is a theology which works!
When one speaks of theology, there can be several senses under this term’s wide semantical range. The fundamental dichotomy is the cognate’s more general usage to apply to all things related to talking about God. One must be careful, in any case. Initially, to speak of the supernatural, one spoke more metaphysically than is often considered appropriate presently, and the suitable expression behind this concept is in reality mythos. However, myths and mythology somehow came to be understood in post-enlightenment thinking associated with fairy tales and has become a derogatory term in popular colloquialism.
The strict sense is maintained academically. This juxtaposition allows one to understand best why the two worlds often do not correspond well. Scholars tend to use terms more precisely while the general populace is quite loose in its terminology. This inaccuracy breeds misunderstandings between the two realms. The under-initiated can get lost when not keeping careful attention to one’s management of words.
Etiologically, theology is based on two Greek terms in θεός and λόγος. It is still quite a struggle to relate these concepts in John 1 to our modern world and the ever-widening chasm that separates the human from the divine whereby in the incarnation they become so well fused even as God intended from the beginning. In modern usage, the “ology” is the study of things as in the mixing of Greek bios with logos; one gets biology which is the contemporary study of life generally. Hence, theology used more specifically, often called Theology Proper, is the systematic study of God the Father.
Interestingly, in its original sense, archaeology was simply the study of the arcane. Today’s usage often limits it to those who dig up artifacts, but initially, it was broader and covered those who studied any of its more antiquital aspects, including the texts, cultures, and backgrounds. For example, in the Hellenistic world, is a first-century Jewish Historian known as Josephus. His History of the Jews is often called in short Antiquities, but its actual name transliterated into English characters is Ioudaikes archaiologias. Rainey and Notley signify how archaeology “came to be used by scholars in the eighteenth century to mean all study of antiquity.”[1]
Combining the above as the pertinent context, as a missionary scholar currently serving South Asia, I am involved in the logic behind the areas of the Bible in biblical studies, biblical theology, theology, mythology, and if one allows the more general semantical range of the term, archaeology as I am constantly digging into the literature of the ancient world to unravel the relevant context of the Scriptures in which to understand best them utilizing the worlds of anthropology, epistemology, philosophy, sociology, and the like to then help the people in their present worldview to ascertain what these archaic texts would speak to them in rising in the 21st century to have their ideology in how best to exemplify their beliefs apart from contexts quite foreign to their thinking, juxtaposed with some European models from about five centuries ago.
At one institute I taught, one of the leaders was quite concerned I had come with a type of “replacement theology.” He feared I chad come to usurp what little was left of the culture here entirely with Western ways. The internet already has widely pushed much of local tradition utterly out of many youths’ minds through its bleaching and brainwashing of what little remains of the ancient ways of thinking. It appears to be fading fast. I pressed back hard.
I find significant faults in the Western worldviews and do not hold them as supreme. I have no intention of superseding the beliefs here by supplanting them with the flawed views of moderns. Instead, I have come to allow Eastern thinking to ascend to its rightful place and reinvigorate ways of thinking that are much more biblical than the post-enlightened and now lackadaisical worldviews of modernity and post-modernity which plague much of the West much of the West. It must be noted often, Western ways of thinking toward the Bible tend to demand purging specific ways of thinking deemed pagan by the unlearned. Recent scholarship has proven them to be the most significant in understanding the text in its original animus considering the final form of the extant text as given to us by our forbears in the faith.
Rainey and Notely, rightly summate, “[t]here is nothing to be gained by the pretext born of intellectual laziness”[2] often found today. This ruse aptly sums David Bentley Hart’s overall argument in his Atheist Delusions: The Christian Revolution and Its Fashionable Enemies: The Christian Revolution and Its Fashionable Enemies. The underwhelming malaise of today’s skeptics causes them to be found wanting such that no one bothers to think these days critically and merely accept the general status quo as the way things were, are, and should be without even considering the facts. No one wishes to fight the good fight of faith as most have chosen instead to lie down depressed in apathy toward the greatest of God’s goodness in the incarnation of his triune nature into humanity with the Church as its present glorious embodiment. What fellowship afforded that is forlornly cast aside for what is deemed “grace” yet entirely antithetical to God’s “gracings” as endowed within the Scriptures passed down to us.
Any seminal theology of work has been unseated. It is not only ignored but abhorred! More modern “free” grace avoids “works” to the point of being wholly unfruitful, unproductive, and entirely unworkable. Classical freedom has been displaced since Ockham and Dun Scotus via the Reformers to the detriment of the vitality of participation “in Christ,” leading mainly to the privation through privatization of believers who are so “sola” that they have been severed from the vine only fit for the fire lacking any fruition of the Spirit walling themselves off from paradise in building their private kingdom of a more personal faith which comprises of the hay and stubble which will smolder in the Parousia. It is groundless as much as it has ignored the traditions which birthed it. In an “us” against “them” approach, Christian crusades become infighting that no longer reflects the world above but the one below further descending the world into this present darkness against the light we’re called to be.
[1] Anson F. Rainey and R. Steven Notley, The Sacred Bridge: Carta’s Atlas of the Biblical World, Second Emended & Enhanced Edition. (Jerusalem, Israel: Carta Jerusalem, 2014), 21.
