Theologians and their Moral Life (by Roger Olson)

What impact does a theologian’s moral life have on whether you read or are influenced by him or her? 

Roger Olson’s proposal is about to the degree it influences his or her theology.

The sad fact is that many, many great heroes of Christian history and theology had sides to their personal lives that we cannot be proud of. To what extent should those affect how we regard their theological contributions and contributions to church reform and renewal? Luther, of course, drank a lot of beer and advised others to do so as well. (His letter to a young friend named Jerome includes advice to drink much beer when the devil tells him not to!) He advised the German nobles to slaughter the rebelling peasants without mercy. He condoned Philip of Hesse’s bigamy. Toward the end of his life he fell into anti-Semitism and wrote essays against the Jews that were resurrected and used by the Nazis. John Knox, the reformer of Scotland, married a teenage girl when he was fifty. Ulrich Zwingli condoned the torture and drowning of Anabaptists—some of them his own former students. John Calvin condoned the execution of Servetus and publicly took responsibility for it. John Wesley couldn’t live with his wife; their marriage was, by all accounts, deeply troubled. Kierkegaard was not only eccentric but went out of his way to offend people including cutting off relations with his close relatives (including his brother who tried to have a good relationship with him). And he broke his engagement to his fiancée without explanation—a terrible faux pas at that time. Jonathan Edwards owned slaves.

All those things are well known. We tend to excuse those men as “children of their own times.” And yet, we tend not to excuse Catholics who did similar things. If you are a Protestant hero you’re forgiven, but not if you were a Catholic pope, bishop or theologian.

I will not name names, but I happen to know of recent well-known theologians who were alcoholics. Some of them were evangelicals. I once knew two students of a very famous evangelical New Testament scholar who told me he often came to class drunk. A very well known Lutheran theologian is an alcoholic who often misses classes and conference sessions where his presence is announced because he is drunk. (I was present at a weekend conference where he was the keynote speaker and he only showed up briefly. After that his absence was obvious. One man who knew him well told me he was in his hotel room too drunk to get out of bed.) A famous Baptist New Testament scholar whose name everyone would recognize died an alcoholic of liver disease. A well-known and influential seminary dean was caught with pornography on his office computer. There was a brief brouhaha about it but people forgave him and he stepped down but remained on the faculty. His books are widely read and studied without people thinking about that episode in his life. It doesn’t have anything to do with his scholarship….

So, to the extent that a theologian allowed his infidelities, racial prejudices, wrong political views, to affect his scholarship, I believe we must inevitably either 1) discard his scholarship, or 2) use it but highlight those areas where the scandalous parts of his life affected it.

However, to the extent that the theologian’s scandalous actions did not affect his theology (or biblical scholarship) I see no reason to make much of them. They should probably be mentioned in a biography but there’s no need to reject his whole theology because of them.