Phone call from uncle (overheard in a London cafe)

In a crowded cafe near Trafalgar Square, a crumpled old donnish-looking gentleman put down the book he had been reading and made a phone call. Though I was sitting at the other side of the room, I had the benefit of hearing the conversation quite distinctly since the gentleman bellowed every syllable at the top of his lungs, holding the phone at a distance from his face like a singer with a microphone. I have thus recorded his words for posterity, as a distillation of general sound advice for young people everywhere.

Hullo! Now I wanted to say I'm frightfully sorry I've not come to see you. I know we talked about it, and I haven't forgot to come, but I'm afraid it's been quite impossible because, as it were, of the weather. It's been awfully cold and wet in the city – sunny from time to time, you understand, but very cold as a rule – and I can't get out much in weather of that sort. But I hear you've settled in, and I wanted, as it were, to say hello and find out how you're doing. So then: how are you finding things in Sussex? And where are you staying? Do you have, as it were, a flat? And are you sharing it with three or four other characters, or do you have your own little place all to yourself? Ah, I see, and these other characters, what are they like? That is to say, do you get along with them? And do you all, as it were, eat together? And how often do you take these meals together? Excellent. I suppose it's one of those little flats with a shared bathroom and loo somewhere in the building? No? Your own loo? Splendid, splendid, excellent. And how are you finding university? I'm sorry we didn't to get to talk about your Johnson paper, we could certainly have had a little talk about that, but I'm sure the paper went splendidly all the same. And what is the teaching like, how do you find it? I suppose by now you've found the good men who are worth hearing? I suppose you're rushing back and forth taking in lectures by all the best people? And have you been all right, because last year you were really quite depressed. How is all that business now? Do you get out and do things? I mean, apart from study and socialising, do you go out, as it were, to discos? What do you do then? Are you involved in any clubs, that is to say, university clubs apart from study? I see. Are there any hobbies, pastimes, that sort of thing? You do what? Now the trouble with poker is that in the end one always ends up losing one's money, so stay away from poker from now on. And what about girls, do you see any girls? Have you managed to find, as it were, a girlfriend? And where does one go to meet girls in Sussex? I see, I see. It was rather different in my day, quite a different thing. Girls today are concerned about hygiene and cleanliness and that sort of business. It really makes it a lot harder for a chap. But you mustn't let it get you down. I'm not talking specifically about sex, if you catch my drift, but you must try to find a girlfriend if you can, just do your best, but above all, don't get too concerned about it. But you must certainly try to get out more often to places with girls. Get out, as it were, in the evenings. Good man, good man. Now then, here is what we shall do. When the weather improves I shall come to see you in Sussex, and we shall have, as it were, a drink together. It'll be soon, soon. But until then: goodbye!

On books written for students: a polemic

In times past there were two kinds of books that scholars could write: books for other scholars and books for the general public. But now a third type of book has insinuated its way into our minds and hearts: books written for students. In the past several years it has become fashionable for authors to write books for students, and for publishers to publish them. It may even have become fashionable – who knows? – for students to read them. 

Just look at the endorsements on the back cover of the latest theology paperback: "an essential book for undergraduate courses" – "a landmark work that will be required reading for graduate courses in the field" – "now all new students will have a sure guide to the terrain!" – and so on.

This is a bad state of affairs – bad for writers, bad for publishers, bad most of all for students and the discipline – and I must raise my voice against it. 

Can you imagine signing up for a university course on Shakespeare, only to discover that you are expected to read summaries, introductions, cleverly worded journal articles – everything, in short, except Shakespeare? Or a course in biology in which the students spend so much time reading introductory literature on microscopes that they never actually get to look into one? It is the same with students who pay good money for the opportunity to study the Christian tradition, and end up squandering their time reading about the views of various theologians without actually getting to encounter a real theologian at close range.

Now introductory survey books are a fine thing. I have read, or started reading, some of them myself. But who are they for? The answer, which ought to be obvious, is that they are for the general public. Anyone interested in Shakespeare can pick up an accessible introduction to his plays: that is why such books are written. But a student who enrolls in a university course on Shakespeare should protest vehemently if they found they were expected to read the same introductory material. The reason you go to university is to study the thing itself – Shakespeare's plays – under the guidance of an expert in the field.

