Methodologies in Systematic Theology: A Few Contributions

By Louis Roy

For readers eager to seek an improved understanding of the Good News, this book provides a way of better construing the Christian message. It begins with the church fathers, continues with the medieval thinkers, and covers modernity's doubters who published critiques of faith and elaborated new conceptions of faith. It thus surveys the various theological methods that were employed over two thousand years of Christian experience. The principal theologians and philosophers that are presented here are Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, Schleiermacher, Lonergan, Ricœur, Congar, and Geffre.

The author also presents several modern authors' nuanced assessments of historicity, which fashioned and are still fashioning a large variety of cultures. This sense of history has allowed scholars to appreciate both the particular and the permanent in religious studies that convey meanings.

The originality of the author of this volume consists in combining a competence in systematic interpretations with an expertise in pastoral theology. In addition, readers will find in these pages a living ecumenical dialogue characterized by correct construals of those "others" whose understandings of religion may appear as contradicting one's own views.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wipf and Stock
• Release date: Jun 21, 2024
• ISBN: 9798385223008

Louis Roy

Louis Roy, a Dominican friar from Canada, received a PhD from Cambridge University. He was a professor at Boston College for twenty-one years and now teaches at Dominican University College in Ottawa. He is interested mainly in the relations between Christianity and cultures, interreligious dialogue, spirituality, and mysticism. Among his books are Coherent Christianity, Embracing Desire, and The Feeling of Transcendence, an Experience of God?

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Introduction

In a book titled Christian Identity and Theological Education , Joseph Hough and John Cobb argue that theological education is teleological, in the sense that it aims at educating students who will be ministers or teachers in church and society. In the light of this principle, Hough and Cobb move a step further, as they write, There can be no clear unity to theological education until there is recovery of clarity about the nature of professional leadership within the church. ¹ Therefore, with the help of Alasdair MacIntyre’s notion of social characters they proceed to describe several ministerial models which have been influential in church life. ²

Their typology about secular characters (the Manager, the Therapist and others) is informative.³ Moreover I share their doubts about whether the several kinds of church leadership that have been inspired by those secular characters are the best way to shed light on the nature of theological education; Hough and Cobb are right in assuming that we rather need an understanding of what it is to be a Christian community in the world.⁴ And I would suggest that what should be clarified is the intellectual side of lived faith.

If we begin with the old-fashioned fides quaerens intellectum (faith seeking understanding) and if we have in mind the contemporary connotations of the word meaning, we can state that the human person is a symbolic animal, who spontaneously looks for meaning.⁵ One desires understanding, asks about the truthvalue of what one has grasped, and deliberates regarding one’s commitments. Theology is nothing else than a systematic exploration and enlargement of this quest for meaning, with sustained attention to text-interpretation, to historical oppositions and developments, as well as to the affective and normative aspects of belief. Consequently this book on theological methodologies will have much to say about the process—personal and collective—of interpretation, namely about hermeneutics.

This view of faith and theology invites us to focus, not on the objects which are studied, but on the inquiring subject that each of us is.⁶ Hough and Cobb note that disputes about method are as divisive as those about doctrine.⁷ Such disputes are indeed inextricable so long as we deal only with objects.

I contend that the dialogue between historical scholarship (essential to theology) and pastoral theology (also an indispensable part of theology) would be more fruitful if a wrong conception of theory was exposed and abandoned. This inadequate conception asserts that scholarship should be principally concerned with external data, namely texts, artifacts, events, rituals, social structures, etc. What is then neglected is a handling of religious meanings that would be objective and universal enough to be transposable from one historical context to another. When historical and systematic theologians do not believe that historical transpositions are feasible, they mediate to their students a mass of useful information, but not an intelligible set of truths. In so doing, historical and systematic theology create an insurmountable problem for pastoral theology.

How is it that so many students have the impression that theological scholarship is purely theoretical and unconnected with faith seeking understanding? Maybe some of them are ignorant and prejudiced. But in fact many are correctly reacting against the long-lived Western illusion that real, serious scholarship must be academic in a conceptualist sense—concepts being more important than questions and insights.⁸ They vaguely feel that conceptualism cannot express the religious meanings that constitute the core of human life. Moreover if so many pastoral theologians take an existentialist, emotivist, or therapeutic view of their profession, are they not backlashing against the seemingly-normative positivistic conception of scholarship?⁹ And what happens when students and teachers reject the pragmatic, managerial view, which stands further away from faith seeking understanding? This book will therefore eschew erroneous conceptualist-line abstractions and will do much better, by building on the readers’ search for meaning as they discuss theological texts.¹⁰

It is most important to realize that students’ knowledge is grounded and unified in the knowing that they find in themselves as they have access to God in faith, as they respond to God in love, and as they pray, particularly in meditation. This unification is often called integration and it is much more than the acquisition of a body of knowledge. The specialist in religious education Edward Farley wrote:

The aim of education is sometimes thought to be the transmission of knowledge concerning a content or subject matter. But when we ask about the purpose of the transmitted knowledge, we are referred to another order of aims, an order having to do with the use, function, and relevance of knowledge. Knowledge, in other words, lends itself to various agendas that attend human life, and it can improve the ways human beings exist in the situations of life. Human life is constituted by a succession of situations that call for understanding and interpretation. . . . Here there are not just bodies of knowledge but also basic types of understanding and interpretation.¹¹

Some readers may ask, where does the author of this book stand? My answer is that I see myself, not as a traditional dogmatic theologian, although I believe in the indispensability of dogmas, which I would rather call doctrines, after Bernard Lonergan, but as a systematic theologian in constant dialogue with pastoral theologians and with scholars who practise a hermeneutical, hence historical, approach to religious texts, as will be shown throughout my enterprise.

