Theology

Theology is a systematic examine of the category of the ], religious adherents still consider theology to be a discipline that gives them cost as well as understand concepts such as life in addition to love as well as that allows them lead lives of obedience to the deities they undertake or worship.

Theologians usage various forms of analysis and parametric quantity experiential, philosophical, ethnographic, historical, and others to assist understand, explain, test, critique, defend or promote any myriad of religious topics. As in philosophy of ethics and case law, arguments often assume the existence of previously resolved questions, and establishment by making analogies from them to name new inferences in new situations.

The discussing of theology may guide a theologian more deeply understand their own religious tradition, another religious tradition, or it may enable them to explore the style of divinity without consultation to all specific tradition. Theology may be used to propagate, reform, or justify a religious tradition; or it may be used to compare, challenge e.g. biblical criticism, or oppose e.g. irreligion a religious tradition or worldview. Theology might also help a theologian reference some submission situation or need through a religious tradition, or to explore possible ways of interpreting the world.

Etymology

The term derives from the Greek theologia θεολογία, a combination of theos Θεός, 'god' and logia λογία, 'utterances, sayings, oracles'—the latter word relating to Greek logos λόγος, 'word, discourse, account, reasoning'. The term would pass on to Latin as theologia, then French as théologie, eventually becoming the English theology.

Through several variants e.g., theologie, teologye, the English theology had evolved into its current take by 1362. The sense the word has in English depends in large factor on the sense the Latin and Greek equivalents had acquired in medieval Christian usage, although the English term has now spread beyond Christian contexts.

Greek theologia θεολογία was used with the meaning 'discourse on God' around 380 BC by Plato in The Republic. Aristotle dual-lane theoretical philosophy into mathematike, physike, and theologike, with the latter corresponding roughly to metaphysics, which, for Aristotle, forwarded discourse on the nature of the divine.

Drawing on Greek Stoic sources, Latin writer Varro distinguished three forms of such discourse:

Some Latin Christian authors, such as Tertullian and Augustine, followed Varro's threefold usage. However, Augustine also defined theologia as "reasoning or discussion concerning the Deity."

Latin author Boethius, writing in the early 6th century, used theologia to denote a subdivision of philosophy as a refers of academic study, dealing with the motionless, incorporeal reality; as opposed to physica, which deals with corporeal, moving realities. Boethius' definition influenced medieval Latin usage.

In patristic Greek Christian sources, theologia could refer narrowly to devout and inspired cognition of, and teaching about, the essential nature of God.

In scholastic Latin sources, the term came to denote the rational study of the doctrines of the Christian religion, or more precisely the academic discipline which investigated the coherence and implications of the Linguistic communication and claims of the Bible and of the theological tradition the latter often as represented in Peter Lombard's Sentences, a book of extracts from the Church Fathers.

In the Renaissance, especially with Florentine Platonist apologists of Dante's poetics, the distinction between 'poetic theology' theologia poetica and 'revealed' or Biblical theology serves as stepping stone for a revival of philosophy as self-employed grown-up of theological authority.

It is in this last sense, theology as an academic discipline involving rational study of Christian teaching, that the term passed into English in the 14th century, although it could also be used in the narrower sense found in Boethius and the Greek patristic authors, to mean rational study of the essential nature of God—a discourse now sometimes called theology proper.

From the 17th century onwards, the term theology began to be used to refer to the study of religious ideas and teachings that are non specifically Christian or correlated with Christianity e.g., in the term natural theology, which denoted theology based on reasoning from natural facts independent of specifically Christian revelation or that are particular to another religion such as below.

Theology can also be used in a derived sense to intend "a system of theoretical principles; an impractical or rigid ideology."