Theology Is a Western Invention
Theology has its critics. Before we begin to explore the benefits and outcomes of our subject, we must pause and listen to these criticisms. Perhaps because I have a high profile as a Christian theologian, many people write to me explaining their difficulties with theology. Sadly, I rarely have enough time to respond properly, but I always make a note of the problems and try to address them in my writings. In what follows, I will look at five concerns. Most of these have been raised by Christians. The first, however, is widely encountered within Western culture.
Many in the West can see no reason why any intelligent or informed person would want to study theology. I used to share such an outlook, so I will try to explain why I think that this criticism can be countered. Theology matters for serious atheists. It sets out what Christians believe, why they believe it and how they came to express these ideas in certain specific ways. If you want to criticize Christianity intelligently and responsibly, you need to grasp its fundamental tenets. That makes it possible to have productive and helpful conversations between Christianity and its critics on the one hand, and those who are wondering what it’s all about on the other.
Engaging with the leading atheist Richard Dawkins helped me to understand why theology matters. Our first encounter was in a private debate at the University of Oxford, in which he argued that science and science alone is able to answer all life’s important questions. In 2003, I researched and wrote a theological analysis and assessment of his views about science and Christianity (published the following year), mapping out some of his criticisms of faith and developing responses to those concerns. Before criticizing him, I wanted to make sure that I had understood him.
In 2006, Dawkins’s highly influential book The God Delusion was published, now seen as the leading manifesto of the movement known as the New Atheism, which fizzled out ten years later. My wife and I wrote a response to Dawkins’s critique of Christianity, expressing concern about the shallowness of his understanding and offering a response to his criticisms of faith.
Here’s my point: theology sets out what Christians believe and that’s important for any public discussion on matters of faith, whether you think Christianity is right or wrong. If you want to criticize Christianity, fair enough – but make sure that you know what it actually is. Dawkins’s refusal to take theology seriously means that his criticisms of Christianity are largely based on misunderstandings, misreadings and (sadly) what often seems to be prejudice. As the cultural and literary critic Terry Eagleton (b. 1943) pointed out in a withering review of The God Delusion: ‘Imagine someone holding forth on biology whose only knowledge of the subject is the Book of British Birds, and you have a rough idea of what it feels like to read Richard Dawkins on theology.’
Most atheists I know consider it important to grasp at least something of this theological vision, whether they agree with it or not. Not Dawkins, however. Dawkins’s criticisms of Christianity suggest both that he knows little about it and that he relies upon his intended readership to share his ignorance of theology and cultural distaste for faith. I have been astonished at how many people I’ve met whose understanding of Christianity has been shaped by Dawkins’s caricatures. It’s hardly surprising that such people crumble and crumple in discussion with intelligent and informed Christians.
The contrast on this point between Dawkins and the leading American evolutionary biologist Stephen J. Gould (1941–2002) is striking. Gould did not allow his personal agnosticism to interfere with his concern to understand what he did not agree with. He took theology seriously, realizing that it represents an important and significant attempt to make sense of our world and our place within it. For Gould, science develops theories to explain the observed facts of nature; theology deals with questions of human meaning and moral values. We need both these fields of knowledge to cope with life.
Dawkins’s critique of theology rests on his ‘scientism’ – the belief that science alone can answer life’s great questions. As many of his critics, religious and secular, have pointed out, his sectarian approach to human knowledge is a hopelessly blunt instrument, which wipes out not merely theology but also other significant areas of intellectual and cultural life, such as philosophy and poetry. The cultural critic Neil Postman (1931–2003) put his finger neatly on the problem that many people have with this inflated estimation of the capacities of the natural sciences:
Science does not provide the answers most of us require. Its story of our origins and of our end is, to say the least, unsatisfactory. To the question, ‘How did it all begin?’, science answers, ‘Probably by an accident.’ To the question, ‘How will it all end?’, science answers, ‘Probably by an accident.’ And to many people, the accidental life is not worth living. Moreover, the science-god has no answer to the question, ‘Why are we here?’
As I mentioned in the Introduction, Dawkins’s view is now widely regarded as intellectually circular and imaginatively deficient. It presupposes its own conclusions. Both philosophy and theology are happily now back in business, offering richer and more satisfying engagements with the big questions of life than Dawkins’s unsatisfactory overinterpretations of science.
