Introduction to Theology

A century ago the french author Jules Verne (1828–1905) wrote extravagantly imaginative stories of adventure and travel. In them he foresaw remarkable scientific and mechanical achievements of our own day, such as submarines, aircraft, and television. What he did not foresee, however, was the loss, equally remarkable, of what was almost everywhere taken for granted a hundred years ago: the reality of God.

Far more sure is contemporary man of the landing of astronauts on the moon than of the incarnation of God in Jesus Christ. To Western man in the nineteen seventies, no world seems more strange than that of theology.

Introductions are still popular. This is evident in the success of television “talk shows,” which give viewers a vicarious meeting with otherwise inaccessible personalities. Many people who care little about the Catholic Church want to meet or read about the Pope, and many who care little about the Gospel like to meet Billy Graham.

But speak of an introduction to God, or to the science of God, and many people are sure to look for the nearest exit. An introduction to sex techniques—now there’s a likely best-seller. Or a manual (not on how to avoid the rise and fall of the American empire but) on how to turn rising Dow Jones averages into a John Doe windfall—that’s heaven on earth; that’s practical religion. What dangles a more fascinating future, after all, than the tops of Masters and Johnson, or of Merrill, Lynch, Pierce, Fenner and Smith?

But what future has theology? Has it even a present? Haven’t theologians themselves been telling us that God is dead? Can theology still be considered a serious intellectual pursuit? For our generation, is not the reality of God a questionable matter at best? Is not discussion of a theological world, except in some cult of metaphysical mystics, now more likely to be greeted by incredulity or indifference than by curiosity and inquiry? Not by derision, to be sure, because religion is considered “everyone’s own kettle of fish”—a matter of personal preference, not a commitment to truth held to be universally valid for one and all. Alas, religious propagandists have for so long recommended spiritual decision not for truth’s sake but for the personal comfort or social stability it brings, that untruths are increasingly thought to be the lifeblood of religion.

If theology, then, is not dead, is it sheer bunk? Are we merely chasing a will-o’-the-wisp? Is it, as someone has suggested, a specialized and rather bogus form of philosophy in which the conclusions are laid down before the argument begins? Do not even neo-Protestant theologians today assert that divine revelation is to be believed without questioning, and that it cannot be integrated with any unified system of truth? And has theology not been taught for centuries by men ordained by the various world religions to raise their own flag? Is theology then a spurious form of philosophy that sets out with unquestioned and unquestionable assumptions, refuses to face problems, and corrals its converts into an irrational commitment that is academically closed and intellectually dishonest? Is the skeptic’s doubt about Christianity to be overcome by a hurried appeal to Pascal’s “wager”—a gambling of life on the view that even if a person is intellectually mistaken he stands to gain more by betting on God than on not-God?

That theology simply prepackages a platter of ideas to be hurriedly ingested rather than carefully savored is a standard complaint of modern atheists and agnostics. The notion is now widespread that theology is an outmoded superstition, like alchemy or astrology, that has unfortunately survived from the Dark Ages, and—whether Christian or not—that it is not truly a rational enterprise at all. The world religions offer, it is thought, a variety of man-made convenience foods awaiting the moment when harried persons run into emergencies and will eat anything rather than starve. Richard Robinson writes, for example: “If theology were part of a reasonable inquiry.… In philosophy one is allowed to come out with whichever …” (An Atheist’s Values, Oxford, 1964, p. 116).

Replying to this mood, Peter Baelz of Cambridge University rightly insists that theology must set out not simply with God as a presupposition but with some agreement on rational methods of inquiry, ways of argument, and verificatory criteria. There can be little doubt that spiritual commitment embraces all man’s interests and anxieties; it is not merely a matter of objective inquiry. But the appeal to God and to revelation cannot stand alone, if it is to be significant. For the critical question today is not simply, what are the data of theology?, but how does one proceed from these data to conclusions that commend themselves to rational reflection?

The fundamental issue remains the issue of truth, the truth of theological assertions. No introduction to theology is worth its weight where that fundamental issue is obscured. To be worthwhile, theology will therefore have to revive and preserve the distinction between true and false religion, a distinction long obscured by neo-Protestant theologians.

We shall doubtless need to admit that much of what has at times passed as Christian theology is laden with logical fallacy: ad hominem arguments reject the assertions of critics on the ground of their personal wickedness; arguments from contradiction affirm the God-hypothesis to be genuine simply because the many alternative theories cannot all be true and hence cancel one another out; arguments from ignorance (like the explanation of earthquake damage to a disreputable nightclub as God’s judgment on sin, and of damage to a reputable church as evidence of the inscrutability of his ways). Tertullian even wrote Marcion that because Christian assertions are absurd they are to be believed. The only worse absurdity has been the ready espousal of such nonsense by modern dialectical and existential theologians. So much has the leap of faith been exaggerated into a virtue that contemporary theologians have become more noted for ingenuous hurtling over rational objections than for intelligible confrontation of the issues.

Either the religion of Jesus Christ is true religion or it is not worth bothering about. True worship is what Jesus Christ demanded: “God is Spirit, and they that worship him must worship him in spirit and in truth” (John 4:24). Jesus broke with Jewish religious leaders in his day on the ground that they were falsifying the Old Testament revelation. He came very close, in fact, to denouncing some of the influential religious spokesmen of the time as liars (John 8:44 ff.). That strategy was hardly calculated to win him any brotherhood awards, but it did maintain top priority for truth as a religious concern. Christianity has affirmed from the beginning not only that Jesus Christ is to be worshiped as the incarnate Logos of God but also that “grace and truth came” through Jesus Christ (John 1:18). Were theology once again wrestled in the context of ultimate truth, no one could afford to evade an introduction.

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