Theology used to aim at an account of reality as a whole. Creation, humanity and what is to come were described in relation to one another, not separately. Contemporary theology has enormous disciplinary depth, but no part of it is charged with that older task any more: saying, as a whole, what Christian faith fundamentally is, in a form that can be examined by people who do not share its starting point. I think the task is worth resuming, under the conditions of a secular age.

Those conditions are conceptual as much as social. The words we use for knowledge and for the human were formed under particular historical circumstances, and they carry commitments that almost nobody states. “Science” is the obvious case. In public and academic discourse it works less as a description of what researchers actually do than as a settled picture of what counts as knowledge, one in which theology has already been placed outside. If a theological account borrows such terms without examining them, it has given away the decisive questions before it starts. The German word Wissenschaft covers a wider range of disciplined inquiry, and it does not build that exclusion into itself.

What I work with, conceptual theology, is a subfield within constructive systematic theology. Its task is to identify the small set of concepts that are genuinely central to Christian faith, to work out how they hold together, and to draw the relevant disciplines into one coherent account. Its central requirement is transparency: the moves have to be as visible as the conclusions, and both have to remain open to revision. That is what makes such an account comparable across traditions. Disagreement can then be located, and it becomes clear whether it sits at the centre of an account or much deeper, at the conditions under which anyone believes anything at all. The novelty here is methodological, not substantive. Theology at its best has always done this work. What it has lacked is a recognised home for it, a shared vocabulary, and a form in which it can be argued about across confessional lines.

Applied to one family of accounts, this gives theologies of Scripture: those that treat Scripture as their primary source and norm. Applied substantively, it gives the claim I am working out, that the resurrection of Christ and of the dead governs what Christian theology may say about everything else.

None of this can simply be asserted and then applied. It has to be put to particular questions, in the church and outside it, in theory and in professional practice, and it has to make a difference to the answers. Where it does not, that is worth knowing. The projects gathered here are that testing.