Changing one's mind

[wildeabandon]

I think it's good to note when you change your mind about things and why, and that happened to me at this week's Bible Club*. The question we were considering was "Do you have to be a Christian to be a Christian** theologian"

We went round the room, and everyone else said 'No'. And my starting position was that whilst you certainly don't have to be a Christian to study or teach Christian theology (which apparently some people have argued that you do), you do in order to do new work/research in the subject, and that non-Christians doing related work were doing something more akin to anthropology than theology.

My argument was that Christians doing Christian theology were trying to understand and elucidate what is true about God, and therefore about the world, whereas non-Christians were trying to understand and elucidate what Christians believe, which is a fundamentally different question. For example, one of the hot topics in theological discussions of the second half of the 20th century was whether God can suffer. And if you're a Christian, trying to answer that question makes sense, but if you're an atheist or a Buddhist, then it doesn't, although "what do Christians believe about the suffering of God," does, and if you're Jewish or Muslim then it's a question in Jewish/Islamic theology instead, and if you're a Hindu then you probably need to come back with "which God?"

And then one of the others*** asked "So if I was doing historical research into the Synod of Ancyra, and what was decided there, and the social context at the time, and what influence that had on the subsequent development of the church, would that be theology? And if an atheist was doing exactly the same research with exactly the same tools, what would be the difference?" And I was pretty stumped. I could have argued that perhaps both people were doing history rather than theology, but we'd had an earlier question about how we define theology, and there was a pretty clear consensus that things like theological history, as well as pastoral theology and ecclesiology and biblical studies and Christian ethics were as much a part of the discipline as the kind of systematic theology that focuses specifically on setting out clearly what it is we believe about God.

I still think that there are some questions in Christian theology where the difference between answering them as a Christian or non-Christian changes them into fundamentally different questions, which could also be phrased as "you have to be a Christian**** to do some aspects of Christian theology," but that's a much weaker statement than "You have to be a Christian to be a Christian theologian."

*which is currently slightly misnamed, as although most of the time we have been looking at biblical interpretation, we are currently working through Alistair McGrath's "Introduction to Christian Theology", which is a slightly broader topic.
**in which the adjective Christian is modifying the type of theology being done, rather than the theologian doing it, so as not to be tautologically true.
***the person in question should let me know if I've misrepresented them. I'm not at all sure I've got the right Synod
****there's also some fuzzy edges here about what it means to be a Christian, especially when it comes to people who are questioning their faith in either direction

Comments

[jack]

That's really interesting. I think I almost entirely agree with your definition even if it's hard to make precise. Perhaps it's something like, "lots of things *are also* Christian theology, but *doing* theology by expressing opinions on what should be there is a central part of it, and it's not Christian theology as a whole if you do the other bits but never do that"?

I'm often really interested in parts of theology, and it's not just me -- things like interfaith discussions (I think?) represent meaningful engagement in theology that overlaps only partly with your own. But there's some ways it doesn't count if you don't really MEAN it.

Perhaps its one of those questions where it's useful to consider the things that do and don't count, but that once you've thought that much about it, the overall question doesn't boil down to a clear single answer.

Did the debate go on further after that? Was there a teacher who put forth anything they thought should be included?

[wildeabandon]

One other thing that got brought up was that sometimes the reason that you're doing something changes the essence of what you're doing even when the outward actions are the same, with an analogy about building a motor car to go on a long road trip or to commute to work, as an argument for why the research into the Synod of Ancyra Whitby might in fact be theology in one case and history in another, but I don't think it quite hit the mark.

And yes, I think engaging in theological discussion with people who don't share your faith perspective is both really interesting and often enlightening and informative. I think it's particularly important for Christians to listen to and understand Jewish perspectives on the Hebrew scriptures and have than inform our interpretation, but figuring out what the Christian interpretation is, is a job for Christians.

There's no teacher - it's just a group of friends reading a textbook a chapter at a time, and then meeting once a fortnight to discuss the questions at the end of the chapter (or occasionally some other questions we come up with ourselves if the ones in the book aren't up to scratch). I think we talked about it at Thronescamp, and you were like "that sounds really cool, but I have too many things on my plate at the moment", but if you ever do feel like you've got space for it, you'd be very welcome to join.

