To the Teacher: How to Use This Book

Christian theology is a subject which ought to excite students. In practice, both student and teacher often find the teaching of the subject to be difficult, and occasionally rather depressing. Students are often discouraged by the vast amount of material it is necessary to grasp before they “get to the interesting bits” – as one Oxford student once put it to me. Teachers find the subject difficult for two main reasons. First, they want to introduce and discuss advanced ideas, but find that students are simply unable to appreciate and understand these, due to a serious lack of background knowledge. Second, they find that they lack the time necessary to introduce students to the substantial amount of basic theological vocabulary and knowledge required to engage more advanced and interesting topics.

This book aims to deal with both these difficulties, and to liberate teachers from the often tiring and tedious business of teaching entry‐level theology. This book will allow your students to acquire a surprisingly large amount of information in a short time. You may find it helpful to read the advice given to students (p. xxiv) to get an idea of how the book can be used. From your perspective as a teacher, however, the following points should be noted.

This textbook is intellectually permissive and pedagogically hospitable, in that it allows you to add additional material of your choice and adapt it to your own teaching context without in any way compromising its approach. This textbook lays the foundations of a course on Christian theology, while encouraging you to build on those foundations in ways you find helpful and appropriate – for example, by providing additional or alternative examples of theologians, debates, or topics. The book provides you with a scaffolding that has been tried and tested over a period of three decades, to which you can easily add your own material.

The contents of this book can be mastered without the need for any input on your part. Every explanation which this book offers has been classroom‐tested on students at university and college level in Australasia, Canada, China, Hong Kong, the United Kingdom, and the United States, and refined until students reported that they could understand the points being made without the need for further assistance. For example, we know that students as young as 16 years are using this work in the United Kingdom, and finding it intelligible and interesting. You should be able to invite students to read this book as essential background to your own teaching, thus enabling you to deal with more advanced and interesting themes in classroom time. The hard work has been done for you, to allow you to enjoy and develop your own teaching, without having to spend valuable teaching time on basic introductory issues.

The book is designed to create space for you, the teacher, to weave in your own assessments, judgments, and additional material you may feel is helpful. It is intellectually permissive, in that it allows you to add supplementary material of your choice without in any way compromising its approach. This textbook provides you with a tried and tested scaffolding, on which you can build, weaving in writers, topics or debates that you feel would be helpful to your students, particularly theologians working outside the mainstream of western theology. You can easily expand our examples or quotations with ones that you think are more appropriate, or would work particularly well for your purposes.

A series of video and audio resources have been developed especially for this work, in which I introduce the textbook and its approach, as well as give students an overview of many of the issues that will be covered in the textbook. These resources have been designed to be very informal and accessible, and ought to help your students gain both confidence and familiarity with the material more rapidly than would otherwise be possible. You can find these resources on Alister McGrath’s YouTube video channel. There are no charges, fees, or permissions issues for using these.

This textbook is theologically neutral; it does not advocate any denominational agenda. It reports criticisms made of positions, but does not itself criticize those positions. It does not tell its readers what to think, but tells them what has been thought. The work is descriptive, analytic, and explanatory; it is not advocational, in that it does not impose or extol any specific approach to theology. Our primary goal in this book has been to introduce readers to the themes of Christian theology, and enable them to understand them. This means that we have included discussion of many theological positions that are not my own, and tried to present them as accurately and fairly as possible. We know that this feature of this textbook is hugely valued by its readers, and it is our intention to maintain it. Readers of this text who believe that any positions are misrepresented are invited to write to the authors or publisher, so that appropriate corrections can be made in future editions.

Because it aims to be clear, fair, and balanced, this textbook will allow you, as the teacher, to build your own distinct approach or understanding on the foundations which it lays. This work will help your students understand Aquinas (or Augustine, or Barth, or Luther), but it will not ask them to agree with Aquinas (or Augustine, or Barth, or Luther). The book aims to put you, the teacher, in the position of interacting with the classic resources of the Christian tradition, on the basis of the assumption that your students, through reading this book, have a good basic understanding of the issues.

The ordering of material in the seventh edition has not been altered from that of the sixth edition, which ensures an easy transition from the older edition. You may like to note that the first four chapters offer an overview of historical theology; the next four chapters a brief overview of aspects of philosophical theology and questions of theological method, including many questions usually described as “fundamental theology”; and the remaining ten chapters deal with the leading themes of systematic theology. The work aims to include a fair and representative selection of the contributions of Christian theologians over two thousand years.

You will notice that the work includes generous quotations from the original works of theologians. This is a deliberate matter of policy. It is important that your students get into the habit of reading theologians, rather than just reading what has been written about them. The work aims to encourage students to interact with original texts, and offers them help in doing so. If you find this practice valuable, you might like to think of using the companion volume to this work, The Christian Theology Reader. This work offers its readers the opportunity to engage with more than 360 original sources – substantially more than any other such textbook – while providing far more help with this process of engagement than is normally found. Each reading in The Christian Theology Reader is provided with its own individual introduction, commentary, and study questions, and is fully sourced so that it can be followed through to its original context without difficulty.

If you are teaching a course on the basic themes of systematic theology it is strongly recommended that you ask students to read the first eight chapters before the course commences. This will give them the background knowledge that they will need to get the most from your teaching. You will find the questions at the end of each of those chapters helpful in judging whether the students have understood what they were asked to read – or, indeed, whether they read it at all!

Because this work is introductory, certain issues are occasionally introduced or explained more than once. This is a deliberate matter of policy, resting on the observation that some of its readers skip chapters in their haste to get to the bits that they think are really important – and in doing so, miss out on some relevant material. The book works at its best if the chapters are read in the order in which they are presented; however, it is sufficiently flexible to permit other approaches to using it.

Additional teaching aids for this volume will be provided through its dedicated website, maintained by the publisher, which includes full bibliographies for each chapter (which will be updated regularly), video and audio resources, and links to theological resources on the Internet. This dedicated website is not password‐protected, and can be used by anyone with access to the Internet. The website address is: http://www.wiley.com/legacy/wileychi/mcgrath/

We also recommend students to make use of the authoritative online St Andrews Encyclopedia of Theology which has established itself as an excellent source of reliable, free surveys of major theological topics and up to date bibliographies (https://www.saet.ac.uk/), and the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy which offers excellent articles on philosophical topics of theological importance (https://plato.stanford.edu/). This supersedes the older practice of providing printed reading lists, which date quickly, and are often not particularly comprehensive.

The authors and publisher are committed to ensuring that this work remains as helpful and thorough as possible, and welcome comments or suggestions for improvement. In particular, we welcome being told of any approaches to teaching any aspect of Christian theology that you have found...