Letters to a Young Theologian

Henco van der Westhuizen, Henco van der Westhuizen, Henco van der Westhuizen

• Publisher: Fortress Press
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9781506478791
• eBook ISBN: 9781506478807
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Literature & the Arts in Christianity

Theology is, for many, far more than a profession. It is an identity, a passion, a way of life. While books on the topics of theology--theology as a discipline--are countless, books on the identity of the theologian are all too rare.

How does someone reflect on the life and work of the theologian as a person? Hearing the wisdom of others who also walk the path is an excellent start.

In this helpful volume, Van der Westhuizen has assembled an outstanding and diverse array of theologians who each offer their wisdom and reflection on what it means to be a theologian through a brief letter written to someone considering becoming a theologian. Each letter is as unique as its author, and together they form a rich symphony on the art and craft of being a theologian.

Everyone engaged in the work of theology, whether first-year student or professor emeritus/a, will benefit from reading the fruits of centuries of collective work.

With contributions by Hannah Reichel, Jürgen Moltmann, Miroslav Volf, Michael Welker, Richard Kearney, Piet Naudé, Stanley Hauerwas, Nicholas Wolterstorff, Katherine Sonderegger, Jan-Olav Henriksen, Paul Nimmo, Kevin Vanhoozer, Bram van de Beek, Daniel Migliore, Wolfgang Hüber, Ellen Charry, Emmanuel Katongole, Mitzi Smith, Tracy West, Adam Neder, Rachel Muers, Denise Ackermann, Catherine Keller, John deGruchy, Michael Mawson, Douglas Ottati, Heinrich Bedford-Strohm, Gijsbert van den Brink, Alister McGrath, Veli-Matti Kärkkäinen, Johan Cilliers, and Cynthia Rigsby.

On Flourishing, Blossoming, Liberating

20

Miroslav Volf (III)

In my first letters, I invited you to love theology—even, in a certain sense, to lose yourself in it. But why? Why theology, when you could love and lose yourself in so many other endeavors? To answer the question, I first need to say something about theology as a discipline.

As the word itself says, theology is about God. You can take this in two ways. One is straightforward and was dominant through theology’s two-thousand-year history: theology is talk about God. Thomas Aquinas, one of theology’s most accomplished practitioners, puts it this way: the subject matter of theology is “God and everything in relation to God.”1 But you can take the statement that theology is about God in an altered sense: it is not a disciplined kind of talk about God but talk about talk about God. In this case, human discourse about God, and not God directly, would be the subject matter of theology. I am a proponent of the first definition, which, of course, doesn’t exclude what the second definition says that theologians should be doing. To talk well about God, you’d be foolish not to engage also in the talk about the talk about God. After all, lots of very smart and dedicated people have talked about God, and you’d want to know and critically sift through what they have said.

So the subject matter of theology is God. At the end of one of my letters, referencing Jeremiah, I implied that God can be a reason for doing theology—at least that was and still is so in many cases. God “enticed” Jeremiah and “prevailed” over him (Jer 20:7), lit the fire that burned “in [his] bones” (20:9) and made it impossible for him not to speak even when he knew that speaking would land him in the stocks. Jürgen Moltmann, my doctoral supervisor, puts the Jeremiah-like experience of theologians this way: “It is simple, but true, to say that theology has only one single problem: God. We are theologians for the sake of God. God is our dignity. God is our agony. God is our hope.”2 I am with Moltmann here. The motivating reason for doing theology and the subject matter of theology are one and the same: God. We are theologians for the sake of God.

What does this being a theologian “for the sake of God” mean? Why does God light the fire? Why should you love theology and devote your life to it? Some will say that the purpose of theology is the same as the subject matter and the reason for theology—God—and in a certain sense, that’s surely the right answer. God created all things “to” God, as the apostle Paul famously says in Romans 11: “From God and through God and to God are all things. To God be the glory forever” (my translation). It is important, though, to understand rightly what it means that all things, including theology, are “to God.” For the truth of the matter is that theologians aren’t of much benefit to God; neither are the prophets. The reason is simple: God has no needs that any humans can satisfy, just as God has no interests of God’s own to realize at any creatures’ expense! When it comes to creation, the “need” and the “interest” of God are the good of all God’s creatures, the flourishing of each individually and of all of them jointly. God created them out of love to thrive as objects of God’s delight. Here’s what that means for theology. Though theology is about God, theology isn’t for God; theology is for what God is after. The purpose of theology is furthering God’s purpose for creation: the flourishing of creation in the life-giving presence of God. The dignity, the agony, the hope, and the delight of theologians lie in their role within that grand purpose of God. I find this an exhilarating thought.

