Prolegomena to Disputationes Theologicae VI: Why Disputation?

“Theology reaches its determinations responsibly only by passing through genuine questions and serious objections.”

This essay is the sixth and final of the Prolegomena to Disputationes Theologicae, a series in philosophical theology produced through the Department of Philosophical Theology at Christ School of Theology. Together, these essays articulate the methodological foundations of the larger Disputationes Theologicae project by recovering the proper order of theological inquiry. They proceed from the conviction that theology exists because these questions exist and that theology’s first responsibility is to render Christian doctrine intelligible without diminishing, translating away, or replacing the reality to which it refers. Having argued that theology proceeds through an ordered movement from intelligibility to reference, truth, appropriation, and the ministerial use of reason, the present essay explains why these inquiries properly assume the form of disputation rather than mere exposition.

Every theological work embodies a judgment not only about its conclusions but also about the manner in which theological truth ought to be sought. The form of a work is therefore never merely literary. It reveals what the author believes theology to be, how theological judgments are reached, and what responsibilities attend the act of making them.

A theology organized primarily as exposition may suggest that the principal task is to state, arrange, and explain conclusions already secured. Such a form may be entirely appropriate when the aim is instruction, confession, catechesis, or the orderly presentation of doctrine. Yet exposition alone can conceal the labor by which theological conclusions are responsibly reached. It may allow assertions to appear self-evident, distinctions to appear inevitable, and inherited formulations to appear as though they had never been contested.

Disputationes Theologicae proceeds differently. It is organized as a sequence of disputations because theological judgment is not responsibly reached by assertion alone. It must pass through questions, objections, distinctions, counterarguments, and determinations. Theology must not merely announce what it believes; it must also show why a judgment should be made, what alternatives have been considered, what objections might defeat it, and what distinctions permit one conclusion rather than another.

Theology therefore advances by disciplined judgment rather than by declaration alone. Declaration may confess what is true, but disputation examines whether the declaration has been responsibly understood and whether the reasoning that accompanies it can withstand serious objection.

This conviction is older than the modern university. The medieval disputation was not originally an exercise in rhetorical display or intellectual combat. It was a disciplined method for bringing a question to determination. A question was formulated because something genuinely required judgment. Objections were presented because the proposed conclusion could not be responsibly accepted until competing possibilities had received a serious hearing. Distinctions were introduced because apparent contradictions often arose from ambiguity, equivocation, or the failure to specify the respect in which a predicate was being used.

The determination came only after this work had been completed. It did not merely restate the thesis with greater confidence. It represented a judgment that had passed through the strongest available reasons against it.

The Reformers inherited this disputational discipline while transforming its theological center. Luther’s disputations remain exemplary not because they reproduce medieval conventions mechanically but because they reveal how theological judgment proceeds under the Word and under the cross. The Heidelberg Disputation, for example, does not merely assert that the theology of the cross is preferable to the theology of glory. It exposes the assumptions by which human reason identifies divine power, goodness, wisdom, and righteousness, and it subjects those assumptions to the judgment of God’s self-disclosure in the crucified Christ.

Theological truth is not protected from objection by being removed from criticism. It becomes clearer when the objections disclose what has been assumed, confused, or left unexamined. The cross does not exempt theology from reasoning; it judges the expectations under which reasoning has proceeded.

The present project stands consciously within this tradition. Disputation is employed not as an antiquarian literary form but as a discipline of theological responsibility. Its purpose is neither to imitate scholastic conventions nor to cultivate an appearance of intellectual rigor. Its purpose is to make visible the path by which a theological conclusion is reached.

Disputation begins by acknowledging that serious questions deserve serious answers. It requires that opposing positions be represented fairly before they are criticized and that objections possess genuine argumentative force. It refuses to confuse rhetorical confidence with theological adequacy or inherited authority with completed argument.

Most importantly, disputation recognizes that theological determination is achieved rather than assumed. A conclusion becomes responsible only when theology has risked the possibility that its initial formulation may be confused, inadequate, or false.

This willingness to risk correction belongs to theological realism. If theology concerns a reality that exists independently of our discourse, then theological formulations must remain answerable to that reality. They cannot be secured merely by ecclesial repetition, institutional authority, or the intensity with which they are believed. The theologian must be prepared to revise a description, sharpen a distinction, abandon an argument, or correct a model whenever these fail to preserve the reality theology intends.

