How Should We Study Theology?

Ware, Kallistos

At this time I do want to introduce our speaker. Really he needs no introduction I think. Those who have been introduced to him through his works. Many of you perhaps have probably attended this chapel this morning and heard a wonderful, wonderful sermon on prayer. Metropolitan Kallistos of Diokleia is presently the, well he is a professor of Oxford and he is presently the Metropolitan of Diokleia, he is our Palmer lecturer for this year and I can just say that we are incredibly blessed to have him amongst us. He will be sharing with us on the topic: how should we study theology? Just another not that he will be here this evening at seven thirty in Upper Gwinn. Following his talk with us, he will open it up to Q&A and so we are so delighted and grateful to have him with us and tremendously blessed. So let us give a warm welcome to Bishop Kallistos.

Good afternoon. My theme today is: how should study and teach theology. This might lead us to ask what is theology. Now if we look at the Bible, we encounter once a striking and remarkable fact. Nowhere in the old of new testaments do we find the words theology, theologian or theologize. These are quite simple not scriptural terms. But the same token we may also note that none of the twelve chosen by Christ was educated at a theological college. It is only gradually that the term theology enters Christian discourse. The word was viewed with suspicion by the apologists of the second century because for them it meant primarily the speculations of religious thinkers who were pagans. The people who rarely introduced the word theology into Christian discourse are in Alexandria. Clement of Alexandria in the late second century and then above all Origen. Origen is one of my saying to my friends over there it is lunch. Origen is one of my favorite theologians. I agree with St. Vincent of Leeriness who said, “Who would not rather be wrong with Origen than right with anyone else”. And significantly it is at Alexandria that there first emerges a well-established theological college, the celebrated Catechetical School where Clement and Origen both taught. Well, when theology as a word enters Christian discourse, what does it mean? In the Greek fathers, it has a rather different sense from the one we give to it today. Evagius of Ponticus who was a disciple of Basil and Gregory of Nazianzus and who then became a desert father observes in a famous epigram. If you are a theologian you will pray truly. And if you pray truly, you are a theologian. So that was before the Greek fathers, there was an essential between theology and prayer. They saw theology not just as an academic study, not just as a question of intellectual rigor, though they certainly believe in that, but they saw theology as involving a personal commitment, a commitment through prayer. In the 14th century, St. Gregory Palamas sums up the view of the

Seattle Pacific University Transcriptions Greek fathers on theology by saying that there are three kinds of theologians. First of all he says the real theologians are the saints, those who possess personal experience of God. Then he says there is a second class of theologians who are on a lower level but none the less, they are people who trust the saints and try to reproduce what the saints are saying. Such people even if they themselves lack personal experience of God can nonetheless be good theologians. Then, he says, there is a third class of theologians, people who are not saints who lack personal experience and do not trust the saints and they are bad theologians. Well that reassures me. I don’t claim to be a saint but I hope that in the 35 years that I taught theology at the Oxford, I tried to be faithful to the message of the Holy men and women who have borne testimony to their living experience of Christ. But all of this shows that theology as the Greek fathers understood it is not just a subject to study at university. It is not an on exactly the same level as geology or some other scientific disciple because it does involve a certain personal commitment. Here is the way a contemporary Greek theologian speaks about the meaning of theology for the Greek fathers: “In the Orthodox church in tradition, theology has a very different meaning from the one we give it today. It is a gift from God, a fruit of the interior purity of the Christian spiritual life. Theology is identified with the vision of God, with the immediate vision of the personal God, with the personal experience of the transfiguration of creation by uncreated grace. This way”, he, continues, “theology is not a theory of the world, a meta physical system, but an expression and formulation of the church’s experience, not an intellectual experience but an experiential participation, a communion. Now e might notice key words there: gift, grace, personal experience, participation, communion, interior purity, transfiguration, vision of God. Well, in modern university, especially a secular university and Oxford is now in fact a secular university can you really teach theology at all if that is what it means? I think you can. Keeping in mind the idea of Gregory Palamas’ second level of theologian. We can even in a secular university try to be faithful witnesses to what the saints have discovered and what the church has lived. Now, following to this approach to theology, this means that theology is closely linked to mystery. The Greek files often talk about the mystery of theology, but let’s recall the proper meaning of the word mystery, whether it comes from the Bible, for example in the epistle to the Ephesians or whether it is used by Christian writers. A mystery theologically understood is not just an unsolved problem, a baffling conundrum. A mystery is something that is revealed to our understanding. But it is never exhaustively revealed because it reaches out into the infinity of God. Now in the theology of the Greek fathers and in modern Orthodox theology, there are two approaches which are often described as the cataphatic approach and the apophatic approach. cataphatic and apophatic have two rather grand ways of saying affirmative and negative. cataphatic approach in theology is trying to say in positive terms what God it. But this needs to be balanced by the apophatic approach which says what God is no, which emphasizes the mystery of God, the unknowability of God, His transcendence and anyone who wants to enter into the Eastern orthodox approach