It is the same with theology. It is an excellent thing that an interested member of the public may learn about Christianity simply by reading a good scholarly survey. But if that person subsequently showed up at seminary or divinity school, they would (or should) be scandalised to discover that their teachers wanted them to spend their time reading introductory books. The teacher's job is to help students engage with the tradition for themselves. That's the difference between spending $10 on a paperback and spending $10,000 on an education. It's the difference between reading a book in the comfort of your own armchair and submitting yourself to the rigours of an academic curriculum.

In the discipline of theology, the primary sources are not only scriptural texts but also those texts and lives which have proved generative of subsequent traditions of reflection and debate. Thus Irenaeus and Origen and Augustine are primary sources; Aquinas and Calvin are primary sources; Julian of Norwich and Teresa of Avila are primary sources; the life of St Antony and the life of St Francis are primary sources.

There is a bizarre assumption that primary sources are for the experts while students need the easier, more accessible stuff of secondary literature. But the truth is exactly the reverse. Anybody can read Augustine's Confessions or Julian of Norwich's Revelations – but it takes an expert to appreciate a judicious scholarly survey. That is why publishers struggle to sell copies of their Introductions and Guides, while Augustine and Julian of Norwich have never gone out of print, and never will until the end of the world.

This is not to say that primary sources have to be old books. If you are studying liberation theology, then some of the works of Gutiérrez are primary sources, since these works have generated a tradition of reflection and debate. If you are studying feminist theology then the works of Mary Daly and Rosemary Radford Ruether are primary sources. If you are studying political theology then not only Augustine and Calvin but also Barth and Reinhold Niebuhr might be read as primary sources. But not an introductory survey of liberation theology or feminist theology or political theology.

Does this leave our publishers with nothing to publish? Our aspiring authors with nothing to write about? By no means! Those of us who write should commit ourselves to the two main types of books outlined above: books for other scholars and books for the general public. But please, for the love of God, let us leave our students out of it.

Now I know publishers need to market their books to a wide readership, and I know there is Money to be made from textbooks. But writing for undergraduates is not only bad for the long-term health of the discipline, it's also a mug's game as far as writers are concerned. To write well, it is necessary to have a certain audience in view together with an aspiration to move that audience in some way: perhaps to persuade your scholarly peers to see things differently, perhaps to engage the interest of non-experts, or whatever. If you are aspiring to write for a captive audience – a student readership, required by force to read your book – then the quality of your writing will tend to measure up to the size of your aspiration. That is to say, you will end up writing a boring and tedious book that nobody would ever read without being forced into it. How much better to enlarge our aspirations, to envisage a wider audience of non-captive readers who might just enjoy learning all this stuff – if only we can keep them turning the pages. That, in my opinion, is what publishers ought to be looking for and encouraging in their authors, alongside their primary (and always necessary) commitment to publishing books for the scholarly community.

But as far as publishing books for students is concerned, we ought to be concentrating on finding the best ways of putting the primary sources into their hands. And here is where our publishers could actually be doing a lot more. In fact, at a time when the market seems to be flooded with Guides to This and Introductions to That, there is a surprising scarcity of exactly the kinds of books students really need. There seem to me to be three categories of books required here:

1. First, the anthology. It is only stating the obvious to say that anthologies are one of the most convenient ways of putting primary sources into the hands of students. There are some excellent anthologies around, but not nearly as many as you'd think. Wiley-Blackwell has tended to corner the market, with books like Alister McGrath's Christian Theology Reader, David Ford's Modern Theologians Reader, Samuel Wells' Christian Ethics reader, and Gene Rogers' Theology and Sexuality: Classic and Contemporary Readings. There are some from other publishers, such as Oliver and Joan O'Donovan's political theology sourcebook (Eerdmans) and Bryan Stone's new Reader in Ecclesiology (Ashgate), but they are few and far between. Given the range, diversity, and complexity of the Christian tradition, you'd expect to find a lot more options here, even at the most basic introductory level. And Gene Rogers' Holy Spirit: Classic and Contemporary Readings shows that the anthology doesn't have to be a dull chronological business, but can be a creative and provocative work in its own right, in which traditional texts are framed from the outset by contemporary questions and perspectives.

