Resentment and theologians

There was an interesting conversation going on at Moot blog recently, which I dropped into a couple of times but was too busy to get involved in. Ian Mobsby had been digesting quite a lot of writing on networks, emerging, new forms of church, etc., and raised a bit of a fluster by commenting that the majority of writing on this at present is from a sociological, not a theological standpoint. (I was drinking beer in a pub with Ian recently, and remember saying the same thing to him then, so maybe it's my fault he got himself into hot water. Or maybe two minds with but a single thought. Anyway.) The reaction to this idea in particular was a bit prickly, and not unlike a trend I've seen on other blogs that seems to resent the notion of theology as an academic specialism, and query any idea that theologians might know more than most about theology (NB I am referring here to knowing about theology specifically, not about God or faith in everyday terms).

I agree with Ian that most of what has been written and blogged thus far on Emerging/Liquid/New Forms/Complexity, etc., isn't, technically speaking, theology as such - it's sociology, or the particularly sociological cousin of theology, religious studies. That's not a value statement. It was the 1960s when Ninian Smart et al pioneered Religious Studies deliberately as a mode of examining faith from a sociological point of view. And it's a valuable and fascinating area of study. But it isn't the same thing as a theological analysis of a system of thought, or a devotional exploration of a theological system. All of these have their place. But if ALL our conversation is observational (i.e. sociological) concerning the way we "do" church, and if the nearest we get to talking about God is an extrapolation from sociological observation, then we will be in serious danger of creating God in our own image. Theology isn't only about describing God from our own point of view - it's about everything in the light of God. We need to talk about God, in the classical terms of trinity, Christology (=the person, function and meaning of Jesus Christ?), and pneumatology (= the person, function and meaning of the Holy Spirit?); theology also encompasses theological anthropology (=who and what do we think WE are, what is our function, purpose, identity?). Theology isn't a means of persuasion, it isn't principally for proving anything about God, it's for accounting intellectually for our faith which encompasses all of life. Theology, in the long term, is an important part of what holds the church together, and if we abandon theology in favour of sociology, sooner or later the church will disintegrate. Sociology and theology aren't alternative options. One doesn't replace the other. They are both important reflections in the life of the Church, and they intersect with each other and with other disciplines that are variously seen as independent but related, or as subsets of each other - ecclesiastical history, for instance, or linguisitics and hermeneutics as they apply to theology.

There seems to be a particular resentment against professional theologians around the blog-world. Over and over I read that we are "just stuck in the ivory tower" with no connection to real practice, no concept of what the church is "really" about... etc. None of this bears out in my ongoing experience in one of the best theology faculties in the country, which is stuffed to the gills with people who are members of, and/or leaders of, their own congregations. We have, among the Christians in our Faculty, people involved in Catholic, Anglican, Reformed and Non-conformist Churches, New Churches and Alternative/Emerging groups. Common-room conversation often revolves around the practice of faith, and research topics are just as likely to be begun in the daily practice of faith as they are in some abstract vein of philosophical theology. It is a very common view in the academy that theology itself can't ultimately be abstract, even though it can be discussed in abstract terms.

The inconsistency of the argument is clear. How is it, I have to ask myself, that the same Emerging blogs that on the one hand depict theologians as disengaged Ivory Tower types, also endlessly quote NT Wright, Robert Beckford, Alan Jamieson, Jurgen Moltmann, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Rowan Williams, Len Sweet, Stanley Hauwerwas, et al.?

It's as if we somehow theologians are regarded as getting above themselves by daring to suggest that we know stuff other people don't know. But from where I'm looking, being a theologian doesn't mean I know more, in lived terms, about God, or about faith, than the next person.

In the congregation that sent me to theological college, there was a marvellous, elderly woman called Icilda. Icilda could feed a whole congregation with her goat curry. And she was like an extra mother to a whole lot of people. When I got my place at Cambridge, she came over to see me, and waved a finger at me. "I have a word for you," she said. (Icilda was one of those people who, when she said GOd had spoken, you knew this was no excess of religiosity) "Now you work hard, young lady," she said. "God gives each one of us gifts. And he's given you a brain, and a gift for theology. Don't let anyone ever tell you that thinking will damage your faith. The Church needs cooks and doctors and mechanics and scientists. And the Church needs thinkers too. We need people just to devote themselves to thinking about God too."

It never occurred to me to imagine that I knew more about God than Icilda. If I ever get even half the glimpse she did of God, I'll be doing well. But I took her seriously, worked hard, and learned the skills of theology. Being a theologian doesn't make me a better Christian than the next person. It just makes me a theologian. Sometimes that's useful to the Church. When the roof is leaking we need an engineer. When the roof needs replacing we need a fundraiser. When we're assessing our community we need a sociologist. And sometimes, when we're adding together our accumulated communal knowledge of God, a theologian can be remarkably useful too. It's not that we can't all figure out that the roof needs mending. It's just that we need someone with the expertise to pull the project together. Same with theology. We all have a theology, we all have some knowledge of God. But a bit of expertise from an academic point of view can sometimes be what we need to clarify, push forward, or focus the issue.

I would think it ridiculous if a plumber arrived to mend the central heating, and said "Well, of course I have a few ideas, but I'm only a plumber, what do I know?" In the general course of things, we expect people to be confident and clear about their expertise - not patronising or rude, and not assuming that everyone else knows nothing at all, but confident and competent. Why not expect the same of theologians? Why not expect the same of theology? By all means let's put a cap on the attitude some people have that they are better than the rest of us. There are people like that in all walks of life, including theology. But please, don't let's start resenting theologians and the universities they work in.

All of this reminded me of this post I wrote some time ago, about why we need specialists, not a democracy of knowledge.