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..?