The Society for the Advancement of Ecclesiological Theology

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Academic Theology Posts

• November 9, 2009 by Gerald Hiestand

  Doug Sweeny On the Professor as Researcher and the Pastor as Theologian

  At the close of the ’09 SAET Symposium, our Senior Theological Consultant, Doug Sweeney, offered the following proposal regarding the future relationship between academic scholars and pastor-theologians:

  “We will not always need academic, systematic theologians to do all the heavy theological lifting for God’s people. We are not often explicit about this, but systematic theology, insofar as it is distinguished from biblical, historical, philosophical, psychological, and intercultural theology, is the work of generalists, people who synthesize the findings of those in the other scholarly disciplines and neither have nor require a methodology of their own. They put the big picture together and apply it to our lives. They don’t require the resources or the structures of the academy to do this kind of work (though they do need very good libraries). In fact, the people best suited to synthesize our knowledge of God and His ways in the world, applying this knowledge to the empirical realities people face, are pastor-theologians.

  We should work toward a day when professors view themselves as handmaids serving pastor-theologians, and pastor-theologians play an important public role in guiding people theologically. Professors should continue to offer specialized instruction in ancient languages and history, exegesis, church history, social science, and philosophy. They will continue to raise up future generations of pastors. But we should work to raise up the kinds of pastors who can synthesize, exposit, and apply the knowledge of God to the lives of all God’s people with authority.”

  In sum, professors in the academy should continue to focus on primary-level research, but theological reflection and synthesis should be moved back into the churches. Doug’s way of parsing this out was extremely helpful in reminding me of the need for church and academy to lock arms. Given the rise of the modern research university, as well as the development of the specialized theological guilds, it is no longer realistic to expect one person to be both a cutting edge research scholar and a robust systematic theologian. The fields have simply become too specialized and the secondary literature too vast.

  Given our current context, the professor is best positioned to engage in primary-level research. Pastors—in the main—simply cannot afford the time away from their parishes to do the sort of work the modern research professor does (visiting research libraries, study centers, etc.). And if the professor is uniquely positioned to engage in primary research, the pastor is just as uniquely positioned to engage in theological analysis. Who better to write ecclesially sensitive theology than pastor-theologians?

  Doug’s willingness to refer to himself and other academics as “handmaids” is remarkably charitable, and no doubt a word for those in the academy. But for my part, I had lost sight of the fact that pastor-theologians were in need of such handmaids. But we no longer live in a pre-critical context, and thus the pastor-theologian can no longer go it alone. The days of Calvin, Luther and Edwards are gone; the modern research university is here to stay. Pastor-theologians need believing research professors who ably hand them the raw data necessary for theological reflection. And believing professors need pastors who can ably synthesize the data they mine, for the good of the church.

  The current division of labor between the academy and the church is, ”Professors will do the thinking, pastors will do the praxis.” But if we follow Doug’s advice, it should become, “Professors will do the research, pastors will do the theology.” Of course, it’s not a zero-sum game. No doubt pastor-theologians can (and will) do primary-level research. And certainly professors will continue to make helpful theological contributions. But in the main, Doug’s suggestion makes the best use of our respective social locations.

  Categories: Academic Theology | Ecclesial Theology | Pastor-theologian | Symposium

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• October 4, 2009 by Gerald Hiestand

  Who Cares What Calvin Thought? (The Church, That’s Who)

  Despite their comments earlier in the book, Bradley and Muller acknowledge the difficulty of achieving total objectivity in historical studies, and indeed, affirm the importance of having a sense of involvement in and with the events of history. “Objectivity in historical studies does not, and cannot, exist if it is defined as an absence of involvement with or opinion about the materials.”

  This is more reasonable, even  if out of step with their earlier comments. But what the right hand gives, the left hand takes away. Bradley and Muller go on to state that a historian should not render judgment on the matter studied. “As a historian, one makes no judgment about the rightness or wrongness of the person’s teaching on an absolute scale. . . the student should not ask whether or not Arminius is ultimately doctrinal right or wrong.” And again, “One’s own writing should not register one’s own theological opinion, pro or con.”

  Here I must voice strong disagreement. The entire point of historical studies as done by Christian theologians and historians is precisely to render theological judgment in service to the Church. The conscious divorce between systematic theology and historical studies is the curse of academic theology. To be sure, historians—christian or non—must be careful to do the hard work of finding out what was really going on in the original context; we can’t appropriate what we haven’t accurately understood. But to suggest that Christian historians shouldn’t appropriate the theological reflection of our tradition is significantly unhelpful.

  I am reminded here of a recent exchange in JETS between two Calvin scholars on the role of “union with Christ” in Calvin’s soteriology. Thomas Wenger argues for a more traditional, forensic reading of Calvin and accuses Marcus Johnson of allowing his theological agenda to carry undue weight. Wegner writes, “It seems that Johnson has a vested interest to ground his existing theological views in Calvin, and in then grounding Calvin in Paul. . . My arguments have been decidedly historical, and in the original article I do not make a single theological claim.”

