My latest: the ends of theological education

Sapientia is the online periodical of the Carl F. H. Henry Center for Theological Understanding, housed at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School. They regularly publish series organized around themes or questions, and the latest is on theological education. You can read Joshua Jipp’s introduction to the series here. My entry is the first to be published; it’s called “The Ends of Theological Education.” Here’s how it starts:

The first and final end of theological education is the knowledge of God. The God in question is not just any deity, much less generic divinity, at least if the theological education in view is Christian. Christian theological education is instruction in the Christian God, which is to say, the triune God of Israel. Theological education is about him, namely, the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ revealed by his own Holy Spirit. Whatever else it may be, whatever other ends it may have, theological education aims at the Holy Trinity or it misses the mark entirely.

There are many genres and locations for theological education. The modern research university is only one among many institutional habitats for it, the latest and perhaps the most expansive home, if not the snuggest fit. The monastery is one ancient and abiding institution for instruction in divine knowledge. Sunday school is another. Sometimes theological education happens within the Church, sometimes not; sometimes taught by the ordained, sometimes not; sometimes in a catechetical or devotional spirit, sometimes not. There is no one right way to do it.

Read the rest here.

Lifelong ministry

People today are leaving ministry in droves. Churches, likewise, are shockingly under-staffed. As a colleague of mine recently wrote, “ministers are in short supply.” The pandemic is a major factor, but it exacerbated existing trends; it did not create the problem. The ministers I know—and for the purposes of this post I’m thinking exclusively of “low-church” traditions, not mainline or catholic—get calls on the regular from churches offering generous salaries and appealing jobs, and the churches in question are reasonably sized, in cities anyone would be happy to live in, and often have gone without a lead pastor for months, if not years. Whereas, on the flip side, many churches that once (pre-pandemic) had a budget for X number of ministers are now having to cut their staff down to size.

A few reflections on the dynamics at work, past and present.

Of the teenagers and college students I meet who (a) are believers, (b) go to church, and (c) are interested in pursuing formal ministry, none of them, with only the rarest exceptions, plans on becoming a “head” or “lead” pastor/preacher. What they want instead is a job with one of four modifiers affixed to the title of “minister”: children’s, youth, college/young adult, or worship.* There are many reasons for this shift. One is that the person who most influenced them in their faith was such a minister. Another is that the churches in which they were raised aren’t organized by and around a single visible head pastor, along the lines of the traditional parish or rural/neighborhood church model. Instead, these churches have ministry staffs, filled with specialties and sub-specialties (including evangelism, outreach, missions, poverty, rehab, media, sports, etc.). Naturally, young people being raised in such communities see modeled for them a specialized ministerial role, not the single (if capacious) traditional “office” of ordained pastor, whose principal task is the proclamation of the word and the administration of the sacraments in the context of public worship. To the extent that these young people’s churches do have a single visible “head” person, he is usually conceived (in their minds and in their experience) as a Public Speaker, whose primary job is, naturally enough, public speaking. Indeed, he is paid the highest salary to be the best possible weekly speaker he can be. Such a person is not necessarily (or uniquely) involved with pastoral tasks, the sacraments, and/or worship more generally. And because young people, like all people, fear public speaking as a fate worse than death, only rarely do any of them see in this Head Role a vocation to which they might aspire.

Thus, whatever the reasons—and there are surely others, not least the decline of seminary and of churches’ expectation that ministers have an MDiv—more and more young people who enter ministry today are doing so much differently than those who did so in the past. In my anecdotal observation, a majority of people who enter one of the “big four” ministry staff roles I mentioned above—children’s, youth, college/young adult, worship—exit full-time, formal ministry at some point between ages 30 and 45. I’m tempted to speculate that the percentage is far higher than a bare 51%, perhaps even as high as 75-85%. Such ministers serve, often ably, in the churches for (on average) a dozen years before returning to civilian life. Half of those remaining stick with their original titles; the other half climb the staff ladder (for there is unquestionably an internal hierarchy at work, even if it is never spoken outright) to administrative, pastoral, or preaching roles.

