The Gift of Theology (Mark Valeri)
I sometimes feel guilty these days about my teaching at Washington University, zoomed once a week for the rest of this tattered spring semester, to teach my students formal, abstract, scholarly theology. The course is called “Christian Theology and Politics in the Modern West,” and it deals quite a bit more with the theology than the politics. What in the world am I having my students do, reading the likes of Kathryn Tanner, the Yale theologian who painstakingly draws out a theory of human nature and its political implications from the technicalities of the Christian doctrine of the Trinity? In times like this, I think, they ought to be reading material that immediately connects to contemporary issues: the fears and strategies of living through a pandemic, the call to assist those most damaged by Covid-19, the need for practical wisdom.
I have had the same feeling when called on to preach in local congregations. No matter how hard I try to produce a plain-spoken exhortation to practical piety or acts of justice I seem always to land on fundamental theological questions. I am unable to resist a good quotation from Soren Kierkegaard or Karl Barth or Kathryn Tanner. Reflections on the very nature of God, Christ, and redemption—philosophically compelling, historically grounded, and exegetically thorough—lift my spirits and my mind. I realize that this may be a peculiar taste, and suited, especially in our fraught times, for no student or parishioner.
Just when I am about to swear off theology, however, students and parishioners teach me better. In class, my students have livened up when we get, as they have put it, to the really “interesting” stuff. By that they don’t mean the politics per se, or reflections on our dire current social circumstances. They mean Calvin on, of all things, divine sovereignty—a concept that kept them talking way past the end-of-class time. Or Jonathan Edwards on what it means to love God, a conversation that sparked passion along with perplexity. Or James Cone on the very nature of God as the God of black liberation, a topic that evoked some of the most creative and energetic comments from the whole class. I presume that many—even most--of my students are not Christians. Yet they are drawn to the material because it raises issues that compel them deep down, whatever their faith or not. I can’t wait to get to Tanner next week.
And those poor souls subjected to my occasional preaching? After one Sunday service, a young couple came up to me to thank me for the sermon, which probably included one too many quotations from the Old Testament scholar Elizabeth Achtemeier and from Dietrich Bonhoeffer. I said “thanks,” and “sorry for making it so pedantic.” Later that day, the woman sent me an email to this effect: “C. S. Lewis once said that he could not quite stand to read devotional books or books of practical piety. He loved to do his devotions with a good systematic theology, pencil in hand. Keep preaching to challenge our minds as well as our hearts. You are in good company.”
It is not, of course, an either/or (there, see, I could not refrain from quoting Kierkegaard). On the eve of the Second World War, C. S. Lewis told a gathering of Oxford students that their studies of human culture—the humanities, we now call it—might well have seemed an unaffordable luxury at a time of war. Lewis disagreed. Farmers, soldiers, nurses, and street-cleaners had just as high a calling as did the students but the crisis itself raised issues of truth and beauty and the purpose of things. That was why people, as Lewis put it, “propound mathematical theorems in beleaguered cities, conduct metaphysical arguments in condemned cells . . . [and] discuss the last new poem while advancing to the walls of Quebec . . . . This is not panache. It is our nature.” We long to know what it means to be human and whether there is a God at all times, come war or peace, plague or prosperity.
So let us do what makes us most humane, most alive, most loving, and if that means reading and teaching a dense book of theology, then do it with confidence.
Mark Valeri is a Carver Project faculty fellow and the Reverend Priscilla Wood Neaves Distinguished Professor of Religion and Politics at Washington University in St. Louis.
Further Reading:
C. S. Lewis, “Learning in War-Time,” a sermon preached in the Church of St. Mary the Virgin, Oxford, Autumn, 1939, in The Weight of Glory and elsewhere.
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