until philosophy once again gained its independence from theology in the modern world.
Theology, with the aid of philosophy, was one part of the church’s witness to its faith in Jesus Christ. Theology is essentially responsive, in the sense that it responds to the grace of God as well as the quotidian details of life in the Christian community. From the beginning, the practice of theology was related to questions of church authority, the proper reading of scripture, and the ongoing interpretation of the faith. As ecclesial conversation, theology is governed by a complex set of rules arising from rituals, creeds, and Scripture. Determining what those rules are, what weight they carry, and how they can best be understood today is one of the chief tasks of theological reflection. Theology is thus a self-reflective discipline in the sense that its self-interrogation is essential to its purpose and mission.
Theologians do not examine the past merely for its own sake. They engage the past in order to speak to the present. Theology thus consists of two kinds of conversation occurring simultaneously, one with the past and one with the present. One way to sort out the different kinds of theology is to ask what relative weight they give to these two foci. Some theologians are primarily interested in contemporary issues and problems, and they draw on traditional resources carefully and critically. They are concerned to establish the intelligibility and credibility of Christian faith in the modern, secular world. This effort is called constructive theology. Theology that is more interested in recovering the religious life of the past is called historical theology. Historical theology is motivated by a need to pay the debt all Christians have to the saints who have preceded us.
For practical purposes, the study of theology in seminaries, colleges, and graduate schools often encourages students to focus on either the constructive or the historical aspects of theology, but it is doubtful whether the two can ever be fully disentangled. A constructive theology that is not adequate to the patterns of faith established throughout church history runs the risk of stretching Christian faith to the breaking point. Likewise, theologies that retrieve voices from the past must be aware of why we need to listen to those voices today.
Beyond this basic twofold division, the study of theology is often organized according to three distinct and yet interrelated forms. These forms—fundamental, systematic, and practical—can be analyzed according to their methodology and their social location. Fundamental or philosophical theology concerns the intellectual credibility of Christian belief. This theology engages various philosophical methods in order to develop criteria to test the viability of the truth claims presupposed by faith. Fundamental theology is most likely to be found in secular universities and colleges, where religion is put on trial and therefore must prove its relevance to a skeptical public.
Systematic or dogmatic theology is concerned less with proving the truth of faith than with showing its internal coherence. This theology tries to show how the various topics of theological discourse fit together like pieces in a puzzle. Such topics include ecclesiology (the study of the church), eschatology (the study of the end time), Christology (the study of the person and work of Jesus Christ), a theology of culture, and the like. Given so many topics, systematic theology needs an overarching principle or set of criteria to illuminate their various connections, but it usually does not make these connections by employing a philosophical method. Instead, dogmaticians take the risk of reducing the richness of religious faith by focusing on a basic theme or ruling metaphor. Such theologies are often less metaphysical than hermeneutical; that is, they do not appeal to the universal conditions of knowing but instead develop a theory of interpretation. Interpretation is more of an art than a science, and it involves a close and intimate participation in the subject matter. Systematic theology is thus done in and for the church and is most likely to be found in church-related colleges and seminaries.
Practical theology involves reflection on how religion actually functions in specific contexts. Some of this theology is pastoral in the sense that it focuses on the training of ministers and their various tasks and duties. But practical theology also has a wider goal and ambition. Practical theologians are interested in the church’s role in the wider culture. They examine a wide range of essentially moral questions, from the relationship between religion and power to religious interpretations of various public policy issues concerning everything from marriage to the military. Practical theology often draws from the social sciences for its methodologies, especially psychology and sociology. Practical theologians address the church when they examine the nature, growth, and future of religious institutions. They also address the wider public when they illuminate religion’s contributions to various public debates.
Some theologians resist this threefold division. Where, for example, is ethics? If ethics is defined broadly as the witness of the church to an increasingly non-Christian public, then every systematic theology today must be ethical at its core. Indeed, ethical reflection should flow from doctrinal formulations, rather than being treated as an independent topic of reflection. Ethics has become a separate academic discipline only because colleges and universities have moved away from church history and theology courses to the teaching of practical issues with only a vague reference to religious faith.
Other theologians privilege one of the forms as prior to and necessary for the others. Philosophical theology, for example, is often taken as foundational for all other theological work. The argument is that the theologian must defend the epistemological status of religious beliefs before trying to see how they connect with each other and how to apply them to practical problems.
In fact, theology throughout the mid– to late–twentieth century was dominated by methodological problems, and the leading theologians were those who put forth coherent reflections on how theology should proceed. In the wake of the religious confusion of the 1960s, theologians rushed to reconstruct the Christian tradition from the ground up. Most of these theological positions were dependent on a particular philosophical school, which was used to give religious faith a rational foundation. With the emergence in the 1980s of a postmodern ethos and the philosophical movement known as deconstructionism, many philosophers and theologians alike began attacking the notion that rationality can be grounded in clear and distinct ideas and methods. It has become more common to suggest that all rationality is contextual, so that philosophy is no longer portrayed as providing the principles by which each discipline must be practiced.
After these attacks on foundationalism, theology has become more grounded in history than ever before. This change can be formulated by saying that there has been a shift from fundamental to historical-systematic theology. By the 1980s, the assumptions of secularism were not so quickly accepted, and traditional religious belief was gaining more acceptance in educational institutions. Theologians began recovering the rich heritage of the past that constructive theologians frequently ignored or dismissed. Theologians are immersing themselves once again in those ancient thinkers who were speaking to and for the church, not some abstract public of the educated elite. The central debates that have always defined the church now seem much more complex and intriguing than all of the cunning theories theologians used to combat or accommodate secularism in the last decades of the twentieth century.
There are several other ways in which theology can be divided and assessed. Most commonly, theology is often divided into various schools. Thus, there are feminist, liberation, African American, postliberal, postmodern, evangelical, and environmental theologies, to name a few. Each of these schools has its own methods and preoccupations. Liberation theology is perhaps the most prominent of these schools and often serves as a general category under which many other schools can be located, like feminist, African American, and environmental theology. Liberationists emphasize the socio-political dimension to all theological discourse. They analyze the ways in which theology is shaped by oppressive political forces and propose ways in which theology can contribute to progressive social change. Liberation theology began in Latin America as an attempt to make the Christian message more relevant to social and economic inequities. In North America, liberation theology more frequently deals with issues of gender and racial identity, or the problem of the environment. Some commentators have recently suggested that liberation theology has reached
