Sunday, October 2, 2022

Andrew Louth and the Problem of Theology and Eastern Orthodoxy

  

Orthodoxy has a problem with theology. The reasons for this problem are mainly historical. The science of theology developed in the medieval universities, and then passed through the waves of cultural history that swept through the West: Renaissance, Reformation, Enlightenment, Romanticism. But by the time the universities began to develop, in the twelfth century, Christendom had divided, and these developments all took place in a world from which Orthodoxy was estranged. . . . Most Orthodox are critical of the development of theology in the West, in particular the way theology had developed as an academic discipline, remote from the life of prayer (a complaint already heard in the West from the fourteenth century onwards), and yet the fruits of critical scholarship, which have led, among other things, to a rediscovery of the riches of the theology of the Fathers, can hardly be ignored. (Andrew Louth, “Foreword,” in John Behr, Formation of Christian Theology, 2 vols. [Crestwood, N.Y.: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2001], 1:viii)

 

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