The word ‘theology’

The word ‘theology’ comes from two Greek words: theos, meaning ‘God’ and logos, meaning ‘word’. Hence theology is literally a word about God, speech about God. Christians did not invent the word. The first recorded use we find of the term is in the work of the pre- Christian philosopher, Plato (427–347 BC). But he used it to describe the mythical stories told by the Greeks and their gods. For him theology was therefore ‘talk about the gods’.

Later on, the term came to refer also to a philosophical exploration of the nature of the divine. We see the beginnings of this development in Plato's pupil Aristotle, who refers to metaphysics as ‘theology’. This shift in meaning became an established part of the Stoic use of the term. Today we would call this ‘natural theology’, that is to say, a theology based exclusively on what the human mind can know about the divine by the use of the natural light of reason.

Later still, during the time of the Roman empire, the word took on political overtones, since it began to be used for the beliefs associated with the official gods of the empire – and since the emperor came to be seen as a god, to ‘theologise’ also came to mean to praise or honour the emperor as a god.

When the early Christians looked for a term to describe their reflection on their faith, their body of beliefs, one can understand why they did not immediately pick on the word ‘theology’. Instead they preferred initially the word ‘philosophy’. Philosophy means literally ‘the love of wisdom’. Christians began to speak of their beliefs as being the ‘true philosophy’, the true wisdom – and that idea, of course, was based on their conviction that Christ was the revelation of God's wisdom and therefore the true wisdom (see for example Colossians 2:3, where all the ‘treasures of wisdom and knowledge’ are said to reside in Christ).

However, it was probably inevitable that Christianity would eventually take over the word ‘theology’ to describe its own beliefs. First of all, the custom had already developed of calling that part of philosophy that dealt with the divine, ‘theology’.