The Study of Theology

Recently, The Christian Century has been running a series of articles from theologians about how their minds have changed over the years. In the February 23rd issue, Kathryn Tanner, who teaches theology at the University of Chicago Divinity School (and was one of my teachers), wrote a lengthy essay about the scope of her career so far. In the middle of the (admittedly technical) article, she offers an interesting thought about what makes theology unique:

Relevant to this interest in history is the fact that part of what originally drew me to theology was its oddity within the secular university and even on the contemporary scene... Theology had the ability to propose the unexpected, to shock and startle. It offered an escape form the taken-for-granted certainties of life by referring them to something that remained ever beyond them, resisting capture and encapsulation. The theologian respects the capacity of theology, it seems to me, not by dressing up contemporary commonplaces in religious terms, but in seeking what lies beyond a contemporary outlook and beyond the immediate context of one's work.

Tanner continues by suggesting how the entire historical breadth of Christian theology encourages such epiphanies and "outside the box" thinking:

A theology that starts from, and uses as its toolbox for creative ends, materials gathered from the widest possible purview is, in my opinion, a theology with that imaginative expansiveness. Such a theology looks to the Christian past not for models for simple imitation but for a way to complicate one's sense of the possibilities for present Christian expression and action. It looks to the past not to restrict and cramp what might be said in the present but to break out of the narrowness of a contemporary sense of the realistic. It complements an understanding of the complex variety of premodern theologies in the West with an understanding of the complex forms of Christianity's global reach now and in the past. It moves beyond narrow denominational confines to the broadest possible ecumenical vision and sees beyond elite forms of theological expression, in written texts primarily, to the popular theologies of everyday life.

This is an intriguing, and I think helpful, understanding of the possibility of theology, especially academic theology, during our lifetime. Many disciplines of knowledge, from the sciences to the social sciences and throughout the humanities, have pretty well-defined fields of inquiry and methods of inquiry. The definitions that help to isolate things for study in a precise way also unavoidably limit what conclusions might be reached from that study. To give a crude example: a scientific experiment either "works" (proves the hypothesis) or "doesn't work" (disproves the hypothesis). A scientific experiment doesn't generate a poem or produce a new political philosophy; scientific experiments are not designed or equipped to lead to such things. Likewise, a poet does not write a geometric proof: poetic language is different from mathematical language.

Tanner argues that theology is different. It allows someone to ask a question, and in the course of studying that question come up with drastically unexpected results: sometimes answers, sometimes different questions, sometimes an observation that renders the initial question irrelevant. It's the equivalent of putting 1000 monkeys in a room with 1000 typewriters, but with a catch -- they produce not the works of Shakespeare but some novel literate description. A biologist would wrestle with how a monkey's brain functioned to produce the writing; a theologian would wonder about that and apply the writing itself.

In her brilliance, though, Tanner isn't requiring monkeys to produce these new, unexpected insights into God. Instead, she realizes that many of these insights have already been produced and were preserved in the Christian tradition -- they've just been overlooked or applied in other ways. So the theologian can study the works of the ages and constantly gain new insights into God, making connections between writers of different generations and different cultures, of different educational levels, different genders, different outlooks.

Happily, Tanner doesn't simply argue that this ability to shock and startle comes from the Bible alone, though it is present there too. Instead, she sees this ability -- which many Christians attribute to the Bible -- to the great Christian writings of history that have interpreted the Bible through the centuries.

Maybe the leaders of other disciplines would argue with Tanner. Maybe the chemist or theoretical mathematician would say she overlooks the same possibilities in their areas of study. Maybe the anthropologist would suggest that she's never done field work with a culture almost entirely different from her own, or the astrophysicist would counter that she's never tried to decipher the galactic implications of a spectrograph. Surely there are stunning surprises in these fields too.

And yet, I think Tanner is right about theology's unique ability to flesh out such shocking revelations (if I might used a rather loaded theological term). In a way unlike anything except perhaps philosophy, theology exerts a continuous questioning about the validity of its own methods; and like philosophy, it benefits from the almost unimaginable amount of saved artifacts to study.