2. Second, the student edition. It was once common – and, in some humanities disciplines, still is – for publishers to produce special study editions of important works. Typically these include scholarly introductions, bibliographies for further reading, footnotes to help students understand the main text, and perhaps discussion questions at the end. Often headings and sub-headings are also introduced to help reveal the internal structure of the work. The Popular Patristics Series (SVS Press), Classics of Western Spirituality (Paulist Press), and the Works of Saint Augustine (New City Press) are excellent examples of this kind of publishing; and of course Penguin Classics has long published a handful of important Christian texts in this style. (These series are all marketed to the general public, but they are also ideal as student editions.) Another notable example is the Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works series by Fortress Press. But there is really not much else to speak of in theology. In some cases, simply inserting headings and sub-headings into a text would do wonders for the text's teachability. An obvious example: the whole of Barth's Church Dogmatics ought to be published with headings, sub-headings, sub-sub-headings, etc, with a separate table of contents in which students can take in the complex structure of each volume, chapter, and paragraph. (I have an edition of Thomas Aquinas's Summa with a big fold-out table like this, where you can see the whole plan of the work all at once.) To anticipate the objections of purists: there is nothing unseemly about interpolating headings into classic works. We've been doing it for centuries – where do you think Bible chapters come from, or Shakespeare's five acts? It is a tried and true way of helping readers to comprehend, study, and discuss difficult books.

3. Third, the study guide. This is less important than the first two categories, but there is still a legitimate place for separately published guides to primary sources. The aim of such books is to help students to understand a work's background, its internal structure, perhaps its reception, and some of the main scholarly debates surrounding it. There should be a strong component of discussion questions. Most importantly, such books are of use only if they are extremely concise, and if they point students back constantly to the primary source. The danger of such study guides – just think of CliffsNotes and SparkNotes – is that they easily become another substitute for reading the work itself. The longer a study guide becomes, the greater the risk: so keep it short and simple. In the best case such guides can be a valuable stimulus to the students' own engagement with the text, and can help them to stay focused on the big questions raised by the text. This kind of publishing is all but nonexistent in theology, though I've seen a couple of examples recently, both by Wipf & Stock: Jason Byassee's guide to Augustine's Confessions, and Kenneth Oakes' companion to Barth's Romans.

A final word to teachers. When it comes to assigning texts for student reading, every book has an opportunity cost. No matter how wise, wide-ranging, and benevolent the latest Dummy's Guide to Christology might be, a student who spends nine hours reading it could have spent those same nine hours reading Athanasius, Cyril, Rosemary Ruether, or whoever else you believe has a generative importance in the tradition.

But shouldn't we be suspicious of the power dynamics involved in identifying any specific body of texts as authoritative? Yes! I don't mean to suggest that we should all try to agree on a fixed canon of theological texts. But I do think every teacher of the discipline is responsible to decide on a kind of functional canon of primary sources for the purposes of their curriculum. Once you've decided what the primary sources are, you should try to ensure that every course or subject involves a direct encounter with those sources.

It is disempowering if students only ever get to hear other people's views about the tradition, without ever having the opportunity to engage it directly for themselves. If you want to cultivate a highly critical stance towards "canonical" Christian sources, that's fine. But the best way to do it is to help your students to read those sources for themselves. No matter how much critically informed secondary literature your students might read, you'll still be giving them mediated access to the tradition instead of helping them to engage it head-on for themselves. An education in which everything is mediated through expert opinion is ultimately disempowering, and only reinstates the authority of the expert without cultivating genuine intellectual freedom or independence.

Heaven is a classroom: Origen's pedagogical theology

Of all the things I like about Origen, what I like best is that he is a teacher. 

We have the testimony of Eusebius that Origen was a distinctive and charismatic teacher. Eager students flocked to him. He taught them the whole sweep of Greek intellectual culture, allowing them to explore everything and anything. Nothing was off limits. "We took our fill of everything and enjoyed the good things of the soul", writes one student. By stages Origen would lead them through Greek philosophy, geometry, arithmetic, literature – until finally they came to the pinnacle of all learning, the interpretation of scripture. 

Origen's students loved him. He was called "philosophy's guide", a "divine man". Numbered among his pupils were not only bishops and scholars but also ascetics, saints, martyrs. 

