Doing (theological) Work: What is it?
What the heck does one do or learn as a theologian? Honestly, without much exaggeration, that is the most frequent question I get when people ask, or I mention, that I am currently getting a Masters in Divinity and a Masters in Theology, and hope also to get a PhD after the two Masters degrees. What the heck does one learn as a theologian? I mean sure the bible is big, but what else? The usual question Im asked (not without legitimacy) is what exactly do you learn or do or accomplish by being a theologian? I think its both a great question, but also one that betrays a certain attitude towards theological work. On the one hand theology as a profession certainly isnt mainstream enough for anyone to know exactly what is going on when someone says "Im studying theology." This assertion of my studies is usually followed either by a blank stare and a hesitant nod, or, should the asker be a Christian, a different (but usually equally dismissive) response comes: namely along the lines of "oh good for you." The simple fact is what theologians exactly do (aside from teach, perhaps) is a mystery to most and what we learn is usually assumed to be nothing but esotericisms and obscure metaphysical speculations without support or--lets be honest--immediately obvious relevance in day to day life. On the other hand the ambiguity that most feel in relation to knowing what exactly it is theologians do (or philosophers, for that matter) comes with a certain attitude toward day to day life--namely that the way we do things is obvious, that our day to day lives are secure, that what we do and who we are are relatively certain topics as opposed to theology, which is nebulous, ethereal, and not immediately relevant to what we have defined as the day to day. So this question is basically two questions: what is it that you learn, and why or how is it important? These are clearly weighty questions, because certainly as I have dedicated my life so far (and massive debt) to the profession, should it have no practical, political, or orienting ramifications, or should it consist of learning only obscure, irrelevant facts, I should probably be getting my head examined. Luckily for me I am still of the opinion that theology is so much more.
A few posts back I wrote a little bit on some of the frustrations I feel regarding being a theologian (or at least trying to be one). Probably the most major one is the sheer amount of reading that needs to be done in such a diverse array of fields. "Theology," we might say as a first response to the question "what does one learn about?" is not merely one "field" (though of course theoloy proper regards the Doctrine of God in particular); rather theology is more about a certain theme or organizing principle of knowledge and activity, of being and living. Theologians are usually required to be renaissance learners, covering multiple disciplines under the organizing heuristic of their relation to Christian doctrine. In fact the "interdisciplinary" approach so en vogue today in Universities arguably finds its roots in the history of theology itself. The guiding theory is, at least in my opinion, that while no total horizon of comprehension is ever actually possible (especially on this side of the second coming) the basic principle of operation any act of knowledge implicitly works by is a theoretical "horizon" or total comprehensibility and interaction with other disciplines. Theology understood thus is a type of "meta-discourse" which provides the context of interaction for various fields of study, since theology purports to know the one God, in the words of Robert Jenson and Wolfhart Pannenberg, it must either be a founding discipline or a delusion.
To be an (ideal) theologian then, we study not only the bible, its different books and unity, but also the history of theology, the history of philosophy and its interaction with theology, history in general, ethics, various subdisciplines of philosophy such as hermeneutical theory and epistemology (the theory and practice of interpretation, and the investigation of knowledge and how we know, respectively) but also the difficult enterprise of textual criticism, anthropology, sociology, apologetics, and especially linguistics (to receive a PhD or a Doctorate in Theology of any stripe, one usually needs to be proficient in Greek, Hebrew, Latin, German, and French, and, depending on the particular focus of the degree, one could add endless others such as Dutch to study Dutch Reformed theology, Italian has recently become a desired language for the boom of Early Church or Patristic theological research occurring there, or Russian to get a grasp of the complex Russian Orthodox theologies of the last few centuries, or, recently, even languages like Korean in order to get a handle on the Calvinist and Barth theological explosions that have occurred over there, or Spanish if one wants to delve deep into the Liberation theologies of central and south America.)
