A few days ago I read a brief denominational paper which, like many others before it, addresses the issues of pastoral leadership and the church’s future. The beginning point of the paper, again like so many others, focuses our attention on various changes in contemporary culture asking questions about how we can be more relevant to people in this time while remaining faithful to our ecclesiastical traditions.
After reading this paper – written by dedicated people who care very much about Christ and the church – I lamented with my colleague, Ted Wardlaw, the ways in which the beginning point for the paper determined both its direction (making it into a rather utilitarian document seemingly grounded in the assumption that the future of the church rests in our hands) and its almost defeatist tone (feeding a generalized anxiety that grips much of American Protestantism), and how a different starting point, an explicitly THEO-logical starting point would have changed the whole character and spirit of the paper.
Please let me explain what I mean. A generation ago, in a series of lectures later published in the United States under the title, Christ the Center, Dietrich Bonhoeffer critiqued our various attempts to understand Jesus Christ that begin by asking “How” questions, (for example, “How can Christ be both divine and human?” “How is it possible for God to be both three and one?” “How can an eternal God be subject to creaturely changes?” And so forth). According to Bonhoeffer, all such roads that begin in questions of “How” inevitably lead to dead-ends of arid curiosity that try to force the unprecedented and unique event of God in-the-flesh into some already existing categories we’ve fashioned with our own hands.
Bonhoeffer’s alternative is elegantly simple. When we return to the biblical witness, we discover that it is unconcerned about questions of “How” but is preoccupied with the question of “Who.” As someone said of Bonhoeffer: “Every avenue of his thinking leads him to confront Christ and ask, ‘Who art thou, Lord?’ or to be confronted by Christ and hear his question, ‘Who do you say that I am?’”[1]
Here’s my point: when we begin with the various questions of “How” in our current climate we inevitably privilege issues of utility over character: How can we appeal to people whose attention spans have been conditioned by years of television viewing? How can we re-craft the church’s message so it competes in a marketplace already saturated with other messages? How can we train church leaders who are more entrepreneurial? I could go on and on. And we do go “on and on” in this vein! Anxiety climbs as we give ourselves the impression that the church’s survival depends on us, that we must change or the church will die.
We all know that just putting some theological window-dressing on a document will not solve the problem. One only has to look at a artifact from the church’s past to see this confirmed: for instance, the sixteenth-century theologian William Perkins, in his “The Golden Chain,” nods first to God the Holy Trinity before proceeding in his discussion of election to undercut the very notion that Jesus Christ fully reveals God. But, as another theologian, Karl Barth, observed toward the end of his life: when we get the starting point wrong it’s very hard to get much else right. And the starting point that corrects our self-obsessions and anxiety is the THEO-logical starting point.
God is revealed in Jesus Christ. And the God revealed in Christ calls us to our true and full humanity in Jesus Christ. The God who is almighty in power, in whose hands surely rest our past, present and future, is also the God almighty in love, into whose hands we can entrust our lives and all that we love. To say we believe in the God revealed in Jesus Christ (as opposed to any number of other gods promoted by our culture, whether gods of technology, nationalism, brute force or wealth) is to say something distinctive about everything we are and do. Certainly to say we believe in the God revealed in Christ it is to place boundaries on our actions. But it is also to imagine bridges across gaps that seem too vast to span. And ultimately it is to liberate us to imagine new ways to be and to flourish. To speak of this God is to speak THEO-logically, and this is our first and fundamental business as church.
Last summer while attending a gathering at one of our church’s marvelous conference centers, I overheard a neighbor complain about a presentation we were listening to. He muttered under his breath, “This speaker is just too theological.” Now, he wasn’t saying that the speaker was too abstract, academic or long-winded, too narcissistic, self-referential or lacking in insight. The speaker was “too theological.” The presentation was just about God, about who God is and what it means for us to worship and love this God. His comment reminded me of something John Leith once said in a series of lectures here at Austin Seminary: “The renewal of the church will not come without the recovery of the authenticity and theological integrity of the church’s message and a renewed emphasis on preaching… [our] first concern … must always be content.” Leith said this by way of addressing the topic, “What the church has to say that no one else can say.”[2]
The church can’t be too theological. In the final analysis, listening for the Word (Logos) of God (Theos), speaking a word about God (theology), living lives in the Spirit of God’s Word: this is really the only excuse for our existence as church. We begin THEO-logically so we can remember who we are and where we are going.
Michael Jinkins is dean and professor of pastoral theology at Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary in Austin, Texas.
[1] Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Christ the Center, John Bowden, tr. (New York: Harper & Row, 1960); the quote is from Edwin H. Robertson’s introduction to the book, 16-17.
[2] John H. Leith, The Reformed Imperative: What the Church Has to Say That No One Else Can Say (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1988),