In an infamous passage, Eusebius relates that Origen castrated himself in order to secure the trust of his female pupils and to ensure that his relationship with them was not misunderstood by others. The castration story (generally presumed to be apocryphal: let us hope so) would be shocking enough as a tale of heroic asceticism. But actually the point of the story, as Eusebius tells it, is not ascetic triumph over the body but simply a teacher's total commitment to pedagogy, to teaching and learning at any cost. Origen wants his female pupils to trust him implicitly; he is unwilling to let any obstacle get in the way.

To read Origen today is to follow the mind of a great teacher, boundless in curiosity, alert to difficulties, always on the lookout for opportunities to learn something new, always ready with an apt illustration to ease the burden of heavy concepts. Whatever he happens to be thinking about, you find him thinking like a teacher. His approach to exegesis, theology, prayer, the spiritual life – it is pedagogical through and through. And some of his most charming eccentricities come from his teacherly habit of mind.

If you take a group of people and ask them what they find most striking about the Gospel accounts of Jesus, I expect they'll mention his miracles, his supernatural powers, his return from death, perhaps his uncommon attentiveness and human warmth. But what amazes Origen most of all is Jesus' accomplishment as a teacher. Origen is stunned that Jesus could teach so well, and could fill the world with his teaching, in an educational career that lasted little more than a year. Good teaching requires constant improvement and growth; it takes years of practice to make a great teacher. How could anyone have been so good a teacher – the best teacher who ever lived – in just one year? Jesus is a pedagogical miracle: that's how Origen sees it.

And then there's heaven. If I ask you what heaven will be like, you'll perhaps mention light or harmony or happiness or feasting or some sort of über-erotic fulfillment. But when Origen tries to imagine the life of eternal blessedness, all he can think of is an everlasting classroom. We will sit down at heavenly desks in heavenly lecture rooms and Someone will lecture to us. In this manner our minds will be constantly enlarged, our hearts purified, as we spend eternal ages penetrating more and more deeply into the mysteries of divine Wisdom. To live eternally is to grow eternally: and you grow by learning. So, Origen reassures us warmly, heaven will be one long never-ending education.

Throw away your spurious monographs on "Eastern" and "Western" views of personhood; forget all those trite textbook distinctions between "Greek" and "Latin" doctrines of the Trinity. If you want to know the real substantive difference between the Greek and Latin theological traditions, here it is: St Augustine thinks of school as one of the most lamentable effects of the fall – school as hell on earth – whereas Origen thinks heaven will be school writ large. Now there's a division worth arguing about.

Even the most controversial part of Origen's theology – his universalism – is really just another byproduct of his pedagogical mindset. When Origen suggests that all the wicked, including the fallen angels, will eventually be saved and reconciled to God, it's not because he has a soft view of divine justice, or because he failed to notice all those biblical texts about fire and judgment. It's just that he can't believe anyone could suffer all those fiery torments without eventually learning something from the experience. Sure, you might start off in hell; but eventually that's got to teach you something – right? And so by learning you'll be purified, until eventually you make it up to heaven – that is, to the heavenly classroom where the "process of instruction and rational training" begins (First Principles, 2.3.1).

"A process of instruction and rational training": if that sounds dull to you it is only because you don't love learning the way Origen loves it. When our author wrote those words his body quivered with excitement. 

Origen knew scripture and the mysteries of the faith better than anyone. Yet he knew that all the learning of this life is only preparation for the life to come. Even the profoundest scholars are like children learning the alphabet; but one day we shall step through the doorway, and in that big bright classroom in the sky we will finally learn to read.

Preaching on every book of the Bible: or, the problem with the lectionary

Speaking of those Bibledex videos: if I ever get the chance to preach in the same place for 66 consecutive weeks, I'd love to do a series of sermons like this – one on every book of the Bible. It would be an exciting, demanding discipline to have to identify one theme for each biblical book – not only its internal theme, but also its location and function in the wider canon – and to proclaim the subject-matter of that book in one simple address. (I'm talking here about a sermon, which by definition can have only one point, one Word – not a lecture, which might have various different points and themes and observations.)

