What is theology?

Alister McGrath, in his new book The Passionate Intellect: Christian Faith and the Discipleship of the Mind, explores this theme through the themes about theology in the poetry of George Herbert, and toward the end of the study makes this wonderful statement:

Theology makes possible a new of seeing things, throwing open the shutters on a world that cannot be known, experienced or encountered through human wisdom and strength alone. Christian doctrine offers us a subject worth studying in its own right, yet its supreme importance lies in its capacity to allow us to pass through its prism and behold our world in a new way.

Why does theology too often create arrogance instead of humility?

George Herbert, like C.S. Lewis, sees theology as a prism through which we see divine light refracted. But Alister McGrath’s next chp ponders the incomparable Martin Luther, for whom the Cross took center stage. McGrath tells his own story of his early academic career and how he was not yet ready to handle the profundity of Luther’s cross theology.

In the physical brutality, the aesthetic ugliness, the conceptual fuzziness and the spiritual messiness of the crucifixion of Christ, we find a reassertion and reassurance of the hidden presence and activity of God in this puzzling, disturbing and often overwhelming world.

And that Cross showed that C.S. Lewis’ early rationalistic faith, say in The Problem of Pain, was simply not complete until the death of Joy Davidman. When she died Lewis’ rationalistic faith cracked and he found himself wandering into a Lutheran cross-shaped theology, and Lewis came out on the other side in his brilliant A Grief Observed. That book shows for McGrath that theology is both intellectual clarity and mystery, it is both light and darkness, and ultimately theology will come to its knees at the Cross and know that it, too, is pale compared to the ultimacy and brilliance of God.

Do we respect our limitations when doing theology? Or, do we think we’ve got it all figured out? Do we see that theology is truth but that the immensity of the subject means that our framings of truth are always finite in the face of the Infinite One?