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

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

Kelsey's interest in congregations may also be more related to justifying the theological enterprise than to equipping effective leaders. This is consistent with his purpose to determine what is theological about a theological school. The congregation is important as subject matter.

Since God cannot be studied directly, theological schools must draw information and insights from a variety of fields and employ the methods of many disciplines, always "governed by the overarching end of theological inquiry: To understand God by focusing study within the horizon of questions about congregations." This purpose must guide the institutional practices, academic specializations and governance systems of the theological school.

Kelsey refers to conversations surrounding James F. Hopewell's proposal for "a Congregational Paradigm for Theological Education" and in particular explicates Hopewell's description of a Christian congregation as "a group of persons that gathers together to enact publicly a much more broadly practiced worship of God in Jesus' name." Kelsey's ecclesiology is not merely congregational, nor has he indulged in sentimentalism about the local church or its public mission. He has hope of drawing the theological school beyond its conventional dilemmas of theory vs. practice, academic vs. professional, head vs. heart and classroom vs. field, but the purpose is quite precisely and narrowly theological, intellectual and critical: "A theological school's study would be against and for Christian congregations, and only for that reason in a way would be about them."

When Kelsey invites you to "reflect critically on a theological school well known to you," you might begin by imagining how thinking theologically about theological education proceeds differently if you are not at Yale Divinity School. Perhaps the hegemony of Berlin is not so dominant, although your faculty know its reality. Perhaps the issue of leadership for the church is not so captive to "professionalism" and is more alive to mission or apostolic mandate, though surely you know the dangers of clericalism. Perhaps the congregation is much more than an arena for your theological inquiry and assessment: it is the community for which your churchly seminary exists.

The map of theological education in North America overlays a collage of Christian histories, traditions and peoples converging from the settlements in the East and missions in the West. The diversity of evangelical, holiness and churchly traditions is a sustaining legacy in an era of profound change in the ecology of religion and religious communities. The present generation has inherited academically defined and duly accredited theological schools, seminaries and Bible schools. As the Christian religion is increasingly disestablished in this society, its academic subcultures included, shrewd wisdom will be needed to steward the education of leadership for the church's mission and to redefine the excellence of the institutions called upon for this task. Kelsey's book will help us seek the theological ground and goal of such schools.