  Pause here. What was the point of Wegner’s article then? With all due respect to Dr. Wegner (who is a pastor, ironically),  I don’t really care what Calvin thought about anything unless it can be demonstrated that Calvin’s thought has relevance to the Church as she exists today. Wegner’s article is excellent. Indeed I think his read on Calvin is more accurate than Johnson’s  (and I even agree theologically with Johnson!). But the superiority of Wegner’s article is not because he refuses to render theological judgment. If anything, this is a significant weakness of the article. Who is he writing this for, anyway? Apparently not the church, whose very life-blood runs red with theological judgments.

  Johnson has not misread Calvin because Johnson has a vested interest in the subject matter. No doubt Wegner has a vested interest as well. No. Johnson has misread Calvin because he misread Calvin.

  Bradley and Muller are correct. “It is…exceedingly unlikely that badly done history can be the basis of well-done theology.” Agreed. But  “well-done theology” is the ultimate telos of good history. Historical analysis that doesn’t terminate in theological assertions and a prophetic call to mission is like a “house” with no framing and only a foundation. Good as far as it goes, but useless in and of itself.

  Categories: Academic Theology | Book Review | Church History | Ecclesial Theology

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• August 14, 2009 by Gerald Hiestand

  Reformation 21 Article

  The kind folks over at Reformation 21 have posted my article, “Ecclesial Theology and Academic Theology: Why We Need More of the Former.”

  The article briefly recounts the founding of the SAET, and is my latest attempt to flesh out a distinction between academic theology and ecclesial theology. If you read it and have thoughts, I’m interested to hear them.

  Categories: Academic Theology | Articles | Ecclesial Theology | Resurrection | Uncategorized

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• March 2, 2009 by Gerald Hiestand

  Rusty Reno and the Bifurcation between Theology and Exegesis

  Rusty Reno has a couple of relevant posts (see here and here) in First Things’  On the Square blog. Reno, as you may be aware, has been leading the charge in the new Brazo’s Theological Commentary series. The series is decidedly theological, and the respective volumes are being written by theologians rather than bible scholars. Genius, in my mind. Yet not everyone is impressed. Many professional bible scholars are crying “foul”, declaring theologians (particularly Christians ones at that–gasp!) unfit to handle the text appropriately. Too much of the church’s theological dogma is being imported back into the text. My favorite is the (apparently self-evident) complaint by biblical scholar Barbara Green that the Jonah volume “features Jesus on nearly every page.” Ha! Luther would be horrified, I’m sure. Reno, quoted at length below, gives us his reason for pressing forward in this (at certain points) unpopular project:

  “Not surprisingly, biblical commentary played a central role in the life of the Church. The Fathers wrote commentaries, far more in fact than treatises on doctrinal topics. The great medieval theologians wrote commentaries. Martin Luther and John Calvin wrote commentaries, as did Cajetan and Robert Bellarmine. For more than a thousand years it was simply assumed than an exegete and a theologian were pretty much synonyms. After all, you need to know what the Bible says in order to develop an accurate account of God and salvation—and you need to study classical doctrine in order to give a clear and cogent account of what the scripture says.

  These days this unity can no long be presumed. Over the last two hundred years, the work of biblical interpretation has rotated away from the churchly business of teaching doctrine. Bible scholars have built their own independent intellectual project, one that excludes Church doctrine from the process of interpretation as a matter of principle. The job of the modern historical exegete is to scientifically determine what a particular portion of the Bible meant when it was composed, not how it should be read by the Church today.

  We can point to many remarkable intellectual achievements in modern biblical scholarship, some of service to the Church. But on the whole the results have been disastrous. The “meaning in the original context” approach has made the Old Testament into the Hebrew Bible. To read forward to fulfillment in Christ is the unforgivable sin of modern biblical scholarship. The New Testament is rich with the vocabulary of Christian piety. St. Paul’s letters are themselves already theological. But even in New Testament scholarship, the requirement of original context invariably drives a wedge between Scripture and the great Trinitarian and Christological doctrines of the early Church. Ask a biblical scholar, “Does the New Testament teach the doctrine of the Trinity?” Odds are overwhelming that the answer will be “no.”

  In the quote above, and throughout the rest of the post, Reno addresses many of the concerns that drive the SAET. The bifurcation between biblical exegesis and theological reflection so prevalent in the academic guilds is a big pet peeve of mine.  In many respects, Reno (and other sensistive academic theologians/bible scholars) are looking to do within the academy what the SAET is looking to do outside the academy. God speed to Reno.

  Categories: Academic Theology | Commentaries

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