Divine Teaching

An Introduction to Christian Theology

Mark A. McIntosh

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781119468035
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Theology

This innovative work is an introduction to Christian theology with a difference. Not only does it interpret, with clarity and energy, fundamental Christian beliefs but it also shows how and why these beliefs arose, promoting an understanding of theological reflection that encourages readers to think theologically themselves.

From Irenaeus and Aquinas to Girard, from Augustine to Zizioulas and contemporary feminist thought, Divine Teaching explores the ways in which major thinkers in the Christian tradition have shaped theology through the wide variety of their encounters with God. It makes theological study adventurous and interactive, not necessarily requiring a faith commitment from all, but allowing readers a thoughtful involvement in the subject that takes seriously the Christian vision of God as the ultimate teacher of theology.

Divine Teaching: An Introduction to Christian Theology is an imaginative and lively analysis of the Christian way of thinking, offering vivid and informing insight into the history and practice of Christian theology.

Part I
Becoming a Theologian

Chapter 1
How God Makes Theologians

Astonishment and Theological Virtue

Just about the worst thing that could happen to Christian theologians is for them to be taken too seriously. I don’t mean to imply that I and my colleagues are all farcical figures, of course. Perhaps we could be compared to children wading in the sea: studiously cautious, not intending to get wet, but magnificently upended by the vast, joyful rolling of the tide. The tide pulling at theologians is God, trying to get us to float, even swim, or at least admit we have no business floundering along on two feet in such a current.

I picture theologians this way (myself included) because we are essentially hapless folk, ever prone to manage and clarify what remains, mercifully, beyond our grasp. The divine currents we paddle about in – grace, for example, or forgiveness, or resurrection – are, right down to their last filaments of eternal glory, entirely unaccountable to us, unexpected, and undeserved. The ordinary cycles of everyday life, by contrast, are conveniently predictable; they amble amiably along into the sleek charts and scholarly monographs in which we render them as subjects of study. Most of us contemporary theologians, soberly trained in the best scholarly methods, try our hardest to analyze the divine realities by dutifully herding them into the approved pens of dialectical arguments and critical studies. Yet when we open our mouths to discourse of deity, out come skirling parables, hopelessly impossible histories, and such reckless extravagances as the idea of a God who refuses to stay exclusively divine, and a savior who’s such a miserable failure he cannot even save himself. As the Apostle Paul said, the whole thing seems comically weak and foolish by any human standard you like (1 Corinthians 1: 18–31).

Who can blame us if we theologians try to remain inconspicuous? The danger is that we will attempt to blend in all too well; we will master the academic and ecclesiastical arts so proficiently that people will not notice how outrageous is the subject of our work. We may even manage, perhaps without realizing it, to substitute for the outlandishness of Christian faith, a gray orderliness in which nothing unexpected ever happens or ever could. But every once in a great while, theologians of such good humor and humility come along that they are content to teach the truth about God precisely by letting the ludicrous inadequacies of their art appear in broad daylight. They let the divine truth shimmer gracefully in the soaking garments of their patiently constructed arguments, having walked through yet another doorway with grace like a pail of water perched comically above. That is my warning and my confession. We theologians cannot show you the reality of grace in a proper argument. We cannot explain it according to rational necessities. We can only gesture in what we believe is the right direction and hope our hand waving will entice you close enough to get splashed, indeed immersed, yourself.

This does not mean that the study of theology is a fruitless task. Like the study of poetry or music in a university setting, academic theology can accomplish any number of useful purposes. It should shed light on the history and forms of theologizing, on the ideas and imagery we try to compose with, on the nature and interrelationship of the thoughts of vast swathes of humankind. But at the end of the day these chores ought to leave one more sensitive to the truth and beauty that beckons ungraspably from within poetry or music or theology, not earnestly confident that one has wrestled reality to the ground. While writing one of the most voluminous efforts in theology in human history, the Swiss theologian Karl Barth (1886–1968) paused to remark:

If anyone should not find himself astonished and filled with wonder when he becomes involved in one way or another with theology, he would be well advised to consider once more, from a certain remoteness and without prejudice, what is involved in this undertaking. The same holds true for any who should have accomplished the feat of no longer being astonished, instead of becoming continually more astonished all the time that he concerns himself with this subject. When he reconsiders the subject, however, such a man might find that astonishment wells up within him anew, or perhaps even for the first time. And this time such wonder might not desert him but might rather become increasingly powerful in him. That astonishment should remain or become wholly foreign to him is scarcely conceivable. But should that happen, both he and theology would fare better if he would devote his time to some other occupation.… If such astonishment is lacking, the whole enterprise of even the best theologian would canker at the roots. On the other hand, as long as even a poor theologian is capable of astonishment, he is not lost to the fulfillment of his task.¹

As I have been suggesting, this recurring astonishment that theologians suffer has everything to do with the reality they seek to understand.

