Systematic Theology as Cognitive and Correlative

I think I've finally decided to use this blog to post stuff I write for classes. This is an assignment for Systematic Theology in which we were asked to offer a definition of theology, specify the resources for theology, and identify our theological norm.

Theology is the cognitive, correlative process that is a part of the church's past and present experience of God. As a cognitive process, it arises from, informs, interprets, and articulates that experience of God. Through theology, the church constructs, describes, and evaluates beliefs, models, and theories related to the experience of God. As an aspect of experience, theology frames and informs continued experiences. Experience, in general, does not neatly precede interpretation, but is partially shaped by it. Thus theology is not simply passive description, but involves creative construction, even (and perhaps especially) when this fact is not admitted.

As interpretation and articulation, theology must have an audience. In general, its audiences are the community which identifies itself as the church and the larger public. Both groups have many subsets. To say theology is an activity of the church is not to say that it is the responsibility of theologians to locate themselves within the church. Rather, it is the responsibility of the church to acknowledge and expand to include theology wherever it is being done well.

The resources of Christian theology come from the canonical heritage of Christianity (scripture, creeds, liturgy, sacraments, lives of saints, theological and devotional literature, etc.) and from our own context (experiences of individuals and communities, philosophy, physical and social sciences, the arts, the human disciplines, interreligious dialogue, etc.). These are cognitive and experiential elements from the past and from the present. The method of theology is to correlate these disparate elements: experiential elements with cognitive elements, experiences of God in the present with experiences of God in the past, and cognitive work in the present with cognitive work in the past.

This correlation must be mutually critical and constructive. This is less a normative claim than a descriptive fact. From the very beginning, our own context shapes our experience of the tradition. It is true that as we interact with the tradition, our understanding of it critiques and corrects the perspective we bring from our context. But we cannot pretend that our approach can ever be entirely shaped by the tradition; we must allow that elements from our present context can critique the understanding we gain from our experiences of the tradition. Thus, none of these elements is prima facie superior to the rest.

To see how these elements are to be correlated, we return to the definition offered above. Theology is essentially a process of human cognition, though God is involved in the experience which gives rise to it and which it then interprets and shapes. The church experiences God both in the tradition and in its present. This ontologically transformative experience begs us to think, to make connections, and to form beliefs. But it does not confer a ready-made epistemology. We must avoid making too sharp a distinction between thought and experience, but, nonetheless, theology is the distinctively cognitive aspect of this experience of the divine.

As an aspect of the cognitive life, theology falls under the regulative guidance of epistemology.¹ This is not to say epistemology governs theology, but rather that theology is a fundamentally epistemic and epistemological activity. We start with the particular experience of transformation by the tradition, and proceed epistemologically from there. Thus we come to the contextually variable norm which regulates the correlation of the resources: Theologians do well to make explicit their epistemological assumptions, to examine their epistemic practices, and to use the best epistemological tools available to them to do and to evaluate their work.

1. See William P. Alston, Beyond Justification: Dimensions of Epistemic Evaluation, Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2005, 1-5. Following Alston, I take epistemology to be philosophical reflection on the cognitive life as a whole, rather than merely the theory of knowledge or justification.