Patristic Theology: Day One Reflections

Here is a brief writing our professor had us do at the end of the day to answer the "so what" question of what we were learning.  This piece is not well written or edited, but it is merely an immediate reflection of the day's learning.

            The work of theology is incredibly contextual, answering the questions posed by each culture and each generation.  Not that each culture or generation needs to reinvent the wheel, but certainly we need to appreciate new ways to see and use the wheel.

            However, I do not sense in the free, evangelical church today there is any desire to wrestle anew with old and new questions of theology.  There seems to be an Enlightened, certainty that these matters of theology are well settled, and, therefore, there is little purpose in doing theology in the church.  Put in other terms we often seem to say, “just read Wayne Grudem’s “Systematic Theology” because this is the an excellent statement of well settled matters.”

            Reading the Apostolic church writers will shatter any comfort the Protestant church has in the narrative that paints the Reformers simply as saving the church and renewing it to its former, pristine 1^st and 2^nd century status by breaking from the Catholic Church.  This Protestant narrative also asserts that, “believing this great Reformational work has been accomplished, we can forget all the theological messiness and move forward to the higher task of making good moral followers of Jesus.”

            The Apostolic Fathers’ writings show how they thought about and wrote about the biblical text in very different terms and categories.  They simply had different concerns and questions for their day, and their theology, derived from scripture, was dramatically shaped by their contemporary events and culture.  Likewise, our culture has its own set of questions, and, as we live under the authority of the biblical text in this age, we need to develop a theological response to the contemporary questions/issues, thereby producing a theology for today and this culture.

            The danger in seeing theology as well settled and static is that the church will become an isolated enclave.  Doing theology anew puts us into this world and puts our settled understandings and interpretations at risk, in a good way.  Reading theology from different ages and different cultures makes us sensitive that our theology is very embodied, contextual and mutable.