There are lots of different methods recognised in theology. Theology is often taught under the titles “Systematics” or Dogmatics” but in fact not all theology is systematic in method or dogmatic in the popular sense.

One of the things I always recommend to people when they are reading a new thinker is to take careful note of the context into which that person wrote. Context isn’t everything. But it can illumine why someone wrote in a particular way. For instance, the neo-orthodoxy of the 20th century was not only a reaction against the anthropologically centred liberalism of the 19th century, it was also a response to a world at war. Theology, like everything else in Europe, was never the same again after 1918.

What qualifies something as theology, then? Is it the method, or the style, or the terminiology? Julian of Norwich was the first woman (in fact the first person) to write a surviving work of theology in English. Why write in English? Was it a cultural statement, an issue of accessibility? No, it was an accident of history; as a woman she was not schooled in scholastic Latin or in the Medieval Disuptation. SO she wrote in the language she knew, and in a form that, at the time, would not have been recognised as “proper” theology. What qualifies her book as theology is that it looks in depth at the character and being of God, and the consequent understanding of who human beings are in relationship to that God.

Context is important, then. But context isn’t everything. Sometimes the value of reading an old book is not so much to see its context, but to see what things rise above context; what is enduring from one age to the next. C S Lewis was a champion of reading the classics (unsurprisingly, given that he was a Medievalist at Oxford where they strongly resisted the study of literaturea as a “proper” subject until surprisngly late). Never read two “new” books in a row, Lewis advised – always read an old one in between, or read at least one old for every two new. Why? because

“…Every age has its own outlook. It is especially good at seeing certain truths and especially liable to make certain mistakes. Where they are true they will give us truths which we half knew already. Where they are false they will aggravate the error with which we are already dangerously ill. The only palliative is to keep the clean sea breeze of the centuries blowing through our minds, and this can be done only by reading old books.”