theologynow for the most part in Catholic and Protestant seminaries, which are
schools for pre-professional training, and at church-affiliated institutions
that still have departments of theology or a combination and integration
of theology and religious studies. There is a vocal voice within the acad-
emy for not teaching theology within the setting of the modern university
because it is not scientific and thus not a rigorous discipline.
There have evolved four traditional fields of theology: systematic, his-
torical, pastoral, and philosophical. Systematic theology is theoretically
founded on biblical scholarship. Historical theology calls attention to the
historical nature of Christian theological discourse and its time and place
in an attempt to elucidate the relationship between the development of
ideas and their context. A historical theologian might, for instance, be inter-
ested in how the socio-economic situation influences the doctrine of salva-
tion in liberation theology in Latin America. Historical theology is
subversive in the sense that it can expose how foreign notions get incorpo-
rated into Christian thought. Pastoral theology is primarily concerned with
nurturing and care for the souls of local parishioners and other issues asso-
ciated with ministry, whereas philosophical theology uses philosophical
rationality to support religious positions. An excellent example is the five
arguments for the existence of God by Thomas Aquinas who incorporates
the philosophy of Aristotle into his theological reflections. In some cases,
as with the twentieth-century theology of Paul Tillich, systematic theology
uses philosophical insights to raise existential questions about the human
condition, and theology responds with answers to these human problems
in what Tillich calls the method of correlation because philosophical ques-
tions and theological answers are in mutual interdependence.
Since the Enlightenment, there have been numerous types of theologies:
liberal, modernism, neo-orthodoxy, feminism, narrative, liberation, pro-
cess, and postmodern. Even though its precise origins are complex, liberal
theology is often traced to the work of Schleiermacher with his emphasis
on human feeling and condition. Within a cultural context of scientific
optimism, technological progress, and economic prosperity, liberalism
attempted to bridge the gap between faith and scientific knowledge by
reassessing doctrines such as original sin and the identity of the historical
Jesus. Modernism is a Roman Catholic school that took a critical and skep-
tical view of traditional church doctrine, although its versions in different
European countries do not allow it to form a school because of a lack of
commonality. Modernism can partly be grasped as a late response to the
Enlightenment. Neo-orthodoxy is given impetus in the aftermath of World
War I, and it represents a rejection of liberal theology because it seems to
the best exemplary Karl Barth (1886–1968) to be more about human expe-
rience than a God-centric theology. Rather than the human-centric theology