Theology

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StartWhat is theology?Start TimelineFrom the Fathers to the nineteenth century, in order

What theology is

  1. What is theology?Theology is thinking and speaking about God: faith seeking to know more deeply the God who has made himself known. Every believer already does it, so the question is whether we do it truly; and theology done well learns humility and ends in worship.
  2. The sources of theology: Scripture, tradition, reason, experienceTheology learns from Scripture, from the church's tradition, from reason and from experience, but the four do not weigh the same. Evangelical theology takes Scripture as the norm that judges all the others, and uses tradition, reason and experience gratefully beneath it.
  3. Interpreting ScriptureThe church has always read Christ in the whole of Scripture; the Fathers and the medieval church looked for spiritual senses beyond the letter, and the Reformers anchored reading in the plain sense, with Scripture interpreting Scripture. We read today with attention to context, genre and the whole Bible, with Christ at the centre, in the church and in prayer.

The disciplines of theology

  1. Biblical and systematic theologySystematic theology gathers what the whole Bible teaches on each subject (God, Christ, the Spirit, the church, the last things) and sets it in order; biblical theology follows God's revelation as it unfolds through the Bible's history and covenants. Both start from careful reading of the text, and each keeps the other honest.
  2. Historical and practical theologyHistorical theology studies how the church has understood and confessed the faith through the centuries; practical theology asks how that faith becomes the church's life in preaching, worship, pastoral care, teaching and mission. With biblical and systematic theology, they are one work for one church.
  3. How to study theologyLuther learned three rules for studying theology from Psalm 119: prayer, meditation on the word, and trial. Theology is studied well with humility and love, in and for the church, with Scripture read first and most, old books and primary sources read fairly, and what we learn turned into prayer.

The early church and the Fathers 100–500

  1. After the apostles: the apologists and IrenaeusWith the apostles gone, the second-century church had to keep their faith before martyrdom, before the emperor, and before teachers who offered a secret knowledge. Ignatius, Justin and Irenaeus answered with one God who made the world, a Christ who came in real flesh, and an apostolic faith open to all.
  2. Nicaea: is the Son truly God?When Arius taught that the Son of God is the first and greatest of creatures, the church answered that he is truly God. Nicaea (325) confessed him ‘of one being’ with the Father, and after half a century of struggle Constantinople (381) gave us the creed we call Nicene.
  3. Chalcedon: one person, two naturesOnce the church had confessed the Son truly God, it had to ask how Jesus Christ is one. Through the controversies over Apollinarius, Nestorius and Eutyches, the Council of Chalcedon (451) found its words: one Christ, acknowledged in two natures, without confusion, without change, without division, without separation.
  4. How the Fathers read ScriptureThe church Fathers were first of all readers and preachers of the Bible. Origen sought the spiritual sense beneath the letter, Chrysostom preached the plain meaning to ordinary people, Jerome translated the Old Testament from the Hebrew, and Augustine taught that all Scripture is given to build up love of God and neighbour.
  5. Augustine, doctor of graceAugustine of Hippo (354–430) found rest for a restless heart in Christ and, as a bishop in North Africa, taught that the church is holy because Christ is and that salvation is grace from first to last. Catholics and Protestants alike call him their teacher.

The medieval church 500–1500

  1. Monks, missions and the parting of East and WestBetween the fall of Rome in the West and 1054, monasteries kept prayer, Scripture and learning alive and carried the gospel across Europe. Icons divided the East until Nicaea in 787, while language, the claims of Rome and the filioque slowly drew East and West apart.
  2. Anselm and the rise of scholastic theologyIn the eleventh and twelfth centuries theology moved from the cloister into the schools and set out to understand what it believed. Anselm of Canterbury sought the reasons of faith for God's existence and for the incarnation; Abelard's method of questions and Peter Lombard's Sentences shaped the theology of the new universities.
  3. Thomas AquinasThomas Aquinas (1225–1274), a Dominican friar and the greatest of the scholastics, joined in his Summa Theologiae the truths reason can reach and the truths God alone reveals, convinced that grace does not destroy nature but perfects it. Catholics honour him as the Common Doctor; Protestants have learned from him while differing on merit, fallen reason and the sacraments.
  4. Late medieval crisis and the forerunners of reformIn the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries the Western church was shaken by the papacy at Avignon, the Great Schism and the Black Death. In those years Ockham's ‘modern way’ and the Modern Devotion grew, Wyclif and Hus set Scripture above popes, and humanists went back to the sources, giving the church Erasmus's Greek New Testament: together they opened the door to the Reformation.

