Theology translates into English from the Greek theologia () which derived

from heos (), meaning "God," and -logia (-),[12] meaning "utterances, sayings,
or oracles" (a word related to logos [], meaning "word, discourse, account,
or reasoning") which had passed into Latin as theologia and into French as thologie. The
English equivalent "theology" (Theologie, Teologye) had evolved by 1362. [13] The sense
the word has in English depends in large part on the sense the Latin and Greek equivalents
had acquired in Patristic and medieval Christian usage, though the English term has now
spread beyond Christian contexts.

Greek theologia () was used with the meaning "discourse on god" in the fourth
century BC by Plato in The Republic, Book ii, Ch. 18.[14] Aristotle divided theoretical
philosophy into mathematike, physike and theologike, with the latter corresponding
roughly to metaphysics, which, for Aristotle, included discourse on the nature of the divine.
[15]

Drawing on Greek Stoic sources, the Latin writer Varro distinguished three forms of such
discourse: mythical (concerning the myths of the Greek gods), rational (philosophical
analysis of the gods and of cosmology) and civil (concerning the rites and duties of public
religious observance).[16]
Theologos, closely related to theologia, appears once in some biblical manuscripts, in the
heading to the book of Revelation: apokalypsis ioannoy toy theologoy, "the revelation of
John the theologos." There, however, the word refers not to John the "theologian" in the
modern English sense of the word butusing a slightly different sense of the root logos,
meaning not "rational discourse" but "word" or "message"one who speaks the words of
God, logoi toy theoy.[17]
Some Latin Christian authors, such as Tertullian and Augustine, followed Varro's threefold
usage,[18] though Augustine also used the term more simply to mean 'reasoning or
discussion concerning the deity'[2]
In Patristic Greek Christian sources, theologia could refer narrowly to devout and inspired
knowledge of, and teaching about, the essential nature of God.[19]
In some medieval Greek and Latin sources, theologia (in the sense of "an account or
record of the ways of God") could refer simply to the Bible.[20]
The Latin author Boethius, writing in the early 6th century, used theologia to denote a
subdivision of philosophy as a subject of academic study, dealing with the motionless,
incorporeal reality (as opposed to physica, which deals with corporeal, moving realities).
[21] Boethius' definition influenced medieval Latin usage.[22]
In scholastic Latin sources, the term came to denote the rational study of the doctrines of
the Christian religion, or (more precisely) the academic discipline which investigated the
coherence and implications of the language and claims of the Bible and of the theological
tradition (the latter often as represented in Peter Lombard's Sentences, a book of extracts
from the Church Fathers).[23]
In the Renaissance, especially with Florentine Platonist apologists of Dante's poetics, the
distinction between "poetic theology" (theologia poetica) and "revealed" or Biblical
theology serves as steppingstone for a revival of philosophy as independent of theological
authority.
It is in this last sense, theology as an academic discipline involving rational study of
Christian teaching, that the term passed into English in the fourteenth century, [24] though
it could also be used in the narrower sense found in Boethius and the Greek patristic
authors, to mean rational study of the essential nature of God a discourse now
sometimes called Theology Proper.[25]
From the 17th century onwards, it also became possible to use the term 'theology' to refer
to study of religious ideas and teachings that are not specifically Christian (e.g., in the
phrase 'Natural Theology' which denoted theology based on reasoning from natural facts
independent of specifically Christian revelation[26]), or that are specific to another religion
(see below).
"Theology" can also now be used in a derived sense to mean "a system of theoretical
principles; an (impractical or rigid) ideology."[27]