“As I said, the theologian’s real work is not to prove that the Faith is true, only that it’s interesting.” Robert Farrar Capon, Hunting the Divine Fox p. 85
We had never been that close, friends of friends really, but I have always liked Ryan. He doesn’t pull any punches, and he is also a killer songwriter, a real deal storyteller, who has written an album called Flatlands full of dark and brooding songs that capture where I am from with an intimate knowing that is both caring and critical. A few months ago he wrote an email to me and a bunch of friends, many of whom are pastors and/or seminary students, about some real doubts he was having about faith and the isolation he felt as a musician trying to make it at something that almost nobody makes it doing.
When we wrote back some of us made versions of the case that things are not as bad as they seem, while others of us retreated into abstract theological categories. At the time I thought the matter was closed because he didn’t immediately write back, but a few months later he responded to all of us to tell us how badly we had failed him. What he had heard in our responses was the same old pap about faith and doubt, and as pastors and as students of theology, he thought we should have more to offer than, “That sucks man” or worse still, “Well, let’s look at this through the lens of sovereignty or providence or the theology of suffering.” There was real sadness and anger in his reply, and though he later wrote a follow-up apology, saying he had overstated things and that he was sorry, I felt the sting of what he had said because whatever the tone, I knew there was a red-hot core of truth in it.
In his final email he asked if he could call all of us to apologize over the phone. He called me and we talked and he apologized again. Though I accepted his apology, I told him that in many ways he was right. I told him that in my case there were times when I used theology, particularly theological categories, as a kind of armor against doubt. When I had read his second email, I felt him saying, “I see your armor, and it isn’t protecting you from anything. It might shimmer in the sun and look formidable in battle, but I know exactly where the chinks are.”
What Ryan said hit deeply because he tapped a nerve in me that was already raw. For some time I had been thinking about the value of my theological training and my calling as a pastor and had been wondering how I might better use theology to meet people in their doubt or pain or curiosity. As much as I love theology as theology and find it intrinsically fascinating whether or not I can make it practical, I know that for most people theology has to hit their lives in a way that makes sense. I don’t think that is a failing on their part. I think it’s good to ask how things apply in real and meaningful ways. I’ve just been wondering if you can make the leap from the theology of seminary to a meaningful theology of the street, and if you can, then how.
In seminary I was shown the virtue of a clear head and was taught the need to think in categories. Categories are useful because like empty hangers they give you a place to hang things instead of throwing them on the floor. I wouldn’t have survived seminary without this way of thinking, and it continues to come in handy in all sorts of ways. When many things come at you at once, categories allow a kind of intellectual triage to sort through what is urgent and what is not. Categories can also help you distinguish between what is truly interesting and what appears to be interesting because of seeming novelty. The story of our time is not that the emperor has no clothes but that the emperor has the same clothes and keeps telling us they are new. Categorical thinking helps you say, “Same clothes, same emperor.”
It shouldn’t be surprising though that there are dangers in this way of thinking. For one, if what you crave is novelty, then you really are going to be disappointed once you begin to peel back the layers and discover that there may be a few new things under the sun, but not as many as you might think or like. For some that fact alone can become a point of despair and the world can become flat as a consequence.[1]
For another, thinking in theological categories can feel like a weapon so that some who wield it fancy themselves Alexanders with worlds to conquer and subdue. I have certainly found a temptation in myself to use my theological categories as a dismissive way of dividing the world. An education in any discipline should provide ways to encounter and interact with and divide the world, so this isn’t a temptation unique to theology. However, theology’s subject is the God who made everything so there is a particular temptation for those who study him to think that they therefore know everything.
I am thinking about all of this for a few reasons. One is I just submitted a proposal to do doctoral work in theology, so in auditing my own motivations for doing such a thing, I’m asking some questions, including “Why does theology matter, again?” and “If it does, how can I make it matter to people?” In writing this essay and the ones I hope to write, I’d like to have my lover’s quarrel with theology in public and write my way to an answer. I’d like to invite the feedback of any who would read this so I can sharpen my own thinking. In all of this my hope is to write my way toward a different way of communicating theology.
