this may well be the heart of theology, but it is not its art.Naturally, to extend a critique such as this towards, what has among contemporary theologians become an accepted truth, a deeply held personal, emotional and existential commitment; an unquestioned and socially constantly reinforced truism with many layers of historical, social and political sympathies clustered together, will as a reaction- even rebuttal- always elicit a battery of quite predictable (and by now, after Lombaard 2009b:274-287 and Lombaard 2006:144-155, also tiresome) misrepresentations; even name-calling. To preempt these - the above criticism is not meant to imply that: The poor ought not to be cared for. Injustices in society should be left as is. A bad past is being pined for. Theologians should strive to be context-free. Exegesis should not be brought into discussion with modern problems, and so forth.Any rehearsal of these reflex responses to the critique expressed above would amount to misreading the objective here. The plea here is namely not for less, but for more: The poor must be better cared for. Injustices should be eradicated more efficiently. The bad of the past (as with the bad in the present) should be mercilessly exposed. Theologians should be fully contextually aware. Exegesis should be a strong voice among many others in discussing modern problems, and so forth.The underlying consideration here is that, in the urgency to do good, theologians - with those from the bibliological sciences as example - have been doing good poorly. This may have been pointed out too harshly above, and too broadly within the confines of only an article, but the criticism had to be made clearly. Often we theologians "know not what we do", because we know too little from outside our immediate academic specialisms; and we trust in some kind of automatic, direct effect of our writings.Equally, the correlative point must be clearly made: we do not what we know.We do not what we knowThere is a strong conviction of faith among many, even most theologians within the broader contextual/liberation theological stream (and of course wider), that God can change the world for the better. Along with this goes the corollary: that human beings are called on to play their role as active agents in such processes. There is also the vague sense that theologians may have a bigger responsibility than other professions in such matters. These underlying factors play a tacit role in the way much theological scholarship is understood and practised. It is also particularly the former kind of conviction that, in a way, blinds - to remain still with the earlier example - exegetes to the urgency of combining Bible reading skills with skills in economic analysis, for instance (cf. e.g. Nurnberger 2002 and Nurnberger 1999). This is a most demanding undertaking, which glib reference to cross-disciplinary research usually belies. Even then the self-assuredness of usually less experienced scholars in assuming that proposed ideas will straightforwardly alter the world for the better should be tamed by the sense from experience that such results seldom follow. Idealism and realism should meet.This should, however,