And all of this in addition to, of course, the fairly complex realm of Christian doctrine itself (e.g. topics like soteriology--doctrine of salvation--Christology or how and who we understand Christ to be, Trinitarian theology, etc... Thus like I said, in short theology is not so much a "field" of study as it is, we might say, a theme or organizing principle of all fields. (While I hesitate to use the term, this is what was often meant by the description of theology as the "queen" of the sciences). This last semester, just to give a small example I read several books on the relation of Christianity, culture, politics, and social theory (John Milbank's Theology and Social Theory; Nathan Kerr's Christ, History, and Apocalyptic; David Toole's Waiting for Godot in Sarajevo; and William Cavanaugh's excellent The Myth of Religious Violence which I hope to post on this week or the next), several books on the history of philosophy and theological movements and their relation (Conor Cunningham Genealogy of Nihilism; James K.A. Smith Introducing Radical Orthodoxy George M. Marsden Understanding Fundamentalism and Evangelicalism and Claude Welch's In This Name which is a mid 20th-century overview of 19th and 20th century Trinitarianism up to that point). In another vein I have the privilege of studying Patristic and Medieval theology (that is, theology of the early church from around 100 AD to roughly the 14th century, or pre-Renaissance) under Dr. Jon Robertson who received his training in the field at Oxford and is probably one of the foremost experts in the world on the subject. This semester we read Dr. Robertson's own book Christ as Mediator on Origen, Athanasius, Eusebius of Caesarea, and Marcellus of Ancyra (all early church theologians, though all but Athanasius were deemed heretical in one way or another) Aloys Grillmeier's massive 600 page Christ in Christian Tradition, Gavrilyuk's The Suffering of the Impassible God and of course numerous primary sources of early theologians like Origen, Athanasius, Arius, Apollinarius, Maximus the Confessor, Gregory of Nazianzus, Cyril of Alexandria, et al.
There were other aspects, too. I also did some reading in apologetics this semester (the usual fair was required for the class--books by Nash, Schaefer, articles by many including Craig, Boyd, and the standard whos-who of evangelical defenders of the faith). But the point of all this is that theologians arent studying esoteric doctrines per se--in fact in every instance all the doctrines and philosophies and theories of man, world, history, etc...were heavily indicated and elaborated in relation to how they have played out in the practical realm of defining our everyday existence. While I wont belabor the point here (though perhaps in another post) what I learned most by way of a theme this semester, is how philosophy, theology, and Christian doctrine often seem so esoteric precisely because we assume or define them over against our day to day lives, which we for the most part consider "untheological." But the fact of the matter is that what we think of as day to day (living in a capitalist economy where we go to work, being considered a free center of willed action who deserve equal rights, being "practically" or "pragmatically" oriented, not seeing the immediate use of theology) all of these things are not "common-sense," so to speak, but are constructed and inculcated habits of processing information, of envisioning what being human is, and how we are to exist and interact in the world. In part then, as a theologian, when people ask me how theology applies to their day to day lives it is difficult to answer because in a very real way the question has, I have seen especially sharply this semester, been set up in advance against an answer that many will see as viable. In our culture which treats individuals as those who have the right to consume, the right to choose, theological or philosophical "application" would appear to necessitate a correlation of the theology or philosophy to the day to day "way things are."
But what is not seen in this correlaation is that the "way things are" is already set up by a theology, by a philosophy, so that the "correlation" that people are asking for is not really between day to day "untheological" or normal/secular life and theology or doctrine or what have you. It is rather secretly attempting to display the relation between two theologies. The day to day is not an obvious given. It is a construction based upon habits inculcated by narratives and theories of the common good (ethics) of the nature and purpose of existence (metaphysics) of the way we are to be saved from the harsh realities of the world (soteriology, salvation), the goal to which we are all supposedly moving toward (eschatology) and what it means to be human (anthropology). Hence a part of the trick of being a theologian--we might hesitantly call this the pragmatic aspect, though of course as I have just briefly argued that itself is not necessarily a great designator since it too assumes a philosophy that has legitimated what is pragmatic--is to call into question the normalcy of everyday life in order to demonstrate that all life everywhere all the time, whether or not it is acknowledged--is already theological.
