Introducing

Theology
INTRODUCTORY LECTURE: WHAT IS THEOLOGY
… AND HOW MIGHT YOU DO IT??
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Introducing Open door

the Module
Minerva – quick tour

700 word theological

Assessment analysis (40%)
1,000 essay (60%)
Talk to your neighbour

What is Christianity?
What does it involve or mean to be a Christian?

Now think about whatever you have listed and ask –

how do we (think we) know this?
Who says it’s this? Does everyone agree?

When did this get worked out?

How does it get Has it/can it

Why?
passed on? change/d?
What have you answered?

 Practices?
What is Christianity?
What does it involve or mean to be a Christian?
 Worship?
 Basic orientations or values
(moral; spiritual?
Attitudinal?)
Now think about whatever you have listed and ask –
how do we (think we) know this?  Behavioural patterns
Who says it’s this? Does everyone agree?
 beliefs

When did this get worked out?

How does it get Has it/can it

Why?
passed on? change/d?
Theology: Base meaning

 Thinking about; speaking about; reasoning about; discourse

about – God
 Some talk of God maybe isn’t theology?
 Like other ‘ologies’ this is ‘disciplined’ speech & thought:
who or what disciplines it?
 Christian theology = Christian God-talk
 What is it that makes the talk ‘Christian’?
 Establishes parameters of not or no longer Christian talk?
 Something like the grammatical rules?
 How are those decided/negotiated and who decides?
Tradition

• Think of some non-religious examples

What comes into your head
• Trooping the colour; family Christmas arrangements and rituals;
when you see or hear this roast dinner on Sunday or fish on Friday; Turkey at Christmas;
word? Morris dancing??

Something that we have • fixed in the past perhaps?

inherited from the past?

May be custom or an official

• Some accounts of Christian faith and theology are like that, as are
body authorising some liturgical communities
contemporary repetition
Authoritative deposits

 bible
 Significant authorities/interpreters
 Lineage
 The church
 Classical formulations
 Core doctrinal loci
 Nodes of theological conversation
Some helpful (?) analogies

 Think about changes in

the rules governing a sport
or what a political party
stands for?
 How decide what is
positive development
 Or what makes this
another game/political
agenda?
  Tring to discern what God is up to in the world
and what that calls us to do

What might
 Theology/formalised beliefs secondary deposit?
 Christianity incarnational: Christians are in their
embodied contexts
provoke  When meaning isn’t clear or maybe received
meaning looks unsustainable
people to  Trying to hand on (tradere) a faith to or explain it

‘do’
to others)
 Whose situation may be different from one’s own

theology?  Considering coming to faith/trying to understand

someone else’s faith
 Trying to understand how their or other people’s
faiths connects with lives/decisions/values/issues/
other knowledge claims
 Facing change or new challenges
 Where is the ‘essence’ of a faith? In a set past or
in the act of handing it on and living it out?
(incarnation?)
Method in theology (How?)

• Which sources?
• How are they correlated and sequenced?
Sources • How are they prioritised? – especially where conflicts
(whence?)

What decides issues

authority
Basis and criteria of judgment
Norms What drives theological enquiry/reflection?
(says who?)
Fides Quaerens Intellectum

crede, ut intelligas/Credo Ut Intelligam

Self-involving theology begins from and reflects from
life-shaping commitments

Faith Seeking Understanding (Anselm)

Clarification and systematisation –

internal coherence
Theology as Apologetic, missionary, external
coherence
confessional? Insider and outsider
Empathy & critical distance
 Theology is the self-articulation
of faith

‘I’m not religious, so why should

I take this module?’

BUT…
‘I’m not a Christian, so why
should I take this module?’

‘I’m a Christian, so why should I

take this module?’
so why do Christians (historically) do
so much theology?

Christians believe that the true God (the God who is worth
worshipping) can be known –
not ‘known all about’, but identified, talked about,
distinguished from other possible objects of worship.

They also believe that the way this God is known and related to is
(primarily) through one particular person’s history
so why do Christians (historically)
do so much theology?
This means that they need to
keep retelling and reinterpreting
this history
working out how, in each
different context where the
question ‘who or what is God?’
is asked, this history constitutes
an answer
And in each context, this
question is to be asked and
answers sought, even where the
God-question does not
automatically arise or its
significance is not apparent…