Theology’s Proper Humility

Theology claims to be the queen of the sciences, the master discipline that provides the deepest and most penetrating answers to our most important questions. And yet it does not reach up to the true, the good, and the beautiful, but instead attends to the particular details of salvation history. Christians treat Christ as the way, the truth, and the life. Jews look to the Law given on Sinai. Reflection turns downward and contracts our attention. Theology humiliates the mind.

This works against the grain of our natural impulses. The human mind is programmed to ascend. Thus, in one of his dialogues Plato has Socrates guiding us from the beautiful body of a particular person to the more enduring beauty of a marble statue and finally to the eternal and changeless ideal of beauty. This movement is characteristic of philosophy. If we can see things in their most general aspect”seeing what makes humans human, or what makes truth true, or what makes right right”we’ll be in a much better position to live well. Seeking to attain the most universal perspective, something even the skeptic tries to do with his negative conclusions, philosophy exalts the mind.

Origen was perhaps the greatest speculative thinker in all of Christian history. Yet his theology bends the mind downward. As he writes at the outset of one of his most important works, we should draw wisdom “from no other source but the very words and teaching of Christ.” He wants to realize as best he can the words of St. Paul in Corinthians: “We destroy arguments and every proud obstacle to the knowledge of God, and take every thought captive to obey Christ.” Our goal should be to see things in their Christological aspect, as it were, which means seeing how his life, death, and resurrection make truth true. In this, Origen is typical of the theological tradition as a whole. It affirms a version of the scandal of particularity, in this case the entirely counterintuitive claim that the most intellectually powerful point of view is not above but below.

By and large, modern theologians have found this kenosis, or humiliation of the mind, difficult. They want to tell people what the Gospel is “really about,” which has meant placing Christ into a universal frame of reference: a general theory of religious experience, a concept of social justice, a vision of universal history, and so forth. Anxious about and often embarrassed by the parochial character of revelation, modern theologians have tried to make theology relevant. They have wanted their work to be part of the supposedly larger conversation. This has encouraged us to ascend to the universal rather than descend in thought to Christ crucified.

But descend we must. Theology is a form of obedience, which is why Karl Barth pronounced it “a modest undertaking.” It’s a claim not falsified by the vast scale and vigor of his remarkable work, or by the fact that theology affirms divine truths with utmost confidence. It is modest because submissive, bending down to the given facts of revelation rather than rising up to the heights of the universal.

There is a second and related sense in which the vocation of theology humiliates the mind. Because of its commitment to the supremacy of reason, philosophy claims to cure our souls. Ancient philosophers were clear about this. They consciously presented their teachings as therapies. Although the Stoic, Skeptic, and Epicurean disagreed about the ultimate truth of things, they agreed on one key point, the one that makes philosophers philosophical: If we reason rightly, we will not suffer unnecessarily, nor will we fear death. In this way, these ancient philosophies promised a kind of salvation.

Academics today are less self-aware, but they make a similar claim: If we think clearly and critically, we will not be duped. Unmasking and deconstructing frees us from the oppressive power of the past. Even moral relativism promises a kind of therapy. When we see that there are no deep truths, we find peace and calm. If nothing is worth fighting for, then nobody will fight. If there are no moral truths, then we can live without the disturbances of judgment, guilt, and shame. Thus do the philosophers of our age promise salvation.

As an intellectual discipline, theology makes no such promises. The sacred Scriptures and sacramental life of the Church cure our souls, not theological reasoning. This makes theology more like jurisprudence than philosophy. A professor of law can organize and clarify the complex history of court decisions, but he cannot administer justice. Only the actual work of judges does that. The same holds for the cure of our souls. We can theologize about the Eucharist”often for good reasons and with good consequences for the proper order of our communal practice. But it’s the actual work of the liturgy that brings to us the healing presence of Christ.

This humility”the realization that our work is not, at the end of the day, the central and fundamental work of salvation”is very important. Theology need not be proclamation with footnotes. It need not be preaching through syllogisms, a tendency sometimes encouraged by Karl Barth. It can be undertaken in the obscure corners of canon law, or in close study of the history of the church, or in the rarified reaches of Trinitarian theology. Because theology is second-order rather than first-order, a discipline that serves what saves rather than offering salvation, it is free to be detailed, practical, and even pedestrian. And because it does not do the work of salvation, theology is free to be contemplative.

These are among the reasons why religious ways of thinking are so important for a free, healthy society. The ideological mind is in an important sense philosophical. The spirit of philosophy encourages us to believe that above all we need to reason rightly. This tempts us to become a jihadist for certain ideas. So much is at stake! We owe it to our neighbors to bring them to the right understanding of things!

The humility of theology combats this tendency. The queen of the sciences does not pretend to rule over hearts. She knows that our souls are in the care of our churches and synagogues, not our ideas.