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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
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
no subject
Date: 2023-10-01 10:34 pm (UTC)From: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!