Seattle Pacific University Transcriptions to theology needs to keep those two words in mind. I often illustrate them by appealing to a little book I have in Oxford, though I didn’t bring it with me here. It is a book called Signs of the Times. It is the result of a competition instituted by the Times Newspapers in London where people were invited to photography parsling sign posts form different places of the world. For example from Wales there was a notice in a car parking area that said “Parking is limited to sixty minutes in each hour.” Another one came from a nature park somewhere in Africa saying “Elephants have right of way”. Also one from a market in England where there was a sign post saying “Sheep go straight on, pigs turn right” and then there was an arrow pointing left and the times Commented that it was rather ungracious when pigs have learned to read deliberately to confuse their sense of direction. Anyway, two of the sign posts they photographed illustrated the difference between cataphatic and apophatic theology. First of all there was a notice at a railway crossing which said “If the bell is ringing,” and there was a bell attached to the post “spot, look and listen in case a train is coming. If the bell is not ringing, still stop look and listen in case the bell is not working.” That you see, allowed for all possibilities. So that could be a motto for cataphatic theology. But there was another sign post from Australian which simply pointing, it said, “This road does not read to either Canes or Townsville”. But it didn’t say where it leads to. However if you happen to know the geography of the place you might from this negative statement derive a positive message. And that is true of apophatic theology. By making negative statements about God, you can in fact convey a possibility message about the being of God. Yet, one so powerful that it can’t be put in the direct form of positive statements but has to be expressed through negations. This is very much the way you find the Greek fathers and Orthodox Church today speculating in theology. Negative theology, the apophatic approach is prominent in people like Basil the Great, Gregory of Nazianzus, much loved by John Wesley and many later authors like the Oniciaous the Ariocogite or Maximus the Confessor. There is a phrase used by the poet T.S. Elliot which we can apply to theology: “it is a raid on the inarticulate”. Father John Mindophin, another Russian who worked here in American says that theology is simultaneous a contemplation of God and the expression of the inexpressible.” “Every theological statement” says St. Basil “falls short of the understanding of the speaker. Our understanding is weak and our tongue is even more defective. According to the early fathers, once theology forgets, the inevitable limits of the human understanding, replacing the ineffable word of God with human logic, then it ceases to be Theo logia and it sinks to the level of techno logia. That is why our theology has to be expressed to use Paul’s words in 1 Corinthians 13:12 “In a riddling and enigmatic way we are often compelled in theology to use paradox because we are stretching human language beyond its proper limits in order to embrace however inadequately the fullness of divine truth. We find ourselves obliged to make statements that are seemingly contrary to each other. Not without reason, Cardinal Newman describes the theological enterprise as “saying and unsaying to a possible effect”. All of this means that we who study or teach theology should be conscious of the danger of trying to say too much. On

Seattle Pacific University Transcriptions Oxford Station when I am waiting for the railway train, and I walk to the far end of the platform, I eventually come to a notice which says “passengers must not proceed beyond this point, fine 200 £. Well perhaps we should put up a similar notice: theologians must not proceed beyond this point, fine, what should we say, a very long time in purgatory.” If we started for example patristic theology, we will find that though the trinity and the doctrine of Christ at great lengths, yet in the end, the element of mystery still remains. How can God be simultaneously both one in three? How can Christ be fully and completely God, fully and completely man. In the end he cannot explain through, often we chose to set aside certain manners of speaking that are inadequate. Our theological statements set a fence around the mystery that they don’t exhaustively describe. There are three qualities that I would to emphasize connected with our study or teaching theology. Three words: wonder, freedom and community.

