Describe the History of theology in details
Origins
The term theology is derived from the Latin theologia (“study [or understanding] of God [or the
gods]”), which itself is derived from the Greek theos (“God”) and logos (“reason”). Theology
originated with the pre-Socratic philosophers (the philosophers of ancient Greece who flourished
before the time of Socrates [c. 470–399 bce]). Inspired by the cosmogonic notions of earlier
poets such as Hesiod and Homer, the pre-Socratics were preoccupied with questions about the
origin and ultimate nature of the universe. The first great theologian, however, was Socrates’
student Plato, who appears also to have been the first to use the term theology. For Plato,
theology was the study of eternal realities, the realm of what he called forms, or ideas. For his
pupil Aristotle (384–322 bce), theology was the study of the highest form of reality, the “first
substance,” which he seems to have regarded at different times as the “unmoved mover” and as
“being qua being.” Aristotle spoke of three theoretical, or speculative, ways of knowing: the
mathematical, the physical, and the theological, with theology being the “most honourable.”
The notion of theology as the study or contemplation (theoria) of the highest form of reality
became commonplace in the Hellenistic philosophy of the Roman world in which Christianity
emerged. In that world, the quest for God acquired for many people—including both Christians
and non-Christians—a certain urgency, in part because of the recognized inadequacy of the
traditional pagan religions and the social and political turmoil of the era. Accordingly,
philosophical speculation about the ultimate nature of reality assumed a distinctly religious cast.
The “lower” studies of logic and ethics and the observation of nature came to be regarded as
preparatory training for communion with the divine.
These ideas very quickly found acceptance among Christian thinkers, notably the 3rd-century
theologian Origen, who described the three stages in the Christian’s advance to communion with
God as the ethical, the physical, and the “epoptic,” or visionary. Origen’s triad was developed by
the 4th-century monastic Evagrius Ponticus, who distinguished between praktiki (ascetic
struggle), physiki (contemplation of the natural order), and theologia (theology as contemplation
of God). The understanding of theology as the fruit of sustained ascetic struggle, as the highest
exercise of the human mind, and as prayer quickly established itself in Greek Christianity, and
this interpretation is still fundamental in Eastern Orthodox theology. It is expressed succinctly in
Evagrius’s oft-quoted assertion: “If you are a theologian, you will pray truly; if you pray truly,
you will be a theologian.”
Alongside this sense of theology, Christians also understood the word theologia to mean the
study of the divine, or the unraveling of the nature of the divine as revealed in the Bible.
Christians believed that God reveals himself in the Hebrew Bible (Old Testament) through the
history of the chosen people of Israel and in the New Testament through Jesus Christ, the
incarnation of the Son of God. A distinction quickly developed in Christian reflection on God
between theologia, strictly understood as the study of God in himself—that is, the study of God’s
divine nature—and oikonomia, understood to mean the study of God’s activities in the created
order, particularly the acts of creation and redemption. Because God is known only through his
self-manifestation in the created order, however, the distinction between theologia and
oikonomia is easily blurred. Nevertheless, it remains fundamental in Greek theology.
Late antiquity and the Middle Ages
The development of Christian theology was decisively influenced by an unknown writer of the
early 6th century whose works circulated under the name of Dionysius the Areopagite, the
Athenian disciple of St. Paul the Apostle (the writer is therefore often called Pseudo-Dionysius).
In the writings of Pseudo-Dionysius, God is depicted as revealing himself to the created order
through hierarchies of angels and through the hierarchy of the church. Pseudo-Dionysius also
introduced a number of distinctions about the nature of theology that were destined to be of
profound influence. His short treatise The Mystical Theology discusses affirmative and negative
(kataphatic and apophatic) theologies, symbolic theology, and mystical theology. Pseudo-
Dionysius borrowed the kataphatic-apophatic distinction from the great 5th-century Neoplatonist
philosopher Proclus: whereas a kataphatic theology affirms what God has revealed of himself (in
creation and revelation), an apophatic theology negates everything ascribed to God because
human concepts and images are inadequate to describe his reality. Symbolic theology, as
Pseudo-Dionysius understood it, is an extension of kataphatic theology that seeks to interpret
symbols and images that are used in the Scriptures to express God’s nature and activity.
Mystical, or hidden, theology seems to be the experience of the divine reality to which apophatic
theology points—the equivalent of theologia in the sense in which Evagrius Ponticus used the
term. This identification was made explicit by the 11th-century Byzantine theologian Nicetas
Stethatos.
With the development in Western theology of increasingly sharp distinctions between nature and
grace, the natural and the supernatural, and reason and revelation, theologians became interested
in what truths about God could be established by reason alone. Called natural theology
(theologia naturalis), as opposed to revealed theology (theologia revelata), this discipline
became particularly important in arguments between Christians on the one hand and Jews and
Muslims on the other, because the arguments of natural theology did not depend on the
acceptance of revelation.
The systematic presentations that characterized Western theology in the 13th century (the age of
the Schoolmen, or Scholastics) were often prefaced by an account of what could be established
by reason about God; usually the first thing to be established was his existence. The most famous
set of such arguments is the so-called Five Ways of St. Thomas Aquinas, which appears in his
greatest work, the Summa theologiae (1265/66–1273). Aquinas claimed to have established the
existence of God as the unmoved mover, as the ultimate efficient cause, as the necessary being,
as the perfect being, and as the final cause of all beings. For Aquinas, such natural theology was
part of the sacra doctrina (“sacred doctrine”) of the church.
