I've been thinking a lot lately (some here on this blog) about what theology actually does. How necessary is theology, and how does it relate to the local church?
I've noticed that many theologians and theology students influenced by "Yale theology" or "Duke theology" tend to use this language of "brokenness" regarding regular local churches. You get this picture sometimes that local church congregations in the US are being unfaithful (through being too Americanized, etc.), and that we theology-trained pastors are supposed to "fix" them. One person I know called it the theology "trickle down" theory. My divinity school spent a lot of time and energy forming and educating Pastors with the goal of sending them out to pass their formation and knowledge on to churches that needed it in a model similar to this.
I think this attitude is wrong. This kind of theology emphasizes the "Church-as-polis" aspects of the Gospel, and in doing so I think plays down the language of sin and salvation used in most congregations where Duke or Yale-influenced Ministers would work. I've struggled with this perspective in my own work with churches. When I started working at churches I felt like I should almost correct people when they talk about "getting saved" in a particular experience ("no, you've actually entered a particular cultural-linguistic system and an alternate political witness to the heretical soteriology of the state"). But I learned that the "Church-as-polis" view tends to run rough over the spiritual experiences of many Christians, and not to mention the way many local congregations read the bible. I think some of the philosophical thinking behind this brand of theology puts seminarians' understanding of theology, theology as in reflection/talking about the Gospel, at a problematic remove from people in local churches.
I may be wrong here. I'd like to blog more on this with a little more philosophical/theological background soon (mostly using Kathryn Tanner's book). I'd welcome discussion.
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I hear you, brother. You're on to something, but I think you've framed it incorrectly. Focusing on the question of "what theology does" perhaps is misleading when talking about Yale/Duke. At Duke, there is the notion that theology is important from a cultural-linguistic standpoint, but more determinative is the talk of habits and practices. I would assume that if you poked around in the Yale/Duke ether you'd find something like: the purpose of ministry is to connect people to God's activity through the practices of the church. Every practice needs institutions to sustain it, even though institutions tend to corrupt the practices that they sustain. Thus, institutions need policing and theological reflection can help with this. I'm not sure that someone from Duke would say that the purpose of ministry is to fix or impart theology...at least not directly. So, your question of "what theology actually does" perhaps should changed to "for what does a minister need theology."
ReplyDeleteIt is true that Duke/Yale/Barth downplays human experience as a starting point for theology...but as to your: "when they talk about "getting saved" in a particular experience ("no, you've actually entered a particular cultural-linguistic system and an alternate political witness to the heretical soteriology of the state")," you have to ask how someone came to know what "getting saved" was about. These things do not happen in a vacuum. So there are relatively easy ways to mollify the difference between "getting saved" and your mental caricature of Duke theology.
As a Baptist, I guess you have to wrestle with the question of mediation beyond Christ's meditation.
Yep I think there are some theological convictions in the background that are pushing me here, perhaps I should work on explaining those.
ReplyDeleteI'm concerned that a view of ministry that says "the purpose of ministry is to connect people to God's activity through the practices of the church" is wrong, because I think there's a problematic reductionism in "practical" accounts of Christianity (see the Willimon/Smith debate on practices recently, although I think some practice-talk is really useful and important).
I feel like Duke takes the practical account and teaches it as Gospel, leading to confusion when ministers go out and work in congregations were salvation is understood as something imputed or whatever rather than incorporation into an alternate "polis" of some sort formed by practices.
Every now and then I think I'm caricaturing Duke theology and then I read "Resident Aliens" and realize it's all there. The sub-sub-title of that book is exactly the broken church + let's fix it with theology attitude that I'm talking about - "a provocative assessment of Christian ministry for people who know that something is wrong"
"But I learned that the "Church-as-polis" view tends to run rough over the spiritual experiences of many Christians, and not to mention the way many local congregations read the bible. I think some of the philosophical thinking behind this brand of theology puts seminarians' understanding of theology, theology as in reflection/talking about the Gospel, at a problematic remove from people in local churches."
ReplyDeleteFrom a more "practical" (i.e., the on-the ground reality of actual practices of the church vs. theory about those practices) standpoint, I don't think most seminaries do a very good job of actually preparing people for the realities of ministry. Maybe it's the theological perspective you mentioned but I suspect it's also because seminaries are more concerned with making sure their students ask the "right" questions than with how students will deal with the real-life experiences of their parishioners.
I don't know what sorts of classes are offered at Duke in the areas of congregational leadership, pastoral care, counseling, etc. I used to be really critical of these sorts of classes - thinking them to be clearly inferior and useless compared to the "real" theology classes I wanted to take.