First of all, wonder. Plato says,”the beginning of philosophy is to feel a sense of wonder” I think that applies also to theology. To a lot of theology we could apply the criticism: Your God is too small. Without a sense of amazement, a willingness to be surprised, without astonishment there can’t be real teaching or study of theology. This applies to all study that the purpose of all study is not to communicate information to we who are teachers are not here to stuff facts into the heads of our pupils. The purpose of teaching, of education theologically or otherwise is to open our eyes to a sense of want. That is what the teacher is trying to do with his pupils. Not to tell them what they should think but to say “open your eyes, look for yourself. See how amazing this all is.” And as us teachers we don’t success in some sense of wonder, then we are failing in our tasks. I could quote T.S. Elliot again, “old men ought to be explorers,” he says. Well, that applies to young men and young women as well. And it applies particularly to theologians. We should be explorers. We need to find the kind of wonder that is evoked in for example the book of Job when at the end God speaks out of the whirlwind. He doesn’t exactly answer Job’s questions but what he does is speaks of the beauty and mystery of the created world. And we need to have, in our study of theology, some sense of beauty and mystery. Because that applies also to the study of science. Scientific discoveries have not abolished the wonder and mystery of the universe. They have simply extended the horizon of that mystery, making us ever more keenly aware of its vast dimensions. So there can be no authentic theology, no authentic personhood without a sense of wonder. But then let’s just take another quality linked with wonder that is freedom. There can be no real study, no real education, theology or anything else without a feeling of freedom. The truth will make you free, says Christ in John chapter 8. A university, a theological school is a controlled environment, for, yes the cultivation of wonder and also the cultivation of freedom. If I was asked by my students of Oxford, “What are you trying to do for us,” then I felt my best answer was to say no more that this: “We want you to learn to be free.” So to educate is to invite not to command. Education is linked to the Latin word edu cere meaning to lean forth, to draw out, to conjure up, and to evoke. That is what a teacher should be trying to do. And of course that applies right through

Seattle Pacific University Transcriptions the Christian life. In a second century text, a letter to Diognetus, we find these words: “God persuades. He does not compel for violence is contrary to the divine nature.” I with Christians through the centuries could have listened more carefully to that golden saying. God persuades. He does not compel. That is true of all education and study and true particularly of theology. So while there needs to be a sense of commitment in our study of theology, there needs also to be a sense of freedom. The significance of a college, a structured environment for learning freedom is well expressed in a Jewish saying recorded by Martin Buber in his book The Tales of the Hasidim Rabbi Shalamo was asked “what is the worst thing that the evil urge can achieve?” He answered, “to make us forget that we are each the child of a king. Child of a king and therefore, free.” May we never forget our royal birthright and may we carry that into all our theological work. So then, theological school is a place for the evocation of wonder, for the learning for freedom, but there is a third element that we need to add. This wonder is evoked. This freedom is learned not in isolation but through interaction with others. Not in solitude but in mutual solidarity. A theological school is a commune. It is a place for a shared exploration. That will be my third idea in the study of theology. Alongside wonder and freedom, community kenonea. There I think of one of my favorite all purpose anecdotes. This comes from Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s masterwork, the Brothers Karamazov. It is a story about an old woman and an Anya. Some of you know it but II am going to tell it all the same. Once upon a time there was an n old woman. After death she woke up to find herself, much to her surprise, the Lake of Fire. Looking out on the bank she saw her guardian angel walking along. So she called out, “I am a very respectful old lady. I shouldn’t be here in this lake of fire.” “Oh, said the angel, I think there has been some mistake.” “Yes,” she said. “Did you ever do something to help someone else?” asked the angel. She though for some time and then she replied, “yes, once I was gardening and a beggar came by and I gave her an onion.” “Excellent,” said the angel, reaching into his robes. “I happen to have that very onion with me now. Let us see what we can do with.” So she took the other end of the onion and the angel began to pull her out. Perhaps it wasn’t an onion, perhaps it was a shallot. But never mind. However she wasn’t the only person in the lake of fire. When the others saw what was happening they crowded around hoping to be pulled out as well. This didn’t please the old woman. She began to kick and shout. She began to say “let go! Let go! It is not you being pulled out, it’s me. It is not your onion. It is mine.” When she said it is mine, the onion snapped in two and she fell back into the Lake of Fire and there so I am told, she still is. That is Dostoyevsky’s story. No my development. If only the old woman had said, “it’s our onion” might it not have proved strong enough to pull them all out of the fire. But in saying that it is mine, not it’s ours; she was denying her essential personhood in refusing to share, she became less than human. It is no coincidence that in the Lord’s Prayer we say “we” once, “our” three times, “us” five times. But nowhere in the Lord’s Prayer do we say “I”, my,” “mine,” or “me.” It is equally in no coincidence that the word poroso for person is prosopon which means literally “face” or “countenance”. I am not genuinely a person unless I face others,