As I trust is obvious, there is a problem here. Not only are fewer and fewer young people seeking and entering lifelong pastoral (homiletical and sacramental) ministry. Those who do become ministers aren’t remaining ministers for long. Worse still, the process is compounded, thereby creating a negative feedback loop. I suppose the crisis isn’t more pronounced than it already is because churches are themselves declining in numbers and closing their doors at high rates. Which itself raises a chicken-and-egg problem for figuring out what’s going on here.

In any case, here’s one last thought prompted by these trend lines. It seems to me that there are two necessary conditions for a person to enter into, to undertake, and actually to accomplish a lifetime of formal ministry as a pastor in the local church:

1. Belief in and commitment to a concrete ecclesial tradition.

2. The socially embodied and transmitted principle and concept of being called to be a “ministry lifer”—whether explicitly, through the sacrament of holy orders, or implicitly, through a tacit but passionate understanding of and dedication to the pastoral vocation as divinely given, normatively irrevocable, and necessarily enacted at the parish or congregational level.

This, I think, is the deeper problem at issue. The young people I have in mind are “non-denominational,” down to the marrow, even when they belong to a specific denomination. The Baptists attend the local “community church,” the Reformed attend the local Church of Christ, the CoC-ers attend the local Baptist church. In other words, they’re all members of that ever-embattled, ever-thriving American family called evangelicalism. And because they have little to no deep-set, self-conscious membership in, much less identity as, this or that particular denomination or tradition, they swap churches without a second thought. It’s the gig economy applied to the church: a more or less comprehensive collapse in institutional durability and reliable ecclesial identity. So that, if and when a thoughtful, committed young Christian considers ministry, s/he does not do so with a mind toward serving this particular tradition but only “the church” in generic, non-denom terms.

Furthermore, such a person lacks any reason to believe that s/he is making a lifelong commitment, or that the church expects—much less that God commands!—ministerial service to be for life. That lifer status still applies by default to catholic traditions and, in an attenuated but real way, to mainline and confessional Protestant traditions that maintain official procedures and gatekeeping bodies for equipping, credentialing, and ordaining priests and pastors. Not so here. I’ve come to realize, though, that something like a wholly untheorized analogue to sacramental orders existed for quite a long time in the evangelical (and adjacent) communities I have in mind. That is the only explanation (along with the existence of sectarian and/or denominational identity) for why nineteenth- and twentieth-century ministers would spend their whole working lives slaving away in financially painful, psychologically grueling, and emotionally punishing congregations, sacrificing all that they had, moving twice a decade, and rarely considering the simplest option: namely, heading for the EXIT sign. Truth be told, there was no such sign, at least most of the time, since the two conditions I’ve named were met. Given, that is, thick ecclesial identity and thick pastoral vocation, to be a minister just was to be a minister for life, since that is what the call of God through the church entailed as a matter of course. Remove either or both of those conditions, however, and the EXIT sign lights up in bold, bright neon. Its flashing letters begin on the periphery then drift toward the center of one’s vision. At some point, ministry involves too much sacrifice for any but the most heroic to stay. Lacking the necessary conditions to hold them in place, to endure through the suffering that ministry invariably brings in its train, ministers head for the door. They may come back, but not as clergy. That door is closed for good.

Can you blame them?

*In case it’s necessary, allow me to add that my comments here in no way imply denigration of what I’m calling “specialized” forms of ministry. My first book is dedicated to my youth minister, who is the reason I earned a PhD in theology and am now a professor, and my second book is dedicated to my children’s minister, who is the reason why literally thousands of children who came through the doors of my home church first heard the name of Jesus. Nothing I’ve written here should be taken to mean that such ministers are either “less than” or an unwelcome development. It does mean, however, that their development raises new questions and challenges for modeling, communicating, and training young persons for lives of full-time, formal ministry. And that we ought to be identifying and addressing those questions and challenges now, for they are as urgent as any problem facing the church today.

