Now I have my nice long list of books to read, and now they have started to land with a reassuring 'thud' on my doormat, I have also started reading them - from the sublime to the ridiculous in as many days, first reading a fairly complex journal article on the writing of histories of religions and then starting an undergraduate text on historical method.  As is the way of things, a lot of what they say is much the same, just the length of words varies!  And, as is also often the way when I read such things, it is sort of stuff I already intuitively felt anyway but had never got round to expressing - and would have needed six times as many words to do half as good a job.

Anyway, apart from the need to be good and reflect on why I think it is OK for me to read 'level 1' history whilst being miffed at being offered what feels like 'Level 1' theology (my aim with this reading on history being to have a DIY crash course from zero to competent in about 4 weeks!) I have discovered one person's working defintion of history which, with a bit of tweaking could fit almost any discipline I know of, but then the author admits a similarity to a defintion for literature.

So, Keith Jenkins in Re-Thinking History, identified as an A-level/1st year undergraduate text says

History is a shifting, problematic discourse, ostensibly about an aspect of the world, the past, that is produced by a group of present-minded workers (overwhelmingly in our culture salaried historians) who go about their work in mutually recognisable ways that are epistemologically, methodologically, ideologically and practically postitioned and whose products, once in circulation, are subject to a series of uses and absues that are logically infinite but which in actuality generally correspond to a range of power bases that exist at any given moment and which strucutre and distribute the meanings of histories along a dominant-marginal sprectrum.

 

Could this be minimally altered to say

Theology is a shifting, problematic discourse, ostensibly about an aspect of the world [or maybe, human experience], faith, that is produced by a group of present-minded workers (overwhelmingly in our culture salaried theologians) who go about their work in mutually recognisable ways that are epistemologically, methodologically, ideologically and practically postitioned and whose products, once in circulation, are subject to a series of uses and absues that are logically infinite but which in actuality generally correspond to a range of power bases that exist at any given moment and which strucutre and distribute the meanings of theologies along a dominant-marginal sprectrum.

 

I think it could.  Indeed, notwithstanding the claim of pure science to stand outside ethical judgements and solely be concerned with facts, it could pretty well be applied to them, and certainly to applied sciences, too. 

The next question is, of course, while it is good to have a working defintion - even if it's a sub-university level one at this stage, what do I then do with it?  I can critique it, I can accept it, in theory I could reject it, but actually I have to find a way of working out how I relate it back to using history within theology.  That should keep me quiet for a bit!!