History of theology

The history of theology has manifestations in many different cultures and religious traditions.

Terminology and connotations

Plato used the Greek word '' theologia'' (θεολογία) with the meaning "discourse on god" around 380 BC in '' Republic'', Book ii, Ch. 18. Aristotle (384–322 BC)
divided theoretical philosophy into ''mathematike'', ''physike'' and ''theologike'', with the last corresponding roughly to metaphysics, which, for Aristotle, included discourse on the nature of the divine.

Drawing on Greek Stoic sources, the Latin writer Varro (116–27 BC) distinguished three forms of such discourse: mythical (concerning the myths of the Greek gods), rational (philosophical analysis of the gods and of cosmology) and civil (concerning the rites and duties of public religious observance).

Some Latin Christian authors, such as Tertullian ( 155 AD – 220 AD) and Augustine (354-430), followed Varro's threefold usage, though Augustine also used the term more simply to mean "reasoning or discussion concerning the deity" ''City of God''br>Book VIII. i.
"de divinitate rationem sive sermonem"

In patristic Greek Christian sources, ''theologia'' could refer narrowly to devout and inspired knowledge of, and teaching about, the essential nature of God.

The Latin author Boethius, writing in the early 6th century, used ''theologia'' to denote a subdivision of philosophy as a subject of academic study, dealing with the motionless, incorporeal reality (as opposed to ''physica'', which deals with corporeal, moving realities). Boethius' definition influenced medieval Latin usage.

In the Renaissance, especially with Florentine Platonist apologists of Dante's poetics, the distinction between "poetic theology" ( ''theologia poetica'') and "revealed" or Biblical theology served as a steppingstone for a revival of philosophy as independent of theological authority.

It is in this last sense - theology as an academic discipline involving the basis of rational study of Christian teaching - that the term passed into English in the fourteenth century, although it could also be used in the narrower sense found in Boethius and the Greek patristic authors, to mean rational study of the essential nature of God – a discourse now sometimes called theology proper.

From the 17th century onwards, it also became possible to use the term "theology" to refer to study of religious ideas and teachings that are not specifically Christian (e.g., in the term natural theology which denoted theology based on reasoning from natural facts independent of specifically Christian revelation) or that are specific to another religion.

"Theology" can also now be used in a derived sense to mean "a system of theoretical principles; an (impractical or rigid) ideology".

Theological development

Indian theology

Christian theology

Christian theology, in scholastics of the Middle Age regarded as "the queen of sciences" first developed on the bases of Judaism and of Greek thought. Initially concerned with shaping and defining the new faith of the followers of Jesus of Nazareth, theological thinkers moved into issues of establishing church government and of preserving doctrinal unity ("orthodoxy") by identifying and condemning heresies. The definitive establishment of a canon of scripture became important; and as Christianity moved into a role as a state religion in the 4th century (in Armenia, in the Roman Empire, and in Ethiopia), the working out of relationships with secular authority became important.

The 16th-century Protestant reformation, in the spirit of Renaissance humanism, paid great attention to the study of biblical text, accompanied by outbursts of popular theology in personal religious fervor

and by the refinement of rigorous systematic theology. The resulting tradition of multiple Christian sects served as a background to revivals in the 18th and 19th centuries, when some of the old "heresies" (such as Arianism and other non-Trinitarian beliefs), once apparently stamped out by the earlier ecclesiastical authorities, received more attention and sometimes became elements in further schisms.

Faced with theological modernism and growing secularity and atheism from the 19th century onwards, Christian theologians have responded in various ways, developing approaches from Liberation theology and liberal theology to revived fundamentalism.

Islamic theology

See also

* Outline of theology

References

External links

"Theology"
on ''Encyclopædia Britannica''
* Chattopadhyay, Subhasis
"Reflections on Hindu Theology"
in Prabuddha Bharata or Awakened India 120(12):664-672 (2014). ISSN 0032-6178. Edited by Swami Narasimhananda.
*

{{DEFAULTSORT:History Of Theology
History
Theology