About the "whys" and the "wherefores" and the "therefores" etc etc etc

Philosophy and theology have always had an interrelationship. They address some of the same questions. Philosophy existed first - the Israelites in the Hebrew Scriptures weren't awfully concerned about the abstractions of either philosophy or theology. They were much more concerned about how to relate, both one to another and to God. Judaism, as presented in the Old Testament, is a very concrete religion of every day life.

It did come about that ancient Judaism encountered Greek civilization. It was never an easy encounter for the Hebrew patterns of life and thought; the Greek was far more elegant and, frankly speaking, a lot more fun. Greek civilization came to dominate nearly every realm that it entered, even the Roman. Rome conquered Greece, then Greece conquered Rome. The language of the New Testament, and the mother tongue of Christianity, was not Hebrew or Latin or Aramaic. It was Greek.

So, with the interrelationship of languages and cultures the inevitable did happen.The Christian theologian Tertullian asked, "What has Athens to do with Jerusalem?" The answer: they wound up having much to do with one another. As Christianity evolved, theologians borrowed increasingly the vocabulary and concepts of philosophy. Such terms as:

Ontology - the nature of being. What is the meaning of existence? Never mind the meaning; what is 
existence? And, the question that theology may approach but with which philosophy has no luck: 

Why existence? Why is there anything at all? How would you answer this?

Epistemology - the nature of knowledge. How do we know? Do we start as blank slates, knowing only by our own senses, or are there things we know intuitively, without being told? When theologians examine this the question changes a bit: how can we obtain saving knowledge? Is our imagination primarily analogic - there are analogies that can be made between the Eternal and the existence we know - or is our imagination primarily dialectic - God is so wholly other, completely different, from anything we know that we cannot attain to any knowledge absent revelation, and even that can only be metaphoric? One of these  - analogical or dialectical - is prominent in Protestant thought; the other is the same in Catholic thought. I know I'm running the risk of oversimplifying, and I'm not going to tell you which is which. What is your approach?

Soteriology - the study of salvation. This term would have no meaning for philosophy. Saved - from what? To what?  For Christians, the question revolves around Jesus Christ. What does his Passion and Resurrection save us from? How does his sacrifice do that? What is needed from us - is Jesus' sacrifice the be-all-and-end-all of salvation, or do we have a role as well? The differences between the Catholics and the Protestants in the Reformation have been overstated. What think ye?

It is necessary to be careful in trying to relate philosophy and theology. The Greeks - I have Plato and Aristotle in mind - may have been close to truth in some areas, but their concept of the Deity was far off. For Plato, the Supreme Being was "The form (or the idea) of the good." That is not personal. It's a concept. You can't pray to a concept, and you can't establish a personal relationship with a concept. Karl Barth, a Swiss Reformed theologian, said "God has real hands - not claws like we have." The God of Christianity - and of Judaism, and of Islam - is a personal God. Aristotle's concept of God - "thought thinking about thought" - is even more abstract, even less personal. (BTW, if you want to start reading these philosophers, let me suggest that Plato is much more accessible for the beginner. Just sayin'.) So, be careful about borrowing too much.

So maybe I should have put a "Heavy sledding warning" at the top of this posting, but I don't think it was all that heavy. If it was, it was my aim to make it accessible. But I'd love your reactions to questions posed:

Why is there anything at all?
Analogic or dialectic? (with awareness that everyone operates in both modes at given times)

Who, exactly, was Jesus to you?

Thanks for hanging out for a few.