Inoculation

Over the last year I’ve noticed something of a theme emerging on this blog. The theme is what people, especially Christians, and most of all well-educated Christians, feel permitted or pressured to believe (or not). I think a good deal of my experience of this phenomenon is a function of having lived for eight years outside of Texas or even the Bible belt—three years in Atlanta (technically the South but not exactly a small rural town in Louisiana) then five years in New Haven, Connecticut. At least weekly and sometimes daily a friend, a colleague, a pastor, or a student will remark in my presence about some topic, and invariably the remark reveals that s/he understands it to be outdated, unenlightened, or outlandish. As I wrote yesterday, usually the topic is one I care about and, indeed, the belief presumed to call for nothing so much as an eye-roll is one I myself hold.

I wrote last year about the existence of angels as a case study. At the very moment that certain aspirationally progressive (in west Texas “progressive” means “moderate-to-slightly-left-of-center on certain issues”) seminarians and pastors unburden themselves of belief in superstitious follies like angels—having belatedly received the decades-old message from third-rate demythologizers that celestial beings belong to a mythological age—at this moment, as I say, angels and demons are sexy again in academic scholarship. I could walk through the hallways of the most liberal seminaries in the country holding a sign that read “I believe in angels!” and from most professors it would elicit no more than a shrug. One more reminder that being intellectually in vogue is a moving target; best not to make the attempt in the first place.

But that’s not my point at present. I’ve already written about all that. Here’s my point.

I understand why people feel pressure to believe, or to cease to believe, in this or that old-fashioned thing. Likewise I understand why they assume that I—returning from a half-decade sojourn among the coastal elites, having pitched my tent in the Acela corridor, now with an Ivy doctorate in hand—not only share their up-to-date beliefs but will do them a solid by confirming them in their up-to-date-ness. I get it.

But the secret about having gotten my PhD at Yale isn’t that I learned the cutting edge and now live my life teetering on it. The opposite is the case. I didn’t journey to the Ivy League only to be disabused of all those silly beliefs I came in the door with—about God, Christ, Scripture, resurrection, and the rest. What I received was far better, if wholly unexpected.

What I received was inoculation.

What do I mean? I mean that I learned the invaluable intellectual lesson that knowledge, intelligence, and education are not a function of fads. I learned that substituting social trends for reasoned conviction is foolish. I learned that no one else can do your thinking for you. I learned that coordinating one’s own beliefs to the beliefs of an ever-changing and amorphous elite is a fool’s errand and a recipe for spiritual aimlessness. I learned that smart people are often wicked, and that sometimes even smart people are stupid—in the sense that raw intelligence is no match for wisdom, prudence, and practical reason.

Most of all, I learned that there are no “outdated” beliefs in Christian theology. As Hauerwas might put it, passé is not a theological category. Think of any doctrine or conviction that is particularly unhip today, or rarely spoken of, or even that you might be embarrassed to admit you believe in mixed company. At Yale, and in the circles of folks who criss-cross Ivy campuses and circuits and conferences, I met people who believed in every single one of those unfashionable doctrines, and they were the smartest, most well-read people I’ve ever met in my life. Certainly smarter and better read than I’ll ever be. To be clear, that fact alone doesn’t make them right: their frumpy beliefs may be erroneous. But the lesson isn’t that prestige or scholarly caliber validate theological ideas. The lesson, rather, is that the notion of some threshold of intelligence or erudition beyond which certain beliefs simply cannot across is a lie. Such a threshold does not exist.

