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08 03 04 L Kallistos Ware How Study Theology
08 03 04 L Kallistos Ware How Study Theology
Ware, Kallistos
At this time I do want to introduce our speaker. Really he needs no introduction I think. Those
who have been introduced to him through his works. Many of you perhaps have probably
attended this chapel this morning and heard a wonderful, wonderful sermon on prayer.
Metropolitan Kallistos of Diokleia is presently the, well he is a professor of Oxford and he is
presently the Metropolitan of Diokleia, he is our Palmer lecturer for this year and I can just say
that we are incredibly blessed to have him amongst us. He will be sharing with us on the topic:
how should we study theology? Just another not that he will be here this evening at seven
thirty in Upper Gwinn. Following his talk with us, he will open it up to Q&A and so we are so
delighted and grateful to have him with us and tremendously blessed. So let us give a warm
welcome to Bishop Kallistos.
Good afternoon. My theme today is: how should study and teach theology. This might lead us
to ask what is theology. Now if we look at the Bible, we encounter once a striking and
remarkable fact. Nowhere in the old of new testaments do we find the words theology,
theologian or theologize. These are quite simple not scriptural terms. But the same token we
may also note that none of the twelve chosen by Christ was educated at a theological college. It
is only gradually that the term theology enters Christian discourse. The word was viewed with
suspicion by the apologists of the second century because for them it meant primarily the
speculations of religious thinkers who were pagans. The people who rarely introduced the word
theology into Christian discourse are in Alexandria. Clement of Alexandria in the late second
century and then above all Origen. Origen is one of my saying to my friends over there it is
lunch. Origen is one of my favorite theologians. I agree with St. Vincent of Leeriness who said,
“Who would not rather be wrong with Origen than right with anyone else”. And significantly it
is at Alexandria that there first emerges a well-established theological college, the celebrated
Catechetical School where Clement and Origen both taught. Well, when theology as a word
enters Christian discourse, what does it mean? In the Greek fathers, it has a rather different
sense from the one we give to it today. Evagius of Ponticus who was a disciple of Basil and
Gregory of Nazianzus and who then became a desert father observes in a famous epigram. If
you are a theologian you will pray truly. And if you pray truly, you are a theologian. So that was
before the Greek fathers, there was an essential between theology and prayer. They saw
theology not just as an academic study, not just as a question of intellectual rigor, though they
certainly believe in that, but they saw theology as involving a personal commitment, a
commitment through prayer. In the 14th century, St. Gregory Palamas sums up the view of the
First of all, wonder. Plato says,”the beginning of philosophy is to feel a sense of wonder” I think
that applies also to theology. To a lot of theology we could apply the criticism: Your God is too
small. Without a sense of amazement, a willingness to be surprised, without astonishment
there can’t be real teaching or study of theology. This applies to all study that the purpose of all
study is not to communicate information to we who are teachers are not here to stuff facts into
the heads of our pupils. The purpose of teaching, of education theologically or otherwise is to
open our eyes to a sense of want. That is what the teacher is trying to do with his pupils. Not to
tell them what they should think but to say “open your eyes, look for yourself. See how
amazing this all is.” And as us teachers we don’t success in some sense of wonder, then we are
failing in our tasks. I could quote T.S. Elliot again, “old men ought to be explorers,” he says.
Well, that applies to young men and young women as well. And it applies particularly to
theologians. We should be explorers. We need to find the kind of wonder that is evoked in for
example the book of Job when at the end God speaks out of the whirlwind. He doesn’t exactly
answer Job’s questions but what he does is speaks of the beauty and mystery of the created
world. And we need to have, in our study of theology, some sense of beauty and mystery.
