What Makes a Theologian?
July 21, 2010
Some food for thought on what it means to do theology and be a theologian…
From James R. Payton Jr., Light from the Christian East: An Introduction to the Orthodox Tradition (Downers Grove: IVP, 2007).
“Orthodoxy, faithful to its own cultural background, has little confidence in human reason when it begins to speak about God” (59).
“This has not led EC to a lack of interest in knowledge of God. To the contrary, Orthodoxy manifests a deep desire to know God, but in the biblical sense of what it means to know someone. …knowing God means having and intimate relationship with him, not just a wealth of data about him. For Orthodoxy, to know God in this way is necessary for all theology and theologizing. Knowing God requires much more—and yet paradoxically much less—than mastering a wealth of reveled information about God. Knowing God in this sense means communion with him, living in openness toward and wonder before him. Knowledge of God in this way entails fellowship between the Creator and the creature—a fellowship that does not bridge the chasm between them but yet draws them together in intimacy. Such knowledge is not achieved by mastering data but by submitting to the God to whom the data point. Knowing God in this sense means loving God without reservation. Such knowledge of God reaches far beyond the processes of the mind, to the innermost depths of the one who would know God” (60).
“In EC practice, from antiquity to the present, meditation and contemplation are the paths to knowledge of God. Divine revelation offers a foundation for all such meditation and contemplation, of course, but the Orthodox emphasis falls not on speech about but on silence before God and his revelation. The person who would know God must drink deeply of, and not just analyze, what God has made known about himself and his ways toward humankind; one must be saturated with it through wonder rather than seek to connect its elements in curiosity” (60).
“Evagrius Ponticus…: ‘If you are a theologian, you will pray truly. And if you pray truly, you are a theologian.’ … For the Orthodox, a life lived open to God is the prerequisite and authentication of a theologian” (61).
“Unless a theologian’s teaching has been so imbibed as to shape that theologian’s life and give evidence of appropriately offering proper glory to God, Eastern Christians would be unwilling to offer it a hearing” (61).
