The question: What is theology?
For many years and with no great warrant I had held a prejudicial view of my neighbour discipline theology. It was really only a superior apologetics – the systematic defence of dubious, even noxious, doctrines formulated in the early centuries of Christianity and expressed in the language of a Platonism that had had its day. It was only in the last decade or so, and through the mildly satirical promptings of the Irish theologian James Mackey, that I realised that academic theology could be more interesting than that, more creative and imaginative, more political, more philosophical; that the evolution of doctrine could be traced with a critical, historical eye, that forensic attention could be paid to the use of scripture as a repository of proof texts – with the literary-critical unawareness such an agenda brings.
Whatever else they do, the scriptures, like any other literature, reveal the unconscious ambivalences of their writers even as they struggle to express and make sense of the human condition and its conflicts – conflicts of impulse that hold us between love and fear, generosity and indifference. We easily recognise the force of Paul's famous lament: "for what I would, that do I not; but what I hate, that do I". But we need to locate his struggle between just these contrary impulses.
I was brought up on the classical view that whereas the nature of the divine is beyond all comprehension we know God as he reveals himself in his works. I was also brought up on the view that our conception of the divine as it reveals itself undergoes refinement over time. Well, yes, there is some distance between the lunatic warlord and the still small voice, and whatever this tells us about God it tells us much about human beings. What seems to drive the theological refinement is an independent refinement of moral sensibility. The author of The Red Badge of Courage, Stephen Crane, ironically illustrates the familiar progression:
The livid lightnings flashed in the clouds;
The leaden thunders crashed.
A worshipper raised his arm.
'Hearken, Hearken! The voice of God!'
'Not so', said a man,
'The voice of God whispers in the heart
That the soul pauses,
Making no noise,
And strives for these melodies,
Distant, sighing, like faintest breath,
And all the being is still to hear.'
From Stephen Crane The Black Riders and other Lines  in War is Kind and other poems (New York: Dover, 1998)
I do not draw attention to these verses because they highlight a shift in theological understanding, but because they reflect a progression towards a demeanour, a spirit of attention, that has an impact on the moral sensibility within which a particular theology is lodged. But by that token, such a demeanour and sensibility survives the demise of any kind of theology at all.
Recent moral anxiety about the link between religion and violence has perhaps failed to see how sensibility thus determines perception. John Buchan wrote of the divines of the 17th century Scottish kirk that "Finding little warrant for force in the New Testament, [they] had recourse to the Old Testament, where they discovered encouraging precedents in the doings of Elijah and Hezekiah and Josiah". If the New Testament at its best offers a message of regeneration it can remain unheard by its unregenerate recipients and perhaps even be distorted by the bearers of that message. But the intractable problem for believers is the apparent dissonance between our conceptions of the divine and our experience of dreadful realities. Thus the Lisbon earthquake in the 18th century and the Holocaust in the 20th, not to mention Katrina and Haiti, have occasioned creative but existentially fraught theological renewal as thinkers have tried to make sense of the problem of evil. But these reflections are arenas for the development specifically of moral insight, and it is this that drives the theology.
Thus the question where was God in the Holocaust finds resolution for some in the thought that God can only act through human hands, a reflection which turns (deflects?) the attention of the believer to the moral condition of humanity. Equally, recent emphasis by theologians on kenosis, Christ's "self-emptying", making himself "powerless", is precisely a way of fixing or projecting a moral insight about the nature of power – sometimes one's own power must be renounced if compassion, or any other moral virtue that allows others to be, is to emerge or flourish.