Introduction and Approach

How theology is defined as an academic discipline is a function of history. Medieval theologians, like Thomas Aquinas, understood theology to be a scientia, or a demonstrative mode of reasoning based on propositions revealed by God. Theologians in the modern period, specifically those of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in the West, continued this tradition. They organised theological knowledge as a system of revealed propositions, primarily drawing upon the articles from the Apostles’ Creed, from which they derived other theological and ethical claims. When academic scholarship in the eighteenth and early nineteenth century turned to consider history as significant for knowledge claims, theologians took up the philological and historical study of language and texts into their discipline. From medieval scientia to modern historia, theology is a field of study that appropriates, uses and transforms ways of knowing respective to the wider academic culture to which it is related.

The question of ‘reason, system and method’ in the theology of the twentieth century must therefore be addressed, as is the aim of this essay, in view of broader cultural, historical and political movements. The question of how theology produces knowledge about the Christian religion is one that must be answered in relation to academic and ecclesial considerations concerning how theologians and Church leaders engaged, integrated or repudiated ideas and claims pertaining to ways of knowing deployed by their colleagues. I begin with some presuppositions before embarking on a survey of distinctive theological rationalities in the twentieth century.

That theology's own way of knowing is rightly understood to be coterminous with the respective intellectual and religious cultures in which it is practised is itself a historical claim. The claim that theology is a function of culture was advanced by early twentieth-century theologians, particularly in Germany, who sought to connect their discipline to new developments in the humanities and social sciences. In a talk delivered in 1906, Protestantism and Progress – as its English title runs – German systematic theologian Ernst Troeltsch developed a theory that understood modern culture to be characterised by a distinctive religious spirit that developed alongside and in complex relations to other aspects of human experience, such as politics, society, economics and the arts. Troeltsch thought that modern religion, which he identified with Protestantism, expressed cultural values common to yet distinct from other fields of human experience. Religion was not immune to influences from other experiential domains.