ABSTRACT
Theology is what we call any serious attempt to represent and explore the meanings of the word ‘God’, which is presumably what Wittgenstein meant in his throwaway remark that theology was a kind of ‘grammar’.1 ‘Grammar’ (he has just said) tells us what sort of object we are talking about, it has to do with the ‘essence’ of a subject of discourse. And so it entails following out – for example – what sort of criteria are being used to make sure two people are talking about the same thing. Any grammatical study will involve looking hard at how usages of words are established, refined, modified, narrowed or broadened, how a recognizable shared use comes into focus. So, if theology is grammar, it is not going to be able to get away from narratives. This is not to say that the only proper kind of theological talk is story-telling, as some have overenthusiastically claimed – only that exploring what theological language means obliges us to look and listen.2 At the beginning of his Summa theologiae,3 Thomas Aquinas argues that ‘sacred teaching’ can and should be treated as an ordered body of knowledge, a science, but one that arises out of scriptural narrative: it does not deal primarily with narrative, but narrative is what establishes why and how we should rely on ‘those through whom God’s revelation comes to us’.
