School of Theology & Missiology

Degrees offered:

Theology is the study of God or, more generally, the study of religious faith, practice, experience or of spirituality.

Theology is defined as the “reasoning or discussion concerning the Deity” Richard Hooker defined “theology” in English as “the science of things divine.” The term can, however, be used for a variety of different disciplines or forms of discourse. Theologians use various forms of analysis and argument (philosophical, ethnographic, historical, spiritual and others) to help understand, explain, test, critique, defend or promote any of myriad religious topics.

Theology translates into English the Greek theologia (θεολογία) (from theos (θεός) meaning god and logos (λόγος) meaning word, discourse, or reasoning, plus the abstract substantive suffix ia), which had passed into Latin as theologia and into French as théologie. The English equivalent “theology” (Theologie, Teologye) had evolved by 1362. The sense the word has in English depends in large part on the sense the Latin and Greek equivalents had acquired in Patristic and medieval Christian usage, though the English term has now spread beyond Christian contexts.

Greek theologia (θεολογια) was used with the meaning “discourse on god” in the fourth century B.C. by Plato in The Republic, Book ii, Ch. 18. Aristotle divided theoretical philosophy into mathematike, physike and theologike, with the latter corresponding roughly to metaphysics, which, for Aristotle, included discourse on the nature of the divine.

Drawing on Greek Stoic sources, the Latin writer Varro distinguished three forms of such discourse: mythical (concerning the myths of the Greek gods), rational (philosophical analysis of the gods and of cosmology) and civil (concerning the rites and duties of public religious observance).

Theologos, closely related to theologia, appears once in some biblical manuscripts, in the heading to the book of Revelation: apokalypsis ioannoy toy theologoy, “the revelation of John the theologos.” There, however, the word refers not to John the “theologian” in the modern English sense of the word but—using a slightly different sense of the root logos, meaning not “rational discourse” but “word” or “message”—one who speaks the words of God, logoi toy theoy.