Seattle Pacific University Transcriptions unless I relate to them, unless I look into their eyes and let them look into mine. As John McMurray, Scottish philosopher said in his unduly neglected Gifford lectures written some sixty or more years ago, persons in relation, he says there is no true person unless there are at least two persons in dialogue. He says that all genuine personhood is interpersonal. He uses the memorable phrase “I need you” in order to be myself. Now that was exactly what the woman in Dostoyevsky’s story was denied. But that gives us an indication how we should study and live our theology in a Christian college. We are here to share our onion with one another. And there is a deep reason why this is so. We are created in the image of God. That is the most important fact about our human person and in the image of God means primarily perhaps in the image of Christ. But it also means in the image of God the Holy Trinity as the Wesley’s say in one of their hymns “you whom he ordained to be transcripts of the Trinity.”That is what we are: transcripts of the Trinity. And what does the doctrine of the Trinity mean? God is not just unity as unity in diversity. God is not just one Person loving himself. He is three persons, the Father, the Son, the Holy Spirit loving one another. God is not just personal, he is interpersonal. So if we are in God’s image, we are called to share, to relate, to live our lives in and for others and among other things, we should be doing that in our study of theology here in a Christian college or wherever we may be. So let’s keep in mind prayer and theology, mystery and theology and then the three qualities: wonder, freedom and community. Thank you.

I want to open up the question and answer at this time.

With reference to what I was saying this morning, of course, following out my interpretation of Dostoyevsky’s story, it is perhaps a good thing by saying Jesus’ prayer to say not just have mercy on me, though that is the usual form of Orthodox saving prayer but sometimes we say to the form: have mercy on us and that fits with the Lord’s prayer.

Do you think a secular person who doesn’t believe God can actually study theology?

Yes. So the question is can somebody who doesn’t believe in God study theology? It can be equally asked can somebody who doesn’t believe in God teach theology? I hope that in our theological schools, it depends of course the nature of the school, but I hope that if it is a general theological school not specifically a school training me for the ministry, that there would be no religious tests before admitting people to the university and we will not ask what their private and personal beliefs were. Certainly a place like Oxford where appointing our staff to the theology faculty we would be in grave difficulty if we started asking them about their personal faith. That would be seen as an incorrect intrusion. Some of our teaching staff in Oxford still have to be ordained members of the Angelical Episcopalian church. But in generally certainly at Oxford, I would have felt theology should be open to open to anyone who wants it and anyone who wished to study theology as a liberal arts discipline was welcomed to do so. Among my own pupils, certainly at an undergraduate level I had some who didn’t have any

Seattle Pacific University Transcriptions particular religious faith. As long as they thought the questions being asked by the theology are interesting questions that would be enough. As long as they had a sense of wonder and exploration, that would be enough. I think if they believed that the answers given by theology by Christian tradition could not possibly be true, they could be unlikely to get very much out of the study of theology. As long as they said we have an open mind, we don’t know about the answers but we would like to think more about the questions, then I would gladly welcome them. But I would still feel that to exist in its fullness, theology would imply commitment and belief. Yet, we have a great deal that we can learn from writers of religious topics who many not have any explicit belief. So we should be open. I will bring in my second quality there: freedom.

Other questions?

What would you say are the main distinctive between eastern theology and western theology in general?

It is always dangerous to generalize but basically the theology of the Eastern Orthodox Church still continues to be patristic. The age of the fathers’ orthodoxy goes, did not end with the fifth century or the eighth century or even the Fall of Byzantium but it goes on right up to the present time. For example, one of the greatest Orthodox theologians in the 20th century, Father George Florovsky who taught at Harvard, used to somehow use his theological program in the words “neo patristic synthesis.” So we have not had in Orthodox theology the development that the west saw in the period from the 12th century onwards, the rise of scholasticism. Theology in Byzantium was not taught in universities where as in the west it became a university topic. So in general Orthodox theology is less systematic than western and more mystical in its approach. Most of the works of the fathers are actually commentary on Holy Scripture. Many of the writings were originally delivered as commentaries at the Divine Liturgy sermons in church. Now it is true that in more recent centuries Orthodox have began writing systematic dogmatic theologies. But I think we tend to retain the more mystical element in theology and to stress exactly what I was mentioning the link between theology and prayer. Now clearly the west, the Latin west and the Reformation west has also a rich mystical tradition. But in the later middle Ages there tended to be a separation between the kind of theology it was taught in the schools that was highly systematic. The mystical theologians who are usually not academics, that happened in the later west and Middle Ages, and perhaps it is one of the factors that contributed to the reformation. In the East we have always tried to avoid this kind of division.

