The roots of the current theological crisis go deep into our civilization. It is in fact a crisis of man and his place in the universe, and hence no laughing matter.

Yet, one Cannot escape the fact that there is something amusing about our current
theological crisis. The real and probing question is not "what is theology", but rather: "Is there such a thing as theology?" I have some doubts on the matter, and I must raise my doubts in public, notwithstanding the fact that I am supposed to be Principal of an institution for theological education.

To raise the question of the existence of theology is to some even more deeply disturbing than to raise the question of the existence of God. The reason for this must be that some people are more attached to theology than they are to God.

Theologia, the science of God has had some pretensions to being a science like biologia, psychologia, phisiologia, zoologia, archaeologia, palaeontologia and so on. These are the orderly discourses about certain given fields like bios or zoe, biology and zoology thus systematizing knowledge about the sphere of life, physiology about the phsis or nature of man, psychology about the psyche of man, archaeology and paleontology about ancient events and so on. But what is this field called "God" about which one scientifically discourses? Is God part of the external reality that manifests itself to us?

The pressure of Science and the Scientific method has affected all disciplines.

Philosophy has been in trouble in the west for some years trying to find a field in the realm of experience to which it could devote its scientific investigations. Kant, knowingly or unknowingly, made the process of knowing and acting the field of philosophy, thereby giving it a distinct field for investigation. Husserl tried to make human consciousness the field of philosophy and thus developed philosophy in phenomenological direction. Modern Anglo-saxon philosophy had focused on the field of human discourse or language as its field. They all want some distinct realm of reality open to the senses as the object of their study. Without such a clear and well-mapped out field they could not claim to be scientific and therefore entitled to a place and a chair in akademe.

But what about theology? What field does it scientifically study? The study of
"comparative religion" or "the sociology of religion" does not really constitute
theology, the logia about Theos, God.

What is the field for theology? Some would answer that theology is the scientific study of Revelation. We must now look into this thing called Revelation, about which theology is supposed to give us the scientific logia. Now Revelation is an - ation word, which can in the happily ambiguous English language mean either a process or the result of that process. Foe example education can mean both result and process in the sentence: 'Men with little or very little education are guiding our institutions of education". Tradition for example can mean traditio, the process of handing over, and traditum, that which is handed over. Revelation also similarly mean Revelatio, the process of revealing and Revelatum the result of revelation.

Is theology then the scientific or orderly discourse on the way God reveals himself and on the data of that self-revelation of God? If it is, then we must call it apokalyptology or the logia about apokalypsis or apgkalumma, rather than Theology. For why should we scientifically assume that He who reveals himself is God, or that only one of his many revelations is decisively and normatively true? The Hindus have their own Sruti and Smriti and the various revelations of God through the ages: The Muslims have their revelation through the Prophet. The Jews have theirs in the Torah. Apokalyptology can be a true science only if it analyses all the various revelations, and can find certain universally valid criteria by which to evaluate them.

What then is the claim of Theology to being a science? In my opinion none at all. Theology is not a science of any universal applicability even in western culture. It is the assumption that it is a science that led to the secularist revolt.

It if it not a science, then that is theology? The question can be investigated only in terms of the history of the use of the word. Aristotle and Plutarch used the word theologeo to denote the attribution of divinity to the sun or to idols. In Christian literature of the fourth century we find the expression theologia restricted to the logia peri Triados, the discourse concerning the Trinity. The later fathers made a distinction between three elements: the theologia, the oikonomia, and the theologoumena. Theologia was exclusively concerned with ta peri Triados, matters concerning the eternal being of the Holy Trinity, while oikonomia referred to the dispensation in which the second person of the Trinity accepted the limitations of human existence-- that we sometimes call the dispensation of the Incarnation. The theologoumena referred to all the other questions on which there was room for dispute, since these have not been finally formulated in the official kerygma of the church, namely the Niceno_Constantinopolitan Creed.

Plato used the word 'divinity' or ta theia to denote the things about God; So the word Divinity has stuck both to the name of the theological school of Harvard
(Harvard Divinity School) and the most commonly granted degree in theology
(Bachelor of Divinity, or in many American institutions today, M.Div. or Master
of Divinity).

This whole business of Theology and Divinity by which the Adversary has been leading us along the garden path has been, I suspect, one of his most diabolic master-strokes.

It leads to certain assumption which are death-dealing to faith in God-- that God can be known as other objects are known; that that which is known about God can be conceptually expressed and communicated; and that knowing God correctly in this conceptual way is the central thing.