Disputation is therefore not a sign of uncertainty about whether truth exists. It is the form taken by confidence that truth exceeds our first attempts to articulate it.

Each disputation within this project consequently follows a common intellectual movement. A question is posed because theology must first identify what genuinely requires judgment. The question is not a decorative heading placed over conclusions already known, but an inquiry that opens a space within which more than one answer initially appears possible.

A thesis is then proposed because theology must risk saying something definite. Endless inquiry without provisional determination eventually becomes an evasion of responsibility. The theologian must finally state what is judged to be the case, even while recognizing that every finite formulation remains open to refinement.

Objections are presented because a thesis that cannot be seriously opposed has not yet been adequately tested. The objections must not be caricatures devised merely to make the proposed position appear stronger. They must represent actual alternatives, genuine conceptual difficulties, and arguments capable of overturning the thesis if they succeed.

Responses follow because criticism alone never completes theology’s task. To expose difficulty is necessary, but theology cannot remain content with diagnosis. It must determine whether the objection rests upon a true contradiction, a category mistake, an equivocation, a false presupposition, an inadequate model, or a genuine weakness within the proposed thesis.

Finally, a determination is reached. This determination is neither an infallible pronouncement nor a merely personal preference. It is the most responsible judgment presently available after the question, thesis, objections, distinctions, and responses have been brought into relation.

The determination therefore possesses genuine force without claiming finality. It may become the presupposition of subsequent inquiry while remaining open to correction should later argument disclose an inadequacy not previously seen.

This disputational order gathers into a single intellectual practice the methodological commitments established throughout the preceding prolegomena. Theology begins because the questions that give rise to theology cannot finally be avoided. Christian doctrine must become intelligible because unintelligible assertions cannot be responsibly affirmed or denied.

Theological language must genuinely refer because discourse that fails to identify its subject cannot become true of that subject. Truth must precede appropriation because faith receives its object rather than creating it. Reason must remain under the Word because disciplined thought serves revelation without constituting its content.

Disputation integrates these commitments by requiring each theological judgment to move visibly through them. It asks what a claim means, what reality it identifies, under what conditions it could be true, what objections threaten it, and how reason may clarify the claim without replacing its revelatory ground.

For this reason, disputation is the natural form of theological realism. Realism requires more than confidence that theological claims are true. It requires accountability to the realities those claims intend.

Every determination must answer first to God’s self-disclosure as witnessed in Scripture. It must also attend to the catholic and confessional traditions through which the Church has received, tested, and articulated that witness. Yet these authorities do not exempt theology from argument. Scripture must be interpreted, tradition must be judged, and doctrinal formulations must be examined for conceptual coherence, referential continuity, and truth.

Theological determination must therefore remain accountable to exegesis, historical evidence, logical validity, semantic clarity, ontological adequacy, and serious competing proposals. None of these constitutes a second revelation or possesses authority over the Word of God. Each nevertheless assists theology in distinguishing responsible judgment from assertion, repetition, or projection.

This is why the disputations that follow engage philosophers, biblical scholars, historians, analytic theologians, systematic theologians, and representatives of other intellectual traditions. Reality is not divided according to the administrative boundaries of academic departments. Questions concerning language, reference, truth, divine action, creation, incarnation, metaphysics, revelation, and human agency continually cross disciplinary lines.

Responsible theology must therefore enter conversation across these fields while refusing to surrender its own theological center. It must be willing to learn from philosophy without allowing philosophy to determine the content of revelation, to receive historical correction without reducing doctrine to historical development, and to engage scientific description without assuming that scientific explanation exhausts reality.

The disputational form provides a disciplined means of conducting these conversations. It permits theology to receive objections from outside its customary vocabulary while asking whether the assumptions carried by those objections are themselves adequate. It allows theology to distinguish genuine criticism from the demand that Christian doctrine translate itself into a conceptual scheme incapable of receiving its claims.

Disputation also guards against two opposite temptations that continually threaten theological inquiry. The first is endless criticism without constructive judgment. The second is premature certainty without serious examination.

The first temptation often presents itself as intellectual sophistication. It delights in exposing tensions, destabilizing concepts, tracing hidden interests, and demonstrating the historical contingency of theological formulations. Such criticism may perform an important service, especially where theology has concealed its assumptions or protected itself from correction.