The Reformation 1517–1600

  1. Luther: the theology of the cross and justificationIn Romans Martin Luther found that the righteousness of God is not only the justice that punishes sinners but the gift by which God justifies through faith. He taught a God revealed hidden in the cross, the freedom of a Christian united to Christ by faith, law and gospel, and the priesthood of all believers, and his faith lives on in the Augsburg Confession and the Lutheran churches.
  2. Zwingli, Calvin and Reformed theologyThe Reformed theology that grew up in Switzerland set out to rebuild the church's worship and life by Scripture. Zwingli preached through the Bible in Zurich, simplified worship and parted from Luther over the Supper; Calvin's Institutes taught the knowledge of God and ourselves, union with Christ and the double grace of justification and sanctification, and God's sovereign care.
  3. The Anabaptists and the Radical ReformationIn Zurich in 1525 adults who confessed their faith began to baptise one another, and the Anabaptist movement was born. They taught a church of those who repent and believe, believers' baptism, church discipline and a discipleship that refused the sword and the oath; persecuted by Catholics and Protestants alike, they lived on as Mennonites and Hutterites. The Lutheran and Reformed churches differed from them on infant baptism, the magistrate and oaths.
  4. The Catholic Reformation and the English ReformationBeside Luther's and Calvin's there were two other paths of reform in the sixteenth century. The Catholic Church renewed itself through new orders such as the Jesuits and defined its teaching at the Council of Trent (1545–1563), while in England a king's break with Rome opened the way to Cranmer's Book of Common Prayer and the Thirty-nine Articles.

After the Reformation 1600–1900

  1. Protestant orthodoxy and the PuritansIn the seventeenth century Protestant churches worked to set out and guard the Reformation's teaching with precision. Lutheran and Reformed theologians, the Arminian controversy and the Synod of Dort, the Westminster Assembly and the Puritans all sought to hold sound doctrine and holy living together, and their fruit lives on in catechisms, family worship and Matthew Henry's commentary.
  2. Pietism and the Great AwakeningLate seventeenth-century German Pietism longed for sound doctrine to take root in the heart and life, and it renewed Bible reading, small groups, works of love and missions. In the Great Awakening of the 1730s and 40s Jonathan Edwards and George Whitefield preached the new birth, and Edwards taught the church to test religious feeling by its fruit.
  3. Wesley and the Methodist movementIn eighteenth-century England the brothers John and Charles Wesley preached salvation by faith, the Spirit's assurance and holiness made perfect in love, and gathered converts into small groups for mutual care. Their movement became the Methodist churches, which reached Korea in 1885.
  4. The Enlightenment and modern theologyThe Enlightenment made reason the judge of all things, and nineteenth-century theologians tried to restate Christianity before that judge. From Schleiermacher to Harnack, modern theology asked real questions about history and the heart, but evangelicals judged that, no longer receiving Scripture as God's word, it lost the gospel's centre.
  5. Nineteenth-century evangelicalism, missions and KoreaWilliam Carey's appeal of 1792 launched the modern missionary movement, which carried the gospel across the world in the nineteenth century. While preachers and theologians in Britain and America held fast to the gospel and to Scripture's authority, Scripture in Korean reached Korea before the missionaries did, and on Easter Day 1885 the missionaries Horace Underwood and Henry Appenzeller landed at Chemulpo.