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I was delighted to receive your letter asking about the best route to becoming a theologian. Let me confess up front: I'm still in via myself. My business card should identify me not as research professor but perpetual pupil of theology, though if it did, you probably wouldn't be writing to me. I need to underline the point: Theology is neither a nine-to-five job nor a career. To know and speak truly of God is a vocation that requires more than academic or professional qualifications. The image you should have in mind is not the professor with a tweed jacket, but rather the disciples who dropped everything to follow Jesus. Becoming a theologian means following God's Word where it leads with all one's mind, heart, soul, and strength.
Let me say a few more things about what theology is and why it matters, just to make sure we're on the same page. Theology is the study of how to speak truly of God and of all things in relation to God. But theologians can't approach the object of their study the way biologists study living creatures or geologists the earth. God cannot be empirically examined. God is the creator of all things, not to be identified with any part of the universe or even with the universe as a whole. Speaking of God thus poses unique challenges. If God had not condescended to communicate to creatures something of his light, we would be in the dark.
Are you familiar with Thomas Aquinas's definition? "Theology is taught by God, teaches of God, and leads to God." It's worth pondering these three prepositions.
By God. Only God can make himself known. There is a prior divine self-communication to which all theologians are accountable. You can't deploy God's name simply to add support to your pet ideas or favorite agenda. Theologians aren't fiction writers, either: We're not making this up, Marx, Freud, and Nietzsche notwithstanding. We're simply children who love their father and want to know him better, who trust their father's wisdom (Matt. 18:3), and, for that very reason, keep asking "Why?" (this is my gloss on Anselm's famous definition of theology as "faith seeking understanding").
Of God. There are theologies of marriage, the body, leisure, the...