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Welcome to another of the 'Why Study' series
of the Department of Theology and Religious Studies. With me today is Dr Simon Oliver
who teaches systematic theology and is a very eminent theologian in his own right.
Simon, why study systematic theology?
Well I should probably say something about what systematic theology is to start with.
The word systematic feels a little daunting, systematic theology as opposed to unsystematic
or chaotic theology; well systematic theology implies a system and an order. And I suppose
in its most formal sense systematic theology is concerned with the different aspects of
Christian theology, of Christian teaching and the way that they fit together and the
way that they help to explain each other. So we have different areas, for example, Christology
is the study of the person and work of Jesus Christ, Ecclesiology the study of the church,
Pneumatology is the study of the person of the holy spirit. And we take each aspect of
Christian theology to understand how one can help us explain the other, and so on and so
forth, to try and map it into some sort of system in that rather formal sense. Now of
course the Christian tradition is itself very complex, in its 2000 year history different
teachings get understood in very different ways, so actually in practise systematic theology
can be a very intricate but rather messy and unsystematic affair.
Okay, we live in a very secular Europe and we're told that it's becoming more secular
all the time. In such a context why study systematic theology?
Gosh, well I imagine that that is a question that a lot of people will think of when they
hear the word theology and they hear the word Christianity. But what lies behind a question
like that, this idea that Europe is secular is an idea of what secularism is and what
it means, and the story would run something like this - that from around the 16th, 17th
Century we have the rise of modern science, we have the rise of rationalism, what's sometimes
called the enlightenment, and the modern world. And this involves the rolling back of a religious
imagination and a religious way of understanding things and a Christian way of understanding
things. And the idea is that as you roll back that territory as you demythologise, as some
people say, what you end up with is a neutral ground, a neutral ground that appeals only
to rationality, to pure reason, and particularly to the hard sciences. Now a lot of historians
of Christianity, and a lot of Christian theologians, make the argument that when you roll things
back like that what you're left with is not a neutral sphere at all, what you're left
with is competing pseudo-theologies. So if theology is about our highest aspirations,
our most important commitments, our deepest desires in some sense, things that transcend
the ordinary and the everyday, the idea is that what comes in with secularisation is
new priorities, new highest aspirations, new commitments and new forms of reason. And within
that Christian theology still has a very important argument to make about the kinds of commitments
that the Christian tradition has, and the kinds of reason that it offers. So it's not
a neutral clear space but it is one where there are still theological arguments going
on. Even if one is a committed atheist that is still a theological position and it's still
one that we need to discuss. And coupled to that we must also remember I think that so
many of the categories that we live with: categories of freedom, of justice, of simple
right and wrong, of our understanding of God, even if we reject a belief in God we still
have an understanding of what we're rejecting. So many of those categories come from the
Christian tradition, from our historical inheritance, and so it's absolutely crucial that we study
that tradition and we study that form of reason.
Yeah okay we study it but is there a sense in which when...every age likes to claim that
it's the modern age, and every age likes to claim that it has an insight that is unique
and that is somehow better. Tell me why can't I just say I have a better insight, I live
in the brightness of the early 21st Century?
Right, well again that reflects a commitment to a certain view of history namely one of
progress, so simply what we have now is better than what we had in the past that we march
forward. Now of course, in certain respects, that is absolutely true - we have made enormous
strides in medicine and science and technology, but the question is have any of those developments
made us any wiser? Have they made us any more savvy? Have they solved some of our most fundamental
and perplexing problems about human identity, about right and wrong, about how to live in
community, about whether the universe, for example, has any intrinsic meaning, whether
it points beyond itself to something beyond, to something that the Christian tradition
has called God? So despite our progress it's not entirely clear that we've become any wiser
and better at answering those fundamental questions, and a lot of theologians would
say that answers that were given in the past, by different generations, are in fact clearer
or nearer the mark than some modern ideas that we have now, philosophically and theologically.
And it's therefore very important to go back to those sources and see what they can teach us.
One of the things that I find is that when
I'm talking to a theologian like you, the model of what it means to understand is very
much a relational model, it's how I relate to society, how I relate to meaning, but when
I'm talking to other scholars, not theologians, often the model of understanding is almost
like collecting stamps and gathering information and arranging information in a... the computer
becomes the model. Is there a difference the way theologians think and the way we imagine
a computer to think?
Right, okay, this again represents quite a dramatic shift from the way that humans went
about their intellectual enquiry in centuries past and the way that they have done more
recently. So the kinds of sources we read historically are often written in the form
of dialogue, so Plato, the ancient Greek philosopher, writes in a dialogue. St Thomas Aquinas, who
I study, a 13th Century theologian writes all his work, not in a monologue form, but
as it would have happened in a conversation in a seminar in the University of Paris for
example. And all the time learning belongs within a community, between people conversationally,
because we teach each other. It's as simple as that: we teach each other and we learn
by conversation, by sharing ideas. It's the simple idea: two brains are better than one;
it's as simple as that. But then we get in the modern period, in the 17th Century for
example, the philosopher Frenchman Rene Descartes, who goes away on his own to think
on his own in isolation, to doubt everything, to try to find one piece of very certain knowledge,
and he comes up with the one piece of certain knowledge; 'I think, therefore I am', 'Cogito
ergo sum'. I think, therefore I am, this is an individual on his own and we get the idea
for the first time of the lone scholar, the lone investigator. Isaac Newton, the great
17th Century scientist, works very much in isolation on his own - this is the lone genius.
This is a very different understanding of the human intellectual enterprise, and one
that's quite alien to the way that Christianity and Christian theology and Christian philosophy
have understood their project if you like.
When you say you contrasted the lone genius to the dialogue of Plato, is it significant
that theology, down the centuries, has been done in communities? It's argument among churches,
it takes place almost in the coffee room more often than the library.
Very much so, partly because of this idea that as different viewpoints collide they
in turn change themselves and produce new insights. So providing fora, where ideas can
come together, can be enormously fruitful and generative. And this is why we have, for
example, departments of Theology and Religious Studies, such as we have at the University
of Nottingham, where scholars and students can come together in fruitful dialogue as
part of this theological exercise. Now you've only got 30 seconds. Someone wants
to read something or to start doing systematic theology, what do they do?
They read St Anselm's Proslogion, which was written in the 11th Century. It's very short,
it contains supposedly definitive proof of God's existence, but it's actually written
as a prayer. And the reason that that text is so important is that it demonstrates the
way that theologians are very careful what they say and how they use the word God. And
so often today we think it's very straight forward what we mean by that word and Anselm
teaches us a very fundamental lesson of Christian theology, and that's that we should be very
careful what we say in the presence of almighty God and how we use that word.
Simon Oliver, thank you very much. This is the view of one theologian on how to do theology
and you can see him actually doing some theology in this interview. Good luck with your work.
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