Loving God With Our Minds:
The Vocation of Theological
Education in the Life and
Leadership of the Church[1]
Michael
Jinkins
“I pray that you may have the power to
comprehend, with all the saints, what is the breadth and length and height and
depth, and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, so that you may
be filled with all the fullness of God.”
Ephesians 3:18-19
A Bad
Mood on the Rise
In a recent sermon, Tom Long, Professor of Homiletics at Emory
University, observed that the greatest heresy the Church faces today is not
atheism; it is superficiality.[2]
This is not just a problem we face in churches, of course. The dumbing-down of
American society in general has been depressingly well documented.[3]
But superficiality is an especially thorny problem when it comes to Christian
faith, particularly for Presbyterians. There is a popular mood on the rise in
North America that places an increasingly higher valuation on religious emotion
uncritically examined, pious superstitions and sentimentality than on that
“life of the mind as a service of God” which has historically been the hallmark
of the various Reformed traditions.[4]
Last summer
Ellis Nelson brought me an editorial by Nicholas Kristof, a columnist for The
New York Times. The essay has troubled me more the longer I have thought
about it. Kristof reflects on the increasing credulity of the American public,
remembering his grandfather, “a devout and active Presbyterian elder,” who
regarded the virgin birth as a more or less a legendary aspect of the Christian
faith and evolutionary theory as a fairly viable scientific explanation of how
nature works. Kristof writes: “Those kinds of mainline Christians are
vanishing,” and are being replaced by Christians who prove the fervor of their
religious convictions by refusing to test them intellectually. He argues that
his intention is not to pour scorn on anyone’s devotion, but he is puzzled and
worried “by the way the great intellectual traditions of Catholic and
Protestant churches alike are withering, leaving the scholarly and religious
worlds increasingly antagonistic.” He says he worries, at least partially,
because of the conversations he has had with certain “self-satisfied and
unquestioning” representatives of what we commonly call Islamic fundamentalism.
He writes, “the Islamic world is in crisis today in large part because of a
similar drift away from [its] rich intellectual tradition” and toward
unquestioning, emotional religious fervor. “The heart,” he concludes, “is a
wonderful organ, but so is the brain.”[5]
I share
Kristof’s concern. As one who became a Presbyterian because of the Reformed
tradition’s belief that our love of God is incomplete unless we love God with
our minds, as well as with our hearts and souls, I worry what will become of
Christian faith and practice, indeed of what will become of the world we live
in, if Christians fail to ask tough, deep critical questions of our faith, if
we ignore life’s deep mysteries and profound complexities, and abandon the
curiosity that is unafraid to swim at the deep end of the pool. Today, perhaps
more than at anytime since the Reformation, we need to recover the proper and
distinct role of Christian scholarship in the life and leadership of the Church,
and we need a renewed appreciation for the unique vocation of the theological
scholar.
The Church
has, of course, been at odds with itself over the precise role scholarship
plays in its life almost from the beginning. In the Second Century, Tertullian
of Carthage asked: “What has Athens to do with Jerusalem? What concord is there
between the Academy and the Church?” Tertullian’s answer was, Not much!
As he says: We have no need for curiosity once we possess Jesus Christ, nor do
we need to raise questions having received the gospel. [6]
Apparently Tertullian’s disdain for classical learning extended only as far as
philosophy and theology, since he clearly was a student of classical Latin
rhetoric.
