Lecture 1: What Is Theology?
of what people should be taught to believe is of the essence. Unlike other
religions, Christianity is essentially a faith because it is not fundamentally
about how to live but about the life of another person, Jesus Christ. Theology
is a normative discipline because it concerns not just what is taught in the
church, but what ought to be. The wisdom and message at the heart of
Christianity is not primarily a revelation about how to live but primarily the
story about who Jesus is, called the Gospel.The key concepts of Christian theology should be understood in terms of
their relation to Christianity’s central focus on Jesus Christ. In Christian
theology, even the crucial theme of Jesus’s own teaching, the Kingdom of
God, is subordinated to teaching about who Jesus is—the Christ, which
means the king in the Kingdom of God. Similarly, for Christian theology
all other questions (including very important ones like “How do I get
saved?”) are subordinate to the question, “Who
is Jesus?” For Christianity, what is parallel to
the Torah as the fundamental revelation of God
in Judaism, or to the Koran in Islam, is not the
Bible but Jesus Christ himself (of whom the
Bible functions as a kind of witness).Theology concerns concepts that cannot be
understood apart from the way they shape
Christian life. Although theological concepts
can become quite abstract, they have meaning
only as they relate believers to Christ and thereby give shape to Christian
life. Once formed, theological concepts are used to guide and correct
Christian practice, teachings, and storytelling. To understand what is at stake
in Christian theological concepts is to see how they form Christian life and
practices and their relation to Christ.The focus of this course will be on theological arguments where something
important is at stake for those involved. The aim is for listeners to understand
the diversity of Christian theology today, where it comes from, and what
is at stake for participants in the tradition. The lectures will aim not for
neutrality but for fairness and generosity. Though there is much common
ground, there is no purely neutral ground between rival Christian traditions,Theology is a
normative discipline
because it concerns
not just what is
taught in the church,
but what ought to be.