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The context in which theology carries out its proper task is the context defined by the twofold question that constitutes it as a distinctive process of reflective understanding.

Here, again, it is precisely the task of theology, in the sense of the question it asks and attempts to answer, that proves to be determinative. For the context of theology, just like its method and criterion, is determined by its proper task. Among the other things this implies is that the question often discussed of where theology properly belongs -- whether in the church or in the academy, and, if in the latter, whether with philosophy or with history or with the special sciences or with the arts -- is not a fruitful question. For theology properly belongs wherever it is in fact located by the twofold question that is sufficient as well as necessary to constitute it as a distinct field of human reflection.

But this is not all that can be said about theology's context, and it is only by considering what may be called its several contextual factors that the theological task itself can be fully understood. For the present, however, it must suffice to say that the several factors that go to make up the context of theology all fall into one or the other of two groups, which reflect the twofold question that theology asks and tries to answer and, behind that, its necessary and sufficient conditions as a process of reflection in the Christian witness of faith and the human existence for which that witness claims to be decisive, and hence
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true. Thus one may distinguish such factors as the following as belonging, respectively, to the two groups: (1) revelation, faith, church, the apostolic witness, Scripture, tradition; and (2) experience, reason, culture,
religion, academy, history, philosophy, the special sciences and
the arts. It should be evident that, in pursuing this fourth question of the context, or the contextual factors, of theology, one must perforce retread the ground covered only by all the loci of traditional prolegomena -- not only the locus on theology, but also the loci on revelation, on faith, and on Holy Scripture.

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^1^. On this definition of the theological task, as well as on all that  follows in this paper, see the more extended discussion in my essay,  "What Is Theology?" +The Journal of Religion+, LII, 1 (January 1972),  22-40.
^2^. See my essay, "The Point of Christology," +The Journal of Religion+, LV, 4 (October 1975), 375-395.
\^3^This^3^ This is true, I should maintain,even if a proto-form of "the  Christ-kerygma" should prove to be at least as early as "the  Jesus-kerygma" documented by the Synoptic Gospels. For it is in the  Jesus-kerygma that the Jesus who is the subject of all Christian  witness, and hence the explicit source of all that is theologically  normative, is attested without explicit christological predicates--the  Christ-kerygma as such, as Willi Marxsen has shown, being merely implicit in the "that" of the Jesus-kerygma, as distinct from its  "what." Because all explicit christological predicates not only  interpret their subject but, more importantly, are also to be  interpreted by it, it is the Jesus discernible precisely in the  Jesus-kerygma by which the appropriateness of all explicit christology  and, consequently, all other theological claims must finally be judged.  See further Willi Marxsen, +Das Neue Testament als Buch der Kirche+ (Gütersloh: Gütersloher Verlagshaus Gerd Mohn, 1968), pp. 108 f., III  (English translation by James E. Mignard as +The New Testament as the  Church's Book+ \[Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1972\], pp. 112 f., 115).