Theology, by definition, is the rational discourse about God, and, by extension, the rational discourse about religious matters in general. Man is a rational-though not only a rational-creature, and, as such, he is ever striving to verbalize, to rationalize, and to systematize. If God is the highest of which man can conceive, it follows that man not only tends to rationalize and systematize his conceptions of God, but also that he is prone to view his rational discourse about God as the highest form of rational discourse.

Thus it was that, for many centuries, theology could rule man's intellectual endeavors as the Queen of the Sciences. Only in more recent generations did the sciences rebel against their ‘handmaiden’ status and become queens in their own rightqueens, moreover, who would not infrequently challenge the ‘established conclusions’ and absolute certainties of their erstwhile mistress, theology.

Theologians may have reacted to the demotion of their discipline with good or ill grace, but, by and large, they were in no doubt about the fact that theology was, at any rate, one of the sciences, even if she was no longer prima inter pares, let alone the ‘queen’ of all human intellectual enterprises. Admittedly, the philosophic garb in which theology appeared, and the metaphysical weapons with which she defended herself, changed from time to time-even as the various philosophical systems with which theology had periodically aligned herself were subject to the changing intellectual fashions among men. There have been Platonic theologians and Aristotelian theologians, Neo-Platonic theologians and Idealistic theologians, just as, at the present time, we have Existentialist theologians as well as theologians who accept the limitations placed on them by Logical Positivism.

However, in all of those alliances, theologians have not seldom lost sight of the’ fact that theology is an interpretive discipline, rather than itself a primary source of religious knowledge. As Samuel S. Cohon has put it: ‘Theology is to religion what grammar is to speech.’ Experience, says Cohon, must not be identified with its interpretation. ‘Rdigion, supplying the data of theological investigation, naturally precedes theology, even as flowers precede botany, or as health precedes hygiene or medicine.’