Expectation from Modern Theology

Defining Christian theology

Attempts to define Christian theology can be notoriously facile. One is often told that such theology is “faith seeking understanding.” Alternately, it is often remarked that theology is the interpretation of doctrine, so that one regards interpretation as the business of testing and applying doctrine to the experienced life of the Church. Richard Hooker defined theology as “the science of things divine,” and developing Hooker’s statement is Locke’s famous definition of theology, from 1698:

Theology, which, containing the knowledge of God and his creatures, our duty to him and
our fellow-creatures, and a view of our present and future state, is the comprehension of
all other knowledge, directed to its true end.

Each of these definitions works quite straightforwardly, as do many others.
 One of thethings one constantly discovers is that if Christian theology is Christian talk of God,
then the fact that there are many different ways of doing that in today’s world demonstrates
that pluralism is inherent to any question of how to define theology.

What matters then is to what extent such pluralism is true; or, better, to what extent theological ideas allow for different interpretations.

Attempts to define modern theology exacerbate this difficulty, for the singular reason that the concept “modernity” itself allows for no unambiguous definition. To support this argument, consider solely whether “modernity” is concerned with time, or scope. Is “modernity” a period of history, or is it a particular way of understanding? In other words, if one is attempting a first definition of modern theology, does one try to define a particular period of Christian history, with a start and an end, or does one try to define a way of thinking about Christian ideas that might be coterminous with a specific historical period, but which is intellectual rather than circumstantial?


If the former – as is often the case – then modern theology is roughly the period 1600–1980, with early modernity arguably evident in the sixteenth century, and late modernity giving way to postmodernity in the 1980s. If the latter, then modern theology “begins” when people seek to think about their faith in terms of the world in which they live, rather than the other way round. One might characterize this intellectual definition in relation to time – one might still trace its origin to around 1600, for example.But the essential quality is the way of thinking, rather than the historic moment when it started to occur.

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