I’d think that scripture can be considered the axioms of a theological system. Theologies based on different sets will clearly be incompatible, but both can be good theologies.
Now, the interesting question is what happens when a conclusion, correctly reasoned from axiomatic scriptures, turns out to be incompatible with nature? Fundamentalists reject nature, basically. More liberal theologians start throwing out parts of scripture that lead to the incorrect conclusion, or sometimes move to bad theology by creating warped interpretations of scriptural passages to rejustify them with nature.
I disagree. It is not scriptures themselves that are the axioms of atheological system (unless they’re written in the form of logical propositions). Rather, the axioms of a theological system include its assumptions about what its scriptures are considered to be and how they are to be understood/interpreted.
100% of the text need not be axioms - no one considers parables to be other than stories. But I disagree on the interpretation being an axiom. I don’t think you can have a coherent logical system where the rules vary depending on the input. Think of it - if a set of axioms lead to a contradiction, instead of resolving it by throwing out at least one of the axioms you resolve it by modifying the steps you used to reach the contradiction. You need some coherent set of logical rules, and some sort of test.
Now, changing the rules happens all the time, but that’s what I consider bad theology.
This is, of course, especially true in the case of religions that are not scriptural (whether ‘at all’ or ‘primarily’). Theological axioms will also be embedded in non-revealed sources: architecture, lore (written or oral, but not necessarily scriptural), ritual practice and other procedures.
I agree that revealed axioms need not appear in a book. But any secondary sources, such as architecture or ritual, must be derived somehow from a revealed source. Otherwise, they have no validity. How is a ritual made up by Joe Holyman theologically meaningful, unless Joe justifies it from revealed sources, or claims it is revealed. The latter happens - examples are Popes making infallible judgements, or Mormon leaders changing policy based on revealed dreams.
You can’t argue with these directly, but if one shows that they contradict other revealed axioms then something has to go.
That’s an interesting bias. I don’t have a revelation-based religion at all, so I have to base my understanding of theology on the things you are calling “secondary”, as I have no scripture (or authoritative utterances by a prophet or religious leader, which may count as similar sorts of revealed knowledge).
There’s a reason there’s the term “People of the Book”, after all – to distinguish the people with civilised, revealed religions from us backwards pagans.
Since I’m an evil atheist, I’m even more backward than you. But, what would you call your theology - which is different from beliefs. Is it based on reasoning from the natural world? It’s certainly possible for a religion to have Nature as its Scriptures. That’s a set of axioms that is hard to disagree with, but the chain from there to a set of beliefs is something else.
I’d suspect that the very earliest religions reasoned from the fact that there were droughts and seasons and volcanos to the conclusion that powerful gods controlled them. Only after that did someone write scriptures and claim they were revealed - no doubt after priests claimed a direct connection with the gods.
I didn’t mean to imply that other religious experiences are not as valid as those based on scripture. But I see it being hard to meaningfully discuss theology in non-scriptural religions.
In some religions, believers receive divine messages from an intemediary messenger. In others, believers receive their own direct divine revelations. There’s no reason to consider these sources any less valid than scripture. But I don’t see them as being subject to the kind of interpretation that we associate with theology. In these religions you either got the message or you didn’t - some people may accept the Pope’s authority to declare that abortion is wrong and other people may not accept his authority to declare this but nobody is disputing his position on the issue. The same with personal revelation - if your gods told you that your totem spirit is a bear, then it’s not a subject open for other people’s interpretation - it happened to you and you’re the only one it was directed to.
Theology, as I understand it, is when a group of people have a common set of scriptures which they accept as an authority but have different interpretations of their meaning. They agree the message is there but they’re disputing what the message is.
I wouldn’t be surprised if that were a goodly chunk of the origin of some of the early stuff, but I’m not sure it can be said to be all of it, because, as you note, it’s hard to get from that sort of observation to a set of beliefs.
As both of my religions are heavily praxis-rooted, a lot of my theological work starts at ritual and goes back from there. It’s one thing to say ‘we in this religion do these things, because they are the things we do in our religion’, but the underpinnings of why do we do this are important too (and frankly, it’s a level that I think that most modern pagans are sorely lacking in, sometimes maddeningly so).
Starting from a basis of ‘this is what we do’, there are a couple of directions to take ‘why’, and all of them are productive. The most fact-based is going back on a chain of “This is what I was taught” or “This is how the ancients appear to have done it” (one of these is appropriate for one of my religions; the other for the other), and one can chase back along that along either the threads of who taught what when or into archaeology, anthropology, and ancient history. There’s also the ‘because it works for what we’re trying to do’, which forks into ‘why do we think it works’ and ‘why do we think that’s a worthwhile thing to do’, the latter of which is more likely to lead into mythology, intepretations of lore, and to a certain extent cultural studies.