Despite
Tertullian’s rejection of the role of scholarship in the life of the Church,
even a cursory examination of the history of the Church reveals the fact that
time and time again renewal, renaissance, reformation, and even revival of the
spiritual life of the Church has originated from the efforts of Christian scholarship
at least as often as from Christian preaching and congregational ministry. For
every renewal movement originating with Dominican preachers and Puritan
pulpiteers, with a George Whitefield, a Charles Finney, or a Charles Haddon
Spurgeon, there has been an Aquinas, an Erasmus, a Luther, a Calvin, a William
Robertson Smith, and a Benjamin Warfield. The Methodist movement is simply
unimaginable apart from Oxford University, as surely as Lutheranism is
unimaginable apart from that door of a provincial university Church to which an
angry Augustinian professor of Bible nailed his famous theses. Calvinism grew
from the same soil of that enlightened humanism which knew the Stoics as well
as it did St. Paul, that dedicated itself to exposing superstition as well as
corruption in the medieval church. It was the spirit of humanistic scholarship
that gave us our critical editions of the Greek New Testament and the Hebrew
Scriptures so that God’s Word could reliably and accurately be translated into
the languages of the people, and it was this same spirit that sought to create
in the Protestant Churches a class of pastor scholars to replace an ignorant
and complacent clergy that muttered words they did not comprehend over rites
they could not understand. Arguably the most exciting renewal movement in the
modern Reformed Church, the Great Disruption of 1843, when the Free Church of
Scotland emerged from the ashes of aristocratic patronage in the old
Established Church, was marked not only by its evangelical preachers, like
Thomas Chalmers, but even more by the scholars it produced in its second
generation whose teaching and writing introduced to Presbyterian ministers and
congregations the new critical scholarship of Germany.
An
examination of the church’s history not only reveals the perennial nature of
this struggle over the proper role of scholarship in the Church, but also its
fundamental creativity. The life, leadership, and ministry of the Church have
been blessed, the Church’s preaching invigorated, its understanding of
scripture advanced, its knowledge of its own history enlightened, and its
theological heritage deepened, whenever it has held together, sometimes in
countervailing tension, the distinct vocations of scholarship and of pastoral
ministry: two very different callings (among many others) that through the
richness of God’s grace have, in a sort of living dialectic, complemented one
another in their differences as well as in their commonalities. The lectern and
the pulpit represent two distinct, but equally indispensable, vocations in the
life of the Church, even as the seminary represents a distinct mission from the
congregation in the leadership of the larger Church. Whenever this tension has
collapsed, historically, with either side claiming supremacy, independence, or
subservience, the Church has suffered. Wherever this tension is sustained, the
Church’s common life is deepened and enriched.
In the face
of the contemporary heresy of superficiality, I want to review the role and
function of theological scholarship and seminary education for the sake of the
Church’s life and leadership. But I want to do more. I also want to celebrate a
unique and indispensable vocation that is under threat from within the Church
and without. John Leith, in his 1987 Thomas
White Currie Lectures here at Austin Seminary, asked, “What is it the Church
has to say that no one else can say?”[7]
Today I want to ask a related question, “What role does theological education
play in the Church that no one else can play?”
Theological
Role Playing
E. Harris
Harbison, a professor of history at Princeton University half a century ago, in
his study, The Christian Scholar in the Age of the Reformation,
discussed the function of scholarship in Christian traditions. Harbison
believed that Christian scholarship, as a discrete vocation, plays three roles
in relation to the Church: First, it is responsible to systematically and
critically examine the Christian traditions themselves; second, it must seek to
relate these Christian traditions to the surrounding secular cultures and
traditions, understanding the points of intersection and difference between
them; and, third, it should work “to reconcile faith and science, in the
broadest sense of the word,” respecting the contributions both make to our
understanding of God’s world.[8]
Harbison
observed that Christian scholars, specifically those whose scholarship focuses
on theological and biblical studies, traditionally have been “most often
occupied with the first [critically and systematically studying the treasury of
resources in the Christian traditions, the biblical texts, and teachings of the
Christian faith], and least often with the third [reconciling the faith with
the various sciences of the contemporary world].” But he also observes those
notable exceptions, “the greatest minds, like Augustine and Aquinas,” who have
been concerned with all three scholarly roles.[9]
Between the
Church’s great scholars and the Church, one may find complementarity,
mutuality, and harmony, at times. But, there are also checks and balances,
conflict and countervalation. For
example, though Thomas Aquinas’s thought in time became the very standard of
Roman Catholic orthodoxy, in his own day Aquinas was condemned as a heretic by
some Church leaders because of his use of Aristotelian philosophy. The
relationship between Christian scholarship and Church has always been
complicated.
