Theology is Secondary, Revelation is Primary

"Theology is not something primary but something secondary. The primary thing, which is presupposed by theology, is a body of traditional pronouncements which are believed to have been revealed, not to have come into being through human interpretation of reality, but, as Plato puts it, to 'have come down from a divine source.'

"Now theology is the human endeavor to interpret this body of tradition out of itself, by ordering it and weighing it." 29

"A philosophizing which refuses to be methodologically open toward theology and to reach an understanding with it is quite simply unphilosophical." 19

Joseph Pieper, The End of Time: A Meditation on the Philosophy of History, San Fransisco: Ignatius, 1999