Theological Education Inside Out

In a previous blog I suggested that the idea that the human relationship to religion is of questioner to provider of answers may ultimately destroy both religion and our humanity.

If theological education is intended primarily to form leaders in Christian ministry, then within mainline denominations dominated by post-Schleiermachian liberal theology it may need to undergo dramatic changes away from its current model. That model, shaped by modernity, assumes that Christianity is an answer to a human question, the solution to a human problem. Thus it focuses on training leaders who can answer the questions and solve the problems that their congregations, and society as a whole, pose.

In theological education at its most modern the study of scripture is the intensive, critical investigation that yields credible answers to the inquiries of human readers about the meaning of Biblical texts. Whether this involves now old fashioned “higher criticism” or new analytical frameworks provided by post-colonial theory or queer theory the result may be the same: The student is taught to take ownership of the book and to interrogate it until it yields credible answers and guidance.

The Christian leader as theologian is taught to critically examine the symbols of the Christian faith until, through proper analysis they are fully understood and rationalized as a human expression of human faith. Then these can become the credible and coherent, but peculiarly Christian language by which God is both interrogated and allowed to answer our human questions about the meaning of existence, justice, peace, love, and so on.

Then, in a second step referred to as “public theology” this Christian language can be translated into the common secular language of civil discourse if the church seeks a voice in influencing society.

Christian history becomes the study of Church history, the history of human faith in the midst of human societies in their ever transforming patterns of addressing God with their questions and needs. It is quite possible that it will not ever inquire as to how or what God is or has been doing.

And finally in their fully modern mode the so-called practical theological disciplines become largely means of solving problems in institutional religious settings. Preaching becomes the study of rhetoric and communication skills. Pastoral care can become psychotherapy light for troubled souls. Christian education becomes a pedagogy for a school that meets once a week and a curriculum that focuses on an ancient text. Church management and everything associated with congregational life becomes a means of rationally organizing resources to answer human questions and meet human needs on behalf of God.

And worship? Here I think we see the axis on which Christian theological education must turn if being spiritual is going to have any real relationship to being religious.

In its modern instrumental form, which occurs ironically most often in self-declared evangelical settings, the study of worship can be seen as the study of how to manipulate human feelings toward the end of: 1. relieving them of whatever guilt, anxiety or hurt they have brought as a problem to God, and 2. motivating them to act on God’s behalf to meet human needs. Worship becomes the alchemy by which humans who seek to be transformed are transformed.

This instrumental view of worship emerged with the great American revivalists of the mid 19th century, and built on the acceptance by both emergent evangelicalism and emergent liberalism that the “use of means” was acceptable in worship. In short the worshiper could be intentionally manipulated emotionally toward a desired goal, whether that goal was repentance and conversion, giving, or social activism. Once this happened worship could become, as it has often become, primarily a marketing tool for a Christian agenda.

Yet worship can also be the one discipline in practical theology, indeed all of theology, that most resists being instrumental; that most resists being used by the autonomous human subject as a means of asking questions and demanding solutions. Worship, if it is in touch with tradition at all, can also be the place where religious people best remember what it is like to stand before the Transcendent and listen, to stand before God awaiting not an answer but a question.

Worship can be the discipline that reminds all the others what they were made for – what “discipline” means in a religious context, not action toward a humanly constructed goal but listening for a divine Word.

I do not believe that seminary education, at least as I have been part of it for more than 30 years, has entirely succumbed to modernity. Beneath the surface of the liberal theological disciplines there remains the deep, commitment to disciplined listening for God’s call. Scrape past the human questions with which we have been taught to interrogate our texts, our traditions, and our practices and I believe we will find both faculty and students who deeply desire that through these same texts, traditions, and practices God question them, challenge them, and humble them to God’s purposes.

Beneath the reflexes of modernity and the modern university there remains the desire to wonder that animates theological education. We may not be able, as Charles Taylor asserts, to “naively believe in God” in our contemporary world. But we can place ourselves, in our autonomy and freedom, in the precarious places where God is most often, if never predictably, found. The poem, the song, the story, the painting, the stage, and the embrace of unexpected love.

So it may be that the most important change that theological education needs to make is to turn itself inside out. To place learning to worship at the center of learning to be a Christian leader, only then followed by learning to lead worship, and only then to important but derivative matters of hermeneutics, theology, history, and pastoral practice. I wonder what that curriculum would look like?