The subfield of theology I’m personally most interested in is systematics – which the person-with-a-theology-degree I chat with describes “as a 3D framework of interconnecting pieces, where when you wiggle one, the whole thing wiggles”; the system of relationships between all the parts. She suggests that covering a basic sense of the systematics of a religion includes (quoting again from my notes): “a) scripture/foundation myths; b) beliefs; c) liturgy and ceremonies, particular changes in life; and d) how to be X in everyday life and maybe e) private spirituality vs. public spirituality”. (Her training is Christian; I believe one of her theology degrees is from a Catholic school and the other from a Methodist one.)
The thing is, chasing back the whys eventually leads us to places where we don’t know where stuff came from. There is some evidence, for example, that some of the myths in Egypt arose to explain why people were performing specific rituals – and we have no bloody idea where the rituals themselves came from. We can look at when they were done, how they were done, how they were changed and embellished over time, and so on, but where it came from? Lost in the mists of pre-history.
For example: a goodly chunk of Egyptian theology is rooted in the notion that the universe was created perfect, and that it is the work of men and gods to maintain it in as close to perfection as possible. From this one can derive things like purity strictures fairly easily (dust and muck is imperfect; clean it up). The basic structure of the Egyptian temple is, as one goes deeper into the inner sanctum, intended to get closer and closer to the moment of creation; in the holy of holies, the decor and design is entirely intended to represent the First Time itself, with whatever god happens to live there placed as Creator; there’s a huge amount of structure that only makes sense in the context of that knowledge (such as ‘the outer walls have foundations dug down to groundwater’). The rituals are based in this conceptual understanding, and can be judged by how well they fulfil the goal of taking the universe in to have its oil changed and tyres checked. And so on.
But all of those depend on the axiom ‘the universe was created perfect, and it’s our job to keep the grit out of the gears’. Which isn’t scriptural – it’s a cultural assumption, perhaps. Mindset. It’s something that can be derived in interesting ways from the Egyptian landscape, which was both harsh and abundant (it would provide anything its people needed most of the time, so long as they treated the landscape in certain ways), but there’s a human leap there about what that means. Their leap was to a fundamentally ordered cosmos which could be pushed out of whack by entropy or error.
For more modern religions, it’s easier to chase down practices. We can point at someone and say “This guy came up with this stuff.” But that doesn’t remove the responsibility to work out why one’s doing this stuff and, for that matter, what it means to do this stuff. My purely modern-pagan religion includes, for example, a theological principle of not allowing oneself to be warped into submission to others. The “what does this mean” questions for this are extensive.
For example, “Is this job compatible with my religion?” is a theological question; I’ve been faced with the question of whether doing something I find morally objectionable because otherwise I may be fired violates that principle of not being untrue to myself and my faith. (At the time, the answer was “Truely, myself needs to pay the rent and my student loan,” but it was a damn difficult choice.) Someone with certain sorts of sexual kinks will have to decide if the submission they want in the bedroom is compatible with that faith, and I know people who come down on both sides of that one. Another interesting theological question for that same principle: is “Being true to oneself” really a virtue to pursue if one is truly, in essence, a jerk? (My personal problem with a lot of self-realisation theologies is that they tend to break down messily when someone is looking for justification to be an asshole.)
I’m pretty sure I’m babbling a bit incoherently here, but I hope there’s something in there that was coherent.
I was discussing this just yesterday with my wife who is currently reading Dawkins’ Delusion (which I have not yet read).
She offered that the study of theology was - essentially - bullshit, as it was the study of a made up belief. Which caused me to think one must distinguish exactly what they think the study of theology accomplishes.
If they simply believe they are learning more about a belief system’s history, practices, and rules - fine. Seems essentially like a specialized study of sociology/history/philosophy.
But if they think they are actually learning anything as to the nature of a God/gods - well, how the hell can they claim that? Does a doctor of christian theology know more about “God” than Richard Dawkins or myself? Does he know more about “God” than a doctor of buddhist or hindu theology (if such persons exist)?
If theology is fundamentally the study of beliefs centered around ideas of gods and spirituality then how can study be termed good or bad unless the act of study is labeled good or bad? I would say what is considered good or bad is the belief system under scrutiny not the act of study.
First there is a belief then there is theology, which is an attempt to understand and question that belief. Theology, the study, is a lie if it attempts to give unfounded justification to a belief system; beliefs supported by other beliefs etc. But then that’s all we appear to have anyway. But then if we? don’t know if a god or god’s exist, whatever that may mean, then we cannot say whether any particular study of a god-belief is on the mark or not. Hence we have agnostic theology; the study of a belief, which is by definition agnostic since it, is a belief and not knowledge.
If theology is the study of something known then that’s another matter.
If someone doing mathematics comes up with 2+2=5, we call that bad mathematics, without calling the study of mathematics good or bad.