Over the years, many ordinary Christians, often with impressive educational achievements, have explained to me how they have been put off theology by what they describe as its ‘weird vocabulary’, its ‘intellectual introversion’ and its ‘disconnection from the life of faith’. I know what they mean. Theology often uses language that bears little relation to everyday life and seems far removed from that of the New Testament.
Much academic theology appears to be written in a language that excludes ordinary people, engaging with writers few have ever heard of and dealing with questions that hardly anyone considers interesting or important. The Yale philosopher of religion Denys Turner (b. 1942) is one of many to protest against this ‘vacuity of thought wrapped up in a theological tribal dialect’. It’s not surprising that so many people think theology is pointless.
But let’s be fair. Every professional group develops its own distinct vocabulary or jargon. Car mechanics, investment experts and medical practitioners all use terms that seem hopelessly inaccessible to ordinary people, but which they understand perfectly as they go about their professional tasks and compare notes on how to do these better. Most academics use one mode of speaking when facing inwards and another when facing outwards. That’s why the media is continually looking for economists, philosophers and physicists who know their professional field yet can explain it to ordinary people in everyday language. This is true of theology as well. Some academic theologians see their role as engaging with the questions and debates of their peers; others – such as myself and Rowan Williams (b. 1950) – see themselves as having a responsibility to engage with wider questions, going beyond the professional guild of theologians.
I fully understand why many Christian laity and clergy are suspicious of academic theology, which so often seems detached from everyday concerns. That’s why it is so important to realize that most Christian theologians are passionately committed to the wellbeing of their churches and communities of faith. Throughout its long history, Christian theology mostly has been developed by reflective practition ers – by bishops and pastors anxious to educate their congregations and help them to grow in their faith, and by monastic writers concerned to develop an authentic life of Christian prayer and spirituality for themselves and their colleagues. There is much to be learned from them.
Yet every rigorous academic discipline, including theology, develops what the French call intellectuels engagés: public intellectuals, deeply rooted in their own fields, who see it as important to make connections with real-life questions, speaking the language of their audiences and engaging with their wider concerns on the basis of a deep familiarity with their own specialist field.
Many, of course, are irritated by the ‘everything can be fixed, trust us, we’re experts’ posturing of some public intellectuals. But the point is that they represent a vital point of contact between a body of specialist knowledge and practice on the one hand, and the concerns of the everyday world on the other.
In the case of theology, the primary interface between this body of knowledge and practice and a wider community is the weekly sermon or homily preached in churches throughout the world. What is a sermon? At its heart, it’s an act of theological translation and application, usually based on reflection on biblical passages that have been read aloud to the congregation. A sermon attempts to lodge some core realities of the Christian faith in the minds and hearts of the congregation, to expand their vision of their faith or to make a connection with a local concern or issue. It’s an interpretative performance in which the preacher becomes the link between the wisdom of the Christian tradition and the audience.
Whatever else preachers (whether lay or ordained) may be, they are sources of reflective wisdom and catalysts of personal growth in faith for their congregations. The preacher is someone who, steeped in the riches of the theological tradition, is able to see how this can enrich and inform the local community. I will say more about this when responding to the next criticism that is often levelled at theology.
In an increasingly pragmatic church culture, theology is widely seen by denominational managers as a waste of time and effort. Clergy should be taught how to increase church membership, not waste their time studying theology. Churches need leaders who know how to grow their market share and pack more people in. Instead of studying dead writers from the past, we ought to focus on those who are seen to matter in the present – such as media consultants, communications experts and social influencers. Church life is really about being affirming, welcoming and inclusive. Theology has no practical value and just gets in the way of much needed church growth, which alone can save the churches from extinction in a rapidly changing cultural landscape.
