This was the first class, so the lecturer was giving some background on the various types of theologies such as practical theology, historical theology, biblical theology, philosophical theology, systematic theology, and analytic theology. I had no idea there were so many branches of theology!
I think I'm most drawn to practical theology because, as the name implies, it's practical. The lecturer said it is about "understanding God by exploring how faith is lived out in the Church and daily life". I like learning stuff that I can apply and that can help me in a more concrete way. That makes it meaningful -- I can see the utility of it and then the learning feels purposeful.
Some people like intellectual exercises and arguing about theories but I really don't see the point in that. Even when I was doing my masters in linguistics, I felt impatient with the theories about first language acquisition. They are theories for a reason: there's no real way to prove how babies pick up language and learn language. This means that it's all speculation! And what's the point of speculating when you're never going to know the actual answer? It's just a waste of time!
Anyway, back to theology. Apart from practical theology, I think I'm interested in both biblical and historical theology as secondary choices. Biblical theology, the lecturer said, is about "understanding God by studying His Words in the Bible" and historical theology is about "understanding God by examining how the Church has understood Him throughout history, tracing how the Christian faith & Christian life has been expressed across times and cultures". The former seems like a deep dive into the Word and I'm a language kind of person, so I think I might like that, although sometimes analysing the words used and the way sentences were structured does feel a bit like majoring in the minors -- like trying too hard to read into the smallest detail. I also haven't forgotten that I'd probably have to learn Hebrew to do this with the OT and Greek to do this with the NT!
As for historical theology, I think it would give me a glimpse of the role that culture plays out in faith and practice? I don't know if I'm getting this quite right but that's the impression I got. I think cultural context is important, especially when interpreting the Bible, but most often laymen like me don't have much, if any, knowledge of the cultural context, so that hampers our understanding of certain passages, I'm sure.
This brings me to something the lecturer said in response to a question from one of my classmates: the question was about clashing doctrines, such as acceptance or rejection of gay church leaders (if I remember correctly). The lecturer said doctrine doesn't change, but our understanding of it or interpretation of it does. The example he gave, which I thought was brilliant, was that in the past people used to think that the sun revolved around the earth, but with the advancement of science and technology, invention of more powerful telescopes and mathematical calculations and satellites and so on, we now know that the earth revolves around the sun. However, in reality, the fact of the matter is that nothing has changed and the earth has always revolved around the sun, whether or not we've known it or acknowledged it.
This also made me think about how humans used to think the earth is flat. A wrong thinking does not negate the truth, it just obscures the truth; so we are unable to see, grasp, or know the truth. However, what is worrying to me is that if doctrine can be misinterpreted by trained and learned people (a.k.a. theologians, seminarians, priests, and pastors) -- especially trained and learned people who are supposed to be able to discern God's truth and teach it to the masses -- then we have ajaran sesat.
Of course, there has always been pockets of ajaran sesat here and there in the form of cults. But we recognise cults because they are extreme and also because some of their teachings are not strictly scriptural. For some issues like homosexuality, we can read for ourselves what Scripture says about that; but then along comes a bunch of trained and learned people who say that oh, that interpretation didn't take into account the historical and cultural context, and therefore it wasn't meant to be a blanket thing but specific only unto the group of people that Paul was writing to... um, how are we, the laymen, supposed to know what is the correct doctrine, if even the pastors and theologians do not know? And if the pastors and theologians lead people astray because they earnestly think their understanding of the doctrine is correct, then how???
We trust that our pastors and preachers are seeking God and are led by the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit is supposed to "guide us into all truth" (Jn 16:13). But then hor, how can there be two separate truths? With two separate camps and diametrically opposed viewpoints? This is what confuses people and then we don't know what to think. Which one should we believe?
(Although, if we go back to the example of homosexuality, then I personally tend to think that the preachers who try to explain it or excuse it from being considered a sin are probably allowing their bias to influence their reading and interpretation of Scripture; and the reason I think this is because I feel secular values such as 'inclusivity' have infiltrated some of the churches, resulting in a pressure to make people feel welcome vs. potentially offending them or causing them to feel shame; also, the belief that one's sexual orientation could be innate and therefore, being born with it, the person should not be faulted for it and God should accept them as they are, not see it as something sinful or to be fought against -- this puts pressure on church leadership to also not 'demonise' those with a different sexual orientation other than what has traditionally been accepted. My personal stance on this is that the orientation is different from the lifestyle; one may not have control over the former, but one does have control over the latter; and from Scripture I think it is possible to argue that Paul and the others refer to the lifestyle rather than the sexual orientation, by which I mean, you can't control whom you're attracted to, but you can control what you do about it.)
Now I have veered into precisely the kind of theoretical territory that I said above I do not like ::rolls eyes at self:: Conjectures and hypotheses can be interesting -- I like to understand things, to try to make sense of things, especially why people act the way they do and why they think the way they do. But in the end, this kind of stuff just lives inside your head. I don't see it as transformative or even impactful.
