The "Academic Study" of Christian Theology

In my Christian Doctrine class this semester (in which we are undertaking the "academic study of religion"), we are reading Introduction to Christian Theology by Bradley C. Hanson. Professor Hanson is a liberal Lutheran with, as he puts it, "rather considerable agreement with liberation and feminist theologies." After the first chapter of reading, which gave a definition of faith and theology, we were asked to jot down a few thoughts that we had on the text. This was what I wrote, and please consider that I am trying to be diplomatic and polite in my response to something that I see as a defacing of true God-centered theology:

In reading the first chapter of Bradley C. Hansen’s Introduction to Christian Theology, I found that I was not quite satisfied with his definition of theology. Hansen defines theology as 1) “reflection on religious faith,” 2) “reflection on a religious faith,” that is, a particular faith, not simply reflection on faith in general, and 3) “personally involved reflection.” While these definitions certainly do describe at least some aspect of the study of theology, it seems that there is a large aspect of the discipline that they fail to capture.

John Calvin, in his Institutes of the Christian Religion, said that the sum of theology is the knowledge of God and the knowledge of ourselves. English Puritan, William Ames, calls theology the “doctrine of living to God.” These definitions contain an element that is lacking in Hanson’s definition; that is, the focus on knowledge of God. The very word “theology” is based on the Greek word for God, “Theos.” Hanson’s definition is comprised solely of the human end of faith. It is the study of the faith that people hold and the reflection upon those beliefs. While Calvin and Ames both take in to consideration the human, personal end of theology, they also recognize that the ultimate object of theology is not man, but God. While Hansen’s definition is good as far as it goes, it is deficient in what seems to be the most important part of the discipline: God. Theology is not simply the study of an individual’s faith, but rather the study of an individual’s faith in light of the revelation of God.

My proffesor took the time at the beginning of the class period yesterday to address the criticism that I had brought to the reading, citing it as a standard controversy over how theology should be defined. While he was certainly very polite in his response and acknowledged it as a good question to ask, his explanation was clearly a correction of the objection that I brought. As he put it, in the academic study of religion (the legitimacy of which is another topic that would be terribly interesting to bring up with him) we are starting from an anthropological standpoint, studying what is common amongst religions in different cultures. It is the study of what Paul Tillich would call the "ultimate concern" of each religion. In Christianity, the "ultimate concern" - the object that all other things are centered around and focused on - is the Theos or God. Therefore, when a Christian does theology, the focus will be God. However, for another faith it might be something else. Christians simply have the advantage of having the practice of theology named after their particular "ultimate reality." Given this example of a relativistic, potentially God-less definition of Theology, I hope it is evident why I am so cynical of a supposedly objective, "academic" study of religion that is removed from any sort of alligience to the truth of a particular religion.