To Understand God: What's Theological About a Theological School. - book reviews

Christian Century, Feb 3, 1993 by David L. Tiede

David H. Kelsey, professor of theology at Yale Divinity School, proposes to help us think about "the nature and purpose of theological schooling" by focusing on the question What's theological about a theological school?" He answers the question by explicating two foundational insights:

What makes a theological school theological is neither

its various subject matters nor the scholarly disciplines

it employs but rather its overarching goal: to understand

God more truly.

A theological school is a community of persons trying to understand God more truly by focusing its study of various subject matters within the horizon of questions about Christian congregations.

Kelsey joins Edward Farley, Joseph Hough, Jr., John B. Cobb, Jr., and Don S. Browning in resisting "theory to practice" thinking. He insists that critical reflection on the practices of the congregation, especially its worship, is precisely a theological enterprise. This is an indirect effort to "apprehend God" in the peculiar and concrete way God is present. Kelsey moves close to H. Richard Niebuhr's concept of the theological school as the "intellectual center of the church's life," which exercises theological assessments of the central practices of Christian congregations. The complex of practices constituting a theological school is oriented to the goal of understanding God truly. This requires inspecting every concrete practice of God's presence for ideology (using God for our own purposes or privilege) and idolatry (absolutizing the importance of anything but God).

The title and foundational insights quoted above reflect the pervasively formal character of Kelsey's theological analysis and his identity as a theologian of the Reformed tradition. We are never far from such convictions of the Westminster Shorter Catechism (rendered in inclusive language) as: "The chief end of human life is to glorify and enjoy God forever." The reader is invited into a controlled conversation which proceeds by the extended exposition of foundational definitions (for example, "a school is a particular community of persons whose central purpose is to understand some subject truly"). This conversation is marked by precise linguistic disciplines (see especially the chapter "Borrowed Language"). Those who have broader questions about the mission, character and effectiveness of theological education will first need to attend to Kelsey's theological method and conviction. The "apprehension" if not "comprehension" of God is the normative goal: "a theological school is a group of people who engage in a set of social practices whose overarching end is to understand God more truly."

The book includes historical assessments reaching back as far as Plotinus and his third-century Christian contemporaries, but Kelsey's goal is not to explore the diverse ways in which theological study has informed or served the vocations of Christian communities. His inquiry is more limited to current questions about the purpose of post-Enlightenment theological education. The paideia of Athens and the Wissenschaft of Berlin are the rock and hard place confronting theological schools: "Expectations of faculty make the Berlin model central for them, but the structure of the school's common life tends to organize student life around the demands of paideia and its expectations."

Kelsey projects a wide spectrum of Christian traditions of theological study and their schools. He provides one of his several typologies in a fruitful description of how theological schools are related to their differing church communities. Still, in portraying these "crossroads hamlets" on the "Trent Road, Augsburg Road, Geneva Road, Canterbury Road, Northampton Road or Azusa Street," Kelsey is most interested in their place on the Berlin Tumpike" where the post-Schleiermacher construal of a "theological school" dominates. Certainly this is a "mainline" account, especially in view of Kelsey's own location at a university-based theological school. But how adequately does this road map define or reflect theological education in North America in the late 20th century?

Kelsey's discussion of "academic freedom" displays his own place on the Berlin turnpike as much by what is unsaid as what is said. He challenges the Berlin idea of autonomous rationality ("freedom to teach, freedom to learn") with a theological rationale for this freedom--the obligation to understand God truly. He points out the hazards of confessionalism and denominationalism, inviting intellectual honesty on theological grounds. But he says less about how far his argument for Christian theological schools and their theological rationale for intellectual honesty will carry in a religious research university suspicious of religious privilege. Yet this is the very nexus of his struggle, for us for whom the research university remains the culturally dominant model of excellence in schooling."

Kelsey's complaint against "the Berlin model of excellent theological schooling" is that it regards a theological faculty in a university as a social necessity. The community needs competent clergy just as it does able lawyers and physicians. Furthermore, this understanding of "professional leadership" includes criteria of "competence" that have had alienating effects on lay leaders. Listen to him warm to the battle: "It is precisely by being schooled in a way that is governed by an apparently nonutilitarian (read: useless') overarching goal (that is, to understand God simply for the sake of understanding God) that persons can best be prepared to provide church leadership." There is more than a little passion in this claim to precision, and the assertion is an effective protest against the Berlin model. But the case for how best to prepare church leaders is incomplete.