I’ve been interested recently in the nature and task of theology. This is a short summary of John Webster’s description of theology in Word and Church (2001). I understand that he has a more elaborate account in Theological Theology (1998).

Christian theology is rational speech about the Christian gospel. As rational speech, it is an attempt to articulate a set of responsible theological judgments. Such judgments are ‘responsible’ in the sense that they are intellectual (and therefore moral and spiritual) acts in which we struggle to order our thinking and speaking in response to reality, and so to think and speak truthfully. To understand the rational character of theology in this way is, of course, to enter into dispute with some dominant modern conventions, according to which rationality is a critical epistemological directive rather than an obedient following of given nature… As rational speech about the Christian gospel, theology directs itself to the declaration which lies at the heart of Christian faith and common life, the announcement that in and as the man Jesus Christ, who is present in the power of the Spirit, God creates, reconciles and perfects all things. Set in the midst of the praise, repentence, witness and service of the people of God, theology directs the church’s attention to the order of reality declared in the gospel and attempts responsibly to make it a matter of thought. Conceived in this way, Christian theology is not a spontaneous undertaking but ordered towards a positum. It takes its rise in an act done to the church rather than by the church; it does not attempt to run ahead or peep behind that act; it does not consider itself competent to inquire into whether there is or ought to be such an act. It arises out of the devastatingly eloquent and gracious self-presence of God, by which it is endlessly astonished and to which it never ceases to turn in humility and hope.

What of the situation in which Christian theology goes about its business? All theology is occasional: bound up in its conception of its own calling is a certain reading of the circumstances into which it speaks. The term ‘occasional’ is much to be preferred to the more familiar ‘contextual’…

Theology is responsible for articulating a theological reading of these occasions. It needs to learn to interpret its present situation, not merely as a set of cultural norms or constraints or opportunities, but as an episode in the history of the gospel’s dealing with humanity, as one further chapter in the history of holiness and its overcoming of disorder, wickedness and unbelief. This - the progress of the gospel through the occasions of human life - is theology’s context, which is properly spiritual and therefore properly a matter for theological description. Yet the obstacles into which the theologian stumbles in trying to do just that - describe theology and its contexts theologically - are very considerable.  Not only is there the resistance generated by the instinctive conservatism of the theological establishment (especially of the liberal establishment) but also the theologian encounters with him- or herself a resistance to the necessary losses sustained by those whom the gospel beseiges. There is a certain temper of mind and soul from which the theologian must be set free, a sense of competence in the matter of the Christian faith, an inordinate and unstable desire for intellectual stimulus, the witty avoidance of the wounds which the truth inflicts on our self-sufficiency. Good dogmatics is a mode of holiness: chastened, unassuming, sancified speech. It has nothing of genius about it; it is simply apostolic. And one of the fruits of apostolic holiness is coming to perceive where we are - in the history of grace, in the wake of the Spirit’s presentation of Christ.

… If one finds that one cannot follow this direction, the risk is of casting oneself in the role of a theological Ishmael: Genesis 16:12… All one can do is - following the example of the grand old man of Basel, or of those ressourcement theologians who pored over Migne for years looking for buried treasure - dig deeply and lovingly into the thoughts of the church thinkers of the past and above all into Holy Scripture, and say as clearly and vividly and generously as one can what one finds, in the hope that it may well prove to be just what church and culture really need. (Word and Church, 3-6)