There's a lot to be said for the use of a lectionary cycle. But the lectionary tends to presuppose, rather than to foster, a broad understanding of the biblical story. Lectionaries were designed for use in societies that were already implicitly Christian – societies in which the rhythms of the liturgical year, and the broad sweep of the biblical narrative, could be more or less taken for granted. In the Revised Common Lectionary (which my own church follows), just look at the theological subtlety with which the OT and NT readings are often connected: a subtlety that is quite lost on anybody without a good working knowledge of scripture and liturgical tradition. And preachers only exacerbate the problem when they take these subtle liturgico-theological connections as the theme of their proclamation, instead of preaching from the texts themselves. (Preachers, please note: the content of your proclamation is not the liturgical calendar, but the Word of God!)

For many congregations today, it would be better to interrupt the lectionary cycle so that specific books of the Bible could be expounded in depth. I once attended a church where the minister interrupted the lectionary for some months in order to preach all the way through the Epistle to the Romans. It was a transformative experience. And alongside depth, our congregations need biblical breadth. Imagine preaching for a whole month on the broad theme of "the Prophets": from that time on, all those weird lectionary readings from Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Jonah would actually start to make sense. (If the lectionary is a sort of doxological hermeneutic, don't forget that the shaping, selection, and arrangement of texts into a scriptural canon is already its own liturgical hermeneutic: with this difference, that the canonical hermeneutic is confessed to be divinely given, so that all subsequent interpretive frameworks are answerable to this "inspired" framework. So the way the Book of Jonah functions in the lectionary is derivative of its function as part of the canonical collection of "the Prophets".)

If you're a congregational minister today, I reckon one of your tasks is to cultivate the sort of catechised community in which the lectionary cycle can be used with profit – in other words, to foster enough biblical literacy for the congregation to be able to participate meaningfully in the church's tradition of doxological reading. 

That's why I'd love to spend 66 weeks preaching on every book of the Bible: not instead of the lectionary, but for the sake of the lectionary's proper and fruitful use.

On catechesis and catastrophe

The day my mother turned seventeen, she went to the local Canberra police station to apply for her driver’s license. When she walked through the door in a short summer dress with a ribbon in her hair, the driving instructor looked up with interest. When she flashed him a smile and said she would like to take the driving test, he thought she was very pretty. When she batted her long black eyelashes and said it was her birthday, he beamed at her and fumbled madly for his camera, then took her photo and, without further ado, issued her with an Australian driver’s license. It was, he told her with a confidential wink, a birthday present.

And so, without so much as turning a key or operating a windscreen wiper, my mother was authorised to pilot one of the most dangerous high-speed weapons ever devised by the dark mind of man: the automobile.

My mother’s older sister had saved up and bought a brand new gleaming white Mini Minor, the kind all the groovy kids were driving in those days. Soon after my mother’s seventeenth birthday, they went on a road trip together to Melbourne. Now the highway from Canberra to Melbourne, if you have never made that noble journey, is an easy eight-hour drive that takes you through the sprawling languid dairy country, down along the great Murray River, and up through the hills of the Great Dividing Range. My mother being a licensed driver, her sister gave her a turn at the wheel. On a long, perfectly straight road, without another vehicle in sight, my gleeful mother held the wheel and plunged down her accelerator foot. In the passenger seat beside her, her sister closed her eyes and began to dream. The little Mini Minor gathered speed. It began, ever so slightly, to wobble. My mother pushed harder on the accelerator, smiling at the charming dairy fields. When the poor little car began to shake violently, my mother did as any person driving for the first time might do: she accelerated a little more, and then, to compensate for all that wobbling, began to nudge the wheel from side to side – gently at first, then harder, with a playful jubilant vigour. Side to side, side to side: no doubt about it, it had been a splendid birthday. Dreamily she watched a flock of birds go by. The car was wobbling wildly now, so she swerved the wheel a little harder and felt the accelerator – at last! – go flat to the floor.

That was how it happened that, on a long stretch of straight flat road, with no vehicles or obstacles of any kind for miles around, the brilliant new hundred-mile-an-hour Mini Minor found itself toppling and rolling like a rugby ball, over and over, until at last it came to rest in a wide dusty ditch, bent and crumpled and crushed, while my mother, breathless with birthday exhilaration beneath a shower of glass confetti, still clasped the wheel with both hands – in fact, still rocked it back and forth with dazed but undiminished glee.

