No fads, please
Writing about angels last week, I had in mind not just garden-variety demythologizers but specifically the sort of MDiv-in-hand pastor who reports having “matured” or “evolved” beyond the simple pieties of his upbringing, his denomination, or his own flock. In my experience, nine times out of ten this maturation or evolution, falsely so called, is not the result of actual wide reading in the church’s tradition but rather a function of moving up in the world, as a matter of education, class, or status. That is to say, it’s the product of peer pressure. “Believing in angels” comes to be seen as the sort of thing unenlightened persons do, and so you, the two-semesters-in seminarian, drop it like a bad habit. That’s not the sort of thing “we” go in for around here, you know. At most, the banished belief comes after a rough skim of half an assigned textbook—not exactly drinking broadly and deeply from the wellspring of the church’s wisdom down the ages.
This phenomenon reminded me of a pet peeve of mine. The sort of pastors I have in mind—and I want to be clear that they are far from all, perhaps not even a majority of, church leaders—fall hard for theological fads. They’re all in for the latest thing, whatever that thing may be. Sometimes it’s a thinker: Barth, Bultmann, Moltmann, Spong, Brueggemann, Hauerwas, Jenson, Milbank, Tanner, Wright, Coakley, Boyd, Zahnd, Sonderegger, whoever. Sometimes it’s a buzzword: story, Christus Victor, virtue, passibility, “being missional,” “being incarnational,” intentional community, new creation, postcolonialism, sacramentalism, natural law, classical theism, and the like. Whatever or whoever it is, it’s where the action is. And if you hear the name or catchphrase once you hear it a thousand times: it’s the lodestar, the church’s true north, the siren song of the contemporary minister.
Don’t get me wrong: some of these ideas, many of these thinkers, are well worth the attention. Fads are rarely fads for no reason. And like everyone else, I’ve been susceptible myself to the temptation to thinking that she or he or it is the Big New Thing, the Solution to All Our Problems.
Here’s where things get off track.
First, theological fads are a puff of smoke. To say they are ephemeral would be a slight to ephemerality. Blink and you miss them. Marry one of them (as the saying goes) and you’ll be a widow before you make it back down the aisle.
Second, it’s difficult to over-emphasize the belated character of theological fads. Such fads usually originate overseas, in Germany or France or Great Britain, sometimes here in the States at an elite R1 university. Often enough their true paternity lies in another discipline: philosophy, critical theory, sociology, anthropology. In any case, once it’s been disseminated to second- and third-tier universities and thence to seminaries, it’s already passé. But it hasn’t even reached pastors at this point. Whether they hear about it in school or from a trade book or via a blog (these days, I suppose, replace “blog” with “Twitter”), the hip new thing that’s blowing their minds is likely decades old. It’s so far downstream from its true origin that the traces of its parentage are minimal at best. But the way the plebeian pastors talk about it, it was born yesterday.
Now, is this their fault? No, at least not for the most part. How are they supposed to know better? Presumably they imbibed the now-defunct fad from a professor or a mentor or a conference or a trusted writer. This is the way new ideas and perspectives get distributed in society ordinarily, as a matter of course. There’s no way around that.
No, the problem isn’t the pastors themselves. The problem is the cult of the new. In particular, the problem is the cult of the new in the realm of faith, ministry, and theology.
Whatever the cause—be it capitalism, the nature of the research university, mass culture, all of the above—ministers are trained to suppose that the answers to their questions, the reservoir of resources to support their lives of service to the church, are sure to be found in living writers and thinkers who are producing “original” and “cutting-edge” work. If a pastoral or theological author pens an idea, the extent to which it is innovative is the extent to which it is likely to be good, true, or (most of all) relevant. Put differently, the degree to which it presents itself as a departure from, or in contrast to, what came before is just the degree to which it can be trusted.
Needless to say, this is a bad way to think about either ministry or the gospel.
There are many reasons why this is the case. For one, it invariably implies, or actively encourages, what Ratzinger famously termed “a hermeneutic of rupture.” What we believe now is by definition not what they believed then. But this is trapdoor thinking. To set up Our Truth Today as the arbiter of what we may be received from the past and (thus) as a far-reaching dissent from forebears in the faith is both short-sighted and self-defeating. It’s a fool’s game. After a while believers will begin asking themselves what, after all, they have in common with the church that came between Jesus and themselves. As the answer approaches “little to nothing,” people will naturally start to wonder why they’re a part of this thing in the first place. If that’s the problem looking toward the past, there’s another problem looking toward the future. For “innovative rupture” (à la creative destruction) thinking simultaneously sets you, the vanguard of enlightened opinion, up for obsolescence and replacement. For there is no reason in principle to suppose that either you or your views are the end of theological history. A successor awaits. There’s always one just out of sight, lurking in the shadows. You and your big ideas have nowhere to go but the proverbial dustbin of history.