None of these three assumptions can stand the test of a rigorous examination.

1. The Unknowability of God

Most modern theologians are free from the first assumption that God can be known as other objects are; though I have read in the writings of some intelligent Christians the assertion that God can be known by the pragmatic method. The usual theological affirmation -- at least in those theologies that affirm God's being, -- is that God is not an object among other objects, that he is absolute subject, and therefore that only God can know God. It is from there easy to move on to the idea that the Holy Spirit and Christ become in some sense the media by which we can have a knowledge of God through God's self-revelation, or to use the a more contemporary jargon -- His self-disclosure.

Now there is a catch in it somewhere. We are warned against it by that one
person among the ancient Fathers who was given the title "The Theologian" (theologos), St. Gregory Nazianzen. Nazianzen knew more about the Holy Spirit than anybody before, or, I suspect, after him. We have not advanced one step beyond Nazianzen in our understanding of the Holy Trinity since his time. And yet listen to these words of his:

"It is difficult to conceive (noesai) God, but to define him in words is an impossibility as one of the Greek teachers of Divinity (i.e. P1ato) taught, not unskilfully, as it appears to me; with the intention that he (Plato) might be thought to have apprehended (kateileghenai) Him; in that he says it is a hard thing to do; and yet may escape being convicted of ignorance because of the impossibility of giving expression to the apprehension. But in my (i.e. Gregory's) opinion it is impossible to express Him,and even more impossible to conceive Him (phrasai men adunaton.....noesai de adunatoteron) For that which may be conceived may perhaps be made clear by language, if not fairly well, at any rate imperfectly, to anyone who is not quite deprived of his hearing, or slothful of understanding" (Second Theological Oration Nicene & Post-Nicene Fathers, c Series 2 Vol.7 p.2ae-90) P. 56:29c .

The impression abroad is that theologians are playing the same trick as St. Gregory accuses Plato of playing. When theologians talk mystifyingly of God and Revelation and Jesus Christ and Holy Spirit, we are all supposed to believe that they know what they are talking about. Whereas the fact of the matter is simply that they don't. If only they could answer the question where God is, I would have been satisfied, even if they couldn't describe who he is, through their concepts and ideas. A clear case of such mystification is the idea of transcendence. Previously they used to tell us that God's transcendence was spatial i.e. that he was above the universe - “up there“ or "out there". Now they tell us His transcendence is temporal, i,e. that He is in the future, that He is the Lord of Hope and Master of the future. This only manifests the immensity of theological stupidity. To shift
from a spatial transcendence to a temporal transcendence is supposed to be "modern" Little do these moderns realize that intelligent Christians had rejected spatial or temporal transcendence as early as the fourth century.

I wish people would pay more attention to Gregory Nazianzen's second theological oration. His pungent style is more modern than the best of the moderns and most of his thought belong very much to today and to tomorrow. St. Gregory asks:
“What will you conceive God to be if you rely upon all the approximations of reasons? Or to what will reason carry you, O most philosophic of men and best of Theologians, who boast of your familiarity with the unlimited?"

He proves first that God is not a body, and therefore that he does not occupy space -- either in the universe or beyond it. It is brilliant display of the power of reasoning. He rejected both "up there“ and “out there" in the fourth century, though Bishop Robinson never seems to have taken the pains to read him. Gregory Nazianzen rejects also God's being in time. For how can He who is without beginning and end he in tine, since time is after all the interval between the beginning and the end? How can the creator of time be just in time, even if it is future time? As the Nazianzen says in his Fourth Theological oration, "He who is, is not limited or cut short by any Before or After, for indeed in him there is no past or future" (XVIII)

Theology will never be able to overcome its crisis until it has the modesty to grasp the basic fact of the incomprehensibility of God. St. Gregory of Nyssa, that other fourth century theologian who struggled valiantly to comprehend the nature or essence of God, has the following report:

"It is clear even with a moderate insight into the nature of things, that there is nothing by which we can measure the divine and blessed life. It is not in tine, but time flows from it....This creative power itself, while circumscribing by itself the growth of things, has itself no circumscribing bounds, it buries in itself every effort of thought to mount up to the source of God's life....Time and its contents seen to measure and the limit of the movement and the working of human thought, but that which lies beyond remains outside its reach....No form, no place, no size, no reckoning of time, or anything else knowable, is there....The existence which is all-sufficient, everlasting, world-enveloping is not in space, nor in time; it is before these, and above these in an ineffable way....It is above beginning and, presents no marks of its inmost nature: it is to be known of only in the impossibility of perceiving it. That indeed is its most special characteristic, that its incomprehensibility."

