This is the first part of a new series developed through the Department of Philosophical Theology at Christ School of Theology, examining theological method, models, interpretation, and the logical and semantic conditions of theological inquiry.
The Question of Method
Theological disputes regularly present themselves as disputes about conclusions. One theologian avers that God acts in history while another worries that such language compromises divine transcendence; one insists upon the real presence of Christ in the Supper while another seeks a conceptual account capable of preserving what is taken to be the relevant biblical affirmations; one theologian speaks readily of divine simplicity while another suspects that the metaphysical apparatus required to sustain the doctrine creates more difficulties than it resolves. Yet beneath disagreements of this kind there usually lies another disagreement, frequently less explicit and sometimes more consequential: What counts as an appropriate way of arriving at a theological judgment in the first place?
The question of theological method therefore arises prior to many of theology's more familiar questions. Before one asks what theologians ought to conclude about some matter, one must ask what kinds of considerations legitimately bear upon the conclusion, how these considerations are related, what authority they possess, and according to what rules conflicting considerations are to be adjudicated. Method concerns, inter alia, what theologians count as evidence, what kinds of inference they permit, what distinctions they regard as legitimate, and what conditions a theological claim must satisfy if it is to be judged warranted.
The matter becomes still more difficult because theology does not operate within a single homogeneous discourse. Biblical texts, historical claims, creedal formulations, metaphysical assertions, phenomenological descriptions, liturgical practices, and logical consequences all appear within theological reasoning, though they plainly do not function in precisely the same way. The theologian who ignores these differences risks confusing the authority of a text with an interpretation of that text, an interpretation with a philosophical reconstruction of it, and that reconstruction with the reality about which the text putatively speaks. Accordingly, method is no mere preliminary housekeeping exercise. It belongs to theology's substantive intellectual work.
Method and Object
A method is ordinarily selected because of the object one seeks to understand. One does not investigate a mathematical structure in precisely the same way that one investigates a historical event, nor does one investigate a chemical reaction in the manner appropriate to interpreting a poem. The character of the object places constraints upon the procedures by which knowledge of that object may responsibly be sought.
This apparently innocent observation carries considerable theological weight. If theology has God as its ultimate object, then theological method cannot be determined wholly in advance by epistemological principles borrowed from some other domain. The theologian cannot simply announce a universally valid method and subsequently inquire whether God happens to fit within it. At least prima facie, the order must run in the other direction: what God is determines what could count as knowledge of God.
Christian theology intensifies the point because it claims that God is known through God's own acts of self-disclosure. Theology consequently begins within a peculiar epistemic situation. Its object is never simply an object standing passively before an autonomous observer. God is confessed as the one who creates the knower, sustains the knower, addresses the knower, judges the knower, and reconciles the knower. Theological knowledge, on such an account, cannot be understood simply as the successful application of a neutral human technique to a religious datum.
This does not entail intellectual obscurantism, nor does it grant theology dispensation from ordinary standards of argument. Quite the contrary. If theological claims purport to be true, then distinctions between valid and invalid inference, consistency and inconsistency, ambiguity and perspicuity, use and mention, entailment and non-entailment remain indispensable. The peculiar character of theology's object qualifies theological method without abolishing rational discipline.
Sources, Norms, and Procedures
It is useful here to distinguish three matters that theological discussions of method frequently conflate: sources, norms, and procedures.
A source supplies material for theological reflection. Scripture is a source; so are creeds, confessions, liturgical practices, historical testimony, philosophical arguments, and the accumulated conceptual vocabulary of the Christian tradition. Different theological traditions will disagree, of course, about the relative status of these sources, but identifying something as a source does not by itself determine what authority it possesses.
A norm performs another function. A norm governs theological judgment. Within classical Lutheran theology, Scripture does not stand merely as one theological source among several; it functions normatively in a manner in which Augustine, Aquinas, Luther, or the Formula of Concord does not. Precisely how such normativity is understood opens a host of hermeneutical questions, though the logical point can be made independently of their eventual resolution: the set of materials from which theology learns and the standards by which theological claims are judged need not be coextensive.
A procedure, finally, concerns what theologians do with sources under the governance of norms. They interpret texts, distinguish senses of terms, draw consequences, construct conceptual models, compare formulations, identify contradictions, trace historical development, and ask whether competing accounts preserve or obscure the phenomena requiring explanation. Much that is ordinarily called theological ‘method’ actually belongs at this procedural level.