Harbison’s understanding of the three-fold role of
Christian scholarship brings to mind Rowan Williams’ typology of theology, a
typology that is worthy of a bit more attention as we seek to better understand
the contribution of theological scholarship to the life of the Church. Williams
maintains that we need an understanding of theology that discerns its
interactive nature in both the larger Church and the theological academy, and
that comprehends both the ecclesial and the academic within their larger social
and cultural contexts.[10]
His typology has the additional benefit of bringing the popular and
congregational practices of theology into conversation with the academic.
The second
category of theological activity, according to Williams, is the communicative.
“Theology,” Williams writes, “seeks also to persuade or commend, to witness to
the gospel’s capacity for being at home in more than one cultural environment,
and to display enough confidence to believe that this gospel can be
rediscovered at the end of a long and exotic detour through strange idioms and
structures of thought.” Paul Tillich described this as theology at the
boundaries.[13] For
Williams, a communicative theology demonstrates a kind of adventurous
faithfulness beyond familiar borders. He explains: “The assumption is that this
or that intellectual idiom not only offers a way into fruitful conversation
with the current environment but also that the unfamiliar idiom may uncover
aspects of the deposit of belief hitherto unexamined. In fact, it involves a
considerable act of trust in the theological tradition, a confidence that the fundamental
categories of belief are robust enough to survive the drastic experience of
immersion in other ways of constructing and construing the world.”[14]
Finally, Williams describes that “probing of what the
‘fundamental categories’ [of Christian faith] really mean,” through what he
calls “critical theology.” The term “critical,” in this context, does not mean
adverse, or derogatory, or negative. Rather critical means analytical. Critical
theology, according to Williams, refers to systematic, constructive, doctrinal,
fundamental, or dogmatic theology. Its concern is to investigate the “inner
tensions and irresolutions,” the “continuity and coherence,” and the integrity
of the faith traditions themselves.[15]
Karl Barth described this, of course, as Church dogmatics. Barth writes: “As a
theological discipline dogmatics is the scientific self-examination of the
Christian Church with respect to the content of its distinctive talk about
God.”[16]
Barth means, by using the term “scientific,” that theology in its critical
mode, is theology in the “strictest and proper sense of the word,” a discipline
which makes use of methodologies appropriate to the critical investigation of
its subject matter, thus acknowledging the Church’s duty to criticize and
revise its own speech about God.[17]
I would add that critical theological activities are not limited to the realm
of systematic or dogmatic theology, but include the duty of biblical scholars
to critically study the sacred texts, of ethicists to inquire into the ways we
construe moral duty, of historians to test sources, and of practical
theologians to examine the ways faith is practiced. In the ordinary run of
things, we generally think of this last category of theological activity as
peculiarly academic in nature, engaged in by scholars with specialized
training. But, in fact, all three categories, celebratory, communicative and
critical, have benefited from both scholarly and pastoral attention. Which
brings me, at long last, to answer the question, “What role does theological education
play in the life and leadership of the Church that no one else can play?”
A Modest
Proposal
I am instinctively suspicious of ambitious grand designs.