Yet criticism becomes sterile when it refuses the responsibility of determination. Theology cannot live indefinitely from the exposure of other people’s mistakes. It must eventually say what should be affirmed, how the matter ought to be understood, and why one judgment is more adequate than another.

The second temptation mistakes inherited formulations for arguments already completed. It assumes that because a statement is traditional, confessional, or ecclesially authorized, the theological work required to understand it has already been accomplished for every later context.

Yet fidelity cannot consist in repetition alone. A formula may be repeated while its meaning is no longer understood, its referent has been altered, or the conceptual assumptions supporting it have quietly changed. Responsible retrieval therefore requires renewed disputation.

Both temptations impoverish theology. Criticism without determination leaves theology unable to confess. Determination without criticism leaves theology unable to distinguish confession from habit.

Every genuine objection deserves careful consideration, but every genuine objection also deserves an answer. Theological criticism reaches its proper end only when it contributes to a more adequate account of Christian doctrine.

For this reason, Disputationes Theologicae seeks neither novelty for its own sake nor the mere preservation of inherited formulations. It seeks disciplined reconstruction. Earlier distinctions are retrieved where they remain necessary, revised where they have become inadequate, and abandoned where they obscure the reality they were intended to clarify.

Objections are sharpened rather than softened because a theological position gains nothing by defeating a weaker argument than the one actually advanced. Positive determinations are offered only after competing possibilities have received their strongest plausible formulation.

This method requires a kind of intellectual charity more demanding than politeness. To represent an opponent fairly is to allow that opponent’s argument to threaten one’s own. It is to recognize that the truth may require a distinction one has not yet made or a correction one would prefer not to receive.

Such charity is not opposed to judgment. It is one of the conditions under which judgment becomes responsible.

The disputational form also explains the cumulative structure of the project. No disputation is intended to stand entirely alone. Each arises from questions and distinctions established earlier, and each contributes determinations upon which later inquiries depend.

The work therefore possesses an architectonic order. Questions of intelligibility precede questions of reference; questions of reference precede judgments of truth; judgments of truth prepare for doctrines of revelation, creation, Christology, reconciliation, ecclesiology, and eschatology. Later disputations may refine earlier judgments, but they cannot responsibly bypass them.

The reader is therefore asked to approach the work not merely as a collection of independent essays but as a sustained exercise in theological reasoning. The argument develops cumulatively, and its later claims presuppose the methodological debts discharged in the prolegomena and in the disputations that precede them.

Such cumulative inquiry does not imply that theology will eventually construct a system from which every question and objection has been eliminated. Finite theological understanding remains finite, and every determination remains subject to the possibility of correction.

Yet unfinished inquiry need not become skepticism. Theology may make genuine progress whenever its judgments become more intelligible, its terms more securely referential, its claims more adequately truth-directed, and its reasoning more deeply accountable to revelation.

Progress in theology does not require that every mystery be resolved. It requires that confusion not be protected under the name of mystery, that contradiction not be excused as paradox without examination, and that inherited language not be preserved after its referent has been lost.

This is the purpose of disputation. It is not controversy for its own sake, academic display, dialectical victory, or the cultivation of theological novelty. It is disciplined judgment undertaken in the confidence that Christian doctrine concerns realities that can be understood more responsibly because God has first made himself known.

The six prolegomena have therefore established the order governing the work that follows. Theology exists because the questions to which it responds are real and unavoidable. Christian doctrine must become intelligible if it is to be responsibly considered. Its language must genuinely refer if it is to remain about God rather than about religious discourse alone.

Its judgments must be capable of truth because theology is not finally justified by usefulness, existential power, or ecclesial continuity. Its appropriation must follow truth because faith receives rather than creates its object. Reason must remain under the Word because philosophy serves revelation best when it clarifies what revelation gives without presuming to govern it.

Disputation is the form in which these commitments become a theological practice. It poses the question, risks the thesis, hears the objection, makes the distinction, offers the response, and reaches a determination.

The determinations that follow are not offered as the final possession of divine truth. They are offered as responsible judgments concerning a reality that precedes them, judges them, and makes their correction possible.

The prolegomena are now complete. The questions have established the order, the method has been identified, and reason has been assigned its office under the Word.

The disputations may now begin.