One is reminded here of Sankaracharya‘s conception that Brahman is Sajatiyavijatiya swgatha bheda rahita, nirguna, and therefore fundamentally incomprehensible. Christian theology must recover this basic insight that even after the revelation by Jesus Christ, God remains basically incomprehensible in His essence, for that which is known or comprehended is by that very knowledge defined, determined, and limited.

In Jesus Christ we have been given a scale model of the irreducible God, but only of his human personality. We know God in his operations, his energia not in his essence, his ousia. Let us therefore be modest about our theology, wherein we speak of how we have experienced God's dealings with us, but not of who God.is. He who is, ever was and ever shall be, can be encountered in worship, but not captured in theology, To say Holy, Holy, Holy, to him is to acknowledge not only that He is wholly other, but also that He is beyond all knowing.

2. The Intellectual Pseudomorphosis of Christianity

We theologians have contributed enormously to the most diabolic distortion even if that dogma be called kirchliche dogmatik, we have fallen into the trap of pseudo-morphosis.

Pseudo-morphosis is actually a chemical process which occurs in nature, when a mineral crystallizes in the empty-space left in geological strata by the crystal of another mineral of a different geometrical shape which has disintegrated. Gnosticism seems to have been an intellectual speculative religion which was disintegrating in the 2nd century. It was this intellectual gap that certain Christian intellectuals like Origen tried to fill. They thus fell into a trap. Christianity began to undergo an intellectual pseudo-morphosis. Origen already thinks in terms of certain Apostolic doctrines as the essence of Christianity. We find the same phenomenon in Ireneus, who had to fight against the Gnostics like Valentinus and Basilides, teachers of a speculative metaphysical system as the essence of Christianity, claiming a secret Apostolic tradition that came down from St. Peter and St. Paul. Ireneus opposed the pseudo-Christian ideology of the Gnostics with something of an apostolic ideology, guaranteed by the work of Hegesippus, a Jewish Christian who had gone around all the churches writing down the tradition in each local church as handed down from the Apostles. Once again what is essentially the way of life of a community is transformed into a set of idea.

The councils, held against the heretics, only assisted in this process of pseudo-morphosis of Christianity. No wonder then that both St. Basil and St.Gregory Nazianzen were vehemently opposed to the idea of councils which serve only to stir up strife and make the holy life a matter for intellectual controversy.

This does not mean that these Fathers were latitudinarians in theology who allowed people to believe that they liked about God. They had to set certain limits and make certain formulations in order to prevent error. But these formulations were not themselves the truth. They were warnings against error, necessary safeguards against being led astray. The Nazianzen was quite skeptical about latitudinarians like us who wander from one school to other, or shop around theological cafeterias. He asks:

"What again of those tho come with no private idea, or form of words, better or worse, in regard to God (i.e. those who do not belong to any existing theological party, but are open and liberal), but listen to all kinds of doctrines and teachers, with the intention of selecting from all what is best and safest, in reliance upon no better judges of the truth than themselves? They are, in consequence, borne and turned about hither and thither by one plausible idea after another, and after being deluged and trodden down by all kinds of doctrine, and having rung the changes on a long succession of teachers and formulae, which they throw to the winds as readily as dust, their ears and minds at last are wearied out, and oh, what folly they become equally disgusted with all forms of doctrine, and assume the wretched character of deriding and despising our faith as unstable and unsound." (Oratio II: 42 NPNF. 7=213b)

That is a fairly accurate description of what we do today to our theological students. Our own libertarian latitudinarianism conducts theological students to an ideological self service cafeteria where they soon lose appetite for all theology, and find solace in some concrete social ideology which is related to life.

The assumption that the knowledge of God can be grasped in terms of concepts and theological ideas has done singular damage to the profound realities of the Christian faith. A great deal of the student protest of our time seems to be directed against the intellectual pseudo-morphosis of reality, both in the theological and socio-politico-economic as well as secular academic realms. Only the debunking of theology can lead is out of this impasse to seek once again the truth of the Gospel in the life of the community of the Spirit.