As in many things, I am guided here by the sanity of Karl Barth, who distrusted
closed systems that might divide our loyalty and enslave us to partisan
ideologies which inevitably run counter to the First Commandment, and by Isaiah
Berlin, who was always on guard for the kinds of idealism and utopian promises
that sacrifice too much humanity on the road to the divine.[18]
When I was a pastor, for example, I found great comfort in Loren Mead’s
wonderful little book titled, The Whole Truth About Everything Related to
the Church in Twelve Pages (If You Don’t Count the Introduction and the Conclusion),
the first chapter of which is titled, “Nothing Works,” and the second chapter,
“Almost Anything Can Work a Little Better.”[19]
With this in
mind, and taking cues from both Harris Harbison and Rowan Williams, I would
like to advance a modest proposal for how we might better understand the roles
that theological seminaries and Christian scholars play in the life,
leadership, and ministry of the Church. I believe theological scholarship, at
its best, functions (1) as the Church’s long-term memory bank, (2) as a
critical faculty for the Church’s self-reflection and analysis of its faith and
practice, (3) as a moderator in the Christian faith’s dialogue across all sorts
of boundaries and divides, and (4) as a provocateur when things in the Church
become too settled.
(1) The
Seminary and the Church’s Long-Term Memory
One of the most startling things about theological
schools and the scholars who teach in them is how long their memories are.
Indeed, I have come to believe that it is a distinctive role of seminaries to
serve as the long-term memory bank of the Church. And, it is a critical
function of seminaries to instill in our students an appreciation for the deep,
lasting traditions, legacies, and memories that make us who we are.
A few years ago, I had the privilege of sitting in on our
colleague, Stan Hall’s, introductory course, CM.122 THE CHURCH AS A WORSHIPING
COMMUNITY. I suppose I was as surprised as the students when I discovered that
Stan began his course by transporting us back to the second century and the
early Church’s worship as described by Justin Martyr. But I shouldn’t have been
surprised. When, in my own workshop on Church finance, someone asks me to
reflect on stewardship it is not unusual at all for me to begin, not with Dean
Hoge’s research into contemporary attitudes toward money, but with John
Chrysotom’s series of sermons on Lazarus and the rich man, preached in the
fourth century. Sure, I’ll get to Dean Hoge, Sondra Wheeler, Robert Wuthnow,
and Douglas John Hall, and lots of other contemporary writers. But I count on
Chrysostom to give us that authentic and fundamental perspective about what it
means for Christians to speak of money, a perspective that had already endured
for twelve hundred years when Adam Smith laid the foundations for modern
capitalism. When I want our students to get their bearings on the meaning of
pastoral ministry, I know we will eventually get to William Willoman, Eugene
Peterson, and Barbara Brown Taylor, but first I want to take us up into the
heights and headwaters of Christian wisdom, to the Patristic writers, like
Gregory of Nazianzus, who was so awed by the holiness of the pastoral calling
that he literally ran for the hills in terror after his ordination, and to
George Herbert, whose description of the pastoral office is pure poetry and
whose poetry speaks with the resonance of heaven.
The corporate memory of a local congregation in North
America is seldom more than a hundred years old. As pastors of suburban
congregations know only too well, most of their churches have a memory shorter
than that of a ten-year old soccer player.
The memory
of Christian scholarship, by contrast, stretches back for millennia. The
scholar’s conversation partners, on a day-to-day basis, speak across the ages,
forming a cloud of witnesses to the faith. Scholars routinely listen to debates
between St. Paul and St. James, Anselm and Abelard, Luther and Erasmus. As
strange as it may seem, Athanasius is as alive to the scholar as that colleague
in the next office (sometimes even more so). Remembrance is for the Christian
scholar an act of reverence, and attending to the multitude of traditions that
vie for our loyalty a matter of calling. As my colleague, Bill Greenway, has
said so well: “Every age has had those who inspire and sustain our faith in
troubled times, those who enhance our joy by articulating [the meaning of
Christian faith] clearly and publicly. We would be losing a wonderful gift from
God were we through inattention to miss out on the wonderful wisdom contained in
the voices of that cloud of witnesses.” Perhaps the principal role of
scholarship is simply this: to bring memory to life.
G. K.
Chesterton once wrote of tradition that it is the extension of the democratic
franchise to that most excluded portion of humanity, our ancestors. Tradition,
he said, is “the democracy of the dead.”[20] But, of course, the dead in Christ are alive
unto God. And theological scholarship may properly be understood as the
Church’s permanent lobby group for the cloud of witnesses. As a scholar, it is
an act of breathtaking arrogance for us to ignore the saints of the past whose
only failing is that they no longer walk among us in flesh and blood.