Beyond the merits, considered at a purely social level, there’s a sort of embarrassment involved in making “not being behind the times” a measure of theological or pastoral wisdom. Think back to angels. It’s true that in the 19th and 20th centuries it was a sign of liberal learning and upper-class status to roll one’s eyes at “mythological” belief in “literal” spiritual beings. (We’ve gotten past all that, haven’t we?) But guess what? That’s no longer the case. At least in elite theological circles, it’s perfectly typical to affirm a populated celestial reality; in some circles, the weirder the better. The same goes for miracles. The air one breathes in Anglophone theological writing circa 2000–2020 is strikingly different than, say, the years 1965–1985. But that shift at the elite level takes a while to trickle down to normal folks. Which means that you’ve got pastors going about their daily lives whose deepest desire is for others to know that they know how silly it is to believe, for example, in angels or miracles, when the ultimate “others” they want to impress—in this case, by proxy—are in fact no longer impressed by such posturing. It’s pure fashion, and pastors are never in style.
The lesson should be clear: avoid theological fads like the plague. That doesn’t mean avoid contemporary writing. Nor does it mean new ideas are always bad. Rather, it means, on the one hand, that pastors (and Christians in general) should not treat faith as a matter of “up-to-date-ness.” Doctrine is not set by the clock. Theology is not fashion. The church is indeed meant to grow in knowledge across time, and the church’s mission means that it will always and of necessity encounter and engage and respond to new questions, challenges, and ideas. The church did not have standing teaching on nuclear weapons or IVF or cloning or CRISPR or extraterrestrial life or climate change until those technologies and eventualities appeared on the (social, conceptual, political) scene. Nevertheless, the terms of the church’s teaching are set by the gospel, and the gospel is itself one and the same as the announcement made by the apostles in the first generation. It is that gospel—the faith once for all delivered to the saints—that at once norms and generates whatever the church has to say anew in the present day.
On the other hand, what resistance to fads entails, positively speaking, is a certain emphasis or approach to learning and rooting oneself in the meaning of the faith. The best antidote to the cult of the new is devotion to the old. If you want to be inoculated against theological fads that appear today and vanish tomorrow, then dedicate yourself to the lifelong task of mastering (not that you can master) sacred tradition in all its breadth and depth. Read Christian texts from every century of the church’s existence. Read Christian texts from every region and locale and culture where the church has been planted. Read multiple texts by every one of the doctores ecclesiae (to which venerable list St. Irenaeus will be added soon!). Read church fathers and medievals, reformers and moderns and postmoderns. Read mystics and missionaries, monks and ministers, bishops and beggars, evangelists and academics. Read Catholics and Orthodox, Anglicans and Anabaptists, Methodists and Moravians, Calvinists and Campbellites. Read them on every doctrinal locus under the sun. Read three of them for every newly written book you open. If you’re lucky, you won’t only be immunized against the pathogen of whatever happens to be trending at the moment. You might just fall in love.
The truth is, the things a newfangled fad might lead you to doubt—Jesus died on the cross as a sacrifice for my sins; angels and demons are real; when I die my soul will go to heaven to be with the Lord; the Holy Spirit works miracles; the Bible tells us about things that really happened—are beliefs so basic that in any given church you might not be able to find a child or a grandparent who ever thought to question them. It usually takes a Master’s degree to do that. But pastors don’t go to seminary to learn why the simple beliefs of ordinary Christians are wrong. They go to learn, among other things, how and why they’re right. It’s a privilege to go beneath the surface, to see more than the tip of the iceberg. But that privilege comes with responsibilities. One of them is to repel every inclination to snobbery and condescension. Another is to report on the glories of what you’ve glimpsed in your deep-sea exploring (which is to say, your theological education). Above all it is your responsibility to use your knowledge to serve the people of God. One of the best ways to do that is to learn the people of God: first by loving them, then by listening to them. Listen to them as they speak today, but most of all listen to them as they speak from the past. Their voices, inscribed in countless texts, are a beacon in the darkness, if only you’ll look for the light.