This view needs to be questioned. As I come from a medical family, it’s natural for me to turn to this important discipline for illumination. Is medicine practical? Of course it is. Yet the practice of medicine depends on the knowledge of and ability to apply medical theory, such as understanding how the human body functions or how its processes can be affected by certain drugs. The medical practitioner is someone who stands at the interface of theory and practice. Having absorbed a detailed knowledge of the multiple disciplines that are necessary to diagnose and to heal, the practitioner brings this wisdom to bear on each individual patient, learning to explain their diagnoses and offering recommendations in everyday language to win the patient’s confidence. And it takes time to acquire such knowledge and expertise. The University of Oxford’s medical course, for example, lasts six years.
There are obvious parallels with theology. Christian clergy need a range of skills, one being the ability to apply the wisdom of the Christian faith to the situation of their congregations, above all through preaching. Preachers ought to be deeply rooted in the Bible and the long tradition of interpretation of the biblical text, and rooted in their community of faith and able to apply this wisdom to its members. Or to use an image associated with the German philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer (1900–2002), the preachers’ job is to connect ‘two horizons’: the Christian faith on the one hand, and their congregations on the other. Learning how to do this takes time. It’s not a quick fix that can be picked up from a seminar.
Preachers are theologians: people who interpret and apply the Christian vision of life to the situations of those to whom they minister. They may not be academic theologians (though some are). They are, however, unquestionably doing theology in practice: explaining, interpreting and applying the Christian faith. Remember that Karl Barth (1886–1968) developed his theology while he was a preacher in the small Swiss village of Safenwil and that most early Christian theologians have passed down to us collections of their sermons, aiming to connect faith and life. Indeed, several hundred of Augustine of Hippo’s estimated 8,000 sermons have survived.
We certainly can learn from reading these works, but perhaps we can learn even more from simply remembering and appreciating that these theologians were preachers and saw the interpretation and application of theology as integral to their calling. Today’s separation of theology from preaching is as artificial as it is unnecessary. We need to recapture the original sense of theology as embracing preaching, spirituality and pastoral care. That’s the way it once was and that, in my view, is the way it ought to be.
This is a widespread concern for many Christians for whom the Bible is a foundational resource. The Bible is central to Christian life, being read in public worship and in private by many Christians, who often use devotional or scholarly commentaries to gain a deeper understanding of its significance. The public reading of the Bible emphasizes its place in the life of faith. Most traditional forms of worship frame the reading of biblical texts by reciting one of the creeds, which offers a structure of interpretation, and through a sermon, which offers reflection, interpretation and application based on these texts.
It is certainly true that some more philosophical forms of theology interact minimally with the Bible. Perhaps surprisingly, C. S. Lewis rarely engages explicitly in any detail with biblical texts although his writings show a deep implicit biblical understanding. Early Christian theologians, however, were deeply and explicitly rooted in the Bible, seeing their task as constructing a systematic account of its basic themes and their application to the life of faith. Cyril of Jerusalem, for example, delivered a series of 23 ‘Catechetical Lectures’ around the year 350, each of which explores a text of Scripture before opening up into a wider discussion of Christian beliefs.
Cyril is the norm, not the exception, in his use of the Bible. Many early Christian theological works, whether these took the form of biblical commentaries or works of systematic theology, regularly included extended engagements with biblical texts. This may be one of the reasons for the resurgence of interest in their writers in recent decades, and a growing appreciation of their importance for stimulating theological reflection in the present.
It needs to be appreciated, however, that theology is not the mere repetition of biblical passages; these need to be interpreted so that they can speak into present debates and concerns. As the leading British New Testament scholar John Barclay (b. 1958) rightly notes:
Our task in each generation, and in each cultural and historical context, is not simply to preserve these words but to unfold them, to explicate them, to tease out their meaning, in a way that ‘masters’ – that comes to grips with and persuasively communicates to – our constantly changing present.
Theology weaves together biblical themes and passages so that they can be understood within the larger vision they disclose when taken together but do not disclose individually. We explored this point earlier when we considered how theology weaves individual biblical themes together to give a big picture of reality.
Barclay also argues that theology ‘has no “once and for all” form of discourse’, as if it could be stated in a way that is valid for all places and times. It is not enough to repeat the words of the New Testament without explaining what they mean in contemporary language; theological interpretation means translation into the cultural vernacular, which changes over time. Theology aims to communicate what the biblical text means to today’s readers in the present.
