About once a year, sometimes more, N.T. Wright churns out another book on theology. I say “churns” because he’s so prolific, but Wright’s books don’t read like they were churned out. They’re usually thoughtful and insightful and informative. And they’re very popular.
Popular there is a relative term, of course. Theology books are not a big niche and a theology “best-seller” is never going to be the next Harry Potter. But every N.T. Wright book will be eagerly snatched up by tens of thousands of readers, and anything over 10,000 is going to make a theology publishing house very happy even if it doesn’t ever make them very rich.
So the new Wright comes out discussing, say, the implications of the “New Perspective” on Paul,* and within weeks thousands of white evangelical pastors all over America have plowed through all 400 pages, underlining favorite or difficult passages and scribbling notes and questions in the margins. They’ve learned from this book and they want to share what they’ve learned with their congregations. But they’re not sure how, or how much, they can or should do that. And so these pastors talk to one another about that. They meet with nearby colleagues in their personal networks, or chat at conferences, or they go online to discuss the book with others in the kinds of forums frequented by evangelical pastors.
This is one form of what I’ve called a “faculty lounge” conversation. It’s a conversation among a group of people who all know something that most people outside of their group don’t know.
And this is a necessary conversation — one that these pastors ought to be having.
Note that there are two aspects to this. The first involves something that members of every guild or profession struggle with — the difficulty of communicating their specialized knowledge to others who haven’t spent years reading and studying all the things that it’s their job to read and study. That’s hard. It involves catching and keeping people’s attention, taking complex ideas and making them simpler to grasp, and somehow doing all of that without over-simplifying in a way that presents a distorted understanding of something you yourself only came to understand after absorbing and reflecting on several 400-page books over a long period of time.
To get a sense of how tricky and complicated and challenging this can be, Google “science communication” and take a dive into the whole community struggling with that. There’s no magic formula, it’s just hard to do well.
Of course, such conversations are not only focused on how to communicate new complex ideas to laypeople. More often, they’re simply the chance for those who have invested in becoming members of the guild — whether that’s physicists or pastors — to talk to one another about the wonderful stuff they’ve all committed to understanding. This is an ongoing conversation. To keep it going and moving forward, the “faculty” need space to conduct it without constant interruptions from those who aren’t up to speed on everything that’s been discussed before. It can be frustrating to have to continuously go back to Page 1 to review all the steps and ideas that previously moved the conversation to this point. There’s a reason, after all, that one isn’t allowed to sign up for a 400-level class without first completing all the 100- and 200-level prerequisites. That’s why the faculty lounge is a necessary thing and a Good Thing, and why it will always be needed.
But then there’s that other bit — the problem that I think is particularly acute for the evangelical faculty lounge.
I chose that example of a new N.T. Wright book because it’s less fraught than many other real-world examples. Wright is regarded as a “safe” writer for evangelicals to read (in part, alas, because he’s been doggedly not safe for LGBT Christians). And discussion of the New Perspective on Paul isn’t a particularly contentious hot-button issue. Yes, it’s the subject of strong and conflicting opinions, but that disagreement is all rather bookish and collegial. The thermostat for this argument is usually set somewhere around the letters page of The New York Review of Books.
The implications of the New Perspective are important and substantial, yes, but this isn’t a topic that has been weaponized and conscripted into the culture wars. Disagreements about it are not partisan. It can’t be made to fit neatly into the format of D vs. R or Red vs. Blue, so it’s somewhat insulated from the scorched-earth world of those disputes. The various opinions on this matter don’t even fall easily onto any liberal-to-conservative spectrum.
All of that makes it a relatively safe topic. But not entirely safe.
Most fundamentalists aren’t reading books by N.T. Wright and they haven’t ever been part of this conversation about the meaning of Paul’s theology. But they may vaguely perceive that the idea here — that there has been a rather massive misinterpretation of the Bible that has endured for centuries — clashes with their belief that the Bible is always clear and obvious to interpret correctly. And they’re not predisposed to be receptive to anything “new” (even though the “New Perspective” is older than I am). So it’s prudent to be a bit cautious about how much of this conversation we allow our fundie neighbors to overhear.
There’s also a certain strain of pugnacious Reformed Christianity — one that tends to be over-represented on social media — that’s always itching for a fight. One doesn’t want to say anything that’s likely to provoke the wrath of that crew.
Those local pastors who read and learned from Wright’s book likely have one or two people in or around their congregation who are like that. And one or two is all it takes. Or maybe it comes second-hand — the host of a “Christian” radio show that some congregants listen to or someone they follow on Facebook. But those pastors have learned, from hard experience, that trying to discuss complicated things can wind up creating an ugly mess with lingering misapprehensions and suspicions that may never wholly go away.
So maybe it’s safer just not to say anything. Maybe we should just keep this conversation inside the faculty lounge. Maybe this information should remain as something we all know to be true but that we don’t need to spread any more widely.
After all, do regular people outside of our little guild really need to know this? Coming to grips with some of this was a struggle for us — wouldn’t it be easier to spare them that struggle? One of the more difficult aspects of the whole New Perspective conversation is the way it relates to Luther’s anti-Semitism, do we really need to get into all that? How does it help them to show that this hero of the Reformation had feet of clay? Maybe it’s all just something they’d be better off not knowing.
That can be a legitimate concern — although, alas, in that particular case, this really is something Christian laypeople need to know. Their grandparents had to fight a war in part because Luther’s anti-Semitism was something that we Christians decided not to talk about or deal with as widely and deeply as we should have. And it’s never a great sign when a teacher of any kind — a pastor or a member of a literal faculty — is defending not knowing.
In any case, this is where we run into a big problem. This is where self-censorship starts to creep in, which opens the door to a kind of duplicity. That self-censorship may simply be the product of a desire to avoid potential conflict, or it may be due to the very real danger of actual censorship on the part of institutions as their way of avoiding conflict and controversy (particularly among their donors). So this is where the good and proper and necessary role of the faculty lounge becomes something that isn’t any of those.
Those pastors talking to each other about the latest N.T. Wright book may self-censor, deciding that it’s just easier to avoid talking about it with anyone else. They’ll begin to treat the topic like a third rail — something dangerous to be steered clear of. At this point, sadly, it’s not really accurate to call that the “third” rail, because it’s more like the 1,003rd — we’ve acquired so many “third rails” that we’re losing track.
I’m not referring here only, or even mainly, to the angrily contentious topics — the sorts of things that can’t be discussed without making somebody, or possibly everybody, angry at the “other side.” I’m talking about the things that everyone inside the faculty lounge already agrees about. The things they all know to be true, but which they have been trained not to speak of when others are around. The things that are not matters of controversy within the faculty lounge and should not be matters of controversy outside of it.
I’m sympathetic to this dilemma. The situation is unfair and the caution/timidity of “faculty lounge” evangelicals is not misplaced. The stakes may be high and intensely personal. And the fallout might be such a distraction that no one would ever hear what was actually being said anyway.
But, still, a context that breeds self-censorship and not-knowing isn’t healthy for pastors or professors. Or for anyone who wants to listen to them.
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* Briefly, ever since the Reformation, Western Christians have treated Paul’s theology as a kind of parallel allegory to the theological (and political) disputes of the European church at the time of the Reformation. We thus read Paul as advocating a doctrine of grace as opposed to the salvation by “works” taught by first-century Judaism. But this won’t do. It turns out that first-century Jews were not at all like 16th-century European Catholics. So something else is going on in Paul.
Or, to put it another way, Paul was not a Lutheran. Realizing that was kind of a big deal.
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