. . . the task of theology is not simply to ask ‘What has the church said and believed, and how can we best express that so that people today will be able to understand it?; it must also ask and answer the question, ‘What should the church say and believe today?’ Consideration of the internal coherence must also entail concern for what we might call the ‘external reference’ of the story which the church tells, of its correspondence to some actual state of affairs in an beyond the world, its responsibility to some objective reality which stands over against itself and of which it seeks to speak. This is vital if theology is to remain essentially a quest for truth, rather than a simple bid (driven by nostalgia or a misguided sense of historical obligation) to preserve the shape an coherence of a particular theological tradition at all costs.
Trevor Hart, Faith Thinking: the Dynamics of Christian Theology (assigned text for Missional Theology I at Biblical Seminary).