Two Rooms

I keep theology and historical scholarship in two rooms, and I don’t let them share furniture.

The historical room brackets faith at the door. It asks what probably happened, weighs manuscripts and motives, and holds its conclusions loosely the way good history always does. I visit it to stay fluent, and I take its craft seriously on its own terms.

The theological room takes the narrative and the tradition as given, and asks what they reveal: about God, about reality, about the human interior. In that room the Councils are live grammar. Nicaea and Chalcedon still parse sentences, and categories like theosis still describe something you can watch happening in a person.

Collapsing the rooms damages both. It turns historians into reluctant priests and priests into nervous historians, and each does their worst work in the other’s chair. Faith, as I hold it, was never a probability claim about documents. It’s a stance toward a narrative received as revelation, and it does its work in a different register entirely.

When I write theology here, I’m writing from the second room. I enjoy the first room too, and I’ll say so plainly whenever I’ve crossed the hall.