(2) The
Seminary as a Critical Faculty
On June 3, 1846, Thomas Chalmers, perhaps the greatest
preacher of nineteenth-century Scotland, spoke at a ceremony at which the
foundation stone was laid for New College, Edinburgh. He said: “There is no
substantial difference between the theology taught at a College, and the
theology taught in a Church.” However, “in the preparation of ministers … it is
necessary that it should be taught in the form of a science, and receive an
academic treatment in the hands of academic [teachers].”[21]
Chalmers’ comments may be illuminating as much in their inaccuracy as their
aptness.
We have tended, at least in North America, to be rather
hesitant to describe theological studies as a science, so enthralled are we to
a narrow conception of science as a study of physical phenomena by means of
controlled experiments, the findings of which must be verified independently by
other scientists who repeat the methods and test the results of previous
experiments. However, when the word science is used the way Chalmers uses the
term with reference to theology, and as Karl Barth and other European
theologians have used it, science means a process of rational, critical, and
analytical study.[22] Theological studies, in their view, are
scientific in that they inquire critically into the faith of the Church,
attempting through methodologies appropriate to the reality of our subject
matter, to investigate, examine, analyze and understand more deeply the
rational coherence of our faith.
Our goal is
to know God, and to understand more deeply who God is, and who God has created
us to be. There is, as Chalmers argued, no difference in substance between the
theology taught in a seminary and that taught in a congregation. However,
Chalmers understates the value of Christian scholarship when he restricts the
role of the scholar to the preparation of ordained ministers. In fact, the
entire Church benefits from critical theological scholarship. One may wonder,
indeed, whether it was the predominance of an attitude like that expressed by
Chalmers which eventually led to the disastrous controversies in the second
generation of the Free Church of Scotland, when the work of its most brilliant
scholars, Smith, Bruce, and Dods, was seen as a threat to the faith of ordinary
Christians. Yet another reminder that sometimes the verdicts of heresy trials
have been overturned only when the Church belatedly catches up with its
scholarship.
Theological
education, as taught in seminaries, is not qualitatively different from the
theological education needed by all Christians. As Edward Farley has argued, “Theologia,
theological understanding, is the presupposed subject matter and goal of all
education in the ecclesial community.”[23]
Certainly those persons preparing for ministry need a deep grounding in
critical studies, and this argues strongly for them to be taught by men and
women whose calling is dedicated to and who are schooled in the vocation of
Christian scholarship. But it is not only the ordained clergy who can benefit
from the constructive, creative, and critical study of their faith. It is an
indispensable function of scholarship to remind all Christians that our faith
is incomplete if it remains unreflective.
Walter
Wyman connects the critical function of theological scholarship to the
scholar’s historical consciousness, the nurturing of that long-term memory to
which I have already referred. Wyman sees the scholar as standing at that point
where (cross the crowded ways of life)?, where past and present practices and
understandings of the faith intersect, where wisdom is forged from the raw
material of life. He writes:
Christian theology may
be defined as critical reflection on the meaning and truth of the Christian
faith. Its task is both to interpret the Christian tradition and to articulate
what it is reasonable to believe in the present. As reflection, theology
is distinct from the life of faith itself: it is second-order thinking that
makes faith its object…. As critical, theology raises the question of
meaning and truth – how the ideas of faith … ought to be interpreted and
whether and in what sense those ideas may make good their claim to be true.[24]
The
theological educator, according to Wyman, teaches us to reflect critically, to
be able to bring careful, disciplined, analytical reflection to bear on the
faith of Christian congregations, on the sacred texts that guide us and the
practices that sustain us, to listen faithfully to the full range of human
developments in politics and law, in philosophy and the arts, and to do so with
one eye on the complex web of Christian communities of faith throughout history.[25]
This means, of course, that seminaries have a fundamental responsibility to
teach those who are called to pastoral ministry and to Christian scholarship.
