Saturday 19 December 2015

tanach - Why is the Bible not a work of theology?


The Bible contains stories, and poetry, and history, and myth, and rules, and a few other bits and pieces. What it does not contain is theology, per se. Nowhere in the Bible does anyone attempt to describe a cosmology: they assume their audience is in on it. Nowhere in the Bible is there a straightforward description of God, or the spiritual world, or any other simply laid out description of the structure of the universe.


Now, those stories, poetry, myth, etc. reflect, of course, the beliefs of those who wrote them, so you can, if you peer at it carefully enough, derive theology from it by attempting to infer the beliefs of the writers. And that is what theologians do. However, there is no part of the Bible which reads like a theology text. The theology has to be inferred from the narrative, the legislation, the prophecy, and the poetry.


Why?




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