Theology: Understanding The Relationship Between Theology And Theology

To understand the relationship between doing theology and studying theology one must look at theology as a science and theology as spirituality. Although critics reason that theology cannot be defined as a science because of the lack of empirical evidence on the existence of God, theology proceeds on the reasoned assumption that God is real and develops rationally and logically on this assumption. According to Anselm theology is not a way of which leads to faith, but a way of believing that leads to the study and understanding of theology and thus God. So why do we study theology? To understand the Word of God through scriptural studies, to satisfy personal, church, community needs and to understand ourselves and our relationship with God

In order to understand the scriptures intensive study into the social, political and historical context in which they were written must be done. This enables one to relay God’s message in our time, social and political context without causing confusion. If we study our Christian Heritage we understand the symbolism and concepts that were passed on through the ages, relaying it through practice to our communities for understanding of past conflicts, boundaries and missions of the church. The study of culture, not just African enables us to understand world views, spirituality and Christian ethics. Implementing this studies in practice will broaden cultural knowledge, give people insight into health questions and major life events such as the questions about life and death and the purpose of faith and believing. The fourth of Mbiti’s sources is history; studying the history of Christianity through the millennia makes us understand the roots of Christianity, where it came from and where it is going, the influences of pre-colonialism, colonialism and post-colonialism as well as the future impact of technology in the spreading and teaching of God’s

Here I learned and adopted an approach to try and understand everyone’s view and to put it into context with my views and ethics. Furthermore I also realized that Christianity is not secular as I was made to belief during my childhood years. I started to see the practice of Christianity in different contexts and through the perspectives and perceptions of various cultures and denominations. The realization that Christianity and religion in the broader sense were much wider a field than I was taught opened the avenue for further studies. I wanted to know more, I linked in with different church groupings and culture to explore their views and beliefs. One thing that I have learned from this theology is to reason; the link between the Abrahamic Religions, Judaism, Islam and Christianity became clear. That we condemn other cultures religious perceptions and beliefs on the grounds of dogmatic belief systems became all too apparent to me. Advances in technology and in particular the internet opened up a world of knowledge to the layman, now different translations of the Bible were freely available, philosophical texts and reasoning is available at the click of a button and other religious texts can also be studied. With all this information