History of Theology

History of Theology

By Wayne L. Fehr

"Theology," in Anselm's classic formu­lation, is "faith seeking understanding." "Faith" may be regarded as a stance of the whole person towards God, charac­terized by radical trust, hope, love, and commitment. In the Christian view, faith is a response to "revelation," i.e., to a divine initiative recognized to be present and operative in a mysterious way within the concrete history of the human race. When human reason attends to this divine self-communication, it can discover important truths about God and the created world, and about the relationship between them. The intellectual effort to appreciate, understand, and order these truths—an activity of reason in obedience to revelation—is precisely what is meant by "theology."

Since Christian faith regards divine revelation as a reality achieved and mediated in certain unrepeatable events, theology must always be oriented towards historical realities (an attitude of "listen­ing" to the historically given "Word of God"). At the same time, the effort to understand these divinely given truths involves the use of all the resources of human reason, e.g., the insights and modes of thought of philosophy, and there is always a rational component in theology which may even take the form of speculation. The intellectual enterprise of theology, therefore, is characterized by a certain polarity, which can be expressed in a series of familiar oppositions: revela­tion and reason, authority and rational argument, scripture and philosophy, "positive" and speculative. In the history of theology, one can notice an alternation of emphasis on one side or the other of this polarity.

Earliest Period: the Primitive Church

The very earliest period of Christian theology is the time of the "primitive church," when most of the NT writings were produced. Although these texts have become the primary source for all later theology, they do not contain any kind of systematic, speculative treatment of the mystery of Christ. They bear witness to the events which gave rise to Christian faith, above all to the person of Jesus the crucified and risen one. In general, the first believers interpreted the event of Jesus against the background of Jewish faith. Jesus was regarded as Messiah (Christos in Greek), and texts of the Hebrew scriptures, especially the Prophets, were interpreted as predicting and foreshadowing him. Initially there was a strong eschatological awareness and an expectation of the imminent return of Jesus which would bring about the consummation of the world and its history. When the event of Jesus' return did not take place, the church had to develop a somewhat different view of God's plan for history. The most promi­nent example is the theology of history found in Luke's two-volume work. The most profound, difficult, yet rewarding texts in the NT canon are the letters of St. Paul. In later centuries, it was especially his Letter to the Romans which had an important influence on many great thinkers.

The Patristic Period

As Christianity emerged from the matrix of Judaism and gradually became a religion of the Roman Empire, theology underwent a transformation involving the creative use of Hellenistic thought forms to express the truths of the faith. There are indications of this shift in the NT itself, but the decisive turn to the world of Greco-Roman culture came with the works of the Apologists in the early and middle second century. This led toward the rich and intense theological activity of the following four centuries (the period of the Fathers).

Theology as a self-conscious intellec­tual project really began only as individ­uals educated in the heritage of Greece (especially its philosophy) set themselves to articulate and defend the truths of Christian faith. The first attempts at using Greek philosophical terms to talk about Christ were apologetic in intent. That is, they wished so to understand the message of Christianity that it could be com­mended to the mentality of educated people of good will in the dominant culture. In order to do this, there was need of "bridge" concepts which could bring the mystery of Christ into some intelligible correlation with the thought-world of Hellenistic culture. A good example of this is found in the thought of Justin Martyr, who made use of the Stoic term logos.

In the late second century, Irenaeus elaborated and defended the essential Christian beliefs against the speculative and mythological distortion of Gnostic­ism. He appealed to the bishops as reliable possessors of the authentic apos­tolic teaching, summed up in the Church's "rule of faith." He also achieved a profound speculative understanding of Christ as the "recapitulation" of the whole human race.

In the third century, Origen was a figure of outstanding importance for the development of theology. Like Clement, his predecessor as director of the famous Catechetical School of Alexandria, he sought after a Christian "knowledge" (gnosis) which went beyond simple faith. An indefatigable scholar, Origen edited the text of the Bible and wrote many exegetical works. He was also the first truly systematic speculative thinker of the Christian tradition. Influenced by Greek philosophy, especially Plato, he constructed a coherent edifice of thought in which he interpreted the traditional-beliefs of the church in an original way. His influence upon succeeding thinkers in the East was strong and lasting, even though some of his ideas were later condemned by the church as heretical.

