Theology done without finding its sustenance in the incarnation of God has no source for a specified fruitfulness. That is, theology that isn’t first christology has no theological grounding except upon the neutrality of the theologian’s wit. But if the theologian is only neutral then their imaginations are free to run wild wherever the winds of social and thus theological imaginary might take them. And yet, the God who is Self-revealed for us in Jesus Christ cannot be generalized or universalized in such a willy-nilly way. The genuinely Christian theologian is bound to the scandal of particularity, to the wisdom of God, the wisdom of the cross. This wisdom has the theologian crucified to the world and the world to the theologian. As such there is no bereft theological imaginary available to the theologian if in fact the theologian will have something meaningful to say. Indeed, the Christian theologian isn’t a manufacturer or fabricator of materials, as if capable to spin theological things ostensibly out of the nothingness of their imaginary. The Christian theologian is simply, and at best, a worshipper of the God Self-explicated for us, by way of the theologian’s participation with Christ in the triune life as an adopted co-heir with Christ; and as such, the theologian’s task is to be a witness (μάρτυς) to the res (reality) they have come to encounter in the prosopon (face) of God in Jesus Christ.

Hence, unlike the philosopher, the Christian theologian isn’t attempting to discover metaphysical things in the vestiges of the natural order. The theologian, instead, is simply in union with the living triune God in Christ, which entails a lively, an organic “system of knowledge” that is based on contact with the LORD by way of Divine sustenance through ‘Immanuel’s veins.’ This is an altogether different reality from the philosopher’s. The philosopher constructs models, presents hypotheses, attempts to tap into a naked knowledge source latent in the natural order. But the theologian sits in the heavenlies above all principalities and powers gaining lived and organic knowledge of ultimate reality upon filial and personalist fellowship with reality Hisself.

Let the theologian (and the philosopher) understand.