The Nature of Theology

As part of the requirements for my MA, I had to write a paper on theological method. What follows is a portion from that paper as I attempt to articulate how I currently understand the work of theology. Many people have asked me how theology has effected my relationship with God - I hope that this short piece can serve as a gentle correction of the form of that question and show that theology is an inextricable part of the Christian relationship with the God who chose to reveal Godself as Father, Son, and Spirit.

I take theology to be the task of helping the Church say no more or less than must be said about God and our relationship to God. The second part of that task, articulating “our relationship to God,” is the easier of the two, as it is simply the exercise of working out how all of human knowledge inheres in Christ. Theology is the great “Queen of the Sciences” insofar as it is, far from being its own unique sectioned off form of discourse, a master discourse that attempts to articulate the relationship of all the contingent things that are in relation to the only One who is not a contingent thing. Theology is the language of creatures qua creatures, in their systematic recognition and naming of all that is as contingent gift from the Creator. This task requires a fair amount of word-care, and should be seen as a divine discipline in the renewing of the human mind in order to see the world aright.

The first part of that task, saying “no more or less than must be said about God” is a devilishly difficult task, especially because it is not always entirely clear what we mean by God.[1] Robert Jenson once wrote, “God is whoever raised Jesus from the dead, having before raised Israel from Egypt.”[2] This sentence provides a thick description of a God who acts in history and is never not who God is in the person of Jesus. This description of God is a far cry from the vague description found on the American dollar, “In God we Trust.” The work of theology is therefore the careful word-care necessary so that our sentences about God more resemble Jenson’s sentence than that of the Federal Reserve.


[1] My conception of the task of theology is probably overdetermined by the work of Stanley Hauerwas. As this is a report on my theological method thus far, I will be unapologetic about this fact, but I should note the two books of Hauerwas’ work that have particularly inspired my conception of theology along these lines, Stanley Hauerwas, Working with Words: On Learning to Speak Christian (Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2011); Stanley Hauerwas, The Work of Theology (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2015).
[2] Robert W. Jenson, Systematic Theology (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 63.

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