The fourth and fifth centuries were a time of decisive importance for the for­mation of the basic doctrines of the church on the Trinity, the divine-human mystery of Christ, and grace. A number of great theologians contributed to this process by defending and clarifying dis­puted points of Christian faith. Especially worthy of mention are Athanasius, the champion of the faith of Nicaea against Arianism; the "Cappadocians" (Gregory of Nyssa, Basil, Gregory of Nazianzus) who helped clarify the full divinity of the Holy Spirit and worked out the termi­nology for distinguishing the threeness and oneness of God; and Cyril of Alex­andria, who affirmed the truth of the Incarnation against the Nestorian ten­dency to separate the man Jesus from the God who dwelt within him.

Augustine of Hippo was perhaps the greatest of the Fathers, whose theolog­ical writings synthesized many of the riches of the patristic period. He was deeply religious and highly speculative at the same time, and a master of rhetoric. In controversy with the Donatists, he worked out an understanding of church and sacraments which became normative for the Western Church. In controversy with Pelagius, he elaborated a theology of sin and grace which entered lastingly into the consciousness of the church. His great work on the Trinity was a master­piece of creative meditation on an inex­haustible mystery. Augustine's works were a rich legacy for the medieval period, and his influence has continued to be all-pervasive in western theology down to the present day.

The Medieval Period

Early medieval theology began with the revival of learning under the leader­ship of Alcuin in Charlemagne's time. The method of this monastic style of theology was the meditation and inter­pretation of the sacred text: first and foremost of the Bible, and secondarily of the patristic texts which had survived the collapse of Roman civilization and the chaos of the dark centuries. This theology was motivated not by a speculative in­terest but rather by the desire for union with God through loving attention to the truth revealed by him. It thus showed a concentration on the historical pole of theology, i.e., the authority of divine revelation as contained in the Bible and the Fathers.

In the eleventh century, Anselm of Canterbury showed the beginnings of a new way of treating the material of scripture and tradition. The form of his work was that of a pious meditation, sometimes in the form of a prayer. But his mind searched out the intrinisic in­telligibility of what he believed, as he attempted to discover rationes necessariae for such mysteries as the Trinity and the Incarnation. His thought was metaphys­ical, though not dependent on Aristotle, and dialectical, though not yet expressed in the later technical form of the Quaestio. Because of this rigorous rational char­acter of his theology, Anselm is regarded as the Father of Scholasticism.

In the twelfth century, the dialectical use of human reason became increasingly important in theology. Abelard, espe­cially in his work Sic et Non, helped to elaborate what eventually became the standard method of scholastic theology, the Quaestio. As this was employed later by Thomas Aquinas and others, it fol­lowed a more or less standard methodical format. A question would be proposed; evidence both pro and con would be cited (scripture texts, opinions of the Fathers, philosophical arguments); then the prob­lem would be resolved through rational argument, often by means of the finely drawn distinctions; finally, responses would be given to each of the contrary opinions or arguments, so as to defend the position taken.

A further development of great impor­tance for scholastic theology was the translation of Aristotle's works from Arabic and Greek in the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries. This ancient Greek philosopher was quickly recog­nized to be not only a master of logical reasoning but also a teacher of the most sophisticated and comprehensive knowl­edge of the real world. This human wisdom, quite independent of revelation and the church's tradition, was fascinat­ing, even seductive, for many of the best minds of the thirteenth century.

It was Albert the Great and his brilliant student Thomas Aquinas who deliber­ately took Aristotle's philosophy as a new resource for Christian theology. In effect, Aristotle's doctrine, especially his metaphysics, became a speculative frame work for thinking systematically about the Christian view of reality. In his great works, the Summa Theologica, Thomas synthesized the human, rational wisdom of Aristotle (subject, of course, to some corrections) with the divine, revealed truths of the Christian tradition.

The influence of Thomas Aquinas stamped Catholic thought with a charac­teristic concern to give full value to human reason, while still subordinating it to divine revelation. His confident use of reason reflected his conviction of the integrity and intrinsic intelligibility of the created world, as well as the harmony between truths knowable by human reason and the higher truths knowable only through divine revelation.

Looking at scholasticism as a whole, one must recognize that it was a great work of human reason, taking up the data of revelation (scripture and the Fathers) as then known and understood, and integrating them with the newest and best human wisdom available to them (especially as formulated in Aristotle's philosophy). It thus showed a remarkable balance between the two poles of history and speculation, authority and human reason.

There were, however, undeniable weak­nesses and dangers in the whole scholastic method. The enthusiasm for rational arguments and logical distinctions could lead away from sufficient attention to the ''positive" basis of theology, i.e., scripture and the Fathers. Moreover, medieval thinkers in general lacked a true historical sense in dealing with texts. The dialectical method could and did lead to excessive and useless subtlety. Finally, the forma­tion of "schools" led, in later generations, to a narrow formalism in maintaining the technical terms and special doctrines of particular schools.

