I had coffee with a student this afternoon. It helped crystallize for me one way in which seminary education can be dangerous. Note well: dangerous does not equal bad. But like many good and helpful things, it can be dangerous as well.
The danger is simply this: seminary can teach us that people are ideas to be argued with rather than neighbors to be loved.
Theology is my friend. Theology is my friend. Theology is my friend.
If I say it enough, I’m sure to believe it.
And I know it’s true. I am a theological reader of scripture. Once upon a time I thought that what I loved was theology proper, but then I discovered that what I thought of as theology was more like a biblical or exegetical theology. But I still love theology.
Ok, so why did I go into a fit of madness yesterday and post this as my Facebook status: “Dear Theology, I want to be your friend, but days like this make me want to disown you forever”?
I think it goes back to Monday’s post wherein I reflected on the impossibility of hearing things we don’t already “know.” The theology we bring with us to the Bible creates a way of “seeing” that determines what “scripture actually says.” And so, my FB friends were quick to point out that we all read the Bible with some theology, that we can’t lay that aside, etc.
They are certainly correct. Heck, I know people who think that the defining characteristic of Jesus is his command “Do not judge,” and they even think that the Sermon on the Mount proves them right! See? It’s hard to see what we don’t believe is there…
I’m currently wrapping up a course on The Cross in the New Testament. I’ve taught it twice and am about to teach it again next week. This class surveys the cross / death of Jesus in the New Testament, and then does some theological integration on the issues of discipleship and atonement theories.
Three big take-aways from both the lecture and the readings are these: (1) when the NT talks about the cross it is infinitely more concerned with how we live lives of faithful discipleship than it is with how the death of Jesus “works” to save us; (2) there are numerous models of “atonement” in the NT that address different facets of the problem of the human condition; and (3) penal substitution might be less pervasive than you think, and probably needs to be rethought in more biblical categories.
The problem with “knowing” how the death of Jesus works is that it keeps us from being able to see how the NT writers talk about it. The papers I’m grading demonstrate a fascinating reticence to embrace models other than a traditional penal substitution model; they often overtly state that we don’t have to do anything as Christians–and the cross of Christ tells us so. They then will chide scholars for not paying attention to the Bible (passages like Isa 53 in particular). *sigh*
This is why I have a love-hate relationship with theology–not because I’m not a theologian of sorts, or because theology isn’t important, but because our theological systems serve their purpose all-too-well: they give us grids for making sense of what we see in scripture, whether that’s the sense that scripture makes or not.
And this is why I’m more broadly skeptical of erecting any theological statement, howsoever so broad it may be, as the “grid” through which we read the scripture. The spiral of reading scripture and theological articulation must always allow for scripture to come back and correct the faith of both the individual and the church.
Theology: no better friend, no worse master.
Something along those lines, “You can’t learn what you don’t already know,” was one point of an E. P. Sanders retrospective on his teaching career. (Anybody have the link for that? It was a talk he gave at Duke a year or so ago.)
I discovered afresh this weekend that this is absolutely true. We hear what we think we are going to hear. Especially when we’re listening to something we think we already know about.
Have you ever been in a situation where you thought someone was going to say one thing, but said something else? And have you ever then not been able to recall what they actually did say because you remember your own expectation more vividly?
I spoke this weekend to a college group about the resurrection of Jesus. Among the implications of “new creation” that I outlined was that God’s work of redemption occurs not just with respect to individuals but also with respect to communities and also then with respect to the whole created order (natural, social, etc.).
Or, if you won’t take my word for it, “He comes to make his blessings known far as the curse is found,” where “far as” entails everything, starting with the dirt and going on up to God.
Folks were with me, tracking, not watching too many of the passers by on the beach (yeah right)… But then I sent them to talk for a few minutes in small groups about these questions:
Interestingly, every response I got was looking at the larger setting of the world, or the felt needs, as means to the end of bringing about the conversion of another individual. The corporate and cosmic potential of new creation in the resurrected Christ fell entirely on deaf ears.
What does this mean?
For one thing, it reawakened me to the need to keep working for a transformed idea of what “gospel” means among the evangelicals with whom I run. It’s not just about personal conversion and forgiveness of sins so that I’m in a right relationship with God. It’s also about feeding, healing, restoring so that the world experiences rectification.
For another, it reinforced the fact that teaching and learning are hard work. Maybe this is why teaching is the best kind of learning…
