theology
of liberalism, Barth stresses the total otherness of God and the need to
grasp the self-revelation of God in Christ. Feminist, black, and Hispanic
theologies are examples of liberation theology that protest historical, eco-
nomic, social, sexual, and racial disparities and other forms of oppression.
They tend to look to the Bible for models of liberation among prophetic
figures and Jesus. Narrative theology points to the importance of stories
used in the Bible to convey important messages. Scholars indicate the roots
of narrative theology in the work of Barth with his emphasis on scripture
and in H. Richard Niebuhr’s book The Meaning of Revelation (1941) that
stresses that stories are a proper way to express God’s revelation. Process
theology is inspired by the philosophy of Alfred N. Whitehead (1861–
1947), which emphasizes that God exists within the process of becoming
and is in fact identical to it, a dynamic process that governs the entire uni-
verse. Using the non-method of Jacques Derrida, postmodern theology
deconstructs Christian theology in order to expose its internal contradic-
tions. According to Mark C. Taylor, the concepts of God, self, history, and
book are interconnected and fall together, resulting in the death of God,
disappearance of the self, the end of history, and the closure of the book
(revealed scripture). A so-called deconstructive a/theology represents a
reformulation of theology in postmodern terms and restores what is lost in
the deconstruction, which includes the death of God yielding to writing as
a divine milieu, the self reappears as marking and trace, the teleological
history of salvation is replaced by mazing grace, and the closed book opens
out into an unfinished, errant, endless scripture.
In addition to the Christian tradition, theology has played an important
role in the development of Islam, where it begins under the impact of
Greek thought, indirect influence encountered with Christian theology,
and local issues that spring from early political issues over succession to
the prophet and religious controversies. The Arabic term for theology is
kalam (speech, oral discussion) and its practitioners are called mutkalimūn
(literally means speaker), which means in a theological context a person
who introduces a dogma or a controversial theological problem into a
topic for discussion. The Muslim theological tradition begins essentially
by accepting revelation and then applying reason to revelation in order to
interpret, defend, justify, and solve problems arising from revelation,
even though the primary concern of the theologian is reaching under-
standing and interpreting revealed scripture.
During the formative years of the development of Islam, there arise four
major schools of theology: Khārijites, Murji’ites, Mu’tazilites, and the
Ash’arites. The Khārijites insist that the only valid judgment comes from
God, which entails that every Muslim must follow the teachings of the
Qur’an. Since the judgment of God is already clear and known, it simply