Though they now had no car and little money, the two sisters somehow made their way to Melbourne. A few nights later, at a party a friend’s place, my mother drank for a while, drank some more, talked loudly and laughingly about her marvellous birthday, and then, wandering alone through the house, noticed some keys on a table and idly picked them up. She twirled the keyring round her finger. She went out the front door and twirled the keys beneath the encouraging smiling winks of the stars. She found the car that fit the key, a lovely red sedan, and climbed into the driver’s seat.

It was such a cool clear evening, such a perfect night for driving my mother thought as she turned the next corner, windows down and engine blazing. By the time she made it back to the party twenty minutes later, she had reduced her second automobile to a twisted steaming wreck on the corner of a quiet backstreet three blocks away.

I often think about that good, sweet-natured Canberra policeman who had given my mother her license as a birthday present. On the night of her birthday, I imagine the policeman lounging happily in his favourite chair at home, thinking of the girl with the beautiful brown eyes, the long eyelashes and dimply smile, congratulating himself on his chivalry, never dreaming that he was, that night, the most dangerous man in the commonwealth of Australia. For it was he who had made my mother a Driver. It was he who had single-handedly turned every other person and every vehicle for hundreds of miles around into a prospective victim of my mother’s birthday joy.

Many of our church leaders today are very much like that innocent-hearted policeman. We would like to make it as easy as possible for people to become Christians. Catechesis is too demanding; education is a chore; deliberate instruction in the Christian faith will put people off. And so with a knowing wink, we waive all the requirements and hand out the baptism certificate. We are charming, gallant, spiritually magnanimous – and ruinously dangerous. In our eagerness to make sure everybody is included, to reassure inquirers that the Christian faith is indeed an easygoing undemanding thing, we are looking only at the dimples and batted eyelashes. We are forgetting the longer view, the screech of tyres and the shriek of twisted steel and the long split-second when a windscreen becomes a million tiny diamonds in the sky. We blame the new converts if after some time they make a wreck of their faith.

But after considering the matter carefully and objectively, I find I cannot blame my mother for the magnificent trail of automobiles left smoking in her wake: I blame the generous heart of a magnanimous policeman.

Philosophy at Middlesex: Boethius and the barbarians revisited

A guest-post by Paul Tyson, Australian Catholic University

How did it happen? How did it come to pass that our universities employ more administrators than academics and that many academics are now powerless in the decision making processes that directly impact the intellectual standards and scholarly viability of their own faculties? How did it happen that the university became a business interested in growing its market share by strategic plans that entail the sacrifice of any school not central to what the administration determines is the university’s corporate brand? How did it come to pass that academics in a university are merely human resources that the administration uses, or dispenses with, or abuses, at will, and students are merely consumers, not even of the intellectual products the academic human resources deliver, but of the corporate brand image of the university?

The “reality” imposed on academics and students by “their” administrations is often this: academics exist to facilitate the corporate goals of university administrations and students are merely the paying consumers of the vocationally useful brand image which the “university” sells. It now seems fabulously old fashion to believe that university administrations exist in order to facilitate the work of academics in the education of students. Gone, it seems, are the days when a university was at core a place interested in learning for the sake of learning, for the sake of the pursuit of truth, for the sake of the humanizing value of being educated. The passing of that pedagogic vision means that the soul of the Western university is now in its death throws; and it is being killed not by barbarians from the outside, but by barbarians from within.

What is going on at Middlesex University is a revolt. This revolt is an attempt to cast off the shackles of administrative barbarianism and to remind us all what the heritage of the Western university is really all about. This is not simply an ideological matter, it is also a matter that has very tangible consequences for universities themselves. For the reality is, barbarian-managed universities are living off the non-renewable capital of past reputation. Such ransacking of what makes a university a university, without any re-investment into the academic health of the institution today, can only kill the successful corporate university in the medium to long term.

But those sorts of horizons do not worry high-level administrators. They get a very nice corporate lifestyle in the meantime, as they drive “their” university into the dirt. The large corporate management culture cares nothing for the intrinsic value of learning or for the sustainable health of a learning institution: its brief is only to market the short term effectively. To this end the administration must always be cutting costs (never corporate), in order to produce a greater financial return for less capital outlay. Hence, “our” administrators are leaches sucking the lifeblood out of our learning institutions, bloating themselves at our expense. And they expect us to thank them for this.