Thus when people rightly seek a correlation between theology and practical existence, my opinion of what "theological" work must be done--and hence where the "use" of the theologian comes in (though I hate the word "use"), is to show that perhaps day to day life needs to be called into question. That it is not about merely translating theology into the "neutrality" of daily existence, but that daily existence is an implicit theology, and often an idolatrous one at that means that some complex theological and philosophical work needs to be done both to unearth the genealogy and pick apart the barely visible seams of the day to day in order to register the architecture of its logic and origin, to show that it is decidedly not self evident or the result of mere ahistorical rational inquiry (whatever its actual pretense to such a logic may be) and in order to expose it as working against the grain of how Christians are supposed to exist, act, and understand. This sounds much like a method of policing, but as a point of fact Christianity is the only true freedom, and our day to day existence is so often dictated by our struggle to survive not only in a harsh and fallen world, but in a system of "powers and principalities" which are themselves fallen and oppressive, and are regulating and interiorizing destructive and oppressive habits based on their construal of the world. As a pattern of inquiry, theology understands reality based upon discipleship to Christ, the freedom wrought by resurrection, and the joyful communal expectation of the second coming, meaning that Christianity pries apart systems of rigid order which are only based upon the strict marshaling of forces or the coercive use of violence and accumulation to secure identity against daily and hourly vicissitude. On the other hand many things that we take for granted as not necessarily theological--the fact that people have a certain nobility, our ethical inclinations, our philosophical views of reality--are often based upon Christian theology, they find their genealogy in Christian concepts and elaborations. As many have argued, for example, we hardly would have an idea of all humans deserving equal respect and dignity if not for Jewish and Christian theological elaboration of the concept of Imago Dei, or of the elaborations of God as a trinity of irreducible "persons" (despite the difficulty of the word). These are not things that are "self-evident" or "rational principles" but have rather been justified by a very historically particular narrative of God creating man in his image, and of God becoming man in order to redeem us. Though secularists would parade these things like universal human equality as rational, universally demonstrable or assumable a priori principles, as many like John Milbank, David Hart, Wolfhart Pannenberg, William Cavanaugh and Stanley Hauerwas have argued, many of the so-called secular ethical and political impulses exist on borrowed Christian theological credit. They are in many legitimate senses bastardizations of Christianity that have obfuscated or forgotten their theological and historical origins because they still cling to a certain form of Enlightenment mythology of universal common reason rather than traditioned reason. They have maintained certain impusles but neglected the only thing which justified them, namely the Jewish Christian history recorded in scriptures and carried out by the church (though of course the church is hardly without blame. It needs more repentance than most).
In short, while this deserves much more elaboration, theologians are not merely trading in supposedly esoteric doctrines. I think if we have a job it is often able to be summarized as a call towards mystery--to the fact that the world could be otherwise, and that the inbreaking of Christ, the incarnation, the death and resurrection of our savior, is the key to this "otherwise." We do not have to live in fear of scarcity, or of failure. The world does not have to be like this, we do not have to work by the logic of the world, by violence, manipulation, usury, greed, without ultimate goals or purpose, because we have been redeemed. We have an existence for others, to spread the gospel, to feed the poor, to tend to God's creation. While morals, ecology, and hope are often peddled as universal human values, the fact is that they are not principles who are universally demonstrable or "naturally" human. They all are based upon contingent series of historical narratives which justify particular courses of action. I think in a certain sense all theology is thus prophetic, since it cries against the normal workings of the world and its injustices, and continually re-provides the context, the logic, and the justification for our actions as Christians. We do not work as the world works because Christ is risen, and there is no need to fear.
A few posts back I wrote a little bit on some of the frustrations I feel regarding being a theologian (or at least trying to be one). Probably the most major one is the sheer amount of reading that needs to be done in such a diverse array of fields. "Theology," we might say as a first response to the question "what does one learn about?" is not merely one "field" (though of course theoloy proper regards the Doctrine of God in particular); rather theology is more about a certain theme or organizing principle of knowledge and activity, of being and living. Theologians are usually required to be renaissance learners, covering multiple disciplines under the organizing heuristic of their relation to Christian doctrine. In fact the "interdisciplinary" approach so en vogue today in Universities arguably finds its roots in the history of theology itself. The guiding theory is, at least in my opinion, that while no total horizon of comprehension is ever actually possible (especially on this side of the second coming) the basic principle of operation any act of knowledge implicitly works by is a theoretical "horizon" or total comprehensibility and interaction with other disciplines. Theology understood thus is a type of "meta-discourse" which provides the context of interaction for various fields of study, since theology purports to know the one God, in the words of Robert Jenson and Wolfhart Pannenberg, it must either be a founding discipline or a delusion.
