What's theological about a theological school?

Christian Century, Feb 5, 1997 by David Kelsey

According to this picture, theological schooling is a movement from generating abstract theory to applying theory in concrete practice. It is as though the underlying picture of theological schooling came from engineering: we receive theories from "pure" scientific research, generalize applied theory from parts or from implications of the "pure" theory, and then devise techniques and technologies governed by the applied theory to solve well-defined practical problems. In theological education it is assumed not only that psychology and other human sciences generate useful theory, but that historical studies and theological reflection on doctrine and ethics should yield theories that are relevant to ministry and can be applied in practice.

This picture of theological schooling leads to intractable problems. If it were correct, there would be so many bodies of relevant theory that one would not be able to learn the theories and test them critically in a three- or four-year course of study.

Let there be no misunderstanding. It is essential that leaders in communities of faith learn how to preach, how to counsel and how to manage an organization mostly staffed by volunteers. This critique is not a matter of the "academic" side of the school dumping on the "practical side." What makes a theological school theological is neither the cultivation of academic skills nor the cultivation of practical capacities. Learning to talk knowledgeably in an Augustinian or Cappadocian way, or in a Rahnerian or Barthian way, no more constitutes a theological education than does learning how to preach well, counsel or run a Sunday school. Teaching and learning these things make for truly theological schooling only when they are done in the service of a further end: learning so to love God with the mind as to come to understand God more deeply and more truly.

WHEN WE PICTURE theological education as a movement from theory to the application of theory in practice, we focus on the bodies of theory as the ultimate subject matter to be studied. We focus not on matters that we believe will lead us to a deeper understanding of God, but on matters that we must master in order to become skilled in certain professional techniques. When that happens, the study of a theory takes on a life of its own, and the curriculum becomes a clutch of unrelated courses instead of an integral course of study. When theological schooling is conceived in this way, it is structurally impossible to integrate theory and practice because it is humanly impossible to integrate all the relevant bodies of theory.

However, if the subjects of study are concrete networks of human practices by which communities of faith attempt to respond to God faithfully, and if they are practices which mediate an understanding of God, then the movement of theological schooling is more like an engaged meditative gaze than it is like problem solving. It is more the circular movement of patient and appropriately disciplined attention toward complex "goings-on": What is going on in these communities of faith? What are they doing here? What are we doing here? What is God doing here? We move from these questions to insights and then test the insights by our further attention to what is going on.