(Ir)religiosity

So I’m participating in the new Transforming Theology Project as member of the blogger consortium.  Dr. Philip Clayton explains what the project is all about in a short video here.  Next month, theologians and church leaders will be meeting to discuss how theology can be transformed, or better yet,  freed, from the ivory towers of the academy and placed back in the trenches of the church where it belongs.

Part of the project, since it is aimed at tranforming theology for the people, is to involve bloggers, who will read and critically engage books from various theologians and church leaders, hopefully coming up with some pressing questions that will stimulate the larger conversation.

First up is John Cobb’s Reclaiming the Church sent to me last week by Tripp Fuller, of Homebrewed Christianity fame.

The book itself is really short, only 110 pages.  I almost wish it were longer.  I say that because Cobb spends a lot of time diagnosing the problem, which is good and he does so well.  But I think want is really needed are tangible, practical ways in which this gap between the academy and the church can be bridged.    We need people to cast a vision and offer a plan of action.

Part of this may have to do with when the book was published — it is now 12 years old.  Not that old, but when you consider what has taken place in the church over that period time it makes sense.  Let me explain.

As Cobb sees it, the problem in part — though he nuances it a bit more — rests on what he calls the “professionalization of theology.”  He argues that just over the last 50 years or so theology has been moved outside of the church and isolated in the university.  He states in the preface:

The church has come to identify theology with what professionals do. Since what professionals do has been increasingly determined by the norms of the university rather than by the needs of the church, the church has lost interest in what it understands to be “theology.” Too often the result has been that the church has ceased to think about its own life in terms of its faith, a faith that has itself become vague and unconvincing.

The abandonment and failure to have a more holistic faith with an informed and critically thought out theology has lead to two things in Cobb’s estimation:  a loss of passion and subsequent lukewarmness.  The church has simply ceased to be relevant because it has ceased to engage its culture, its context and its world by continually developing and re-developing a practical theology.

Cobb argues that this “professionalization” was brought on by Enlightenment rationalism and modernity in general.  The American church borrowed theological method and pedagogy from the German school and as theology became professionalized it also became a detached, scientific enterprise that offered little, if anything, to the church itself.  Disciplines themselves were fractured as theology was needless parsed into various sub-categories: ethics, systematic theology, church history and so on.

In the meantime the cultural and philosophical ground upon which the church stood literally shifted underneath its feet.  Cobb ends the book suggesting that if theology is to be reclaimed by the church, both the church and the academy as instiutions must appropriately accommodate and respond to the new emerging, postmodern worldview.  He argues that the shift from modernity to postmodernity opens up new possibilities for a transformative theology.

I would argue that much of what Emergent has done in the last ten or so years has greatly helped in making sense of the cultural and philosophical shifts that are occurring.  Many emergent/ing churches are now taking theological education very seriously and many pastors are in conversation with academicians and vice versa.  For some, the differences between the tradition roles of each office are becoming less clear. I wonder how Cobb might write the book differently today in light of that.

To be sure, I am not suggesting that any of this is enough.  Our seminaries and schools of theology are still very much entrenched in a very modern, Enlightenment-based pedagogy.  From that we need to be freed.  Furthermore, many churches still frown upon “theology” as a collective, ecclesial enterprise.  Many pastors and lay persons still don’t consider themselves theologians because there is a certain stigma surrounding the term.  This has to change.

We need some serious, creative pastors and academicians who are willing to step up and dialogue with one another about theological education.  Somewhere between the lectern in the classroom and the pulpit in the church theology is getting lost.  We need to find out where.  In the meantime professors need to understand that it’s okay to be pastoral and pastors that it’s not snobbish to be intellectual.  More people need to challenge those traditional roles.

I think the implications of such a conversation might suggest that we need to both rethink our pedagogy in the academy and our preaching/worship in the church.  I have to wonder if both institutions are willing not only to hear that but also modify their approaches in order to allow actual, tangible transformation of theology to take place.

I have hope, but bulky institutions don’t usually take to those things easily.  We shall see.

Thoughts?