It’s not hard to look at an axiomset and derive things from it, and judge whether or not the derivations are sound given those axioms. Someone who comes from a theological principle of “Feeding stray kittens makes the goddess Frufru happy” cannot get from there to “If my neighbor plays disco music too loudly on Thursday nights I can teargas him” with good theology.
Start with axioms, build to consequences. Some of these will have differing schools of interpretation – look at any of the liberal denomination vs. conservative denomination discussions to see schools of interpretation – but there has to be a coherent whole to it, without pulling-things-from-the-arse.
So theology is neither good nor bad. What is evaluated good or bad is the subject of theology in reference to something else, i.e. interpretations of scriptures etc. Good and bad is a function of logic. But then the logic can be coherent but the belief false, and vice versa.
Thank you, that is interesting. I can certainly see that if practice B came from underpinning A, then A has been lost, those who practice B might create a new justification C for it. A might be totally irrelevant today, even if known. For instance, it seems that the primacy of the Temple in Jerusalem might have come from priests attempting to centralize religion. This was not an issue in Roman times, yet the primacy remained.
Where the belief that the universe was created perfect came from seems simple to me. Many cultures have golden ages. Even hours - it amuses me no end when cultural conservatives today say how great things were 40 years ago - in the middle of the '60s! When you get old enough, the old days, when you were young, seem might appealing - I can see this be applied to the culture as a whole.
Yet, even if we don’t know the way a ceremony arose, isn’t reasonable that it came from what seemed to its first practitioners a rational source? Otherwise, who would practice it?
Well, you don’t have to be a theist or pagan to buy systematics. For a living I try to figure out why microprocessors stop working, and have come to the conclusion that when more than a few fail in the same way it isn’t chance - it is the interaction of many things, many of which we never think about as interacting. So, without believing, I can accept that all parts of a religion interact.
Is it a theological question or a personal moral one? Certainly many people who believe in the same religion have vastly different answers. I, who believe in no religion, have to face this problem too. Morality and religion seem to be tightly coupled, but it seems that people do what they think of as moral, or are driven to, religion or lack of religion be damned. We certainly have a good example in the news.
I suppose in the context of the thread, the ceremonies that are to be justified count as axioms. Ceremonies might lead to contradictions also, for instance of the two axioms are respect for life and human sacrifice. They just seem like weak ones to me.
Of course. But we don’t know if that was rational because it hooked into parts of the natural world, or because Joe Protopriest happened to pour some water on his first altar and came away with a sense that that was the right thing to do and went groping for some explanations of how to explain it.
There are also ancient Egyptian rituals that appear to have components that are based on puns – ‘this god’s title sounds almost like this food item! let’s come up with an excuse to offer Him that!’
My theologian friend tells me that systematics is one of those things that theology students tend to either Get or Not Get; it’s straightforward enough for me that I’m confused by people who don’t get it.
But they clearly exist, and I tend to think are where a lot of badly done theology comes from, because a sense of systematics is really useful for figuring out how the principles one’s living under apply to living. (I’m still kind of boggled in a bad way by one of my nominal coreligionists. One of the important bits of my religion is the concept of use of language – considered, basically, to be a divine power that humans have access to, and thus something with great weight and needing to be treated with respect. Having a co-religionist say “What does it matter what you call it?” in a political debate blew my mind – there was this gap between the theology and the actual thought-process. Compartmentalised, with no sense that the sanctity of language use might mean anything other than something to parrot in services.)
I find myself reminded of the guy in … Qatar, maybe? One of the little nations around the rim of Saudi Arabia. Who goes into rooms with terrorists and says, basically, “Okay. I’ll make a deal with you. We each have the Qu’ran. If you can prove to me that terrorism can be supported from the text, I’ll join your group. If I prove to you that it isn’t, you tell us what you know and we’ll get you a job outside this prison.” He’s got a pretty good success rate, because he knows the systematics, and if they pull on one out of context verse, he can point out where it ties in and turn it around on them.
Yes.
Here’s an easier example to untangle: my theologian friend is a practicing lawyer. She does not do divorce cases, and part of the reason for this is that she is a devout Catholic. She’s not willing to personally advise people on their divorces. She is willing to do referrals to people who will do so, especially in cases (like spousal abuse cases) where she agrees that the divorce is a good idea, but she will not do the work herself.
There, the theology (standard Catholic doctrine about divorce) pretty directly informs what she is willing to do professionally. She is willing to give referrals to someone who will provide the service peoplegetting a divorce need, but she will not do it herself – it’s not a knee-jerk ‘DIVORCE BAD!’ but a personal choice to not get involved in something that is contradicted by her faith’s strictures. Her personal morals demand that she keep to said strictures, but that moral sense does not arise in a vacuum unconnected from Catholicism.
But, what would you call your theology - which is different from beliefs. Is it based on reasoning from the natural world? It’s certainly possible for a religion to have Nature as its Scriptures. That’s a set of axioms that is hard to disagree with, but the chain from there to a set of beliefs is something else.