Introduction
I had never heard of theology when I discovered Christianity as an undergraduate at the University of Oxford back in 1971. All that changed three years later as I was reading C. S. Lewis’s essay ‘Is theology poetry?’ Lewis (1898–1963) gave me a fleeting glimpse of something tantalizingly distant yet eminently desirable, like a shimmering Tuscan landscape. I experienced a sense of wonder as I pondered his elegant prose, feeling that I was being drawn into a world beyond any I knew.
Yet most of my Christian friends at Oxford at the time saw theology as pointless speculation irrelevant to the life of faith. Others, particularly those studying philosophy, argued that theology was simply meaningless. They’d read A. J. Ayer’s Language, Truth and Logic (1936), and believed that it justified their secular common-sense rationalism. Ayer set out a ‘principle of verification’, which asserted that a statement is meaningful only if it can be verified. Since Ayer (1910–89) held the Wykeham Chair of Logic at the University of Oxford throughout my years as an undergraduate, it was no surprise that his ideas dominated student philosophical debate. Theology, it seemed, was doomed to an inevitable intellectual extinction.
My decision to switch from the natural sciences to theology in the mid-1970s thus seemed unwise, perhaps even mad, to most of my Oxford friends. But that was fifty years ago and things have moved on. Ayer’s ‘principle of verification’ is now seen as unworkable and self-contradictory. As the atheist philosopher Julian Baggini (b. 1968) points out, Ayers’s discredited views are now echoed mainly in the simplistic and superficial certainties of New Atheist writers such as Richard Dawkins (b. 1941), who urge us to forget about God, stop worrying and instead just enjoy life.
Dawkins’s assurance that science can answer all of life’s questions has lost its initial credibility, now being seen as an exercise in intellectual circularity presupposing its own conclusions in order to confirm them. Most people now prefer to keep an open mind on the matter, having a vague sense that there might be ‘something there’ and wondering what more religious souls think.
I hope this short book will be helpful to those of you who are curious and puzzled about theology, perhaps struggling to understand the apparent confidence with which it speaks about things you consider to be tentative and uncertain. I hope it will also engage readers who attend church yet feel suspicious and sceptical about the subject. Let me be clear: many intelligent and reflective people, both religious and secular, have deep misgivings about theology! Is it pointless nonsense, like debating how many angels can dance on a pinhead? Is it a distraction from more important aspects of faith, such as the beauty of worship, the joy of praise and the satisfaction of serving our communities? Why is it expressed in such inaccessible technical vocabulary, so far from the simple yet rich language of the New Testament?
As I come to the end of my career as a professor of theology at the University of Oxford, I would like to share something of what I’ve learned. I may be wrong in some of my judgements! But the concerns expressed above (and others) will be taken seriously as I explore what theology is really all about – why it remains important for those inside and beyond the community of faith, the difference it can make to the ways in which Christians think and live, and how it fits into the wider human quest for wisdom, wellbeing and wonder.
Alister McGrath