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How Should We Study Theology?

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How Should We Study Theology? 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.
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