Some people can’t get quite as excited about the orientation of theology toward flourishing life as I do, and you may be among them. The opinion is widespread that everybody knows, more or less, what the content of flourishing life is. Some say that we all feel it in our gut; others think that the careful observation of human behavior can tell us what makes us flourish. Our pressing need, both groups believe, isn’t formulating a compelling vision of flourishing but securing the effective means for all human beings actually to live a flourishing life. I disagree. The idea that securing the means to flourishing is all that matters is, I believe, one of the great misconceptions of the present cultural moment; you might even call it an ideology, in the pejorative sense. Neither our inchoate feelings nor the results of very articulate sciences can tell us what the purpose of our life is, the content of a truly flourishing life. For this isn’t a factual question that we can answer by registering feelings and paying attention to our behaviors but a normative question. It’s not about what we aspire to, not even what we aspire to in the hidden depths of our being; it’s about what we ought to aspire to if we want to live a life worthy of our humanity.3

Don’t misunderstand me: I am not putting down science. It would be a fool’s errand to try to elevate the importance of theology by denigrating science. Modern science is extraordinary in its ability to describe reality and to foster technological innovation, helping us orient ourselves in the world and negotiate our way in it with increasing ease. It can tell us how best to get from point A to any point B we choose. But what it cannot tell us, and what its clearest-thinking advocates do not pretend that it can tell us, is which point B is worthy of our humanity. Now, it can tell us which point B we need to reach if we want to get to C, and which C if we aim at D. Notice all the ifs in previous sentences. Science is about means, not about the goal that is good in itself.

Great philosophies and religions have grappled for centuries with this question of our human purpose, with the content of flourishing life, each in its own way. They have also argued with one another about their disagreements. Christian faith has a distinctive answer of its own—or rather, a family of distinctive answers. That’s where theology has to come in, at least theology that is doing what it seems to me theology should be doing. Its purpose is to discern, articulate, and commend visions of flourishing life in the light of God’s self-revelation in Jesus Christ. That’s what excites me about theology. That’s why I have been studying it for almost half of a century with undiminished enthusiasm. That’s why I haven’t regretted even for a single hour that theology became my vocation, not even when I had to raise my own support to be able to continue with the work.4

Now, it won’t help you much to know the purpose of theology if you don’t know how to do theology to achieve that purpose. At the time I was unceremoniously declared a “doctor of theology”—a mere handshake with two professors present—I knew how to write a dissertation, but I wasn’t confident that I knew how to go about doing theology. You might think that writing a dissertation just is learning to do theology, and that may be true for some students. But it wasn’t for me. So I went to Moltmann for advice. I have always admired how alive his theology is, a bit like the gospel itself, full of promise for the world. “What do I do now?” I asked him. I’ll never forget what he said: “Identify what moves people and shine the light of the gospel on it.”

I couldn’t have said it better myself, I thought self-mockingly at hearing his simple but profound answer. It wasn’t long before I realized that doing this kind of theology required disciplined work and what my friend and fellow doctoral student in Tübingen, Siegfried Zimmer, called Mut zur Unvollkommenheit, courage for imperfection. For following Moltmann’s advice required that (1) I knew what the gospel and its light, reaching from the first century into the present, are; that (2) I could understand adequately what moves people; and that (3) I could figure out what kind of bearing the gospel has on the matter. Getting a handle on each of these three and all of them together is the heart of the exciting but difficult work of theological improvisation.

Doing theology is a challenge. But don’t let the difficulty of it blind you to the adventure that it represents. Moltmann’s advice helped me realize that surrounding me on all sides is a cornucopia of themes, sufficient to keep my theological appetite alive as long as I live. Never a dull moment! In my experience, those who consider theology boring and useless have never really gotten to know the real thing—or have ceased believing that God matters much to life in the world.

These letters have grown long. And there is so much more to say about being a theologian—about the need for wonder, attentiveness, curiosity; about how firmly or loosely we ought to hold to our convictions; about theological virtues like courage, gratitude, humility, and faithfulness (in its interplay with creativity); about the centrality of the Bible in theological work and the challenge its serious reading presents; about the need for solitude, communion with the likeminded, and friendship with those who think very differently from you (including non-Christians); about admiring and learning from theologians whose lives were in some regards appalling (which experience I most vividly have in relation to one of my heroes, Martin Luther); about the importance of sensitivity to those who suffer, especially those who aren’t even capable of expressing their pain except through tears and sighs, let alone of protesting against it as the righteous Job did.

More could be added to the list of important things about which I could write you as well. But these three letters should get you going.

Yours,

Miroslav

Notes

1 I am paraphrasing Aquinas’s answer to the question of whether God is the object of theology in Summa Theologiae I, q. 1, a. 7.

2 Jürgen Moltmann, Theology and the Future of the Modern World (Pittsburgh: ATS, 1995), 1.

3 See Miroslav Volf, Matthew Croasmun, and Ryan McAnnally-Linz, “Meaning and Dimensions of Flourishing: A Programmatic Sketch,” in Religion and Human Flourishing, ed. Adam Cohen (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2020), 7–18.

4 If you want to explore this vision of theology’s purpose, take a look at the book I wrote with my colleague Matthew Croasmun at the Yale Center for Faith & Culture: For the Life of the World: Theology That Makes a Difference (Grand Rapids, MI: Brazos, 2019). It sketches a research program for theology of the kind I have just described.