The century following Aquinas was marked by the development of the “theology of the two
powers,” which distinguished between what God can do absolutely (potentia absoluta), or
logically, and what he has bound himself to do in accordance with the covenant he established
with humankind (potentia ordinata). This distinction helped sharpen the division between what
is necessarily so, which could be explored by reason, and what God has revealed about himself
and his relations with humankind. The contrast between reason and revelation was reflected in
the continued development of natural theology and revealed theology .
In the late Middle Ages a further division occurred between “rational theology” (which usually
embraced both natural and revealed theology) and a theology of felt experience, often called
“mystical theology,” a designation consciously borrowed from Pseudo-Dionysius. Mystical
theology came to be identified with the experience of God and with contemplation of the divine.
An alternative approach, known as “ascetical theology,” involved seeking God through a life of
prayer, devotion, self-denial, and mortification.
The Renaissance, the Reformation, and the Enlightenment
During the Renaissance, medieval theology suffered further fragmentation, but theologians also
acquired new conceptual tools. The late-medieval conception of Christianity had emphasized its
contingent nature, its truth being not a logical necessity but the result of the will of God.
Although few, if any, of the thinkers of the Renaissance wished to undermine Christianity, their
awareness of its contingency led them to look for some underlying truth, a “primordial
revelation” that would make sense of both Christianity and the religions of classical and late
antiquity. This truth was often identified with the so-called Hermetic wisdom attributed to
Hermes Trismegistos (Hermes the Thrice-Greatest), the Greek name of Thoth, the Egyptian god
of writing. Although Hermetic teachings were thought to be of unimaginable antiquity, in reality
the writings from which they were drawn (the Hermetic writings) date from only the mid-1st to
the late 3rd centuries.
The theology of the primordial revelation was called pristina theologia (“pristine theology”), or
the theology of human primal innocence. Pristina theologia provided the starting point for many
attempts by thinkers of the Renaissance to penetrate behind the faded texture of the religious
systems of their day to what was thought to be some ultimate forgotten truth. Often it was
studied in combination with mystical theology, which was thought to authenticate pristina
theologia by providing a felt experience of the ultimate. Out of this potent mixture emerged the
Renaissance revival of alchemy, movements such as the Rosicrucians, and the elaborately
symbolic mysticism of the German thinker Jakob Böhme (1575–1624).
With the turn of the 18th century, the ideas of the Renaissance came to assume a somewhat more
somber hue: pristina theologia yielded to natural religion—that is, the principles of religion that
can be established by reason alone (e.g., that God exists). Natural religion was then contrasted
with positive religion, or the particular religious traditions of different societies or cultures. This
distinction would become axiomatic in Protestant theology during the Enlightenment and in
much of the post-Enlightenment period. The Enlightenment belief in the contingent nature of
revelation led scholars of the period to treat the sacred books of Christianity as historically
determined rather than as witnesses to, or embodiments of, divine revelation. This conception
soon created, as the German writer Gotthold Lessing described it, an “ugly, broad ditch” between
the history to which the Scriptures belonged and bore witness and the eternal truths that the
dogmatic systems had derived from them.
The 19th century to the present
In the 19th century, European colonialism led to the rediscovery, translation, and publication of a
wealth of sacred writings from the indigenous cultures of Asia and Africa, which encompassed
both living religions—especially Hinduism and Buddhism—and religions of antiquity, especially
those of Egypt. Treatises of the Hermetic tradition and codices containing texts of the gnostics
were discovered during the 19th and 20th centuries. Access to such a hitherto unimaginable
richness of religious traditions led to many attempts to explore and draw connections between
them, often using theological categories drawn from Christianity. It also led to a revival of the
Renaissance quest for some ultimate religion underlying them all, though the geographical
source of such a pristina theologia was generally thought to lie much farther to the east than
ancient Egypt.
Christian theology itself was not unaffected by these discoveries, though it was more
immediately affected by other currents, notably from the Enlightenment. Attempts were made
during the 19th century to leap across the ditch that Lessing had lamented—notably by the
Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard—but the long-term effect was further fragmentation of
Protestant (and eventually Roman Catholic) theology, leading to the separation of biblical
theology (the theological study of God’s progressive revelation of himself through the stages of
biblical history) from dogmatic or systematic theology. This tendency was further accelerated by
the increasing academic independence of universities (where theology had generally been
studied). Eventually, several additional theological subdisciplines emerged, including Old
Testament theology, New Testament theology, church history (or sometimes historical theology),
pastoral or practical theology, and even “spiritual” theology, often understood as a combination
of ascetic and mystical theology. This fragmentation of theology cast into doubt the coherence of
the whole enterprise.
In later, nonacademic usage, the term theology came to mean a religiously coloured, or
sometimes religiously informed, study of some matter. In this sense one might speak of a
theology of society, in which political and economic considerations are informed by religious
principles, or of a theology of poetry, in which the play of image and allusion characteristic of
poetry is drawn upon to understand religious language. In informal usage, theology has come to
convey the sense of something remotely theoretical and impractical. The wide application of the
term, as well as the current fragmented state of the discipline, indicate the extent to which the
classical concept of theology as the highest pursuit of the intellect has been transformed over the
centuries.
