What is Theology?

Theology is something more than just an academic study rather it is life itself. Life that is offered to the world through the person of Christ. Life offered to all as we live in communion with each other. What it means to see God and to live through his energies is to interact with other human begins and all of the created world. Theology, the study of God, tries to un-package this mystery through both the academic study and through everything we do in life. To understand the mystery of God means to live a life in communion with humanity and creation. The following passage is taken from a book written by a Catholic theologian who was influenced by the late Fr. Alexander Schmemann. In this passage he tries to define theology and how theology is lived through the liturgy. In order to understand theology we have to understanding the liturgy that happens "after the liturgy". We need to break out of the "Sunday church bubble" we find ourselves enslaved to. David Fagerberg unravels this more in the following passage.    

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Any theological effort involves a quest for meaning (logos).

But in this case, the quest does not occur inside the scholar’s mind; it is a meaning sought by the liturgical community. This is why Kavanagh calls their adjustment a genuinely theological effort. He discerns three logical moments in the liturgical event. First, the assembly encounters the Holy One; second, by consequence of this encounter the assembly is changed; third, the assembly must adjust to this change, and this act he calls theological.

“Theology” is not the very first result of an assembly’s being brought by the liturgical experience to the edge of chaos. Rather, it seems that what results in the first instance from such an experience is deep change in the very lives of those who participate in the liturgical act. And deep change will affect their next liturgical act, however slightly. ... It is the adjustment which is theological in all this. I hold that it is theology being born, theology in the first instance. It is what tradition has called theologia prima.

The scholar seeks to understand what the liturgical community understood. Liturgy itself is a stab at intelligibility, a search for understanding and meaning.

Theology does not take place over there in the world of reason and intellect, beyond liturgical ceremony which is only an indulgence in pious feeling. Liturgy is itself theological for reason of being a meaningful understanding of such questions as why God created, the destiny of anthropos, how spirit and matter interpenetrate, the cosmological presuppositions of the kingdom of God in our midst and its eschatological consequences.

Granted, because of its subject matter (theos) this stab at meaning is unlike any other that the human being makes. The subject matter of theology is God, humanity, and creation, and the vortex in which these three existentially entangle is liturgy. I take this to be why Schmemann calls liturgy “the ontological condition of theology, of the proper understanding of kerygma, of the Word of God, because it is in the Church, of which the leitourgia is the expression and the life, that the sources of theology are functioning precisely as sources.”

If the subject matter of liturgical theology were human ceremony instead of God, it would be self-delusional to call it theology; it would be anthropology, not theology. Worse, it would be ritual narcissism.

But liturgy is, in fact, theological precisely because here is where God’s revelation occurs steadfastly.

When a dichotomy is imposed between theology and liturgy, then liturgy doesn’t even appear on the theological map. It is off the taxonomical page. It is as if theology exists for academicians, while liturgy exists for pure-hearted (but simple-minded) believers.

This prejudice supposes a two-step procedure from the believer’s faith-expression (liturgy) to the academic’s rational reflection (theology). The working definition of liturgical theology I am uncovering challenges the supposition that theology only exists in the second phase."

Dr David Fagerberg, Theologia Prima