These faults showed up especially in the period following the great creative work of the thirteenth century. The fourteenth and fifteenth centuries are generally regarded as a time of decadence for scholastic theology. The important intellectual movement of nominalism, stemming from William of Ockham, had a significant effect on theology in this period. By attributing the existing order of reality to the absolute and unrestricted freedom of God, this mentality seemed to deny the intrinsic intelligibility of things. In effect, nominalism withdrew almost all the data of faith from the realm of reason. The consequences were a split between religion and rational knowledge, a distrust of reason, and often enough a kind of fideism. The Thomistic synthesis of faith and reason had been lost.

Sixteenth Century: Reformation and Council of Trent

The new humanism of the Renaissance had already begun to turn away from scholasticism and towards the texts of Christian antiquity, newly edited, for a fresh appreciation of Christianity, when Martin Luther initiated the great religious upheaval of the sixteenth century. Lu­ther's concern for the personal certainty of salvation led him to a creative re­discovery of the meaning of some key biblical texts, and on the basis of this new understanding he was led gradually to a radical and comprehensive critique of existing forms of church life and thought. In his return to scripture as the unique source of Christian truth, he rejected vehemently the decadent scholasticism which he knew, and even went so far at times as to denigrate reason itself. His style of thought was spiritual, personal, almost "existential" in a modem sense, as well as biblical. In all this, he initiated a style of theology in striking contrast to the calm, objective, rational method of Thomas Aquinas.

A more systematic theologian of the Reformation was John Calvin, who de­veloped the basic principles of Protestantism in a distinctive way that would influence large areas of Europe and, eventually. North America. His Institutes (Institutio Christianae Religionis) has become a classic work of the Western theological tradition.

The Catholic response to Luther and the other Reformers was slow in coming. There were several decades of bitter polemics between Catholic and Protes­tant writers, with little mutual under­standing. Finally, the moderate and careful theological work of the Council of Trent reaffirmed and explained au­thentic Catholic doctrine in scholastic terms, in such a way as to reject clearly the teachings of Luther and the other Reformers. This restatement of Catholic faith would serve, then, as the unques­tioned basis for Catholic life and theology for centuries to follow.

An obvious consequence of the Ref­ormation struggles and the Catholic response at Trent was that Catholic theology was bound to be defensive and conservative in the following period. Inevitably, too, there were many contro­versial writings aimed against the errors of the Protestants. The most notable such controversialist was the Jesuit Robert Bellarmine.

Thomistic thought was kept alive and enriched during the sixteenth and seven­teenth centuries especially by the work of the great Dominican school of theology at Salamanca, founded by Francisco de Vitoria. His student Melchior Cano de­voted explicit methodological attention to the positive sources of Catholic spec­ulative theology in his influential work, De Locis Theologicis. Later representa­tives of this school were Banez and Medina, who both published commen­taries on Thomas' Summa Theologica. These theologians were part of a notable series of gifted commentators on Thomas which includes the names of Capreolus, Cajetan, and John of St. Thomas. Scholastic thought found vital expression also in the more eclectic theologians of the Jesuit school, especially in the outstand­ing figure of Suarez.

Seventeenth Century: Historical Scholarship

The seventeenth century also saw the beginning of scholarly historical study of the Fathers and of church history. Most prominent in this work were the Benedic­tine monks of the Congregation of St. Maur in France (the Maurists), who carried out solid and valuable patristic research. The most famous of these were Mabillon and Montfaucon. Their work continued in the eighteenth century, and was paralleled by the research done then in Germany at the Benedictine Abbey of Sankt Blasien under the leadership of Martin Gerbert. Outstanding scholars such as Maffei and Muratori were also active in Italy at the same time. In the long run, this historical work would greatly enrich Catholic theology, even though for a long time it appeared to have little relation to current scholastic thought.

Eighteenth Century: The Enlightenment

Theology entered into a new epoch in the eighteenth century under the impact of the dominant intellectual culture of the Enlightenment. The glorification of reason was accompanied by a profound distrust of tradition and authority, as well as a disbelief in the supernatural. Deistic rationalism and naturalism re­jected the belief in a divine revelation containing truths beyond human reason. Christianity was valued, at most, as embodying the principles of the universal natural religion of reason. Such a radical challenge to the very basis and presup­positions of Christian theology was bound to have an effect on the work of theo­logians.

