An Apology for theology

From The Living Church-

As a discipline, theology is under pressure from just about every direction. Some of those pressures — the most obvious and certainly the most understandable — come from beyond the Christian community. For the majority of nonreligious women and men, theology is an irrelevant, though perhaps otherwise innocuous, preoccupation of the pious. It may have a place in a church or monastery, but it is best left out of public discourse and institutions. Once the “Queen of the Sciences” — locating all the other subjects in relation to their divine origin and final purpose — theology has largely been replaced by a more modest program of religious studies in universities and otherwise sequestered to Sunday schools and seminaries.

For atheists of a more militant persuasion, theology is not only irrelevant but harmful to one’s health. It is the ideological underpinning to humanity’s greatest captivity. By it, human beings rob themselves of their best attributes, ascribing them to some remote deity rather than to themselves. “To enrich God, man must become poor; that God may be all, man must be nothing.”[1] The atheist of this school thus recommends a cynical inversion of John the Baptist’s confession (John 3:30); God must decrease that we might increase.

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