The Gift of Theological EducationL Learning to Read before Learning to Talk

Not long after that a neighbor’s boy, picking up a rifle he found in his house, assuming it was empty, pointed it at his brother and shot him dead.

Still later, when I was approaching 20, my aunt pulled from her bookshelf, in that same room where family celebrations had been observed and opera had been played, a prescription for my adolescent absorption with meaning and purpose, life and death. There in that remote setting, she gave to me, from her own collection, my first book by Paul Tillich.

Theological education is loose in the land. It travels by the medium of preachers good and bad, freely purchased books, and wisdom passed from hand to hand. No denomination or accrediting agency can control it. Its environment is the daily struggles of people over life and death, and its most cherished characteristic is the classic vocabulary of faith that is recognized by the learned and the poorly read alike. It is the stealth culture which, despite our brooding over secularity, inspires many people in very humble settings through their days. What makes it work is its utter plainness.

Not long ago, near the East Tennessee mountains where I live, I pulled the car up to Earl’s Food and Beverage, located close to Billy Bob’s Tatoo and Piercing. Earl has an outstanding price for 87-octane gas. The reason Earl has such a good price is that he doesn’t have fancy pumps. They look like they have been used since Harry Truman’s day. Plain and simple. No place to insert anything as ridiculous as a credit card.

Earl’s gas has no recognizable brand name. Nevertheless, you pump it in and your car goes where you point it. No secret ingredients, no technological cleansers, no tigers peeping at you from around the edge. Earl looks at his world in simple and unsophisticated terms.

I leave Earl’s Food and Beverage and drive over to the town’s cheapest fitness center. Back in the extremely serious free weight room I find a place between the deputy sheriff who has been a regular for ten years, and a guy wearing a black Teamster’s tee shirt. It isn’t long before one says, “What do you really think happens when people die?”

Theological education is everyday business in such off-beat joints. And it deals largely with such apocalyptic issues as sin and forgiveness, life and death. Theological education here has nothing to do with name brand thinkers or papers and exams. It doesn’t require reporting on what one reads. Theological education here is a matter of personal survival. For pastors, however, it involves still more. It involves the way we learn to read.

It was in college that my reading experience first began to break into two parts. There was reading to pass tests, to organize themes and to report facts. Then, on the other side, there was reading that took words and ideas deeper into my life. While they were not always separate, these approaches were frequently quite different. And the difference involved both the setting and the character of what I read. Over time, taking some classic work with me into a distant, off-campus site, I felt the words beginning to burn their way into my brain. It was to such books that I frequently returned. And, it was because this practice came to deepen and broaden my perspective, that my collection of the works written by the spiritual writers and theologians through the centuries has continued to grow. It was there, in the woods north of the Dartmouth College campus, along the banks of the river separating New Hampshire from Vermont, that I first opened the cages and let these texts run freely through my mind. And could there have been something else, that in reading them alone I was actually reading them more closely to the way they had been written?

I wonder what happens when our exposure to classic works of intuitive insight is reduced and reconfigured into answers for tests. Much depends on the character of the tests, but in general something valuable is changed. The assigned work is opened with anticipation as well as some trepidation. We are, of course, afraid that we may not get it right and thus we are apprehensive about the book itself. And then we analyze it, summarize it, report on it before abandoning it in order to pursue assignments in another class. Then the ultimate test occurs after graduation. Do we continue to be nourished, deep within the places where our lives grow hungry through the years, by these classic works that we were once assigned? In teaching, I have often paused at bulletin boards to read the lists of books that students want to sell at graduation. It can be very painful.

Thus in time I too became one who caged up books. As a college and seminary teacher, I must have often conveyed the impression that the reduction of some classic work to a series of abstractions was the intended goal. Did I, in the process, inadvertently push such volumes away from students’ souls? Did I, like an overzealous chaperone at a high school dance, keep love affairs with books from ever getting out of hand? And then, the cold chill runs down my spine — did my pronouncements on the sacred text come to guard them from their own wild infatuations with Scripture’s varied truth?

It was in the pastorate that I learned how to read again. I had, unfortunately, begun to read for sermon preparation in the same way that I had once prepared for tests. Commentaries abounded. Historical interpretations proliferated. Ideologically oriented essays developed new homes in my shelves. But, as impressive as it might be to the eye, I had discovered that like David I could not wear another person’s armor. The stones I threw at giants must be my own. And the way I find these stones is by digging very patiently into the soil.

I began to read the original sources, the seminal works that had most helped others in the past. What I discovered was that, more than any other thing, it helped me to separate the contemporary wheat from the chaff. There is so large a supply of advocacy theology that one hardly knows how to separate that which endures from that which serves passing needs. And in reading them repeatedly and slowly I found some new old friends. As in other walks of life, integrity as a pastor involves the question of how one chooses his friends.

The classic theological concept of discrimination fits in here. Through the slow process of listening to the classic texts, let alone Scripture’s own dismembering voice, one learns to discriminate more carefully among the ideas that are frequently heard. It is only with due diligence here that we can then, to use the near-pop term now, seek to discern which ways our path should go.

I turn back to wonder why I was not led to love those texts before. I accept the blame in part. Passing from college on to seminary and beyond, I began to confuse qualifying with growing, passing examinations with knowing, and ordination with understanding. It was so easy to accept that chaff was wheat. In lieu of the broad range of introductory courses in theological education that now stand like hors d’oeuvres waiting to be sampled and cafeteria dishes to be tried, should we begin to consider some alternative routes? It might help to remember that for centuries theological education and spiritual reading went hand in hand.

Henry, Earl, Billy Bob, the deputy sheriff, and my Teamster friend couldn’t care less about Athanasius and Arius. They not only care, however, but they can tell how deep the well is from which I draw the pail. For the more deeply I read and the more discriminating I personally become, the clearer and simpler I am able to speak. And when I ride life’s tractor into the dark woods, I am not as fearful of what might be waiting to bite. Nor am I as hesitant to shoot.

Richard A. Ray is a Presbyterian minister living in Bristol, Tenn.