Why Theology?

A friend asked me how I got started with theology. I was a college dropout living in Washington, DC in Christian community (l'Arche). A friend of mine introduced me to GK Chesterton, Flannery O'Connor, Walker Percy, and Newman Bookstore at Catholic U. I picked up De Lubac's Catholicism, and then lots of Hans Urs von Balthasar and Adrienne von Speyr (I could spot the distinctive Ignatius Press bindings from across the store). De Lubac launched me toward the Fathers of the Church. I was challenged by Balthasar's Clerical Styles and Lay Styles, which pointed me toward: Dante, Augustine, Anselm, GM Hopkins, John of the Cross, Bonaventure, Pascal, Irenaeus, Péguy. Following Balthasar's example (he studied Germanistics), I returned to college and studied English. 

My college theology classes were too rationalistic, thin, and boring to entice me away from the literary course I had chosen. In college I had Christ in Scriptures (historical-critical study of 3 Gospels); Systematic theology (this and that - I remember a bit of (John?) McQuarrie and the fact that we read R.P. McBrien. We read part of Dulles's Models of the Church - the part where he criticizes the institutional model - every day our teacher would inform us that we had been brainwashed and that he urged us to get beyond the notion of a God who interferes with life); my elective theology class was Roman Catholicism (i.e. the Baltimore Catechism in a college class). Philosophy was mixed but better: Six Great Ideas by Mortimer Adler, Existentialism, Ethics (more boring than theology classes!), and the Philosophy of God (this finally gave me my Anselm, taught by Fr. Jules Brady SJ). 

It may be a bit of an exaggeration, but I think theology may hold a position in pockets of the United States roughly analogous to opera in Italy. In Italy, the construction worker may be singing an aria in the shower; in the US, he may be wondering about justification.