direction is that this is the only stage at which you will depend heavily on tertiary sources. This means a couple of things. On the one hand, it means that if you find yourself needing to read about basic concepts within your area of interest that are most accessible through tertiary sources, you are still on step one of the research process. On the other hand, it means that if you are past step one and are working with secondary literature, tertiary sources will not give you the kind of detail that you need for a research paper. Unless you’re describing the state of the discussion on a given topic, which may be necessary in your introduction, you will rarely cite a tertiary source in a research paper. Their purpose is to introduce you to a topic. Get what you need from them and move on.

Questions to Ask the Tertiary Sources:

1. What are the relevant and necessary primary sources? If you know the answer to this question, you should already be reading those primary sources. But particularly when studying a historical figure, a tertiary source can help narrow your field of interest without you having to read everything that might or might not count as a primary source.3
2. Who are the key people? You cannot read everyone who has ever written on your topic, but a good tertiary source will guide you to the scholars who have made significant contributions to your area of interest.
3. What are the key works? Keep this in mind for later; if every tertiary and secondary source you read refers to a particular journal article, for example, you need to get that article.
4. What are the key issues? Remember that you are coming into a conversation that has been going on for some time. That does not mean you are never allowed to change the subject! But you need to know what the conversation is generally about before you can join it.

Questions to Ask the Primary Sources4

1. Which portions are clearly relevant to the topic you already have in place (however broad that may be)? You’ll have to read more than just these sections to capture the flow of your primary text(s), but identifying them will narrow your focus just enough to get the research process started.
2. What issues within those portions strike you as particularly interesting? This question is subject to the specificity of the assigned topic, but if your professor has left it open-ended, you might as well pursue a topic that excites you! Don’t worry about what has or hasn’t been said about those issues in the secondary literature—for now you need to be more concerned with finding an issue that can keep your attention for the next several weeks.
3. What are some possible arguments you could make? You don’t need to worry about having a refined thesis here; this is merely to get you thinking about making an argument that is based on the primary sources.

Finding Direction: Mark and the Kingdom of God

At the end of each step, you will find descriptions of two research papers I’ve written that illustrate the practical realities of the step. Since students usually take some combination of biblical and theological courses, I have included one from each discipline. The first example comes from a seminary course on the Gospels in which I was assigned an 8–10 page research paper on the kingdom of God in the Gospel of Mark. The second comes from a graduate course on the doctrine of God in which the professor simply asked us to write a 15–20 page paper pertaining to the topic of the course.

For the first paper—on the kingdom of God in the Gospel of Mark—the primary source was obvious: the Gospel according to Mark. So the first step in my research was to read through Mark, looking for references to the kingdom of God or topics that appeared to be, for Mark, connected to the kingdom of God. In brief, I came up with four major areas that held potential for further research: Jesus’ teaching about the kingdom, Jesus’ miracles in relation to the kingdom, the expansion of the kingdom through Jesus’ ministry, and opponents of the kingdom. And though I did not go this route, it would also have been acceptable at this time to narrow my focus to a particular passage (e.g., the “secret of the kingdom” in Mk 4:13-25).

Next, I spent some time reading the article titled “Kingdom of God” in the Dictionary of Jesus and the Gospels, paying particular attention to the section on Mark’s Gospel. From this I gleaned a short list of names and secondary sources, such as William Wrede’s The Messianic Secret, Albert Schweitzer’s The Quest of the Historical Jesus and C. H. Dodd’s The Parables of the Kingdom.5 I came into this research with limited exposure to Mark’s Gospel and to the concept of the kingdom of God, so it was necessary for me to read at least one tertiary source for the purpose of basic introduction to my topic, and in retrospect, reading a few more of them wouldn’t have been a bad idea. You will have to decide for yourself whether or not this is necessary for each research paper.