Among some Protestant churchmen and theologians during the latter half of the eighteenth century, there was a drastic reinterpretation of the content of Christian faith along rationalistic lines. The pastoral concern to relate the church's beliefs to people's moral life led to a soft-pedaling if not outright denial of those doctrines which seemed irrelevant, e.g., not only original sin but even the divinity of Christ and the Trinity. Such an attitude to the Church's traditional beliefs was supported by the new methods of biblical criticism, represented by Ernesti, Michaelis, and Semler, which were uncovering the thor­oughly human character and historical relativity of both the Bible and later church tradition.

Catholic theologians in this same peri­od were somewhat slower to respond to the Zeitgeist and reluctant to cast away any of the dogmatic substance of their tradition. Their thought was still formu­lated largely in the fixed categories of a sterile scholasticism, insufficiently ori­ented to the sources of theology, which operated within the limits set by its own conceptuality. There was, however, a growing awareness of the inadequacy of scholasticism for the needs of the times. Catholic theology needed a new specula­tive framework and new intellectual resources for restating the abiding truth of this tradition, but finding this new form of thought would be a slow, difficult, and ambiguous process.

Nineteenth Century

The nineteenth century was a time of rich and intense theological activity, as Christian believers attempted to under­stand and defend their faith in a quite new intellectual setting. A few of the problems and needs of theology in this period can be mentioned. The Enlight­enment denial of revelation had to be countered in some way, so as to vindicate the most basic Christian conviction that God has spoken in history. Then, the new methods of critical-historical study of the Bible and the history of dogma raised serious problems for theology. Furthermore, as already noted, theology needed to turn to new intellectual resources for the rational, speculative interpretation of its material, and it was natural to look to contemporary philosophers such as Schelling and Hegel. Finally, theology had to deal with the human phenomenon of religion which had now become the object of much study and philosophical analysis. In all these problem areas, faith and reason were in new forms of tension, and the age-old polarity between the historical and the speculative took on new urgency.

On the Protestant side, the towering figure was Schleiermacher, whose influ­ence upon all subsequent Protestant theology has been enormous. Inspired by the mentality of German Romanticism, he initiated a new way of grounding theology in the immediacy of religious feeling. His early work, Speeches on Religion, has become a modern classic of theological literature. His great life-work was The Christian Faith, in which he treated all the traditional doctrines of Christianity from his novel methodo­logical viewpoint.

On the Catholic side, the early decades of the century saw some remarkable theological initiatives in Germany— departing from the fossilized scholastic­ism of the preceding century, but also going beyond the shallow rationalism of the Enlightenment. The most original and influential of the new movements in Catholic theology was the "Catholic Tubingen School." The initiator and seminal thinker of this tradition was J.S. Drey, whose major publication was a three-volume Apologetics. His most bril­liant and famous student was Jokann Adam Möhler, who is still remembered for his Romantic study of the church (The Unity in the Church) and his great controversial work Symbolism. Other members of this group were the moral theologian Hirscher, the church historian Hefele, and the dogmatic theologians Staudenmaier and Kuhn. The dominant concern of this style of theology was to synthesize the historical and the specu­lative. As a group, they were remarkably open to the results of the new historical studies of the Bible and church history, but at the same time they entered into serious confrontation with the dominant philosophical currents of the age (Kant, Fichte, Schelling, Hegel). In general, their goal was to discover a rationally intelligible system in the seemingly dis­parate and accidental data of history (in particular, of the history of Christianity). The early works of this tradition were strongly influenced by the thought-world of German Romanticism.

In England, John Henry Newman was a lone figure of striking originality in his efforts to do justice to the historical dimension of the church and of church beliefs. His theory of the development of doctrine shows some affinities with the thought of Drey and Möhler, although he had not read their works.

The openness to contemporary culture and the sense of history which had characterized much Catholic theology in the first half of the nineteenth century gradually gave way to a quite different mentality in the later decades. A new enthusiasm for the theology of the great scholastic thinkers now became wide­spread and eventually dominant, eclipsing the viewpoint of the Catholic Tübingen School and other liberal thinkers. This "neo-scholasticism" was advocated espe­cially by Kleutgen, Clemens, Schrader, and Schäzler. It was strongly promoted by the papacy in the encyclical Aeterni Patris (1879), which established Thomas Aquinas as the normative teacher of Catholic theology and directed Catholic scholars to the recovery of his thought.

