The Theological Task

“If, rather than facing up to the task of extending God’s story into the present, we seek constantly to dwell in some previous chapter of it, we should not be surprised when we are either ignored or not taken seriously by those who find our approach quaintly anachronistic…..This, then, is the heart of the theological task: the translation of the gospel into forms which are meaningful for our spatial and temporal context, that those who live alongside us in that context may hear and understand and discover the relevance and meaning of the gospel for themselves.” Trevor Hart in Faith Thinking

We as Christians, and thus Christian theologians, must understand the reason that we engage in the task of theology. Plain and simple, theology is our simple attempt to better understand our highly complex and mysterious God. But theology also does involve more than this understanding of God – it should move even further into how our understanding of the one true God impacts the way in which we live in the world around us. In other words, a major part of theology is to translate and interpret our understanding of God in a correspondent and coherent manner with our everyday lives. When we fail to do so, it is at that point that we are “either ignored or not taken seriously” by others around us. As followers of Jesus Christ, his call upon us to be salt and light in the world around us is on the complete opposite end of the spectrum of the previous manner of living in our world – yet it is precisely in the previous manner that a good number of Christians live out their everyday lives. Many Christians do not understand or fail to realize the fact that we are all involved in the theological task, that we are all theologians. The issue at hand is this: Are you a good or bad theologian? As a good theologian, we will task seriously the task of “translating the gospel into forms which are meaningful for our spatial and temporal context.” In other words, we as Christians should take seriously the task of learning how to take our Christian faith and make it speak to the world in which we live today in a way that is faithful to gospel message of God’s story. The Gospel message of God’s story never changes – but the world in which this story interacts constantly changes. Therefore our task as theologians is an always-changing task – and that task is to strive to faithfully translate and interpret this message in our world today – and not to “seek constantly to dwell in some previous chapter of it.” We must learn from the faithful ones in our past how they accomplished this task in their world – so that we can be faithful to this important task in our world today. Let us always remember that the ultimate purpose of our theological task is that our lives our lived in such a way that others around us “may hear and understand and discover the relevance and meaning of the gospel for themselves”!