Once these distinctions are made, certain familiar methodological quarrels become more perspicuous. A disagreement apparently concerning Scripture may turn out to concern an interpretive procedure; a disagreement ostensibly concerning metaphysics may concern the normative authority granted to some doctrinal formulation; a dispute about a theological model may finally rest upon disagreement about which biblical or confessional claims the model must preserve.
Method Does Not Manufacture Its Object
A perennial temptation arises whenever a method proves especially powerful. What begins as an instrument of inquiry gradually becomes a criterion of reality itself. Whatever the method cannot capture comes to be regarded as confused, meaningless, inaccessible, or unreal.
The history of philosophy provides abundant examples. What cannot be verified is declared meaningless; what cannot be phenomenologically given is placed in abeyance; what cannot be expressed within a particular logical language is treated as philosophically suspect; what cannot be naturalized is relegated to the realm of projection. Each maneuver may illuminate something important, though each can also convert a methodological decision into an ontological decree.
Theology must be especially attentive to this temptation. A theological method is made; God is not. Conceptual structures are constructed; the reality to which theological language refers is not thereby constructed. We formulate doctrines, distinguish concepts, erect models, and test their consequences, but these activities must not be confused with the reality they seek to articulate.
This distinction between the given and the made will become increasingly important as this series proceeds. Theologians necessarily make models. They select terms, introduce distinctions, formalize relations, and construct conceptual structures within which doctrinal claims can be understood. Such making is unavoidable and frequently fruitful. Difficulties begin when the structure of the model is silently transferred to the structure of reality, so that what belongs to our representation is treated as belonging ipso facto to that which is represented.
Caveat lector: the point does not entail that theological models are arbitrary. Some models represent their subject matter better than others. Some preserve relevant doctrinal affirmations while others distort them; some disclose consequences previously unnoticed while others conceal precisely what must be explained. Yet the distinction between model and modeled reality remains indispensable to judging any model at all.
Theological Method as Disciplined Judgment
We can now risk a provisional definition. Theological method is the disciplined ordering of sources, norms, concepts, and inferential procedures by which theologians seek truth concerning God and all things in relation to God.
Each part of this definition matters. Method is disciplined because theological inquiry cannot proceed merely by association or intuition. It involves ordering because sources, norms, concepts, and arguments do not arrive already assembled into a theological system. It seeks truth because theology claims more than internal coherence within a religious language-game. And its subject matter includes ‘all things in relation to God’ because theology has historically concerned creation, humanity, sin, history, church, sacrament, death, resurrection, and consummation precisely sub specie relationis ad Deum.
The phrase ‘seek truth’ should also remain firmly in view. Method does not guarantee truth. No procedure can do that. A perfectly executed inference may proceed from a false premise; an internally coherent theological model may misdescribe reality; an elegant conceptual system may succeed brilliantly at explaining claims that ought themselves to be rejected. Method disciplines judgment without rendering judgment apodictic.
The theologian therefore inhabits an unavoidable tension. Theology requires method because thinking without methodological discipline easily collapses into equivocation, inconsistency, and rhetorical assertion. Yet theology must also submit its methods to criticism because no human method enjoys an unrestricted view of its object. The method serves the inquiry; the inquiry does not exist to vindicate the method.
From Method to Models
This brings us to the question that will occupy the next stage of the argument. Once theologians begin ordering doctrinal affirmations, clarifying their relations, and asking what must be true if those affirmations are true, they inevitably begin constructing models. They may not call them models, and they may resist the vocabulary of model theory altogether, but the activity remains recognizable. Certain entities are assumed, relations among them are specified, propositions are held fixed, and the consequences of alternative interpretations are explored.
Accordingly, the next question is unavoidable: What is a theological model?
Answering it will require us to distinguish a model from a theory, a theory from its interpretation, an interpretation from the reality interpreted, and satisfaction within a structure from truth simpliciter. These distinctions might initially appear technical. In fact, they bear directly upon some of theology's oldest disputes, because theologians have often disagreed less about the sentences they confess than about the structures within which those sentences are taken to be true.
The question of method thus leads naturally to the question of models. And once models enter the discussion, logic, semantics, and ontology cannot remain far behind.
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