However, now that I've served full-time in a local church for two years, I'm so glad that I took them - especially when it comes to counseling those who are grieving, there are very few resources in what passes for "theology proper" these days to help ministers and parishioners alike to be be fully present to those who are in need.
I agree that the kind of theology you mention is far-removed from the actual experiences of people in local churches. Beyond that, however, I think the language of practices - at least the way in which it is typically employed these days - might run the risk of obscuring the Gospel all together by allowing people to think that simply "practicing church/community" in the right way creates faithfulness or substantive obedience to the call of the Gospel. In my experience that's not how church "works" (at least not when people are involved).
People, it turns out, can be really nasty to each other, death happens tragically and unexpectedly, and life can be overwhelmingly difficult and painful. In such times, I think much more is needed to help people deal with the realities of sin, forgiveness, death and life are ideas about the church as a "community constituted by practices."
Confusing the rhetoric of a book like "Resident Aliens," which is only one tool--and in this case, the crowbar--in the toolbox, with substantive theological convictions about sanctification and grace, ecclesiology, etc., seems to me to lack depth. I don't think that anyone thinks that reading "Resident Aliens" fixes anything; it seems like it was designed to name a obstacle rather than be a holistic ecclesiology. It starts people imagining possibilities. The confusion between the two is the caricature.
ReplyDeleteI don't want to dismiss what you're saying. You say, "I feel like Duke takes the practical account and teaches it as Gospel, leading to confusion when ministers go out and work in congregations were salvation is understood as something imputed or whatever rather than incorporation into an alternate "polis" of some sort formed by practices." This just seems like an ecclesiological difference (perhaps Baptist vs. Methodist/Anglican).
I mean, perhaps I got us off on the wrong foot insofar as I was talking about practices in the abstract and didn't locate it in a conversation about the role of the Church in the Christian life.
I still feel like I'm not getting at the heart of what you're after, though...hmmm...
I guess I (at times) think of seminary like a the lessons you do on land or in a pool while learning to SCUBA dive. No, it can't really tell you what it's like to be under water and have a large fish swim past, but it can help you avoid catastrophe and give you some experience to draw upon when it comes time to submerge. That being said, the feeling of claustrophobia and the pull toward hyperventilation seems to come with the territory.
I guess I should say some of my problems are more in terms of theology/metaphysics than church-seminary relationship, although I certainly blended the two concerns in my first post.
ReplyDeleteI think Hauerwas's ecclesiology is very "materialistic" in a way that doesn't historically fit even Methodist or Anglican ecclesiologies. I'm no expert on Anglican theology, but it seems historically that there would be a "calvinist" vein in Anglican theology would have a stronger emphasis on the invisible church/church as "corpus permixtum" than Hauerwas does.
How did Anglicans and Methodists historically view the sacraments? Were they practices that incorporated members into an alternate political society, or were they instead understood as concrete enactments of God's promises that would raise the minds/souls of participants to stronger faith in God (this seems to be the way it was to me)? Maybe this view and Hauerwas's understanding are more compatible than I'm realizing...
Yeah, I was about to say in relation to: "Were they practices that incorporated members into an alternate political society, or were they instead understood as concrete enactments of God's promises that would raise the minds/souls of participants to stronger faith in God (this seems to be the way it was to me)?": Do these need to be different?...when I read your last line.
ReplyDeleteWell I said maybe they are more compatible..but at the same time I wonder a "Duke" account of the Eucharist, for example, follows philosophical presuppositions that are essentially antithetical to a Calvinist/classical Anglican or Methodist account of the Eucharist.
ReplyDeleteThis links back in my head to the local church problem. While an evangelical congregation in North Carolina might see the eucharist as merely a symbolic ordinance, there's a theological/philosophical grammar at work in most "evangelical" congregations that would have them at least understand what someone meant if they said the eucharist could confer the grace it signified (even if they didn't believe this particular account). "Duke" theology seems to toss out this grammar out altogether (I've seen Hauerwas make repeated statements on his avoidance of the term "grace").
In addition, what does a more "political" understanding of a sacrament like the eucharist do for you? If you're someone like JH Yoder, you can say that you've rediscovered part of what it means to be the true church, but at the same time if you're Yoder you kind of have to say in the same breath that Methodists and Anglicans are false churches, or at least proclaim corrupted gospels.
I think Duke theology's nuance of Yoder's radical ref. perspective in its own "politicizing" of the various aspects of Christian practice leads to a contradiction when it does such under the name of Methodist and Anglican (and NC evangelical).
ooh and I should nuance, Hauerwas doesn't toss out grace altogether, but says grace is just the fact of the particularity of how God saves us (through Israel, through Jesus's particularity, etc.) - but he still doesn't use the language of grace as a state or a special act of God that heals the soul, as far as I know
ReplyDeleteduk-E theology is over-rated. im glad you are seeing the light!