[jack]

"that sounds really cool, but I have too many things on my plate at the moment"

Oh right! Yes, I hear updates from the club every so often, it STILL sounds really interesting, especially moving onto the theology book which isn't as directly talking about Christian scripture, but I STILL not sure if I quite have time to do another online thing. (And now Rachel is doing Rabbinical School, she probably needs more hobbies that are not theology so it's more just me :))

But when I read the post I forgot about the group and thought you were talking about something else.

sometimes the reason that you're doing something changes the essence of what you're doing even when the outward actions are the same

Yeah, that's a good point. I think what I usually say is that almost always the reasons affect the essence affect the actions (or are likely to affect actions in future), even if some particular cases the actions are the same, and even if in many cases the actions might be similar.

That's my defence to "is this different or not". Like it's not a definition of category, but if someone asks "can a neurotypical author write a book about a neurodivergence and a neurodivergent character?" I'd say that they might IN THEORY be able to write an equally valid book. But that in practice, they'll make lots of harmful mistakes if they don't have at least a big input from people with first-hand experience of the mentality. (And that "can X author write a book about Y character" matters for some Y and not others, depending whether real-world Y people are typically being harmed by having off-base assumptions about them promulgated unthnkingly, or not.)

[jack]

In fact, remind me when you've been meeting, and how much reading you usually end up doing..?

[emperor]

I think it was Whitby I picked, but I don't think the exact synod was especially important to the main point of my argument (I picked Whitby because a lot of the arguments were about ecclesiology rather than critical questions about the nature of God).

[ludy]

Ooo interesting question and I’m not sure what I think.
But I do believe it is useful for members-of-a-faith to read/listen to people outside-of-that-faith when they do that kind of anthropology/historical theology (assuming the outside-the-faith people are acting with good will and it’s not just about being attacking/shaming/exotifying)

[wildeabandon]

Oh yes - very much so. I think more thoughtful perspectives are almost always a good thing on just about any subject. And there are definitely aspects where having a disinterested perspective can make it easier to get at the truth. Perhaps particularly when it comes to intra-group conflicts. In the current book it's clear that McGrath is trying to be as even-handed as possible when describing different viewpoints, especially those that split along catholic/protestant lines, but there definitely are bits where I feel like maybe he's describing the catholic position the way an evangelical would characterise it, rather than as a catholic would put it themselves, and that might be less likely to happen with someone who didn't have a horse in the race.

[highlyeccentric]

Is that not a case of "doing theology requires studying theology, but not all who study theology Do Theology"?

The distinction I'm much more used to is that between Religious Studies (which may include the history or contemporary social studies of theology) as taught in faculties of Arts in australia and Theology, and a Bachelor of Theology, which is intended specifically for practicing Christians. There's overlap in content, but difference of purpose. And the theology of other religions for practicioners of other religions is not taught, as far as I know, as a bachelor subject at all here (rabbis, imams, etc are accredited differently).

I was honestly startled to discover that the distinction between Theology and Religious Studies didn't hold up abroad.

[sfred]

Sounds like a really interesting conversation.

(but I do fully intend to put "Computational Theology" on my business cards)

[pseudomonas]

I feel like my work (computational linguistics/natural language processing as applied to transcripts of bilingual New Testament manuscripts) doesn't make me a theologian - but the broader definition above would include me. I guess I'm OK with saying I'm a theologian sensu lato but that feels beyond how I'd use the unqualified word.

My department is "Theology and Biblical Studies" and I slot fairly clearly into the second of those. I'm personally more interested in studying the nature of language and of documentary transmission than in studying the NT specifically — though the project I'm working on is more aimed at the latter.

[smhwpf]

Really interesting discussion. I like the distinction between "studying/being a scholar of theology" (possibly quite an erudite, advanced one), and doing Christian/Jewish/Islamic etc. theology.

As established in the thread, there are certainly aspects of the discipline of theology that one can do regardless of belief or lack thereof, e.g. New Testament studies/criticism. The textual sources, questions of what we can be fairly confident Jesus actually said or what was from the Evangelist, or the community they came from, etc. But if one then wants to ask "In the light of this, how do we understand the Gospels in relation to Christian faith, the nature and role of Jesus?" etc., then the non-Christian scholar must step back. (Except perhaps to say, my study of the New Testament leads me to the belief that there is no meaningful evidence of any supernatural aspect to Jesus's ministry, and thus I am not a Christian). Which does not make their scholarship any less valid or worthwhile, but it is a qualitatively different thing they are doing.

Conversely, a Christian scholar could be incredibly knowledgable about the Torah, its sources, social context, development, what different Rabbis have said about it, etc., so they could meaningfully do Torah scholarship in various ways, but if it comes to asking, "So how should we understand these commandments now, how is God speaking to us through this?", they can only answer that question as a Christian, so in that sense cannot be doing Jewish theology.

So I suppose it depends partly on what one means by ($Religion) theology!