My Theological Method - Bradley Jersak

Four first principles, such as they are

QUESTION

I was just curious if you have a theological method that you adhere to/work from?
Or ways in which you offer this exercise to your students at St. Stephen’s University?

RESPONSE

It’s a good question but I’m not sure I’ve gathered and articulated them as a “theological method” per se. But here are some first principles:

1. I start with the limitations of what we know about God (“No one has seen God at any time...” is a strong statement on apophatic theology). Transcendence is not about God being distant, but rather, always beyond the limits of human knowledge and understanding and language.

St. John of Damascus begins his Exposition on the Orthodox Faith, begins with a profound statement of these limitations:

Chapter 1. That the Deity is incomprehensible, and that we ought not to pry into and meddle with the things which have not been delivered to us by the holy Prophets, and Apostles, and Evangelists.

No one has seen God at any time; the Only-begotten Son, which is in the bosom of the Father, He has declared Him. The Deity, therefore, is ineffable and incomprehensible. For no one knows the Father, save the Son, nor the Son, save the Father (Matthew 11:27). And the Holy Spirit, too, so knows the things of God as the spirit of the man knows the things that are in him (1 Corinthians 2:11).

2. On the other hand, ‘the Damascene’ continues, “God, however, did not leave us in absolute ignorance,” and surveys the self-revelation of God in human nature, creation, the Law and the Prophets, and most of all, in the Incarnation of God in Christ.

For myself, I’ve come to believe that what I can know and say about theology is specifically Christo-centric (“No one has ever seen God. It is the only Son, himself God, who is close to the Father’s heart, who has made him known” - John 1:18). That is, as the Word of God, Jesus has uniquely made God known as self-giving, radically forgiving love through the Incarnation. It is ridiculous to me that there are Christian theology texts that purport to explain the nature of God for hundreds of pages before they even get to the Incarnation. As my friend Brian Zahnd says, “To call Jesus ‘the Word of God’ is to say that Jesus is what God has to say about himself.”

3. Theology is best composed as a description after the fact of an encounter, including what God is doing in the midst of a praying, worshiping community that is practicing discipleship and participating in God’s work of restoring all things. Theology is thus a derivative of experience and helpful to the degree that it further facilitates our living connection with and apprehension of God. The best theology, even when analytical, is simply a testimony of what we (the Body of Christ) seen and heard. And for this very reason, theology should be a communal project where we hear God together as a fresh act of worship.

4. According to my friend and teacher, Fr. John Behr, theological studies often suffer by imposing later categories onto earlier texts, often in the guise of theme-based or systematic theology. That is, we create a system of categories, and then ask, “What did Paul say about that?” Behr says, “No! The ‘that’ you are using is a 4th or 15th or 20th century filter that was not even Paul’s concern. Instead, simply ask, “What did he say?”

Even an doctrine like the Trinity, established over centuries, can impose assumptions (even true ones) from the 5th century that warp our reading of the New Testament. A simple example is that we now see “God” as meaning “Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.” But this can skew how we read Paul. Every time he says “God,” we think “Trinity,” when in fact he almost never means that. To Paul, there is one God, the Father, and his Son, Jesus Christ. So God = almost always the Father in Paul’s letters and preaching.

But then Paul (and later, the Creed) also says, “And one Lord, Jesus Christ.” And then is readers were meant to respond, “But Lord is a reference to God in the Hebrew tradition.” And Paul would say, “Yes, exactly.” And now the theology begins, based on the story of God and his people, and where Jesus mediates that relationship. The point is, always try to ask “What does he say” rather than “What does he say about” so that we’re reading WITH the concerns and questions of the author, rather than with anachronistic categories.