In short, if what you want is for folks with an IQ above X or a PhD from Y to tell you what you’re allowed to believe while remaining a reasonable person, I’ve got some good news and some bad news. The bad news is that you can be a reasonable person and believe just about anything. No one above your rank is going to set the terms for what you’re permitted to suppose to be true about God, the world, and everything else. The good news is just a reiteration of these same truths, only in a different register: No one gets to make you feel bad for believing what you do. That’s not a license to believe untrue or foolish or evil things. It’s a liberation from feeling like personal conviction is a matter of not being made fun of by the Great and the Good peering over your shoulder, looking down their noses at you. Truth is not a popularity contest. Right belief does not follow from peer pressure. Be free. Be inoculated, as I was. Ever since leaving I’ve found myself blessedly rid of that low gnawing anxiety that someone is going to find me out, and what they’re going to find is that I’m a deplorable—not because what I believe is actually risible or indefensible, but because for about fifteen seconds of cultural time something I’d be willing to stake my life on (as I have, however falteringly) has become intellectually unstylish.

Style is deceptive, and the approval of the world is fleeting; but the one who fears the Lord will be praised. Fear God, not unpopularity. Your life as a whole will be happier, for one, but more than anything your intellectual life will benefit. Seek the truth for its own sake, and the rest will take care of itself.

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.

Four writing tips for seminarians

In the spring of 2016 I served as a teaching assistant for a course at Yale Divinity School on theological interpretation of the New Testament (co-taught by Dale Martin and Kathryn Tanner. I know!). After the first month of class, the students began submitting one 3-page theological exegesis of a NT text on a weekly basis until the end of the semester, for a total of eight mini-papers. The goal—quite successful, as a matter of fact—was to offer detailed feedback on each student's writing in order to see a much improved paper #8 compared to paper #1. It was a lovely thing to see how much improvement could come in just two months.

At the beginning, however, there were a lot of problems to work out. After finding patterns across a number of students' papers, I wrote up a list of writing tips, and I thought I'd share them here. They probably lean in the direction of liberal seminarians, or at least seminarians at a liberal school—though my sense is that even the most conservative context is full of students whose self-understanding is one of liberation or progression or expansion from former, supposedly more parochial, less open-minded ways. I share my suggestions here because I think they capture a specific set of proclivities—as much intellectual as writerly—that are worth identifying and exorcising as soon as possible, being consistently damaging to rigorous and charitable theological thought.

Here they are:

1. Avoid referring to what "modern people/believers/Christians" or some anonymous collective "we" think, assume, or believe. E.g., "modern believers find the subordination of women in the NT problematic." This is an empirical claim that is not true: some modern believers (the world over, but including in the U.S.) disagree with the claim that the NT subordinates women; others think that it does, and that that is God's will. Either, minimally, specify the group in question (e.g., "many mainline Christians in the U.S. are troubled by...") or, preferably, just state, and support, your own position on the matter (e.g., "this text/claim is troubling because...").
2. Avoid fundie-bashing, that is, using conservative evangelicalism and/or fundamentalism as foils in your argument. This, because it is either too easy or too complicated: too easy, because there is always a seemingly stupid fundamentalist position available to caricature, but which is immaterial to your argument; or too complicated, because in fact many conservative theologians have sophisticated theories about theological questions, but by dismissing them rhetorically, your own argument is weakened by acting as if their arguments and positions do not exist or do not require thoughtful consideration.
3. Avoid contrastive argumentation, that is, only stating your own position by way of contrasting it with some other (often 'very very bad') position. Not only is this usually unnecessary, but it also invites the question, 'Why aren't these two claims/positions compatible?' For example, 'instead of a divinely authored document, the Bible is a collection of disparate texts from different time periods' is an instance of bad contrastive argumentation, because the Bible very well could meet both descriptions, yet the claim assumes, without demonstrating, their mutual exclusivity. Best to avoid the contrast, and simply state your own claim, followed by support.
4. Stay modest in your rhetoric and your claims for what your argument accomplishes. Try to be measured in how you represent your conclusions. Assume that if such-and-such theological question has been controversial for centuries, your own paper has not resolved it for all time. At best, you may have resolved some specific issue, or taken a strongly supported position on one side or the other, or pointed out the problems inherent in the side you opposed, etc.