What is Theology? It is "Thinking about God". "God loves me" is a theological statement. It is an understanding and judgement of how God acts in our lives. "Theological Inquiry" is both the most wonderful Christian pursuit for me and the one that I fear pushes people away from being serious about our faith.
"The 'Ology'", so most sciences end in 'ology', its Latin or something (Greek). According to the crowd-sourced, second string online knowledge farm, Wikipedia 'ology' is 'a branch of knowledge'. Thus, an 'ologist' is 'one who studies the topic'. One who studies biology is then a biologist. So, to track that, one who studies theology would be a...'theologist'? I kind of like that, something to distinguish from 'theologian' or 'theologue' as I have self-purposed in the past.
So "Ology" is a Branch of Knowledge while "The-" is actually 'Theos', the Greek word for god, not necessarily the God of Christianity, but the 'gods' of the Greeks like Zeus and Apollo. Maybe a better way to clarify is to look at Arabic. "Allah" is the designate to the God of Islam, but Christians who worship in Arabic use 'allah' to define God the Father, as we Christians understand it. Does that then mean that Allah and God the Father are the same, but understood differently? That's a deep theological question, a deep question to bring to our thinking about God.
But to make a long story short (probably too late for that), "Theos-Ology". Or "The God Branch of Knowledge". Being Greek transliterated into English, we smushed the words together to get 'theology'. When 'ologies', branches of knowledge, were being divided into areas of studies, 'theology' emerged as the Queen of the Sciences.
According to www.compellingtruth.org, "Theology was named queen of the sciences in the High Middle Ages when schools divided classical liberal arts learning into grammar, logic, rhetoric, artithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy." I feel I must add a disclaimer. I am not at all familiar with the focus or point of view of compellingtruth.org, but their summary is one of those moments where I must say "I could not have said that better myself", so I did not try.
So, the Queen of the Sciences, the presumption of the High Middle Ages that every bit of knowledge derives from God. I still believe that but the world in general has gotten more skeptical.
So what does this mean? It means whenever a person of authority, from church leader to elected official, invokes God or their faith to define an issue, they have 'done theology', they have thought about God. But the act of thinking about God, no matter how loudly or eloquently a person might share their point of view, does NOT mean they are correct. So, there is no elected individual, community leader, pope, bishop, high scholarly muckity muck in the most prestigious theological institution, or simple pastor (like me) who cannot be mistaken when they share their thinking about God.
As Christians, calling Theology the Queen of the Sciences translates to calling our thoughts about God as the governing authority for how we live our lives. Because there is no branch of knowledge independent of the creative power of God. Thinking about God is highly personal; including things like 'where am I?', 'What am I blessed to have?', 'Who stands against me?', 'What choice shall I make?', and 'How then shall I live?'
As Christians, whose eyes are open to the sin of the world around us, we need to know better than anyone that, as with any other knowledge, theology can be used to manipulate, to deceive, to impose a point of view, to force matters. Theology can be used to wrap things up in the 'authority of God' and confuse sinful, human agendas with the loving, grace-filled, forgiving plan of God.
So, "Theos-Ology", the God branch of knowledge. That is a capital "G" God because I am coming at this as a Christian. This does not discount that there are branches of knowledge about Gods or gods who are not the one I worship. But we generally bundle those under 'comparative religions', something for a different post.
Peace,
Pastor Peter
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