ReplyDeletelooking forward to chatting post papers.
btw, hauerwas wrote my favorite article of his for all time in modern theology recently on theologians needing to write for congregations. you may enjoy it.
ReplyDeleteha, "overrated" isn't exactly the term i mean in this context...checking out article though
ReplyDelete"but he still doesn't use the language of grace as a state or a special act of God that heals the soul, as far as I know"
ReplyDeleteI'm tempted in two directions here. 1) I think he could though it would be communally determined. 2) So?
I think we should go back to your:
Can theology "fix" local churches? How necessary is theology, and how does it relate to the local church?
I find that's there a lot of emotional freight carried by the word 'fix' for you.
Hauerwas writes in his memoir (Eerdmans, 2010, 194):
"Yoder and Willimon and I were not saying that those who forged the various forms of the church's accommodation to the world were bad or unfaithful people. No doubt there were bad and unfaithful people among them, but I suspect that most of the time they were doing the best they could. But that 'best' simply no longer made sense."
I think you may get an arrogance from students who have had their perspectives changed and think that a change of perspective in and of itself means something. But I'm not sure that I find that a problem with the theology itself. Of course, I know one can always do the kind of easy and boring critical theory thing where one relates the outcome with the argument. But then you'd also want to go to a summer gathering of the Ekklesia Project or something like that. But the whole trickle down thing...I mean doesn't every seminary function thus?
What do you mean by "easy and boring critical theory thing"?
ReplyDeleteAnd I think you're right that most seminaries are in a "trickle down" format.
But I think Duke stands out because of the pervasive emphasis on intellectual formation in particular directions that it gives. It seems that other seminaries don't work as hard as Duke in terms of putting specific ideas in their students' minds, and I'm here thinking of things like particular soteriological emphases, certain positions on how much you can and can't say on God's providence, and political things like the very strong conviction that having a flag in the sanctuary is a bad thing. These three specifically put one at odds with a lot of evangelical congregations in a place like NC from the get-go. I have friends from other seminaries and it doesn't seem like they have this same level of intellectual formation/shift from the churches they are meant to serve.
Now you can say (and I've heard people say) that it's good that Duke is putting people at odds with evangelical congregations on these issues because the seminarian thereby is being faithful to the Gospel. This exactly is my problem. How does the seminarian know they are more faithful to Jesus because they think a flag shouldn't be in a church sanctuary? Or because they teach kids in sunday school that salvation has political aspects to it?
When I was in seminary, I was astonished by the unchallenged way seminarians (and the occasional professor) sought for techniques, as if church life were a kind of manufacturing. Some students even thought prayer was part of a toolbox. We had a comment board at Fuller Sem on which one zealous student had written something like “Imagine the difference if everyone devoted an earnest five minutes a day to praying!” The then president, philosophical theologian and ethicist Richard Mouw, was heard to mutter, “Imagine the difference if everyone devoted an earnest five minutes a day to thinking!” His point was not that thinking was a better instrument for change than prayer, but that ones who were good at thinking would not make mistakes like valuing Christian practices for their supposed instrumental value. When theology (which I take it involves a good deal of thinking) is done for its own sake, rather than as a way to get something else done, it is wonderful. An like Auden said, it’ll show in our eyes:
ReplyDeleteYou need not see what someone is doing
to know if it is his vocation,
you have only to watch his eyes:
a cook mixing a sauce, a surgeon
making a primary incision,
a clerk completing a bill of lading,
wear the same rapt expression,
forgetting themselves in a function.
How beautiful it is,
that eye-on-the-object look….
I understand theology to exist in a symbiotic relationship with the rest of church life. Too often theology-as-techne becomes a source of power to be wielded over others. But theology properly done would have nothing to think about if it didn’t reflect appreciatively over the gritty particularity of this congregation. (That is the wonderful thing about Incarnation; it gives us permission to attend to the God who easters in ordinary. Particularity is valued not as a imitation of the ideal, but for its own sake, warts and all, because that is where God is near.) A genuine cultural-linguistic approach (or theology-as-grammar, if you prefer), involves the dissolution of two-tiered Christianity which plagues many seminaries. Theologians are not on a higher playing field than truck divers or LOLAs (Little old ladies of America).
As Jennifer Herdt points out, as far as Aristotle was concerned happiness can only be achieved by the whole—by a “fellowship of the virtues.” This seems especially true for the Body of Christ. The Body would be “less happy” if theologians were not in the mix, even if theologians are technically “useless,” seeing that they do theology for its own sake.