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The Mind in Another Place: My Life as a Scholar
Luke Timothy Johnson
Eerdmans (2022). 272 pp.
In The Mind in Another Place, Luke Timothy Johnson takes the reader on a journey along the personal and professional life of a scholar. Johnson is a top-rate New Testament academic who recently retired from Emory University and whose work is highly recognized in the guild of biblical studies. This is not a traditional biblical studies book but serves as a “memoir” (p. ix) that seeks to explain to any interested person what exactly a professional scholar is and what the life of scholarship looks like. Johnson divides this journey (and his book) into three parts: becoming a scholar, being a scholar, and a scholar’s virtues. If part one is personal (from childhood to doctoral studies) and part two is professional (from Yale to Indiana and finally Emory University), then the third part is prophetic, a mature forth-telling of the “dispositions and practices that express and lead to excellence in scholarship” (p. 187).
Johnson’s story is not only enjoyable to read but loaded with insights into the many nooks and crannies of the life and lifestyle of a biblical scholar. As a memoir, this book does not make an argument that can be confirmed or challenged; it is a mature reflection that—even in the subjectivity of one individual and a few institutions—bears resemblance to the experiences and realities of all academics, most notably in the field of biblical and religious studies. All those interested in graduate study in biblical or theological studies or those seeking professorial work in the academy would benefit from Johnson’s bountiful experience and wise counsel. As a formerly tenured professor with a PhD in New Testament, many experiences or insights shared by Johnson resonated with my experiences and perspective. But now as pastor, who at least in some capacity serves a pastor theologian, two aspects of Johnson’s memoir are worthy of deeper reflection: his definition of a scholar and his over-arching theme, “the mind in another place.”
Johnson works hard to define a scholar as a person who has a “secret life” (p. 2) of intellectual work and production. Secret does not imply suspicion but an intellectual life that is able to exist set apart for the purpose of scholarship. And scholarship, for Johnson, is the work accomplished by “an intellectual life that is both focused and productive . . . a disciplined process” (p. 3). Such scholarship is not simply about being smart or even well-educated but is a specific work (research and writing/teaching) in a specific community (a congregation of like-minded people with proper resources) for a specific purpose —the discovery, development, and disclosure of knowledge. Johnson is basically wanting the reader to see that a scholar performs an essential craft in and for the world. Even if the task is particular and exclusive, the benefits should be valued (though likely not understood) by all. Johnson focuses less on the product of scholarship and more on the process, with the “hope that this personal account will make some of the mystery of the scholarly life more intelligible” (p. 7). The goal, it appears, is to make a case or the life of the mind, maybe especially in its professionalized manifestations. In a culture saturated with pragmatism and a gradual shrinking of the intellectual life, even in higher education (see Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind), Johnson’s message is relevant and necessary.
Johnson’s title, The Mind in Another Place, reveals the primary theme that runs like a thread throughout the memoir. In short, scholarship requires an “other-mindedness” (a positive counter to “absent-mindedness”) in which a scholar is “deeply and intensely engaged with an issue, question, problem, mystery, or conundrum that challenges their mind . . . to such an extent that they can be said to have their mind in another place” (p. 2). In this sense, the mind is in a “secret” and isolated place and concerned with “something other than the diaper or the keys or the need for an oil change” (p. 2). Johnson’s concept of “the mind in another place” refers to something like a temporary but necessarily disembodied existence that detaches the mind from the mundane and allows it to focus on the mysterious. It is not the denial but the distinction that allows the scholar to be in another place in order to apply themselves to another thing—a thing that requires immersed focus. For example, Johnson describes how the library “became preeminently the space that allowed my mind to be in another place” (p. 47), and how the world of “fiction” (p. 202) is important to aid the imagination. Even though Johnson demanded of himself that his “thinking . . . be based not on abstractions but on contact with and reflection upon actual human experience” (p. 64), his contact with mundane life had to be minimized or removed for such thinking to exist. Johnson even refers to “passionate detachment” (p. 210) as an important scholarly virtue. The goal, it appears, is sabbatical. The scholar needs social dislocation from the contextual realities of work and family in order to focus properly and specifically on the distinct and separate task of the mind. This nuance is important. It is not just time away, a sabbatical “leave,” but a contextual leave, a separation of thought.
But how does Johnson’s definition of a scholar and “the mind in another place” fit a pastor theologian and the church’s theological “scholarship?” There are several comparable aspects. A pastoral theologian, in the ecclesial not popular sense (see Hiestand and Wilson, The Pastor Theologian: Resurrecting an Ancient Vision), is certainly one who has a particular set of skills that find their home and development in the academy. Even more, a pastor theologian would regularly do advanced and focused work that pursues the discovery and disclosure of knowledge. But in contrast to an academic scholar, the specific work of a pastor theologian is in a differently “ruled” and resourced community (“congregation”) that exists for a very different purpose. For example, Johnson reflects the disembodied nature of academic scholarship when he says, “The destiny of humans seldom rests on a scholarly investigation . . . Scholarship, indeed, is a form of play” (p. 219). The pastor theologian, in sharp contrast, knows that their work is directly related to the destiny of humans in general and specific humans in particular, for it handles the word of God for the people of God. It is not a thing of play. A similar contrast can be seen in Johnson’s view of the scholar’s disembodied practice of “the mind in another place.” The social location of the pastor theologian is essential to the proper mindedness of the thinking they are assigned to do. That is, the social location of the church and its ministry is required not only to ask the right questions but also to produce the right answers. For Johnson, social location could actually be a hindrance (p. 145) and was unnecessary to the task: “I found that the habits of scholarship did not cease when my life as an academic [i.e., in the university] ended” (p. 174). For the pastor theologian, however, it is not sabbatical but saturation that procures the right mixture of question and context for God’s word to address properly and specifically God’s world. The pastor may need time away to read and write (yes, please, elder boards!), but the goal is not removing the mind from the mundane but penetrating it with the embodied fullness of the gospel and all its applications. In short, while the pastor theologian is scholarly in training and traits, they cannot quite fit the vision Johnson presents, for their mind needs to exist in “an ecclesial place,” that is, in and for the local church.
Mickey Klink is the Senior Pastor of Hope Evangelical Free Church in Roscoe, IL. He holds a PhD in New Testament from the University of St. Andrews and is the author of several books on a range of topics including biblical theology, the Gospel of John, and the church. He is a member of the St. John Fellowship of the Center for Pastor Theologians.
