God speaking directly to the faithful believer. For Christians, direct revelation is the life,
death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ, and after his ascension the communication of
tradition has been carried on by the Holy Spirit. A third method of revelation of God to
humankind is by observation of the created order. We can infer the nature of God from
the world around us and from our relationships with other human beings.
Theology as a subject in itself did not exist until the establishment and flourishing of
the universities. Until then, theological speculation had taken place in a wide variety of
settings and writings: biblical commentary, sermons, treatises, liturgy, hymns, works of
spiritual revelation. Indeed, any attempts to make generalizations about the nature of God
and Creation, drawn from the various forms of revelation, are the stuff of “theology.”
Theology exists even in the Gospels, notably in the Gospel of John, where the writer
makes inferences about God and Creation from the experience of the life of Christ,
against the background of the Hebrew Scriptures. The basic theological doctrines of
Christianity were framed at general (or ecumenical) councils of the church: Nicaea I
(325, on the divinity of Christ), Constantinople I (381, on the dual nature of Christ),
Ephesus (431, on the singularity of the person of Christ), Chalcedon (451, on the dual
nature of Christ), Constantinople 11 (553, on the persons of God), Constantinople III
(680–81, on the existence of both divine and human wills in Christ), and Nicaea II (787,
on the iconoclastic controversy). These doctrines, formulated from the writings of the
church fathers, were made orthodox by the agreement of the general councils,
representing the consensus of the whole church. The underlying theological theme was
the nature of Christ as one person with two natures and wills, divine and human, and the
relations of the three persons of the Trinity.
During the revival of interest in theology in the Carolingian schools, the main topics of
debate were pre-destination and the nature of the eucharist. Neither of these subjects was
new, but they were given fresh impetus by such scholars as Johannes Scottus Eriugena,
Gottschalk, and Paschasius Radbertus. “Predestination” concerned the belief that some
people were divinely and infallibly led to salvation. Gottschalk’s extreme view of the
matter, “double predestination,” held that others were similarly led to damnation. This
opinion was condemned, since it limited the actions of God. The nature of the eucharist
had provoked surprisingly little disagreement among the early fathers. But Paschasius
Radbertus questioned the identity of the Eucharistic Body of Christ with his True Body in
Heaven. His opinion was not influential in the 9th century, but it resurfaced in the
thought of Berengar of Tours (11th c.) whose opposition to the doctrine of the Real
Presence provoked a finely wrought defense by Lanfranc of Bec.
The heyday of theology as an academic subject was in the late 12th and 13th centuries
in Paris. The University of Paris was famed as the leading center for the study of
theology in the West, and its scholars were listened to by the highest members of the
church. Indeed, they often took those positions themselves: from the 13th century, a
university education became a well-established route to ecclesiastical and political
preferment. It was in the mid-13th century, too, that we first encounter questions as to
whether theology is a science, which is to say, a suitable topic for reasoned investigation.
The corollary to this was to ask who could make theological statements. The Christian
principle that the means of salvation must be available to every believer implied that any
faithful person, no matter how simple or uneducated, must be able to understand enough
of the nature of God—theology—to follow a path to eternal life. This meant that direct
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