To be an (ideal) theologian then, we study not only the bible, its different books and unity, but also the history of theology, the history of philosophy and its interaction with theology, history in general, ethics, various subdisciplines of philosophy such as hermeneutical theory and epistemology (the theory and practice of interpretation, and the investigation of knowledge and how we know, respectively) but also the difficult enterprise of textual criticism, anthropology, sociology, apologetics, and especially linguistics (to receive a PhD or a Doctorate in Theology of any stripe, one usually needs to be proficient in Greek, Hebrew, Latin, German, and French, and, depending on the particular focus of the degree, one could add endless others such as Dutch to study Dutch Reformed theology, Italian has recently become a desired language for the boom of Early Church or Patristic theological research occurring there, or Russian to get a grasp of the complex Russian Orthodox theologies of the last few centuries, or, recently, even languages like Korean in order to get a handle on the Calvinist and Barth theological explosions that have occurred over there, or Spanish if one wants to delve deep into the Liberation theologies of central and south America.)
And all of this in addition to, of course, the fairly complex realm of Christian doctrine itself (e.g. topics like soteriology--doctrine of salvation--Christology or how and who we understand Christ to be, Trinitarian theology, etc... Thus like I said, in short theology is not so much a "field" of study as it is, we might say, a theme or organizing principle of all fields. (While I hesitate to use the term, this is what was often meant by the description of theology as the "queen" of the sciences). This last semester, just to give a small example I read several books on the relation of Christianity, culture, politics, and social theory (John Milbank's Theology and Social Theory; Nathan Kerr's Christ, History, and Apocalyptic; David Toole's Waiting for Godot in Sarajevo; and William Cavanaugh's excellent The Myth of Religious Violence which I hope to post on this week or the next), several books on the history of philosophy and theological movements and their relation (Conor Cunningham Genealogy of Nihilism; James K.A. Smith Introducing Radical Orthodoxy George M. Marsden Understanding Fundamentalism and Evangelicalism and Claude Welch's In This Name which is a mid 20th-century overview of 19th and 20th century Trinitarianism up to that point). In another vein I have the privilege of studying Patristic and Medieval theology (that is, theology of the early church from around 100 AD to roughly the 14th century, or pre-Renaissance) under Dr. Jon Robertson who received his training in the field at Oxford and is probably one of the foremost experts in the world on the subject. This semester we read Dr. Robertson's own book Christ as Mediator on Origen, Athanasius, Eusebius of Caesarea, and Marcellus of Ancyra (all early church theologians, though all but Athanasius were deemed heretical in one way or another) Aloys Grillmeier's massive 600 page Christ in Christian Tradition, Gavrilyuk's The Suffering of the Impassible God and of course numerous primary sources of early theologians like Origen, Athanasius, Arius, Apollinarius, Maximus the Confessor, Gregory of Nazianzus, Cyril of Alexandria, et al.
There were other aspects, too. I also did some reading in apologetics this semester (the usual fair was required for the class--books by Nash, Schaefer, articles by many including Craig, Boyd, and the standard whos-who of evangelical defenders of the faith). But the point of all this is that theologians arent studying esoteric doctrines per se--in fact in every instance all the doctrines and philosophies and theories of man, world, history, etc...were heavily indicated and elaborated in relation to how they have played out in the practical realm of defining our everyday existence. While I wont belabor the point here (though perhaps in another post) what I learned most by way of a theme this semester, is how philosophy, theology, and Christian doctrine often seem so esoteric precisely because we assume or define them over against our day to day lives, which we for the most part consider "untheological." But the fact of the matter is that what we think of as day to day (living in a capitalist economy where we go to work, being considered a free center of willed action who deserve equal rights, being "practically" or "pragmatically" oriented, not seeing the immediate use of theology) all of these things are not "common-sense," so to speak, but are constructed and inculcated habits of processing information, of envisioning what being human is, and how we are to exist and interact in the world. In part then, as a theologian, when people ask me how theology applies to their day to day lives it is difficult to answer because in a very real way the question has, I have seen especially sharply this semester, been set up in advance against an answer that many will see as viable. In our culture which treats individuals as those who have the right to consume, the right to choose, theological or philosophical "application" would appear to necessitate a correlation of the theology or philosophy to the day to day "way things are."
