What is theology?

Words about God

The word theology comes from the Greek theologia, which joins theos (θεός), ‘God’, and logos (λόγος), ‘word’. Taken at face value it means speech about God. The word itself never appears in the Bible, but what it names runs through the whole of it. On the night before he died, Jesus prayed:

Now this is eternal life, that they may know You, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom You have sent.

John 17:3

For the early church, theology was not first a subject in a school timetable. It was knowing God and praising him. In the Eastern churches Gregory of Nazianzus, whose sermons on the Trinity were preached in Constantinople in the fourth century, is still called simply ‘the Theologian’. A saying attributed to Evagrius, a monk of the same century, puts the same conviction memorably: if you are a theologian, you will pray truly, and if you pray truly, you are a theologian. Knowing God and praying to him belonged together.

Augustine, reflecting on Jesus' prayer in John 17, drew the line from knowledge to life: "if the knowledge of God is life eternal, the more advance we make in this knowledge, the more we make in life eternal" Augustine. Only much later, as schools and then universities grew up in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, did ‘theology’ become the usual name of an academic discipline. Even then its root was this confession, that to know God is life.

Faith seeking understanding

Anselm, later archbishop of Canterbury, wrote his Proslogion in 1077–1078 as a monk at the abbey of Bec in Normandy. In its preface he says he first gave the little book the title ‘faith seeking understanding’ (fides quaerens intellectum). It opens as a prayer, and at the end of its first chapter Anselm explains the order of things: he does not seek to understand so that he may believe; "I believe in order to understand", for unless he believed he would not understand Anselm, Proslogion, preface and chapter 1. In this he followed Augustine, who had taught that faith comes first and understanding is its reward.

That phrase is still one of the best short definitions of theology. Theology is not an unbeliever weighing evidence to decide whether God exists, though Christians do give reasons for their faith. It is a believer, already trusting the God who has spoken, trying to understand what he has said more deeply and more truly, and to put it into words.

If so, theology is not only for pastors and professors. When a child asks where God is, when we pray or sing a hymn, when we tell a grieving friend that God is good, we are thinking and speaking about God. Everyone who believes is a theologian of some kind. The question is not whether we do theology, but whether we do it truly.

Scripture expects a faith that thinks. Jesus named the greatest commandment: "Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind" (Matthew 22:37). Paul calls believers to "be transformed by the renewing of your mind" (Romans 12:2), and urges Timothy to be "an unashamed workman who accurately handles the word of truth" (2 Timothy 2:15). Peter tells every Christian, "Always be prepared to give a defense to everyone who asks you the reason for the hope that is in you" (1 Peter 3:15), and adds that the answer must come with gentleness and respect.

Knowing truly, not exhaustively

We can know God only because he has first made himself known (see the doctrine course's lesson God makes himself known). Theology does not invent ideas about God; it listens to what God has said and tries to set it out faithfully. So it goes as far as God has spoken, and stops there. Moses put it plainly: "The secret things belong to the LORD our God, but the things revealed belong to us and to our children forever" (Deuteronomy 29:29).

God himself says, "For My thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways My ways" (Isaiah 55:8); his ways are as far above ours as the heavens are above the earth. Even Paul confessed, "Now I know in part" (1 Corinthians 13:12). Christians have often put it this way: we know God truly, but never exhaustively. What he has revealed is true and trustworthy; our grasp of it is partial and has room to grow.

There is a second danger, and it is closer to home. "Knowledge puffs up, but love builds up," Paul warns (1 Corinthians 8:1), and then turns the matter round: "But the one who loves God is known by God" (1 Corinthians 8:3). The goal of theology is not to become someone who knows a great deal about God, but someone who loves God and is known by him. Matthew Henry observed that "Those who know most in this imperfect state, feel their own weakness most" Matthew Henry.

Theology that ends in worship

In Romans 9–11 Paul wrestles with some of the hardest questions in the Bible: God's choosing and his mercy, Israel and the nations, and whether God's promises have failed. After three chapters of close argument he does not close with a final formula. He breaks into praise:

O, the depth of the riches of the wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable are His judgments, and untraceable His ways! “Who has known the mind of the Lord? Or who has been His counselor?” “Who has first given to God, that God should repay him?” For from Him and through Him and to Him are all things. To Him be the glory forever! Amen.

Romans 11:33-36

Matthew Henry pictures the apostle sitting humbly at the brink of a depth he cannot sound, and adoring it; he ends, "The saints in heaven never dispute, but always praise" Matthew Henry. Augustine looked forward to the day when we shall know God fully: "There will be praise of God without end, where will be full knowledge of God" Augustine. Theology done well does not stop in the head. It ends on its knees.

That is where this course begins. Its first six lessons are an introduction: next, where theology gets what it says (The sources of theology); then how to interpret Scripture, the disciplines of theology, and how to study it. The other eighteen lessons tell how the church has thought and confessed its faith from the Fathers to about 1900, through the early church, the Middle Ages, the Reformation and the centuries after it, with the main events gathered on the course's timeline. For how God speaks to us, see How does God speak?.

Practice