Make good use of it / everyday life

Ludwig Wittgenstein wrote to a recent recipient of a doctorate of philosophy: "May you make good use of it! By that I mean: may you not cheat either yourself or your students. Because, unless I'm very much mistaken, that's what will be expected from you." Seems to me that with only slight changes in terminology this exhortation would apply quite nicely to a recent recipient of a masters in divinity. He also wrote, in a letter to a friend, "What is the use of studying philosophy, if all that it does for you is to enable you to talk with some plausibility about some abstruse questions of logic, etc. and if it does not improve your thinking about the important questions of everyday life?" Once again this could easily apply, mutatis mutandis, to the study of theology in many quarters. On this point I always appreciated my New Testament professor, Jo-Ann Badley, as she tried to push us to ask the question, "How does it preach?"

Both quotes are from Anthony Kenny's Wittgenstein, pp. 10.

In Praise of Lindbeck

Paul Griffiths' off hand endorsement of Lindbeck's The Nature of Doctrine: "This book is the most important English-language contribution to clarity of thought about what theology is and how to prepare oneself to do it since Newman."

I think I agree.

Theology means struggle.

“Theology means struggle. It may begin as Bonhoeffer said in silence, but when the silence is broken, a battle begins. This seems regrettable; in matters of great moment, the human heart yearns ceaselessly for secure truth, and it is easy for us to believe that unchallenged beliefs are self-evident truths. A little reflection, however, will show that this is not so; in fact we very often have believed without doubt or contradiction what turn out to be mere falsehoods. (It is small enough comfort to know that other people do the same.) Thus when we set out upon Christian theology or ethics we must be reconciled to the fact that here as elsewhere hard truth is not available without hard struggles.” -James Wm. McClendon, Jr., Ethics: Systematic Theology, Volume 1 (2nd ed.), 17.