But what is not seen in this correlaation is that the "way things are" is already set up by a theology, by a philosophy, so that the "correlation" that people are asking for is not really between day to day "untheological" or normal/secular life and theology or doctrine or what have you. It is rather secretly attempting to display the relation between two theologies. The day to day is not an obvious given. It is a construction based upon habits inculcated by narratives and theories of the common good (ethics) of the nature and purpose of existence (metaphysics) of the way we are to be saved from the harsh realities of the world (soteriology, salvation), the goal to which we are all supposedly moving toward (eschatology) and what it means to be human (anthropology). Hence a part of the trick of being a theologian--we might hesitantly call this the pragmatic aspect, though of course as I have just briefly argued that itself is not necessarily a great designator since it too assumes a philosophy that has legitimated what is pragmatic--is to call into question the normalcy of everyday life in order to demonstrate that all life everywhere all the time, whether or not it is acknowledged--is already theological.
Thus when people rightly seek a correlation between theology and practical existence, my opinion of what "theological" work must be done--and hence where the "use" of the theologian comes in (though I hate the word "use"), is to show that perhaps day to day life needs to be called into question. That it is not about merely translating theology into the "neutrality" of daily existence, but that daily existence is an implicit theology, and often an idolatrous one at that means that some complex theological and philosophical work needs to be done both to unearth the genealogy and pick apart the barely visible seams of the day to day in order to register the architecture of its logic and origin, to show that it is decidedly not self evident or the result of mere ahistorical rational inquiry (whatever its actual pretense to such a logic may be) and in order to expose it as working against the grain of how Christians are supposed to exist, act, and understand. This sounds much like a method of policing, but as a point of fact Christianity is the only true freedom, and our day to day existence is so often dictated by our struggle to survive not only in a harsh and fallen world, but in a system of "powers and principalities" which are themselves fallen and oppressive, and are regulating and interiorizing destructive and oppressive habits based on their construal of the world. As a pattern of inquiry, theology understands reality based upon discipleship to Christ, the freedom wrought by resurrection, and the joyful communal expectation of the second coming, meaning that Christianity pries apart systems of rigid order which are only based upon the strict marshaling of forces or the coercive use of violence and accumulation to secure identity against daily and hourly vicissitude. On the other hand many things that we take for granted as not necessarily theological--the fact that people have a certain nobility, our ethical inclinations, our philosophical views of reality--are often based upon Christian theology, they find their genealogy in Christian concepts and elaborations. As many have argued, for example, we hardly would have an idea of all humans deserving equal respect and dignity if not for Jewish and Christian theological elaboration of the concept of Imago Dei, or of the elaborations of God as a trinity of irreducible "persons" (despite the difficulty of the word). These are not things that are "self-evident" or "rational principles" but have rather been justified by a very historically particular narrative of God creating man in his image, and of God becoming man in order to redeem us. Though secularists would parade these things like universal human equality as rational, universally demonstrable or assumable a priori principles, as many like John Milbank, David Hart, Wolfhart Pannenberg, William Cavanaugh and Stanley Hauerwas have argued, many of the so-called secular ethical and political impulses exist on borrowed Christian theological credit. They are in many legitimate senses bastardizations of Christianity that have obfuscated or forgotten their theological and historical origins because they still cling to a certain form of Enlightenment mythology of universal common reason rather than traditioned reason. They have maintained certain impusles but neglected the only thing which justified them, namely the Jewish Christian history recorded in scriptures and carried out by the church (though of course the church is hardly without blame. It needs more repentance than most).
In short, while this deserves much more elaboration, theologians are not merely trading in supposedly esoteric doctrines. I think if we have a job it is often able to be summarized as a call towards mystery--to the fact that the world could be otherwise, and that the inbreaking of Christ, the incarnation, the death and resurrection of our savior, is the key to this "otherwise." We do not have to live in fear of scarcity, or of failure. The world does not have to be like this, we do not have to work by the logic of the world, by violence, manipulation, usury, greed, without ultimate goals or purpose, because we have been redeemed. We have an existence for others, to spread the gospel, to feed the poor, to tend to God's creation. While morals, ecology, and hope are often peddled as universal human values, the fact is that they are not principles who are universally demonstrable or "naturally" human. They all are based upon contingent series of historical narratives which justify particular courses of action. I think in a certain sense all theology is thus prophetic, since it cries against the normal workings of the world and its injustices, and continually re-provides the context, the logic, and the justification for our actions as Christians. We do not work as the world works because Christ is risen, and there is no need to fear.
Comments
I think the MA/ThM would suit you would save you several thousands of dollars that could better be used for PhD studies.
I would certainly recommend that you find four or five schools that are of interest to you. As of now, British PhD programs are quick to accept US students (so I am told), due to the extra tuition that is due from International students or non-european union students.