Joseph
Sittler, in his comments on the formation of both scholars and ministers,
argues for something that seems (at least, initially) so patently obvious that
it hardly requires to be stated. Sittler says that scholars and ministers
“should be educated persons.” He means by this that they should be educated, not
merely trained. “You can train dogs to jump,” writes Sittler. But education
is about teaching “the mind to unfold to the multiple facets of human existence
with some appreciation, eagerness, and joy.” To be educated, Sittler argues, is
“the opposite of being dull.”[26]
If Sittler
is right in aruging that the principal work of ministry is theological
reflection, and if Karl Barth was correct when he said that theology requires
free persons, then theological education must be more than mere training, and
much, much more than indoctrination.[27]
Theological education forms creative and critical minds courageous enough to
question settled opinions, confident enough to call to task hallowed
assumptions, and faithful enough to trust God’s hold on us to be stronger than
our grasp of God. But, again, such theological education must not be restricted
to an ordained clergy. The seminary has an obligation to serve as a center of
theological education for the whole Church. However, this does not mean that
market forces and the perceived needs even of the Church should determine the
agenda of theological scholarship or the curricula of theological seminaries.
There are
times when the School of the Church serves the Church best by resisting the
Church’s anxieties, its protestations, and even its anger. The duty of theological
scholarship to critically examine the faith and practices of the Church
throughout the ages and to instill the habits of critical theological
reflection among the people of God has a far higher claim on the vocation of
the scholar than does the immediate comfort and convenience of the Church.[28]
Many of the most mystifying academic traditions, such as granting tenure to
senior scholars, reveal their true value only in those moments when scholarship
is compelled to speak in the face of ecclesiastical structures that would
silence the scholar if they could, examples of which range from the trials of
Martin Luther to the more recent tribulations of Hans Küng.
(3) The
Seminary as Moderator of Conversations
In his magnificent description of the Church as the body
of Christ, one body with many members, St. Paul speaks of the varieties of
gifts we are given by the same Holy Spirit to carry out God’s redemptive
purposes in the world. “Now you are the body of Christ,” Paul writes to the
Corinthians, “and individually members of it. And God has appointed in the
church first apostles, second prophets, third teachers; then deeds of power,
then gifts of healing, forms of assistance, forms of leadership, various kinds
of tongues. Are all apostles? Are all prophets? Are all teachers? Do all work
miracles? Do all possess gifts of healing? Do all speak in tongues? Do all
interpret?”
It is, of
course, in this immediate context that Paul writes surely one of the most
compelling and beautiful chapters in the entire Bible, the great “love chapter”
of First Corinthians 13. The chapter is addressed to people locked in a bitter
church fight over who is more important, over whose gifts and callings are more
godly. Paul writes, “I will show you a still more excellent way.” And he does.
“If I speak with the tongues of mortals and of angels, but do not have love, I
am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. And if I have prophetic powers, and
understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to
remove mountains, but do not have love, I have nothing.” And, indeed, we do
not.
Harris Harbison says that the vocation of Christian
scholarship is not very exciting, certainly in comparison to that of apostles
and prophets. In fact, Harbison is not even sure that the vocation of
scholarship should be equated with that of the teacher which Paul mentions.
Rather, Harbison is tempted to think of the scholar as the “interpreters of
tongues.”[29]
I don’t think Harbison is correct in his reading of this
text, but I do think his mistake is interesting, because the scholar’s function
both within the Church and beyond could well be characterized as that of
interpretation or translation – sometimes literally.