By now you may be sufficiently alarmed to suffer at least some mild wonderment yourself. You wanted an introduction to Christian theology, but so far you’ve been hearing about the peculiar fate of theologians. Indeed, as you probably noticed, I titled this crucial gateway chapter, “How God Makes Theologians.” Why? What is it about theology that requires such attention to the impact its subject matter has upon its students? After all, studying the properties of chemical compounds doesn’t turn you into the chemicals you are studying, nor do we imagine that such a metamorphosis would greatly assist the process of understanding. The trouble and astonishment of theology is that something like this does (or at least, potentially, can) happen in its case. A mysterious affinity kindles between theology’s object and theologians. As this happens, theologians start to catch glimpses of reality, shimmering and beckoning far beyond the proper frames and disciplines of theology itself. Like children playing at the water’s edge, theologians find themselves tugged by the tide and tumbled by waves that delight and lure them deeper. Of course, scholars in many disciplines find themselves enraptured by their objects of study. This certainly happens (or should happen!) in theology also, but I’m afraid there is something yet more unsettling going on.

Consider, by analogy, the difference between studying the chemical composition of a rock and studying the psychology of a human person. It’s true that in both cases good scholars will grow fascinated by their objects of study, and devoted to the truth about them that they are seeking to discover and understand. Really great scholars might even speak about trying to learn from the rock or the human person, about letting the object of study become, in a sense, their teacher. But this is clearly going to be quite different in the two cases. The rock will speak only by means of an enigmatic silence, benign but undeniably stony. But the human person will be a much more active participant in the work: not simply filling out forms corresponding to the scholar’s research template, but perhaps interrupting, correcting, transforming through conversation everything the scholar may have thought were the real data.

And what if the person you were studying had especially peculiar habits, like severe sleepwalking or refusing to talk with you except over gargantuan meals of fresh mussels in which you were required to partake? Pretty soon, if you really wanted to understand, you might begin to develop new habits yourself – allowing you to study your sleepwalking mussel-eater more adroitly and naturally. At first, you would tell yourself, I’m not really a nocturnal person and I don’t really like mollusks of any kind whatsoever. Yet there you are, every evening, gorging with your research subject on mussels and trailing along a few hours later through the darkness on the nightly ramble. What has happened? You have become, at least for study purposes, a learner, an apprentice to the object of your study – who has in fact become your teacher. And for a while at least, you have acquired something of a new way of being, new habits of existence that fit you for your study encounters. We could call these new habits your sleepwalking mussel-eater research virtues; they are the dispositions that allow you a certain flourishing and even excellence as a student of sleepwalking mussel-eaters.

But now suppose that your research subject were even more peculiar still. Suppose that as you drew near, this person, astonishingly, told you the truth about yourself: both the truth you had been afraid to admit and a yet deeper truth you had never known but always longed to hear. Suppose this person was so available for you, so vulnerably honest and self-disclosing, and showed such fidelity towards your own work, that you began to develop a high degree of faith in the person’s essential goodness and reliability. Over time, such a research subject might engender a fair portion of both humility and hope within you, a sense that your study would indeed take you somewhere wonderful and real. And suppose that over time you began to catch glimpses of your research subject helping others with such generosity and breathtaking selflessness that you began to be inspired yourself, feeling a kindred sort of love for people, and gradually finding yourself able to converse with your subject more freely, to understand more deeply, as you yourself began to sense something of this passion your subject had for others. In such a case, you would indeed be studying by a kind of apprenticeship, with your subject as your true teacher. Moreover, the research virtues that would have begun to grow in you – those habits equipping you to succeed in just being around and understanding this person – these virtues would have truly begun to transform you. Faith, and hope, and love taking root in you would point to a remarkable subject of study.

Thomas Aquinas (c.1225–74) calls such habits the “theological virtues,” for they turn out to equip one to participate in a theological life, a life of theo-logia, of speech and meaning and truth about God and, astonishingly, with God (see Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I–II, question 62). These dispositions are the making of theologians; for they are the impact this subject (God) has upon those who draw near. As Thomas puts it, these theological virtues are the way God’s life re-creates a human life as that human life partakes in God’s life: “as kindled wood partakes of the nature of fire.”²

So this is why it’s worth talking a bit about what makes a theologian – because it offers us a glimpse of the “research subject” who makes such an impression on the theologian (indeed, a subject who is in the researcher like fire is in wood, according to Thomas Aquinas). We notice that, unlike having a rock or a sleepwalking mussel-eater as a research subject, the theologian is trying to engage with someone who seems to be supremely free, whose mystery is only available to the researcher by an act of free self-disclosure that is most likely to be visible in the peculiar influence it has upon the researcher. This subject is not like a lab specimen or even someone you can coax into the research program with the promise of a free meal. That’s probably what makes theologians seem so hapless sometimes. The deepest truth of the one they seek to understand is only expressible, sometimes, in the transformations of their own lives.

Where do we get this idea that trying to understand God is going to have such a strange impact on people? From the same Paul the Apostle who said the truth of God seems foolish by human standards. Paul considers the variety of ways that early followers of Jesus express their common life, and he wonders about the leading impulses and gifts they each manifest. He thinks this gifted, transforming, communal life is in fact an ongoing organic expression of Jesus’ continuing life in the world, constantly being brought to life by what Paul calls the Spirit. This means that the habits and virtues and gifts of the Christian community are in some mysterious way animated by the same Spirit who animated and directed Jesus. And guess wh...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Table of Contents
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Preface
• Part I: Becoming a Theologian
• Part II: Theology’s Search for Understanding
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• End User License Agreement