Duke/Yale Theology in the Local Church (Part II)

I really liked the conversation my last post caused, both on here and among friends in real life. Now to avoid controversy I will make everyone extremely bored by describing some of the philosophical background to what I'm thinking.

Kathryn Tanner's book Theories of Culture analyzes the social and cultural location of theology in universities through the lens of cultural studies. She points out how academic theology is a specifically located social practice, one that is located in a way that is invisible to most theology students or theologians. The one professor I had who ever talked about Kathryn Tanner's book and wrestled with what it said was Amy Laura Hall, who I remember trying to drill into her students' brains that by going to Duke they were at a specific social and cultural location.

Tanner's book does a great job of making the social position of theology opaque to us. She reminds us that "academic theology is itself a material social process, a kind of Christian social practice in its own right with material means, a specific type of product, and production values" (Theories of Culture, 72). She goes on to say, in a way that seems to describe current fashions coming out of a general "Yale" perspective, that specialized academic theology works for its own "self-continuance" (and we can say the same for the "emergent" theology industry, "process" theology, and so on). She says "the goal is to enable further investigation of the cultural dimension of Christian social practices in the same explicit terms" (81).

Tanner thinks theology should focus more on the lives of everyday believers in a more material rather than more abstract way. She says theology should involve the arrangement of the pews. Tanner is concerned that an academic theology like "Duke theology," "Yale theology," or "liberal theology" operates at a level of abstraction from everyday churches because they are fueled by academic/publishing institutions that make these theological perspectives self-perpetuating. She says, "Academic theology should not squander its advantages, as it does, when tempted by its relative autonomy as a field, it artificially reduces the scope of its materials. Focusing only on other specialized intellectual productions, academic theology sometimes turns away from all it can use. It blinds itself to everyday theologies, past and present, and to the immediate practical problems that pose difficulties for Christian social practices in the particular historical context in which it works" (89).

In a more theological vein, Tanner gives a kind of "Barthian" read of the diversity in the Christian tradition in the last chapter of her book to say that it is wrong for Christians to use theology as a club to pronounce which confessions or Christian practices are properly part of "the tradition" or not. She says there is no "deep underlying or hidden depth to Christian texts or practice [that] guides the course of Christian life over time and space" (162). Then she says that "diversity is a salutary reminder that Christians cannot control the movements of the God they hope to serve" (175).

This last bit is what really hit me in my work as a youth pastor in NC, and this is what I mean in my last post when I say I think Duke/Yale-inspired theology runs over the spiritual experiences of Christians in a local church. I feel like God worked in ways that I was taught weren't supposed to happen. That sounds odd, but I think a lot of theological educators tend to put God in a box in this way (and I should add that what I'm critiquing isn't the thought of Stanley Hauerwas per se, but the matrix of faculty, students, and general attitude in Duke-inspired circles that led to this particular perspective).