Can
any of us imagine the language-world of today’s English-speaking peoples and
their spiritual consciousness without the translation we call the King James
Version of the Bible? Today we think of the King James Version as the hallmark
of conservatism (it is not called the “Authorized Version” for nothing), but it
was a radical departure from the norm in its own time, a daring act of
translation, and of what we might now call cross-disciplinary integration. As
Adam Nicolson observes in his history of the King James Version, the English
into which the ancient Hebrew and Greek was rendered in that translation was an
artificial language, a language that could only have been devised by the
scholars themselves who translated the Bible. King James English was neither
the English commonly spoken nor written in that age or any age, but was a
language which could only have been invented by scholars who were more at home
in Latin, and who wanted to invest the vernacular with holiness, power, and
glory.[30]
Theological
scholarship also performs the function of translator or interpreter in a
metaphorical sense by moderating conversations across all sorts of boundaries
between languages, faith communities, denominational parties, diverse social
groups, cultures, tribes, classes, and academic disciplines. This function,
which both Harbison and Williams describe in some detail (this is William’s
category of communicative theology), can cause considerable controversy,
because it requires theology to learn new languages, to initiate or join in
conversations that may not defer to Christian theology’s ancient prestige, and
to risk the incarnation of the Word in sometimes radically new thought and
language worlds.
Theology is
most vulnerable when it attempts to speak across boundaries, as any scholar
knows who has ever attended the American Academy of Religion or tried to
participate in Inter-faith dialogue. And we must recognize the risks involved
here. Scholarship can look silly at times, when it mistakes fads for trends;
worse still, scholarship can appear faithless, when its confidence in new conversation
partners takes precedence over its awe in the presence of a holy God. And, yet,
the risks are worth running. It is frequently true that we only make
significant breakthroughs in understanding when we take the risk of looking
foolish or heretical. The Church’s understanding of the universe would be
poorer today had not courageous scholars embraced and become conversant with
the sciences of Galileo and Copernicus in the face of the Church’s threats. The
Church’s preaching would be poorer today had biblical scholars not taken that
fateful step of engaging in historical criticism, of asking questions about the
sources and the formation of the Bible. The Church’s very life would be poorer
today had theologians failed to learn to speak across the boundaries of
cultures, arts and sciences, psychology and philosophy.
Like a
theological Marco Polo, when the Christian scholar traverses the boundaries
that separate disciplines and world views, faiths, philosophies, political and
economic systems, whatever the risks are run, the scholarly adventure holds the
promise of transforming our native ecclesial lands. The Church throughout the
world has benefited throughout its history from undreamed-of gifts imported
from the unlikeliest foreign places of the human heart and mind.
(4) The
Theological School as Provocateur
Recently The Economist reviewed a new book
comparing how Communist era Soviet governments dealt with the arts in
comparison with how the arts have been dealt with in the United States. The
author observes that for all their revolutionary claims, Soviet leaders were
essentially Victorian in their appreciation for artistic achievement: afraid to
experiment, unwilling to move beyond realistic representation in the visual
arts, and inspiring moralistic fables in literature. Ironically, it has been in
the United States that the arts were most revolutionary, and that they
flourished. Though many in the population did not care for the excesses of
certain artists, liberty was valued, and the freedom of expression not only
stretched the boundaries of the acceptable, but allowed previously unimaginable
brilliance to emerge in the arts.[31]
Theological scholarship has tested its friendship with
bishops and priests, kings and presidents as well as the general population
throughout the centuries, provoking the larger Church to think new thoughts and
imagine new realities, challenging settled assumptions and forcing us to
criticize hallowed tenets of faith. And
scholarship has played this role since at least the second century. Origen’s
provocative theology walked the razor’s edge of settled orthodoxy, and was
sometimes considered heresy. But the leaders of the Church who wrote the Nicene
Creed stood on Origen’s giant shoulders.