3. Communication Through Concrete Reality

Neither can we teach theology to our students in the classroom, not can they communicate it in the pulpit or to non-Christians through their preaching. The
principle of the Incarnation demands that communication of Truth should be through living reality and not merely through ideas. This is also the meaning of the sacramental principle. Augustine basically misunderstood the mysteries of the Church when he called the Sacramegtum a verbum visibile. The very word sacrament has led us far astray, either into believing that it is a necessary means or vehicle of grace, or that it is the pledge of a promise as Luther understood it. It is necessary to banish the word 'Sacrament' in order to recover any proper understanding of the sacramental mysteries of the church. The key phrase is "mystery of the church“, not the word sacrament. The Ethiopians still call the
sacraments "mistirate bete Christian" - mysteries of the church. These are actions
of the community of the spirit by which the church lives and grows. The focus is not on matter and form, nor on the grace it conveys to the individual participants, but rather on the whole church as it continues its salvific activity in the world through the use of the human body and mind and of elements of the material creation like water, bread, wine, oil, incense, using colour, sound, smell, touch and movement to express the great transcendent realities of ultimate being.

This earth and our bodies and minds are all materials to be used for the manifestation of the goodness and the power and the wisdom of God. That is the sacramental principle, This same principle applies equally in worship, mission, ethics. Not only do we need to debunk theology as the verbal expression of truth.,we have also to decerebrate worship by making it more participatory of non-verbal realities. Besides we have to communicate the gospel also in forms other than words -- this is to say, in the quality of our being and in the significance of our actions. Holiness has to be recovered through authentic self-discipline or askesis. It was the presence of authentic and transcendence signifying holiness in at least some persons in the Church that gave authenticity and credibility to
both the worship and the preaching of the early Church.

The formula is (1) a modern askesis which integrates body, mind and feeling: (2) a more ‘sacramental’, i.e. less exclusively verbal-passive-rational form of community worship and (3) a more concrete mode of communicating the gospel, not primarily through words, but through life, through action, through service, but also through silent and profound 'being‘.

This is not a plea for achiism, but a search for the true being of the Church as the community of the spirit, the life-giving tree planted in the midst of the world.

There is a futile search going as for a "new and relevant" theology. Those who persist in believing that a fresh theology will show us the way out of our present crisis in faith and belief, seen to me to be backing the wrong horse.

The crisis in theology cannot be faced simply by rewriting theology. The hang up in communicating the gospel to our Hindu and Muslim friends does not appear to be
a problem of language and ideas. It is a problem of language only in the sense that the symbolism of a holy life dedicated to the service of God and the love of fellowman is a language -- the most potent language we have for communication."

This is not a plea for pragmatism as an escape from the ideological impasse. Gandhi wasa super-pragmatist. So was Christ. But there was more than pragmatism in their lives. There was a basic apprehension of truth in both Christ and Gandhi: Christ called it faith: Gandhi called it satyagraha or being grasped by the truth. It was not primarily an ideological apprehension of verbal or conceptual truth. It was the awareness of being possessed -- possessed by the fire of God. It was finding the ground of your being in God. It was also being propelled by God towards his Kingdom. It is this experience of reality to which our theological seminaries should lead men and women.

There was both in Christ and in Gandhi a second quality. Christ called it Agape, Gandhi called it Ahimsa. It is of course not a sentimental non-violence as many today understand and practice it; but neither is it a simple pragmatic achiism committed to social justice and economic development as basic goals. It was nourished and fed by compassion -- the capacity to experience the joys and sorrows of others. It was a passionate desire to unseat the mighty from their thrones of oppressive power in order that the poor and the hungry need not so begging for bread and shelter. It was the quest for God in Sarvodaya, the dawning and blossoming of all in one just and peaceful society.

The need is not for a new theology, but for new human beings in a new society. It is time that Theological Colleges and Seminaries like yours and mine thoroughly reexamined our curriculum in the light of the criterion - what kind of human beings do we need today to minister to the life of the Church so that it may truly become the Temple of God, the Servant-Shepherd and priest-intercessor cf the world?

The preoccupation with the science of theology and the historical critical studies of the New Testament have already proved sterile. The Universities and Academics of the west will continue to be preoccupied with these for quite some time to Come-- twenty or thirty years more, before they realize the futility of their efforts and look for new channels. The cultural presuppositions of the west cannot for the present give them the strength or the wisdom to face these fundamental questions.

We Christians in India need to forge some new trails on our own. The question is: do we have the courage to let go of the crutch of western theology in order to delve deep into our own tradition, and rediscover the profound wealth of the universal gospel in the light of our own cultural predicament?

This calls for a new spirituality, a new askesis, a new vision and orientation and therefore a new style of Christian life and Christian ministry.