The triumph of neo-scholasticism was related to the Catholic Church's very difficult defensive situation in the modern world. In the face of the rationalism, naturalism, and historical relativism of the nineteenth century, the church re­treated into a solid fortress of medieval thought which seemed uniquely suited to express the perennial truths of Catholic faith. Hence, any subsequent efforts within the church to think the meaning of the faith in non-scholastic terms were inevitably regarded by church authorities as heretical departures from the norma­tive truth of revelation. This had a dampening effect on creative theological work during the period between Aeterni Patris and the Second Vatican Council.

The urgent problems raised by modern­ity did not, however, go away. Towards the end of the nineteenth century and in the opening years of the twentieth century, a number of Catholic thinkers attempted to face honestly the new critical-historical understanding of the Bible, the new cultural mentality of post-Enlightenment Europe, and the pastoral need to re-think Catholic beliefs in relation to modern spiritual experience. Most prominent among these were Blondel, von Hügel, Loisy, and Tyrrell. For the most part, they did not succeed in articulating an understanding of the faith which church authorities could recognize as orthodox. In the end, the pope con­demned a number of ideas which were grouped together under the term "Mod­ernism,"and both Loisy and Tyrrell were excommunicated (although neither Blon­del nor von Hügel were singled out for condemnation).

Twentieth Century: Renewal of Catholic Theology

The renewal of Catholic theology in the twentieth century was prepared by a number of concurrent movements in the church: biblical and patristic studies, the liturgical movement, the ecumenical movement. In France, the slogan ressourcement was coined to characterize the movement back to the sources of Christian faith in the Bible and the patristic authors. The Dominicans Chenu and Congar, and the Jesuits de Lubac and Danielou did valuable work in historical theology during the 1930's and 1940's.

In Germany, Karl Rahner was un­doubtedly the single most influential figure in recent Catholic theology. Work­ing within the general ambience of neo-scholasticism, he developed a theological anthropology inspired by modern thought which enabled him to reformulate the meaning of all the church's doctrines in a profound new way.

In the Netherlands, Edward Schillebeeckx's early work in sacramental theology (Christ the Sacrament of En­counter with God) shed a new light on the whole scholastic treatise concerning the sacraments, and helped to renew the sacramental life of the church.

The watershed event for recent Catho­lic theology war the Second Vatican Council. At this meeting of the world's Catholic bishops, new currents of thought found their way into the official docu­ments of the church. The absolute he­gemony of neo-scholastic thought was broken, and there was a new openness in the Catholic Church for a variety of theological approaches. Moreover, the pastoral thrust of the Council oriented Catholic theologians to the values and needs of the larger world, in an ecumen­ical openness to other Christian churches and other religions.

This survey will end with a brief look at the post-conciliar situation in Catholic theology. First of all, there is no longer one normative Catholic theology, but rather a pluralism of theological meth­ods. Secondly, the problem of history has become acute, in a way that can no longer be avoided. A good example of a dogmatic theologian facing this challenge honestly is Schillebeeckx in his more recent works (Jesus, Christ, Ministry, The Church with a Human Face). Third­ly, theology is becoming increasingly ecumenical, trying to take into account the varied experiences and intellectual traditions of all the branches of Chris­tianity (and even of non-christian relig­ions). Finally, many theologians have a new concern to let their thought be relevant to the struggle for justice and peace (political theology, liberation the­ology).

It is perhaps inevitable, in a situation of so much ferment and variety, that there is also considerable disagreement and confusion among Catholic theolo­gians. There are differences of both method and substance which cannot be mediated without getting to the most fundamental presuppositions of the re­spective thinkers. When the differences seem to bear on essentials of Catholic faith, this pluralism can be painful.

These pains accompany the Catholic Church's resolute openness to the modern world which was affirmed at the Second Vatican Council. Faith seeking under­standing today has a difficult task, but the rewards of finding a truly contem­porary understanding that is faithful to revealed truth are correspondingly great. Theology is, therefore, significantly in the service of the faith of present-day believers.

Bibliography. Karl Barth, Protestant Theology in the Nineteenth Century: its Background and History, Valley Forge, PA: Judson Press, 1973. Yves M.-J. Congar, A History of Theology, Garden City, NY; Doubleday, 1968. Martin Grabmann. Die Geschichte der katholischen Theologie seit dem Ausgang der Väterzeit, Freiburg im Breisgau: Herder & Co., 1933. John Macquarrie, Twentieth-Century Relig­ious Thought: the Frontiers of Philosophy and Theology, 1900-1980, New York: Scribner, 1981. Mark Schoof, A Survey of Catholic Theology, 1800-1970, New York: Paulist Newman Press, and Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1970.

Source: Komonchak/Collins/Lane, The New Dictionary of Theology.