For Barclay, we have to ask what it would mean to ‘speak from and with Paul in ways that resonate in the 21st century’, recognizing that some attempts to do this in the past now seem outdated. We need to ‘rearticulate Paul’s meaning in a way that is genuinely good news for our contemporaries’. That is why we need theology – to enable a constant translation of the realities of biblical faith into language and concepts that connect with today’s audiences rather than repeat past articulations of those realities, which may be framed in terms that are now unfamiliar and often open to misunderstanding.
Today, Christianity is a global religion. Although its geographical heartlands during the Middle Ages were primarily in Europe, it has now spread throughout the world, with many of its more dynamic forms based in Asia, Africa and Latin America. Over the last few decades, my correspondents in southern Africa, the Middle East, India, China and Japan have raised a concern that I think is worth engaging with here. Since theology is a Western invention, it cannot be allowed to have a privileged place in this geographically and culturally expanded Christianity. Why should global Christianity be shaped by a Western ideology?
Indeed, it is possible that certain forms of Christian theology are influenced by their Western contexts and, thus, are unhelpful in African and Asian contexts. Yet theology itself goes back to a period when ‘the West’ simply did not exist. The importance of this point can be seen by considering the cultural background of two of the most influential Christian theologians, who are regularly cited today as central reference points in theological discussions. In fact, I’ve already referenced both. It’s time to look at them in a little more detail.
The Egyptian theologian Athanasius was born in Alexandria, which was then one of the most ethnically diverse cities in the Graeco-Roman world of late classical antiquity. His writings suggest that he was fluent in both Coptic and Greek. (The ancient Egyptian Coptic language was displaced by Arabic as the primary language of Egypt following the Muslim conquest of the region three centuries later.) Today, Athanasius is one of the most cited and engaged with theologians and his seminal work On the Incarnation is seen as a landmark in the development of theology.
Augustine of Hippo was born in the territory of Numidia in North Africa, which was populated by three main people groups: indigenous Berber tribes, the descendants of Phoenician immigrants from the eastern Mediterranean and Roman immigrants. Augustine is generally thought to have been a Berber, who was converted to Christianity during a period spent in Italy before his return to Numidia, where he became bishop of Hippo Regius (now part of the city of Annaba in modern-day Algeria). Long after his death, Augustine played a pivotal role in the great medieval theological renaissance in western Europe, which helped to consolidate Christianity as both a private belief system and as a public world view.
While Christian theology today includes significant contributions from Western writers, its historical roots and most significant classical ‘influencers’ lie in what is now the Middle East and North Africa. Some, sadly, dismiss theology as the outdated reflections of the dead. This shallow judgement fails to appreciate how much we can learn from those who have, in the past, wrestled with Christianity’s core vision in trying to illuminate and transform their situations. Yet, happily, modern theology increasingly engages with the wisdom of early Christian writers such as Cyprian of Carthage (c.210–258), a Berber born and active in modern-day Tunisia, and Gregory of Nyssa (c.335–c.395), born and active in modern-day Turkey.
One of the most significant trends in modern theology is the retrieval of the ideas and methods of these ancient writers, including the ways in which they read and understood the Bible, the spiritual and theological ‘disciplines’ they developed and their potential to illuminate how Christianity can engage with multicultural contexts, such as those of late classical antiquity. They have bequeathed to us a usable legacy, which we can quarry, interpret and apply to our own contexts without being trapped in the past.
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In the first part of this book, I have explored some aspects of theology – emphasizing its importance in securing the core vision of the Christian faith – and the need to appreciate the individual elements of this vision, as well as its coherence. The New Testament says ‘in him all things hold together’ (Col. 1.17), which allows us to see both the rich diversity of the Christian gospel on the one hand, and its fundamental unity on the other. The gospel is like a multifaceted jewel with many aspects to explore and appreciate and then put to good use.
The second part of the book focuses on how we use theology. I’ve already pleaded for a recovery of the older vision of theology as enfolding the nurturing of the Christian life, focusing on preaching, character formation and spirituality. Theology does more than preserve the core themes of the gospel; it helps us to apply these to the great questions of human existence. In the next three chapters, we shall consider three themes that can be illuminated and transformed by theological reflection: the quests for wisdom, wellbeing and wonder.