Because that applies also to the study of science. Scientific discoveries have not abolished the
wonder and mystery of the universe. They have simply extended the horizon of that mystery,
making us ever more keenly aware of its vast dimensions. So there can be no authentic
theology, no authentic personhood without a sense of wonder. But then let’s just take another
quality linked with wonder that is freedom. There can be no real study, no real education,
theology or anything else without a feeling of freedom. The truth will make you free, says Christ
in John chapter 8. A university, a theological school is a controlled environment, for, yes the
cultivation of wonder and also the cultivation of freedom. If I was asked by my students of
Oxford, “What are you trying to do for us,” then I felt my best answer was to say no more that
this: “We want you to learn to be free.” So to educate is to invite not to command. Education is
linked to the Latin word edu cere meaning to lean forth, to draw out, to conjure up, and to
evoke. That is what a teacher should be trying to do. And of course that applies right through
With reference to what I was saying this morning, of course, following out my interpretation of
Dostoyevsky’s story, it is perhaps a good thing by saying Jesus’ prayer to say not just have
mercy on me, though that is the usual form of Orthodox saving prayer but sometimes we say to
the form: have mercy on us and that fits with the Lord’s prayer.
Do you think a secular person who doesn’t believe God can actually study theology?
Yes. So the question is can somebody who doesn’t believe in God study theology? It can be
equally asked can somebody who doesn’t believe in God teach theology? I hope that in our
theological schools, it depends of course the nature of the school, but I hope that if it is a
general theological school not specifically a school training me for the ministry, that there
would be no religious tests before admitting people to the university and we will not ask what
their private and personal beliefs were. Certainly a place like Oxford where appointing our staff
to the theology faculty we would be in grave difficulty if we started asking them about their
personal faith. That would be seen as an incorrect intrusion. Some of our teaching staff in
Oxford still have to be ordained members of the Angelical Episcopalian church. But in generally
certainly at Oxford, I would have felt theology should be open to open to anyone who wants it
and anyone who wished to study theology as a liberal arts discipline was welcomed to do so.
Among my own pupils, certainly at an undergraduate level I had some who didn’t have any
Other questions?
What would you say are the main distinctive between eastern theology and western theology
in general?
It is always dangerous to generalize but basically the theology of the Eastern Orthodox Church
still continues to be patristic. The age of the fathers’ orthodoxy goes, did not end with the fifth
century or the eighth century or even the Fall of Byzantium but it goes on right up to the
present time. For example, one of the greatest Orthodox theologians in the 20th century,
Father George Florovsky who taught at Harvard, used to somehow use his theological program
in the words “neo patristic synthesis.” So we have not had in Orthodox theology the
development that the west saw in the period from the 12th century onwards, the rise of
scholasticism. Theology in Byzantium was not taught in universities where as in the west it
became a university topic. So in general Orthodox theology is less systematic than western and
more mystical in its approach. Most of the works of the fathers are actually commentary on
Holy Scripture. Many of the writings were originally delivered as commentaries at the Divine
Liturgy sermons in church. Now it is true that in more recent centuries Orthodox have began
writing systematic dogmatic theologies. But I think we tend to retain the more mystical element
in theology and to stress exactly what I was mentioning the link between theology and prayer.
Now clearly the west, the Latin west and the Reformation west has also a rich mystical
tradition. But in the later middle Ages there tended to be a separation between the kind of
theology it was taught in the schools that was highly systematic. The mystical theologians who
are usually not academics, that happened in the later west and Middle Ages, and perhaps it is
one of the factors that contributed to the reformation. In the East we have always tried to
avoid this kind of division.
I would ask this question that my students ask me every quarter when they are reading the
Orthodox way. Could you give us a contemporary example by what you mean by the figure of
the fool and how that person functions in the Orthodox tradition?
Yes,
My question is you talked about theology as a matter of the heart as well as keeping a sense of
wonder and for the first time recently I heard seminary be regarded as cemetery. It is the first
time I have heard that and that is really kind of a sad thing that I will probably will be seeing in
my future and I am wondering about maybe how you have sought yourself at least encourage
your students to keep that sense of wonder and theology of the heart as they also meet the
demands of studies and the industrial nature of having to produce and having to continue to
meet bars of study and without dying to those studies. How do you cultivate the heart in the
midst of those?
Yes. We have to have a balance of course if you just say freedom in the sense of wonder; you
are going to pass your degree, your examinations very successfully just on that alone. There has