How to Improve your Theological Method: and Other Notions that Explain Why I am a Terrible Guest at Parties

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Christian theology is complex, and systematic theology is perhaps the most complex and all-encompassing discipline in all of human thought. Because Christian systematic theology attempts to incorporate all knowledge from all sources into a coherent system, it necessarily encompasses all other disciplines. Theoretically, if not practically (and I think that it IS true practically, despite superficial evidence to the contrary), Theology is the Queen of the Sciences. Not only do all disciplines derive their first principles from theological beliefs and conclusions and presuppositions and axiomata, but all their methods – are derived from these theological principles.

But how do we do theology well? It isn’t enough to simply say that something is “theological”. What we need today is good theological method. And one part in helping us to develop a good theological method is by understanding what the tendencies of human thought are.

I believe that all theological methods necessarily tend to go one of two ways, but those whose methods are truly good and excellent balance these two tendencies.

Good theologians are able to distinguish between the similar and find similarities in the distinct. And this is something that Christian theologians should find to be intuitive or self-evident – or at least predictable. It’s predictable because if knowledge and truth are reflections of God and God is Triune, then we should presume that truth, and the way to ascertain it, mirror the Triunity of God. Therefore, since God is unity in diversity, we ought to expect truth to be and to be found through understanding unity in diversity. The Personae of the Trinity are similar to one another in that they are co-equal, co-eternal, and they share the same ousia (or substantia if you prefer Latin). They, however much they are homoousian, are distinct and different Personae. To understand God, and thereby to understand ourselves and our world – and that is the correct order – then, is to understand that God and therefore truth contains similar things to be distinguished and distinct things to be found similar.

These processes of differentiation and integration are natural, man being made in the imago Dei and all, but they also must be developed. Just as all human capacities are both natural and need to be developed. And the more we do both the differentiation and the integration the better chance we have of doing good theology because we have a better chance of having a good theological method.

When we consider the history of Christian thought we can see how these themes have come up over and over again. And these tendencies are not restricted to formal academia, but make their way into pastoral, lay, and folk theology as well – often these tendencies, I would argue, become ingrained in a certain culture (or sub-culture…or sub-sub-culture). Whether these tendencies define an entire age of thought or the microculture of a family or office they do exist and seem to move reactionarily away from eachother.

And it’s important to mention that people are not one way only – they can be very higgledy-piggledy when it comes to these modes of thought. For instance, today’s liberals, and evangelicalism more broadly, are very big-tent – they find the similarities in the distinctions; they want to invite as many people as possible into their projects even when there are significant theological distinctions that might otherwise preclude their cooperation. But, many of those same liberals and evangelicals have engaged with Critical Theory and employ its Deconstructionism in their political and social theology. To be fair, Neofundamentalists are also playing the big-tent-game, as churches and thinkers are coalescing around a set of issues that otherwise would preclude Dispensationalists and Post-Millennials from working together under ordinary circumstances (I have thoughts on this but that’s another essay for another day!) So, Neofundamentalists are also finding the similarities in the distinct, while at the same time they are heavily engaged in distinguishing the similar as they reject Critical Theory (read: Wokism). Yes, there is an enormous amount of thematic overlap between, say, CRT and Christianity, but Neo-fundies think that they are incompatible.

The point is that we all sometimes are integrators and sometimes differentiators. But that’s not what I mean about how we develop a good theological method. A good theological method is not to sometimes rush to one extreme and sometimes rush to another – that’s just exhausting and is likely to produce errors everywhere. Like the saying, “Coffee: do stupid things faster with more energy!” just rushing from extreme differentiation to extreme integration situationally is not a marker of good theological method but looks more picayunish and inconsistent.

What we need is to employ differentiation and integration, not situationally, but collaboratively in every situation. When we address a topic we ought to say, “how can we distinguish things that look similar in this area? What can we dissect? What can we break down to its constituent parts? What are the “atoms” and axiomata? Where are the formal and informal logical errors? How can we be most precise in our language and logic?” But we also ought to say, “how do these different things cohere? How do we find unity and theme and harmony among the parts? What looks different but is more the same than we realize and why is it so?”. It’s the study of the parts and the whole – something that sounds very easy in theory but is very hard in practice. It also requires the self-discipline to question our own notions and to not give the hot-take. Moreover, it reminds us of the paradox that has always existed: you can’t understand the whole without understanding the parts and you can’t understand the parts without understanding the whole – yet we do know things!

The truth that we need the parts for the whole and vice-versa is paradoxical, antinomious, and mysterious – as well as seemingly self-defeating! If we can’t know the parts without the whole, nor the whole without the parts then it would seem we can’t know anything, including the statement “we can’t know anything”. Thus, the above is incoherent – and yet it’s true, as far as it goes, because what it implies is not that we can’t know ANYTHING about the parts without knowing EVERYTHING about the whole, it means that to have comprehensive knowledge you need comprehensive knowledge, which is necessarily a truism. Thus the above statement is either entirely false and suggests that all knowledge is impossible – including the knowledge that knowledge is impossible…which makes my brain hurt to think through! Or it is a tautology that reminds us that the process of learning is complementary and sequential and time-bound and that some things cannot be known until other things are.

But now we’re so far in the weeds that we’re starting to get ticks. So, how shall we summarize? I would say that we need to always keep the Trinity at the center of all we do. God is a Person – three Persons – and theology is interaction with Persons. Theology is always a relationship with a Subject and should never be an interaction with an object. Theology can never, ultimately, be about “God’s Glory” or “God’s love” or “God’s mercy” or anything like that because it reduces the irreducible. Theology is about knowing and relating to Persons. When the Triune God, as the Triune God, is the basis of everything, then, and only then, can we advance theology.

Postscript:

Part of my theological method and something that everyone should put in the background of their theological painting is that people tend towards extremes. People as Screwtape said, are always “crowding to that side of the boat which is already nearly gunwale under”. Because this is true, it is all the more important for theologians to strive to be precise, careful thinkers who can critically asses their own arguments and give full merit to others’. Or to put it another way: good theologians are circumspect.

And circumspection is probably, if I had to guess, a characteristic that is both state and trait, and moreover it is both a gift and a skill. If circumspection is a facet of wisdom, and I would say it is, then it is, in Christian theology, necessarily a gift and a skill.

Again, this doesn’t mean that circumspection isn’t something people are born with – I think some people naturally are more circumspect than others. It is necessarily true (at least in Big 5 language) people who are high in Impulsivity are low in Conscientiousness, and vice-versa. The impulse to rush to a theological extreme NECESSARILY precludes you from acting circumspectly. This doesn’t mean that impulses are bad – I think they are very good, under the right circumstances! – but that we need to recognize about ourselves that all human beings have a tendency to NOT be circumspect; some of us have more circumspection by birth, some by gifting, and some by sheer hard work. And we also need to recognize that this is a trait, gift, and talent that we need to develop if we wish to be like God. Indeed, as God is omniscient who could ever be more circumspect than He?