ABSTRACT
ATEACHING COLLEAGUE WITH WHOM I WAS in conversation when compilingthis book posed a straightforward question when I sought to explain its rationale: ‘But why not just get the students to read Augustine, and Calvin, and Barth, and so on? Why go all round the houses by getting them to watch all these films?’ It was a fair point. I do, after all, teach in a Department of Theology and Religious Studies. I should not need to get students interested in theology’s subject-matter, especially as the module on theology and film that I teach is offered at a fairly advanced level. But the exchange discloses what is at stake here. I have no need to get students interested in theology; they already are. And presumably I have had no need to get readers interested in theology either (otherwise you would not have looked at the book, and certainly would not have read this far). But how the texts from the history of theology can best be ‘accessed’ is often an issue. They are not just to be grasped in some cognitive or intellectual way, or located within a stream of thought, but ‘got inside’ existentially. It is too easy to say that ‘you have to believe it to live it’, for theology can be studied by those who stand outside a religious tradition. But the content of a theology and how it works for those who live by it will not be adequately
Chapter 12
grasped unless ways are found by which people can imaginatively and empathetically enter into the thought-and life-world of a religious believer.
