The views expressed in this article are of the author only and do not necessarily represent those of the Center for Pastor Theologians.
Church theology—Was ist das? “Church Dogmatics”? Perhaps. I am an admirer, though not a camp follower, of the man whose comments on Paul’s Epistle to the Romans dropped a bombshell on the playground of the theologians. To begin in the fashionable via negativa: by church theology I mean something that isn’t academic theology. Something joyful. Something the American Academy of Religion wouldn’t recognize as scholarly. Something written in a church, instead of an office. Something written for an actual church, not just that at times modish abstraction “the Church.” Something a pastor would actually read, as opposed to something an elite academic wishes pastors would read but nonetheless writes in a style only the doctor’s-hooded can grasp (and let’s be honest: some of them can’t grasp your meaning either). Something nearly like a song. Something evangelical, spiritual, dogmatic, experiential, mystical, one hopes at times beautiful, bold, glad, traditional, backwards-looking, forward-moving, hopeful, lively, truth-telling, no-holds-barring, orthodox, edifying, free, bound. Something that doesn’t pull punches yet overflows with love. Something nearly like a battle and an embrace combined. Above all, something saturated with, ruled by, and transparent to Holy Scripture.
Now we’re getting somewhere. Church theology—that’s something Jeremiah or Irenaeus or Calvin or Bonhoeffer would have recognized and thanked God for. Something Adolf von Harnack would have rejected as less than scientific, regarding it an object for dispassionate research (requiring much patience) but not the work of a real academic theologian. Something that doesn’t play by modernity’s rules and isn’t enamored with postmodernity’s lawlessness. Something deeply devoted to the Church. Something passionately committed to the truth of the gospel of Jesus Christ, the Son of God.
Now to be clear: I am not against academic theology, at least not all of it. I have studied under learned men and women, from whom I have learned much and to whom I owe much, as a scholar, certainly, but also as a pastor-theologian. Academic theology, like any creature, is good in its proper place, good when rightly ordered, good when responsible to its limits. But this is the beginning of the problem. In the literature department (one charitably assumes) they know the difference between Shakespeare and a scholar of Shakespeare, King Lear and Shakespeare After Theory. In the theology department they typically do not. That’s why doctoral programs and publishing houses produce books about Karl Barth’s theology or queer theology or what happens when you blend the two together, most all of which are able to hum along smoothly for hundreds of pages without a single reference to the Bible and perhaps without a single clear claim about what is in fact true, beautiful, or good—and yet, we generically categorize these books as “theology.” The best sort are indeed books about theology. I love to read these books. I benefit immensely from them. But theology they are not. Or at least, they are not church theology. Most of us, however, do not realize this, and we take the guild at their word: they are the theologians, and what they produce is theology.
This insight has evolved over time, but I remember when it first dawned upon me. I was at a dinner with friends, one of whom was a doctoral student in English literature and another an aspiring pastor. The pastor told us of a poem he’d written, but deferred modestly to the authority of the graduate student. Who then wisely replied: “You are a poet; I just study their stuff.” There is nothing wrong with studying poetry or writing about poetry, in fact there is much good to be had in doing so. But studying poetry and then writing journal articles and books about poetry, is not poetry. Poets know this, and so do the best critics of poetry. It is precisely their unassuming humbleness before the beauty of the poet’s art that makes them such excellent scholars of poetry. The more they realize that their criticism is not poetry, the better their criticism becomes. In a rare case, it may even become rather beautiful in its own right.
For a long time, academic theologians have told the Church that what they write is theology and that if her pastors were learned they would read their stuff. By and large, the Church has listened to the Academy’s claims (if not it’s demand to read its books!) and her pastors have given way to its theologians. Pick one: you are a pastor, or you are a theologian. You write sermons and Sunday School lessons, or you write lectures and books. You inhabit the church or you work in the university. You read the Bible piously or you read the Bible critically, or not at all. You read Max Lucado (no offense implied: in particular, I love his Punchinello books) or you read Thomas Aquinas. You attend the Gospel Coalition or you pilgrimage to AAR. Some lament the disjunction, and we end up with (e.g.) the Brazos series of commentaries written by theologians. A most welcome breach of protocol: but the exegetes don’t really take it seriously, the pastors still aren’t reading them, and the Church continues to suffer because she flourishes in the Truth.
To serve the Church’s flourishing in the truth of the Word of God, under the Spirit’s sovereign grace and to the Father’s glory, Jesus Christ appoints his minister, the church theologian.