A caveat is nevertheless in order: In the bulk of this book (chapters 3 through 8), the treatment of each author’s thought will not be exhaustive, but only bear on his methodology, as indicated by the title of the book, Methodologies in Systematic Theology.

My book has seven chapters.

Chapter 1 presents a chronological overview of Christian thinking: in the Bible, in patristic and monastic theology, in medieval scholasticism, in modernity, and in twentieth-century theology.

Chapter 2 spells out the principles of Catholic theology, the plurality in theology, the Tradition and the traditions, the sources and the hierarchy of truth.

Chapter 3 focuses on Augustine of Hippo, his construal of Christian existence, his view of biblical interpretation, and love as the fundamental principle of hermeneutics.

Chapter 4 introduces Albert the Great, the first Medieval Aristotelian, and Thomas Aquinas, the outstanding synthesizer of a systematic theology conceived as theory.

Chapter 5 bears on Friedrich Schleiermacher, the revolutionary innovator in Protestant theology, his questions and method, the issue of psychologizing, his principles of text interpretation. That chapter will end with a sketch of twentieth-century phenomenology and hermeneutics.

Chapter 6 deals with the eminent Protestant philosopher of the second half of the twentieth century, Paul Ricœur. We shall examine his phenomenological method, his shift from human experience to written texts, and his shift from texts to human action.

Chapter 7 expounds Bernard Lonergan’s thought on human intentionality, on the historical method, and his two basic exposés on interpretation.

Chapter 8 is a study of Yves Congar’s and Claude Geffré’s hermeneutical contributions.

To conclude this Introduction on a practical note, I would submit the following three steps in the itinerary of theology students:

•Christian students usually begin with the knowing that is there in their faith, love, and prayer; this knowing, to a certain extent unarticulated, remains influential during the rest of a person’s life, for good insofar as it is sound, or for ill insofar as it is unbalanced.

•This initial knowing becomes a knowledge developed in informal conversations or in catechesis. It is enlarged and corrected thanks to history (of the Bible and of church councils).

•The knowledge thus acquired is deepened in theology (church fathers, medieval writers and contemporary thinkers).

Such an integrative process, based on human situations and not only on historical knowledge, is far from being easy, given the numerous sources of theology, which will be identified in chapter 2. If students consent to pay the price, however, they will go beyond the hodgepodge offered by most current programs of spirituality or of religious studies. By scrutinizing great Christian texts, they will then be able to make sense of their life and of the life of others.¹²

1

. Hough and Cobb, Christian Identity and Theological Education,

5

.

2

. See Hough and Cobb, Christian Identity and Theological Education,

5

, footnote

12

.

3

. See Hough and Cobb, Christian Identity and Theological Education,

16

and

19

.

4

. Hough and Cobb, Christian Identity and Theological Education,

19

.

5

. See Roy, Meaning in People’s Lives and in Human History, forthcoming.

6

. I include the inquiring subject as religious; see the Preface to my book Mystical Consciousness, ix

–

xi.

7

. Hough and Cobb, Christian Identity and Theological Education,

3

.

8

. On Lonergan contrast between the conceptualist and the intellectualist, see Insight: A Study of Human Understanding,

717–18

, and Roy, Bernard Lonergan’s Construal of Aquinas’s Epistemology,

17–31

.

9

. On emotivism, see MacIntyre, After Virtue; see also Roy, Engaging the Thought of Bernard Lonergan,

172–81

.

10

. Nonetheless there are sound abstractions, which, according to Lonergan, go beyond sensible data and are enriching because they at the service of intelligibility, which consists of a succession of insights; see Insight,

111–12

.

11

. Farley, The Fragility of Knowledge,

135

. For an historical approach to Christian education by the same author, see his Theologia. I thank Hosffman Ospino, a professor at Boston College, for having drawn my attention to these two books.

12

. For a bird’s eye view of Christianity’s interpretative traditions, see Geffré, L’herméneutique chrétienne,

449–56

.

1

A Chronological Overview of Christian Thinking

This chapter presents a tour of the numerous biblical-theological travels undertaken by Christian thinkers over two millennia. So I will briefly introduce various ways of reading the Bible and I will characterize patristic theology, monastic theology, Latin scholasticism, as well as several modern and contemporary Christian forms of thought.

The Bible and its Variegated Reception

Towards the end of the second century BCE, the translation of the Hebrew Bible into Greek was made in the Hellenistic megalopolis of Alexandria. This version is called the Septuagint (commonly abbreviated as LXX). At the same time, the writers of Wisdom literature began to use a few Greek ideas to convey their Jewish beliefs. This is a case of inculturation.

Both Philo of Alexandria and Jesus of Nazareth lived in the first century CE. The writing of the NT probably commenced with Paul’s First Letter to the Thessalonians, written between years 49 and 51, and it ended with the Book of Revelation a few years before year 100.

Insofar as the identity of Jesus according to the four Gospels is concerned, there has been a huge amount of debates since the eighteenth century. Thus, along with most exegetes John Meier distinguished between:

1.the real Jesus, namely the one that actually existed in ancient Israel;

2.the historical Jesus (or the Jesus of history), namely the representation of Jesus that is the construct of historical research; and

3.the risen Lord, who is the direct object of Christian faith.¹

Meier correctly stated that the Jesus known by believers is the Christ of faith. He is also right when he claims that such faith-knowledge cannot be based solely on historical scholarship about Jesus but that faith-knowledge needs to be guided and sometimes rectified by historical scholarship. Even though historical scholarship