What Is Theology?: A Zondervan Digital Short

By Michael Horton

Every seminary in the world offers classes on Christian theology, but what at is its core is theology? Is it a practical or theoretical discipline? Is it centrally a matter of faith or of reason? What are its proper means and ends? Derived from Michael Horton’s recently released The Christian Faith, already one of the most significant systematic theologies of the past 50 years, this digital short explores the discipline of theology through the lens of philosophy, Scripture, ministry, and the church, laying a foundation for pursuing theology as hearing, wisdom, understanding, and more.

“Theology serves the function of articulating the identity of this God so that he may be properly invoked,” Horton writes. This short work constructs a conceptual framework for pastors, theologians, and students wanting to think more deeply about the foundational discipline of Christian thought and practice.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Zondervan
• Release date: Jun 12, 2012
• ISBN: 9780310496427

Michael Horton

Michael Horton (PhD) is Professor of Systematic Theology and Apologetics at Westminster Seminary in California. Author of many books, including The Christian Faith: A Systematic Theology for Pilgrims on the Way, he also hosts the White Horse Inn radio program. He lives with his wife, Lisa, and four children in Escondido, California.  

Book preview

CONTENTS

Cover

What Is Theology?

Introduction

I. SEEING AS CERTAINTY: THE WAY OF VISION

II. HEAR, O ISRAEL …: COVENANTAL SPEECH

III. HEARING IS BELIEVING

IV. THEORY AND PRACTICE

V. THEOLOGY AS WISDOM FOR INVOCATION

Notes

Copyright

What Is Theology?

Introduction

In the sixth book of Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle identified five intellectual habits. As the term is employed in philosophy and theology, a habit is a disposition or aptitude for a particular activity, even if one has never actually done anything with it. For example, a person might have a habit for music, while never having actually learned how to sing or to play an instrument. Each habit is suited to its own particular science, depending on the object that a given field investigates:

techne (Latin, ars/English, art): used in making things

phronesis (prudentia/prudence): used in doing things (phronesis is roughly equivalent to ethics)

episteme (scientia/science): most characteristic of discursive (acquired) knowledge

nous (intellectus/intellect): most characteristic of intuitive (innate) knowledge

sophia (sapientia/wisdom): knowledge of highest objects (via contemplation)

These are not watertight compartments, of course. For example, an engineer or sculptor may be guided by various intellectual aptitudes (habits), but techne dominates. Discerning the dominant habit or way of knowing, one could then determine whether a given science was theoretical or practical. For example, Plato and Aristotle considered philosophy to be superior to other sciences because it was theoretical rather than practical.

Most Protestant scholastics held that theology was the most mixed of all the sciences, drawing on all of these ways of knowing, but that it was best characterized as sophia—wisdom from heaven. However, these theologians understood wisdom in terms that differed significantly at certain points from the classical (Greek) heritage. In pursuing a specifically biblical definition, they observed that theology cannot be easily classified as either a theoretical or a practical discipline. Before we can address this question, we need to reevaluate our Western assumptions that create this problem in the first place.

I. SEEING AS CERTAINTY: THE WAY OF VISION

In addition to these five types of intellectual activity, Aristotle emphasized (like his mentor, Plato) that the highest—sophia, from which philosophy (love of wisdom) is named — can only be attained through constant theöria (contemplation).¹ In the previous chapter, I noted in passing the dominance of visual metaphors for thinking in our Western heritage. For Greek philosophy generally, this contemplation is a vision of the eternal forms — not just gazing upon beautiful things (mere appearances), but the Beatific Vision of the Good in its essence.² Contemplatio is the Latin term for the Greek word theöria, and both come from verbs meaning to see/behold. Comprehend is a transitive verb from Latin (com + prehendere), meaning to grasp or seize with. Much like Eastern thought, our Western grammar for knowing is bound up with seeing, an intellectual vision that is clearer and more certain than the observation of realities available to physical sight.³ In this way, knowing is an act of a subject seizing, grasping, dissecting, comprehending, mastering, and possessing its object.

Plato contrasted philosophers with art fanciers and practical people, whose vocations keep them imprisoned in the realm of appearances. It makes sense in Plato’s scheme: a botanist studies imperfect copies (trees) rather than eternal truth (Tree), but an artist is still further down the ladder, making copies of copies! And why would one want to be a historian, dedicating one’s whole life to the realm of ever-changing shadows? For centuries of pagan and Christian thought, theory meant this understanding of knowledge as a kind of direct, immediate, and glorious vision of the Archetypal Truth in its very essence. And it stood in sharp contrast with practice, which belonged to the realm of embodied existence. The problem of relating theory and practice is already provoked by this ontological dualism.

Although there were movements in Second Temple Judaism that spawned ascetic groups (such as the Essenes), they were Torah centered and devoted to hearing the Scriptures and learning and following the wisdom of the Teacher of Righteousness. Whatever we may say about this group’s beliefs, it is significant that Second Temple Judaism’s most monastic community consisted of hearers rather than seers.

Changes came, however, through the influence of the first-century philosopher Philo of Alexandria, who attempted to blend Judaism with Platonism. The same influences shaped early Christian monasticism in both the East and the West — theöria as the highest form of union with God (theösis) of which believers are capable. Obviously, this privileges the eye over the ear and intellectual union over the believer’s union with Christ in the flesh. It is a testimony to the transforming power of the gospel that ancient Christian writers developed a richly incarnational theology in spite of the Platonic/Neoplatonic dualism that is evident throughout their spiritual writings.

The twentieth-century German philosopher Hans Blumenberg traced the genealogy of the metaphor of vision in Western philosophy back to a dualistic conception of the world found, for example,