There hangs over most theological schools that take
seriously their relationship with the Church a perennial temptation to provide
a mere endorsement of the reigning views of various ecclesiastical powers that
be. Some Christian denominations, in fact, have guaranteed by constraint that
their schools will never challenge the theological or ideological status quo of
the Church. Seminaries may find themselves rewarded in the short-term by giving
in to this temptation. But the schools that choose this road will only isolate
themselves from the rich ferment of ideas and discoveries “in the world in
which [the Church’s] ministry is to take place,” becoming a kind of theological
cul de sac. And the school that abandons its scholarly post is destined in time
to find it no longer serves God, nor the Church of Jesus Christ, because it has
forsaken its distinctive vocation. Like salt which has lost its savor, it has
become worthless.
One thing that stands out when considering the various
roles theological scholarship plays is that sometimes when Schools of the
Church are functioning at their best, their work may go unappreciated in the
Church they serve, either because it is accomplished quietly (as when scholars
insure that the latest critical edition of Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s writings is
published for the next generation) or because the work annoys us so much (in
the grand gadfly tradition of Socrates). The calling of theological scholarship
is a discrete and unique vocation. In the Reformed tradition, it is as
distinctive as the vocation of pastoral leadership. And when it is not
exercised with vitality and integrity, the Church loses.
Closing
Reflections on the Scholarly Vocation
For the
first couple of years after I came to the faculty of Austin Seminary, I still
referred to myself as a pastor. I wasn’t, of course. Not anymore. But I wanted
somehow to affirm the godliness, the deep Christian character, the devotion
required of those who engage in the scholarly vocation. I didn’t yet have a
vocational vocabulary adequate to speak of my new calling in a way that honored
its unique contribution to the life and leadership of the Church. It was some
time before I realized I was not complimenting the Christian scholar’s vocation
by confusing it with the pastor’s.
In the
“Ecclesiastical Ordinances of the Church of Geneva,” John Calvin writes: “The
office proper to doctors [of the Church] is the instruction of the faithful in
true doctrine, in order that the purity of the Gospel be not corrupted either
by ignorance or by evil opinion.” From its very beginning, the Reformed Church
understood lecturers in theology (and this included a wide range of
disciplines) to be “nearest to the minister and most closely joined to the
government of the Church.” However, Calvin’s Church also saw scholars as
exerting an indispensable countervailing force on the practice of ministry.[32]
While the
relationship between these two vocations is, as Calvin himself anticipated,
sometimes characterized as providing checks and balances and countervailing
forces, this relationship is also, and even more profoundly, a mutual and
complementary relationship. Nothing less could possibly be true to the
complexity, to the breadth and length and height and depth of God’s created
world; nothing less could adequately bear witness to that knowledge of the love
of Christ that surpasses all knowledge. During those years when I served in a
pastoral vocation, I relied on those who had dedicated their lives to the
vocation of Christian scholarship to challenge my thinking and my faith, to
deepen my understandings, and to help me challenge the thought and faith, and
deepen the understandings of the congregations I served.
A judicatory
official recently told me that he did not want pastors who read and study; he
wants pastors who learn from their experience. The two qualities are not
mutually exclusive. And I shudder to think how impoverished my own pastoral
ministry and church leadership would have been if I had only learned from my
own puny experience. The writings of scholars like Karl Barth and John Leith, Tom
and James Torrance, John McNeill, and Catherine Mowry LaCugna, and scores of
others, allowed me as a pastor to learn from the experience, the critical
reflection, the deep faith and understandings of thousands of lifetimes of
untold generations who together teach us what it means to be and live as
Christians. Perhaps, in the end, this is the most important thing, the thing we
must remember about the vocations of Christian scholarship and of pastoral
leadership. If we hope to prevent the triumph of the heresy of superficiality,
we must work together: seminaries and congregations, professors and pastors,
respecting our distinct, unique vocations, and exercising these vocations with
integrity. We are called to nothing less, so that God’s world and Christ’s Church
may be filled with all the fullness of God.
“Now
unto the God who by the power at work within us is able to accomplish
abundantly far more than all we can ask or imagine, to God be glory in the
church and in Christ Jesus to all generations, forever and ever. Amen.”
Ephesians
3: 20
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