21

Robert Vosloo

Writing a letter like this holds the temptation to universalize the particular. One can easily assume that your experiences and observations are valid for everybody, that your advice is wisdom for all. This is obviously not the case, so therefore, this letter should be read with a pinch of hermeneutical salt. This being said, writing these kinds of letters holds the opportunity for the author thereof to remember and to renarrate—to think back on what one has received and to discern what is worthy to pass on. And in reading about the particular experiences and perspectives of other theologians, the little miracle can even happen that one recognizes in another theologian’s words something that transcends that theologian’s concrete historical and social location and speaks to one’s own intuitions and questions. It is in this spirit, and with this hope, that this “letter to a young theologian” is presented.

I started my theological studies in 1985 at Stellenbosch University. The group of theological students of which I was part consisted almost entirely of white, male, Afrikaans-speaking students who were preparing for ministry in the Dutch Reformed Church. In our smaller circle of friends and classmates, we debated passionately theological topics such as the Reformed doctrine of election and the question of infant versus adult baptism. Although these are not unimportant topics (and I later came to appreciate the deep significance of doctrinal topics for public life), with the gain of hindsight, it is clear that our conversations at the time happened in a vacuum, disconnected from the broader sociopolitical and economic realities of apartheid South Africa. This was the time when the apartheid government declared a state of emergency, but our theological discussions were not really informed by the injustices and violence that millions of South Africans experienced. In the following years, however, for some theological students, ecumenical encounters across racial and cultural barriers increasingly unmasked the limitations and dangers of a type of theology and piety that takes refuge in an ahistoric, acontextual, and apolitical stance, often unconscious of how such a position underwrites the status quo from which one benefits. For me, and others of my generation, the conviction grew that a timeless theology based on supratemporal principles will not do. Therefore, it resonated with my experience when Professor Jaap Durand, a systematic theologian from the University of the Western Cape, later spoke at a conference on “how [his] mind has changed” about his theological journey “from eternal truths to contextualized metaphors.”

Although I realize that over the years, I might not have faithfully embodied this emphasis on the historical and contextual character of the theological task, I still believe that this is a crucial insight for theological thought and practice. In a very particular way, we are historical and storied beings; we are situated within history and narrative contexts. To understand ourselves, our convictions, our actions, our gestures, our histories—as well as that of others—we need to be conscious of larger interpretative frameworks. In my doctoral studies on narrative theology and ethics, I came to appreciate how this insight was expressed in the thought of the moral philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre and the theologian Stanley Hauerwas. MacIntyre would claim, for instance, in his book After Virtue that “the concept of an action is a more fundamental concept than that of an action as such.”1 Actions and ideas are, therefore, not to be abstracted from the narrative frameworks that give them meaning. Therefore, if I may for a moment in this letter succumb to the temptation to universalize my particular experience, I would reiterate the point that one should not seek refuge in abstract and ahistorical theologizing; one should not show disdain for what is concrete, historical, time bound, earthly, and embodied. This is said not to limit the scope and reach of the theological task but rather to connect theology to the fullness of life.

In my own theological journey, the specter of apartheid theology (the type of theology that justified the logic and policy of separation and segregation) looms large. Much can be said in this regard, but one can conclude that at its heart, this type of theologizing is guided by a posture of isolation and insulation. This basic mindset—an attitude that is, of course, a perennial temptation for theology—is one of being fearful of what is unknown and perceived as being strange. Other conversation partners, including critical voices, are not welcomed. Otherness is ostracized; the strange is strangled. One’s position is not so much to be refined or enlarged through encounter and conversation but to be defended against what is seen as foreign and other. When I was a theological student, another theological student once walked into my room and looked at the book that I was reading at that moment. I was quite excited about the book and started enthusiastically to speak about it. But the fellow student interrupted my explanation of the argument of the book, saying, “Yes, but just tell me, is the author a heretic or not?” This is an insignificant episode, but in many ways, it became indicative for me of a closed and unattractive approach to theology—and life in general.

We should certainly evaluate what we hear, see, or read. We are not to be eclectic consumers of ideas (even great theological ideas) for the sake of their novelty or popularity. We need to evaluate, integrate, and at times resist ideas, arguments, and practices from the perspective of our own received but also dynamic theological frameworks. But openness and curiosity—maybe one can even speak of holy curiosity—remain, in my view, central theological virtues. Or stated in another way, hospitality not only is a virtue for the moral life in general but also belongs to the heart of what it means to do theology. This implies that in addition to the key role of well-established spiritual practices, theologians should also cultivate habits that expose us to what is strange and other. This will find different expressions for diff...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Introduction
• On Ways to Theology
• On Hermeneutics, Reading, Writing
• On Ways in Theology
• On Flourishing, Blossoming, Liberating
• On Healing, Wholeness, Dignity
• On Public Life, Science, Interreligious Dialogue
• On Fun, Joy, Imagination