The End of Theology?

How many angels can dance on the head of a pin?

For most people, this is the prime example of a nonsensical question: the kind of useless theorizing that characterized centuries of theological debate. For critics of medieval mysticism like William Chillingworth and George Bernard Shaw, questions of the space taken up by celestial beings were an exercise in sophistry, an example of the futility of theological study within an academic setting.

This year the University of Oxford, my alma mater, seems inclined to agree. Its Faculty of Theology (one of the oldest in the world, dating to the 12th century, and one of a relatively few secular-university departments in the English-speaking world to offer a B.A. in theology) has changed its name to the Department of Theology and Religion. As of the autumn of 2016, incoming students will have the option of reading Theology and Religion, Theology and Oriental Studies, or Theology and Philosophy, but not — for the first time ever — Theology on its own.

This change in focus is reflected throughout the degree’s revised syllabus. Previously, undergraduates were required to take courses in both Old and New Testament theology, patristics (the history and theology of the early church fathers), and “God, Christ, and Salvation” (a course in 20th-century systematic theology). New students will choose their modules more freely, from a broader selection of areas. They can avoid biblical scholarship entirely, choosing to focus on, say, the history of rabbinic Judaism, or 20th-century theological anthropology. The “God, Christ, and Salvation” course — once the de facto capstone of the degree — has been abolished.

This is good news for students interested in the comparative or anthropological aspects of religion. But for would-be pure theologians, Oxford’s decision to effectively dismantle its bachelor’s degree in theology is a worrisome harbinger for the world’s last few nonconfessional traditional theology programs.

Studying theology is markedly different from studying religion from a comparative perspective. Traditional theology challenges students to consider the Bible (ideally in its original Hebrew and Greek) on painstaking levels of critical detail, and — much like law students working with case precedent — to assume its veracity for the purpose of subsequent metaphysical or ethical argument. How we treat one another, for example, is rooted in the biblical understanding of Imago Dei because we manifest our true humanity only insofar as we approach an understanding of what and who God is.

At first glance, that kind of approach may seem terribly outmoded. Why should contemporary undergraduates assume, even for the purpose of argument, the truth of the Bible? Why should we start with the first principles of the church fathers — that, for example, God is necessarily unchanging, omniscient, and sovereign — when most undergraduates aren’t even sure there’s a God at all?

But theology isn’t just about proving the existence of God or defending the church against accusations to the contrary. In studying how the theologians of the past approached the question of God, we, too, are challenged to address the ultimate intellectual problem: how to talk about something that transcends the language used to describe it. This is what St. Augustine acknowledges when he qualifies some of his theology as working within the limitations of the expressible: “For the sake, then, of speaking of things that cannot be uttered, that we may be able in some way to utter what we are able in no way to utter fully.”

What most non-theologians know about the fourth-century Council of Nicaea is probably limited to a vague sense that a group of churchmen convened to counter “heresy,” a term that today conjures up images of book burnings and the Spanish Inquisition. But, as the theological historian William Placher points out, the desire on the part of the disparate church figures to codify a Nicene Creed had less to do with a desire to punish those who did not toe the party line than with an effort to collectively figure out how that “party line” should be worded. As Placher puts it, “Manufacturers carefully preserve their legal rights to the names of their products, and with good reason.” The Christian church, too, had to figure out precisely what it meant to be a Christian church, and how to best convey that message to others.

Cue centuries of debates over the use of language to describe divinity and humanity alike. To say, for example, that Christ was homoousios (Greek for “of the same essence”) with God the Father was to have to engage in a debate about what ousia — essence — really meant. Was divinity a form of stuff, a raw material from which individual deities could be formed? Or was the relationship between the Son and the Father, as in the words of the third-century theologian Tertullian, “as the root puts forth the tree, and the fountain the river, and the sun the ray.” Such a conception makes clear that there are not two Gods, but it risks implying that Christ is subordinate to God the Father, and thus in some sense lesser (which comes with intellectual problems of its own — can we really speak of degrees of divinity?). The question of whether the Son is contingent upon the Father — whether there was a “time when the Son was not” — was the axis on which the Council of Nicaea turned. Every interpretation of every word in every creed, when taken to its logical conclusion, risks saying something contradictory or problematic about the nature of divinity.

All this may well seem to be metaphysics in the vein of “angels on the head of a pin.” Why should a non-Christian care whether the Son proceeds from the Father, or is coeternal with Him, or is homoousios with him but exists as a different hypostasis, or person? Isn’t this all just semantics?

But in asking ourselves what the church fathers meant by homoousios or hypostasis, or in examining the difficulties they faced even in translating from one part of the early Christian world from the other, we begin to question the fundamentals of language itself. The translation and interpretation of the word ousia — which one could fairly, if irreverently, interpret to mean “stuff” — had cataclysmic effects for the Western intellectual tradition.

For the early Christians, “stuff” was that which made something what it was. But could it be mixed or mingled? Could it be divided? Did the God-stuff and the man-stuff in Jesus Christ exist as a single unified “stuff” or two disparate “stuffs” in a single body? The former risked implying that divinity was something tangible that could be diluted, like a solution in water. The latter meant giving Jesus a schizophrenic quality — a single body with two contradictory natures.

Theology isn’t just the study of scriptures and creeds. It is an investigation into the complex process by which words and images are chosen, interpreted, and rejected. We learn to weigh the major metaphysical implications of each of our words.

The “social Trinitarian” movement of the early 20th century made one ousia and three hypostases — a reductionist translation might be “one essence, three persons” — a paradigm for human interaction. Defining the hypostases through their relationships to the other hypostases in the Trinity, and defining the ousia of divinity by the love-relationship between each person (Father, Son, Holy Spirit), social-Trinitarian thinkers like John Zizioulas and Jürgen Moltmann argued for a vision of God characterized by mutuality and concordance of disparate persons, rather than an authoritarian monad with three aspects. That vision necessitated a theology of interpersonal relationships likewise predicated not on hierarchy and power but on mutuality and love: a Christianity of radical equality, which in turn could be used to justify the “liberation theology” movements in South America in the 20th century.

In good, systematic theology, each aspect of a theologian’s worldview relates to every other. Questions like “Who is God?,” “What is ousia?,” and “How do the persons of the Trinity relate to one another as God?” help theologians answer questions like “How do we treat each other?,” “What should a good political system look like?,” and “What should our relationship with the environment be?” Abstruse interpretations of Greek words have very real consequences for understandings of real-world interactions.

For believers and unbelievers alike, the study of theology is, at its core, the study of language: both of how it works and of how it must not work. Statements about what it means to be God or to be made of God-stuff have implications that last long beyond a theological council or the condemnation of fourth-century heretics.

Even the business about angels on the head of the pin can be traced back to Thomas Aquinas, who, in his Summa Theologiae, asked whether an angel is in a place. The question wasn’t about angels on the head of a pin, but rather whether an incorporeal being could be said to occupy physical space. Aquinas’s conclusion? That we can recognize the presence of something that does not take up physical space by understanding the effect it has on its atmosphere.

By moving away from the study of theology, and to a more general approach that regards a religion’s traditions from without, rather than within, we risk losing not only an understanding of the complexity of theology but also an understanding of the complexity of the language that goes into creating it. We lose the ability to spend hours over a single Greek word, examining the myriad ways in which it can be translated, and testing each manifestation for illogical or counterintuitive implications. We risk losing our understanding of how rooted any intellectual tradition is, not simply in Christ the Logos in the Gospel of John, but in words themselves.

It may not be heresy. But it is, nevertheless, a terrible shame.