Finding Direction: Calvin’s Doctrine of Divine Accommodation

It was much harder to get started with my paper on the doctrine of God. I couldn’t simply pull the primary source(s) off the shelf and start reading! The more open-ended the assignment, the more important it is to be patient. This is especially the case with a topic about which you know very little at the outset. The biggest mistake you can make is to decide too much too early. Devote the first few weeks of the course to paying careful attention to the lectures, class discussions and assigned reading, and let them be your guide in evaluating potential research topics.

Not long into the course, we began discussing John Calvin’s doctrine of accommodation, which states that God adjusts himself to human capacities in order to reveal himself to us in ways that we can actually understand. I latched on to this topic for my research paper for three reasons. First, it automatically limited my primary source: the writings of John Calvin.6 Second, I knew that by using words like “accommodation” and “John Calvin” in my database searches, I could hone in on the right secondary sources rather quickly. Third, I thought I could connect this project to a previous writing project on divine theophanies in the Old Testament. Since the doctrine of accommodation is concerned with how God reveals himself, biblical narratives wherein God actually does that in some tangible way offered a way for me to overlap one issue about which I knew very little with another issue about which I knew a fair bit more.

My first task was to narrow the scope of my search. Rather than writing a single treatise on the doctrine of accommodation, Calvin discussed this doctrine in hundreds of places throughout his Institutes and biblical commentaries. So I began by checking the subject index of the Institutes, and since I was interested in relating the doctrine of accommodation to Old Testament theophanies, I read his commentaries on those texts. I also found some very brief descriptions of accommodation in introductory volumes to Calvin, where I learned that an essay written in 1977 by Ford L. Battles titled “God Was Accommodating Himself to Human Capacity” was probably the most important essay on my topic.7

Keys to Finding Direction

1. Do not come into the research process having already decided what your paper is going to argue.
2. Research takes time.
3. In the initial phase of your research, you should not touch a secondary source.
4. This is the only stage at which you will depend heavily on tertiary sources.

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GATHERING SOURCES

At this point, you should have four things: (1) broad familiarity with your primary source, (2) some exposure to the issues associated with your general topic, (3) more than one idea for the direction of your paper, and (4) the beginnings of a research bibliography based on the tertiary sources. Your next task is to begin gathering and working through the secondary sources to which the tertiary sources have pointed you. Start with these particular sources, and use them as a springboard into the rest of the secondary literature. Many of the texts you need are in your school library, either in the stacks or in the reference section; if you need a book that your library doesn’t have, talk to your librarian about interlibrary loan options if you are not already familiar with those systems at your institution. If you need a journal article, start by looking on ATLA (see appendix D). If ATLA offers neither a PDF nor a link to one, try the printed journal stacks at your library. If that doesn’t work, try interlibrary loan.1

Keys to Gathering Sources

The first key to gathering secondary sources is that you should not spend too much time on any one source. This is not yet the time to be reading deeply. When you obtain a potential source, skim it quickly. Don’t worry about whether you agree with its conclusions or whether it has any particular arguments that support or oppose the direction of your paper. If your source is a library book, don’t check it out immediately. Take it off the shelf, give it a quick read, and then decide whether it is worth carrying home. If it’s a reference book that you can’t check out, don’t photocopy it yet. Make sure it has at least some relevance to your project before you spend the money. If it’s an article from ATLA available in PDF form, don’t print it yet. Download it to your computer and skim through it before you waste paper on something you don’t need.

The second thing to remember is that there is a fine line between redirecting and getting distracted. You will find yourself being pulled in different directions by the issues being emphasized in the sources, and you need to remember that a research paper is not an opportunity to read random articles on all the topics that interest you. But at any point along the way, your research may lead you in a direction you were not previously aware of, and that is permissible. Simply keep in mind three things: that your goal is to narrow your topic, not broaden it, that this particular assignment has a deadline, and that you have other assignments besides this one that require your attention.

The third key is that not every important source will be well written. Some sources will make you wonder if you and the author are using the same language. Some sources will make you feel that you simply are not smart enough for serious research because you don’t understand what they are talking about. It may be that you need to look up unfamiliar t...