3. What is a Theology Essay?

Try. Have a go.

That's what an essay actually is - an attempt. The word 'essay' comes from the French word 'essayer', which means 'to try'. We owe the term to the Frenchman Michel de Montaigne who, in 1580, published a book of 'essais'. Englishman Francis Bacon turned his hand to a few 'essais' a couple of decades afterwards, thereby bringing the idea of the essay accross the English channel.

But let's be under no illusions: the kind of thing Montaigne and Bacon wrote is not what you are being asked to write. More's the pity, too: those kinds of essays were exploratory in nature and elegant in style. It wasn't necessarily meant to persuade you of anything. Montaigne and Bacon noodled around, but it was a pleasure to watch them as they noodled. I am sorry, but if you submit a Bacon style essay you almost certainly will not do very well, though you may have more fun.

The form of the undergraduate essay in the humanities in most Western educational institutions has emerged because, in the Western way of thinking about learning, we value independence of thought and the ability to argue a case. Being asked to write an essay in the West is an invitation to state a thesis and defend a position - and to offer that as your own.

It's a notion that comes from a legal way of seeing the world, in which you get at the truth in a rather combatative way - you need to take sides. That's how Western law courts work - you have lawyers who try to persuade a jury (or a judge) to believe one construal of the evidence.

Now, it is worth saying that there are of course other ways of getting at the truth - and these other ways may even be superior to the legal model. Granted. But the persuasive essay does have many benefits to it for the student. It forces you to organise your thoughts, for one. It also requires you to read deeply in one subject area. I clearly remember each of my undergraduate theology essays as landmarks in my education. Thinking is hard work, and a theology essay helps you to think.

I emphasise that it is a Western way of thinking for a reason. If you are from a non-Western background, it may be that you have become accustomed to an educational model whose emphasis is on internalising knowledge delivered by authorised instructors. However strange it may seem, the point of exercise is to express your own informed opinion, and not someone else's. It may also be a difficult point to grasp if your previous tertiary training has been in science or engineering - disciplines in which originality of thought only gets you into trouble! But the tradition of the 'humanities' prizes the freshness of the perspective as a sign that the discipline is being internalised.

Things are not quite as straightfoward as this in theology, however. Of course, in theological thinking there is a body of recognised and authoritative truths to which a writer is accountable. Theology is not the same as, say, literary criticism, in which there are no wrong answers but only bad arguments. Nevertheless, theology is one of the 'humanities' (actually, it is 'divinity', but that's another matter). It is composed of sub-disciplines like history, languages, and the interpretation of texts - all of them literary disciplines. So it makes sense to assess theology in the same way that those subjects are usually assessed.

What of originality? Well, yes, in the practise Christian theology originality may be a vice rather than a virtue. Novelty as a principle does not bring the truth to light. I think theological essayists should reckon with this: faithfulness to the sources in front of you is as important as freshness. But it is still the case that there are many ways to express and articulate and respond to the great truths expressed in Christian orthodoxy. There may also be fresh ways to show the interconnection of these truths. So I am not willing to let go of originality as a principle so long as it is counterbalanced by a humility that says 'I must be true to the object of my study here'.

What makes a theology essay different is its purpose. The object of the theology essay is to say true things about God. Even when you are asked about something that is not God - creation, for example - the theology essay has to tell us something about God, or it is not a theology essay.

To do that it has to focus, naturally, on where God is made known to us. For evangelical theology students, that place is Holy Scripture. So, there will be a lot of Bible in a theology essay (though more about the role of Scripture in your essay later). Even so, it is important to distinguish the theology essay as a type from, say, the New Testament essay, whose goal is to tell us what the New Testament teaches. The two goals overlap of course. But whereas the New Testament essay tells us what a text says, the theology essay attempts to tell us what, when all is said and done, we may say about God himself.

To do that, the theological essayist needs to focus on concepts. Ideas. Thoughts. They are funny things, ideas: they aren't objects in the world like chairs and tables and laboratory rats. And they aren't events that can be accessed through witnesses. (Now theology in fact involves objects and events as it turns out - but it is primarily the thinking about them as ideas and in terms of the ideas that spring from them that involves you, the would-be essayist. But more of that later).

But it is more than just 'ideas' that are your concern. You are being asked to order ideas, in the form of an argument. How are the ideas connected? How do they relate? What do they amount to in the end? What are the implications of this connection of concepts?

That's why it is important for the student to realise that the theological essay does not merely summarise the teaching of scripture on a given subject. It is not a Bible dictionary article. It does that summative task, sure: but it does more. That's what makes it a challenge. One of the things that the theological essayist has to reckon with is that her chief source, Scripture, is composed of a variety of different types of literature only some of which look at all like the piece of writing she is attempting to compose herself. And Scripture doesn't explicitly answer all the theological questions that might be asked of her. The theology essay will hopefully distill, synthesize and extrapollate the teaching of Scripture.

It will distill it in that it will articulate what the whole of Scripture teaches with as much clarity as possible. It will synthesize in that it will look at the diversity of Scripture and try to find its points of coherence. It will extrapollate in that it will make explict what is merely implicit in the Bible, or make connections where the connections have not been articulated.

So, to summarize: remember a theology essay is an invitation to express an argument of your own. It's about God. And it will contain ideas.