It’s sometimes hard to remember that the Church had been doing theology—arguably, its very best theology—for centuries before the first university came on the scene. Most theologians were bishops or monastics or both. None wrote in the context of a modern secular university and none wrote for his academic peers. They wrote in, of, and for the Church of the living and true God, because they loved him, and as an oblation to his glory. Because the intellectual and spiritual contexts and aims of theology were churchly and doxological, the genre itself looked very different than our modern “theology.” Much wasn’t written down at all. What was took the form of sermon, song, poem, catechesis, letter, and occasional and, more often than not, polemical writings defending the true gospel against harmful counterfeits. In the latter case, the defense of the gospel involved inseparably (and wonderfully) the explication of the Gospel’s truth with increasing clarity and at the same time, complexity. There is a great difference between Melito’s On Pascha and Ignatius’ Letters on the one hand, and Irenaeus’ Against Heresies on the other—and we haven’t even made it past the second Christian century. By the time the patristic period flowers in the theology of St Augustine, the Church’s depth of exegetical insight, extent of dogmatic penetration into the beauty of the truth, and coherence of doctrinal presentation have made impressive strides. But we still have to do with the scriptural Gospel preached and taught in the Church of God. Theology is still basically spiritual, because it is still essentially nothing more or less than wise exegesis of Scripture for the Church.
By the High Middle Ages, what began as simple creedal catechesis blossomed into the towering dogmatic cathedrals we know as the summae of scholastic theology. This marked a great gain in many respects, but it came with a loss. The God-intended unity of Scripture and the life of the Spirit in the Church, of illumined mind and kindled heart, of rigorous intellectual work and the rhythm of prayer and study, of footwashing theologian and highly honored lay-people, was broken into halves: the theology of the school and the theology of the monastery, the speculative domain of the specialist and the piety-theology of the people, the true yet cold and the warm yet superstitious. To be sure, there were pious scholastics like Thomas and brilliant monks like Bernard—or John Staupitz. But that being said, the living, graced reality of church theology was fragmented. Out of the vanity of Babel ensued the confusion of the Church’s original scriptural language—united in the Spirit but diverse in manifestation—into the speculative tongues of increasingly barbaric theologies unversed and inarticulate in the language of the Bible.
One part of the Lord’s response to all this came in the form of an academically trained theologian who was at heart a pastor of souls and preacher of the gospel: a patristic-monastic theologian invested with authority to teach the Word of God as doctor in Biblia at an inauspicious university on the edge of civilization. He prayed, preached, labored day and night in the Word, read his Augustine and his Tauler, confessed his sin, struggled for faith, battled against the devil, cared for other suffering souls. Soon he came to see, painfully, that much had gone terribly wrong. His critical theses—note well, a Scholastic theological genre—led to the fall and rising of many in Israel (and a sword pierced through his own heart, too): the fall of a theology grown untethered from the Word and therefore from the Church; the rise of a renewed scriptural theology that Athanasius or Augustine would have recognized as spiritually cognate to their own. He preached sermons, wrote songs, catechisms, letters, and occasional treatises (many, fiercely polemical: at least sometimes, too much so). Like Ambrose, he confessed the Word of God before kings, and was not put to shame.
Sermon, hymn, catechesis, letter, thesis, ad hoc treatise—that’s how church theology comes packaged: incomplete like all theology, yet without pretense of completion; enthusiastically expository, yet without claim to have exhausted the wondrous depths of God’s truth; passionately committed, and unapologetically so; for the church in which an actual theologian sojourns and serves, and thus for the Great Church too; for the glory not of the theologian, but of the God who saved him by his grace.
At the height of the church struggle, Bonhoeffer asked: “Who will give us Luther?” An understandable, if self-serving and rather foolish thing to say. The confessing Church did not need another Luther, and neither do we. All that was needed then and all that is needed now is Jesus Christ as he is attested to us in Holy Scripture, the one Word of God whom we have to hear and whom we have to trust and obey in life and in death. Yes: what we need is Jesus Christ the Son of Man to speak his Word, pour out his Spirit, and raise the dying churches of the West to life. And to this end, may he give us not a Luther or a Bonhoeffer but a whole host of pastor-theologians armed with the Word, filled with the Spirit, and confident in their calling to the daring work of vera theologia.
Phil Anderas (PhD, Marquette) is an Anglican priest and missionary theologian with operations based in Milwaukee. He is a member of the St Basil Fellowship and author of Renovatio: Martin Luther's Augustinian Theology of Sin, Grace & Holiness.