Which brings me back to Ryan, to his music and to his album Flatlands. The album is sparse and honest because, like in the flatlands of the title, there is nowhere to hide. When I first listened to the album and heard his song “Amarillo,” a song about my hometown, it was the sonic equivalent of driving the nothing-but-horizon-roads of the Texas panhandle, dirt kicking up, the road a straightedge laid across the length of golden paper, with little else in the sight line to give any sense of perspective. I felt in that song the same smallness I felt so often growing up, staring out across plains and sky, a smallness that pressed upon me the weight of the seeming cosmic-scale nothingness of life, but a smallness that also was lightness and wonder at being alive, the joy of being a witness to such enormity.
And I realize now that I’ve been chasing that feeling. I chased it in music in high school. I chased it in literature and poetry in college. And I chased it all the way to seminary. I have felt it at times along the way to be sure, if only now and again, and my life and my experience and my belief has taught me to call what I’ve experienced not a feeling merely, but a person, to call it God. The weight and lightness, the dread and joy, the awe and wonder, have cohered in my experience and understanding as the Trinitarian God of Christianity. But there is the experience of that person and then there is the act of speaking of that experience and trying to describe that person. At its most basic that is what theology is–our description of the person and experience of God. In that sense theology is as natural and necessary as oxygen. But Theology-with-capital-T, theology as a discipline and academic enterprise, is something else.
What I am really writing about here is the theologian’s calling. If I want to become more and more a theologian and if I want to serve the church as a theologian, what exactly is it that I would be doing? What characteristics of the theologian and what form of theology best serve the church? For so long the question has been, what characteristics of the theologian best serve the academy, and not the academy as we might imagine it if we were starting from scratch, but the professionalized academy as we find it now. There are disconnects, fractures and fault lines between the academy of the past and academy of the present and between the the theologian who serves the church and the theologian who serves the academy. There are so few who do this well. From my limited viewpoint, whoever seeks to love and cherish both the church and the academy often takes one as a wife and the other as a mistress, and both the church and academy suffer as a consequence. But does it have to be that way at all and does it have to be that way for me?
That’s what I hope to explore in this series of essays that I hope to write over the coming months. The goal is to write one essay of between 2000 to 3000 words each month and to send it out in a newsletter which will include links to books, articles, songs, artists, and other things that have influenced or informed my thinking as I was writing that particular essay. I’m doing this for a few reasons. For one, I want create a tangible writing goal for myself that pushes me to write something of substance on a monthly basis. For another, I want to invite others into the conversation to sharpen and challenge the things I am saying so that this whole process is actually an adventure. I’m setting out with no particular destination. As I said, I want to write my way towards an answer or answers, and I’m inviting you to come along with me.
- The glory of things is not necessarily their newness. Mountains do not stir awe because they are new. They stir awe because they are momentous, sublime, dangerous, and beautiful. If you snub the Alps simply because you have already seen the Rockies, you are missing the point. Getting to the place where you say, “Oh great. Another mountain,” tells you something more about you than it does about mountains. The same is true in theology and reading the bible. Part of the glory is the repetition. This is what typology is all about–that there is beauty in patterns and repetition, in archetypes and symbols. Of course, the one great exception to the Preacher’s lament, “There is nothing new under the sun,” is the great exception to almost everything–the Incarnation. ↩
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Thank you for sharing this, Chris. God is big… I mean to say that, He is big. He has the power to crush or give generously. He has the power to love or lead us to a cul-de-sac of despair. That awareness always makes it a temptation to try to box Him in or control the way we experience Him. Once I experienced renewal in God the Holy Spirit, I (mostly!) gave up that strategy. I am grateful for my time at a Reformed seminary because nobody could have trained me better in systematic theology and The Holy Scriptures. But without God the Holy Spirit, I would lack fire, confidence and an appetite for risk in encountering My Father. I believe breaking down the glass wall that separates us from God is one of the key elements in doing theology as you speak of it, Chris.
He gets a bad rap from some, but I love(d) Brennan Manning. His autobiography is a beautiful, beautiful book. He had to peel off the mask so many times in his life…. getting real with God and with himself was all he had left… multiple times. That reminds me of St. Peter.