I would ask this question that my students ask me every quarter when they are reading the Orthodox way. Could you give us a contemporary example by what you mean by the figure of the fool and how that person functions in the Orthodox tradition?

Seattle Pacific University Transcriptions Yes, I do speak briefly in my book The Orthodox Way about the fool in Christ. This is a figure who existed in the west as well at least up to the end of the middle Ages. It is rather interesting how you treat fools in general and fools in Christ in particular. In the earlier ages by and large and this people were violent and did damage to themselves and to others, they were not shut up. Society managed to live with a certain number of people who were highly eccentric and even unbalanced and yet they were not excluded from the community. The fool was a characteristic figure at all royal courts and he had an accepted role in society. Can we continue to have fools in Christ up to the present day? Of course the fool in Christ in the Orthodox tradition is often someone who has deliberately adopted the part of foolishness. Though the borderline between foolishness and unintended madness is not a clear one at all. You can’t always draw it in practice. A lot of mad people are aware that they are mad and even rather pleased. Yes, the fool traditionally in orthodox spirituality is a prophetic figure who can often say things that no one else can say who has certain freedom because he desires no position in society so he has nothing to lose. So I think he does express in one particular form, the freedom of the prophet and if we don’t have fools we do need still to have prophets in our church life. But there is a Greek saying that runs: “If you want to learn the truth, ask a child or a fool”. So the fool can often tell the truth that other people will not tell or cannot tell. So I think all of this continues to be something that we need in our present day society. And if you go around generally to all Orthodox monasteries you will still find that fools in Christ are made welcome and they exist and flourish and are loved and helped and somehow a Christian community that has no place for a fool is losing something. I believe this does have a contemporary value and there are people in our church today was certainly following this form of sanctity, a form of ultimate self stripping where you reject all conventions in order to bear witness to the freedom of the Holy Spirit.

One last question?

Yes,

My question is you talked about theology as a matter of the heart as well as keeping a sense of wonder and for the first time recently I heard seminary be regarded as cemetery. It is the first time I have heard that and that is really kind of a sad thing that I will probably will be seeing in my future and I am wondering about maybe how you have sought yourself at least encourage your students to keep that sense of wonder and theology of the heart as they also meet the demands of studies and the industrial nature of having to produce and having to continue to meet bars of study and without dying to those studies. How do you cultivate the heart in the midst of those?

Yes. We have to have a balance of course if you just say freedom in the sense of wonder; you are going to pass your degree, your examinations very successfully just on that alone. There has

Seattle Pacific University Transcriptions to be the hard work of study and sometimes that can be a grind. None of us enjoy all the time what we have to do and in order to gain a sense of wonder perhaps we have to begin by gaining the basic facts of disciplines. You can’t make bricks without straw. But I would hope that what could keep a feeling of exploration. When I was teaching History of Early Christian Doctrine, I tried to adopt a kind of dialectical approach encouraging my students to get inside the mind of early and Christian writers trying to understand why they wanted to speak in the way that they did not just what they said but why did they say it? What was their inner motivation and in the disputes between the so called heretics and so called orthodox, again, one would want to try to discover why the heretics, those the church rejected in teaching not just to give people facts but to get them to ask what were the questions people were the questions people were asking and then what we do want to evaluate things, why would some answers be better than others though often a subject like the history of Christian doctrine there are no final right answers. There is only an open ended discussion but I would like people to try to see why some answers might have an advantage that others don’t have. In assigning people essay topics, I always tried not always successful to give them questions that they couldn’t answer by simply copying out passages from the book. But they had to think for themselves and express some view that they wouldn’t find necessarily ready made in the books. So that would be ways in which I would go on to try to keep around the spirit of exploration but it is easier just to teach people facts. It is I think much harder to think yourself and your pupils to ask questions. But that is the real way we should be studying.

Let us thank Bishop Kallistos.

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