The staff and students of the Philosophy Department at Middlesex are telling the world that the killing of the Western university at the hands of its own administration is a great cultural evil, and they are endeavouring to stop this evil. If precedent is anything to go by, the Philosophy Department does not have a high chance of success. Many Western university administrations have already killed off or permanently crippled their humanities programs in recent years. While there is often a bit of a rough patch while academics lose their jobs, and a few students get thrown in the paddy wagon for being a nuisance, the deed is simply done, and things go on as usual (for the administration) once the dust settles. But it is vital that the staff and students of Middlesex triumph over their administrative barbarians. The trajectory of precedent must be turned around.

So, to the real university at Middlesex – the academics and the students who seek truth and love learning – stand together and fight on! To the barbarians who run that university: repent! To the rest of us around the world watching as the shadows of a new dark age gather, let us support the real university at Middlesex however we can. They must win, or the past 800 years of Western university tradition are in peril of being lost.

To follow the Middlesex debacle, you can get regular updates here.

Theological education: what is it for?

A while back, I was asked to write a few paragraphs on theological education for some church magazine. So I wrote the following:

Last semester I taught a class on the doctrine of the Trinity: a notoriously difficult and challenging topic! Later in the year, I heard one of the students from that class leading prayer in our morning chapel service. I was really struck by his prayer: it was a kind of meditation on the things we’d been discussing all semester in class. It was an outpouring of thanksgiving to the God who is made known to us in the person of Jesus Christ.

For me, this summed up the whole purpose of theological education: not simply to make students cleverer, but to help them learn better ways to speak to God in prayer, and to one another in witness.

Who is this God who comes to us and meets us in Jesus Christ? That is the basic theological question. Answering this question requires broad knowledge, sharp thinking, scholarly discipline, and a good dose of intellectual creativity. But it also demands much more than that: if we’re really to grapple with the significance of God’s self-witness in Christ, we’ll also need to respond to that witness.

In this way, scholarly discipline becomes a form of discipleship; theology becomes an exercise in prayer. When we think – really think – of all that God has done for us in Christ, our talk about God gives way to thanksgiving, while thanksgiving likewise issues in a joyful witness to others about God’s grace and goodness.

For me, this is why theological education is so exciting and so promising – and why it’s an urgent priority for the church today. What the church really needs is not cleverer or more relevant or more professional ministers, but women and men who know how to pray and how to bear witness. Nothing could be simpler; nothing more demanding. For true prayer and witness spring only from a life that has been formed in the way of discipleship – the way of Jesus Christ.

Ten virtues for theological students

The ancients understood education as inculturation (παιδεια) into a life of virtue (αρετη). The main point of my recent satirical post was to suggest that theological education should similarly be understood as formation in virtue, rather than (as is too often the case) an inculturation into the vices of academia. In that post, I highlighted ten vices of theological education. And due to the number of emails I’ve received in response (partly from students who felt a little chastened or disillusioned, or that I was being too cynical), I’ve tried here to sketch out a contrasting list of ten virtues. Obviously this isn’t meant as a complete list (much less an autobiographical list!) – it’s just a parallel which makes explicit what was implicit in the earlier post:

1. Patience: In theological education, the process of learning is more important than the specific opinions you might acquire as a result. You can’t learn everything at once; just relax and enjoy the ride.

2. Breadth: In theological education, the connections between disciplines are often more important than the content of any single discipline in isolation. The development of wide-ranging interests – and the capacity to engage in wide-ranging discussions – is more valuable than the selection of any narrow specialisation.

3. Curiosity: One of the goals of theological education is to cultivate a lively sense of curiosity; the student who sticks only to the curriculum will not learn much. So resist the temptation to become too disciplined – and be sure to “waste” plenty of time reading novels, listening to music, and aimlessly enjoying the company of friends.

4. Clarity: In theological discourse, a single lapidary statement is better (and more difficult to achieve) than twenty pages of jargon.

5. Attentiveness: In theological education, even the most brash and opinionated among us are given the opportunity to cultivate a childlike fascination with the views of other people. Without attentive fascination, one’s capacity for surprise is diminished; and the essence of theology is surprise.

6. Love: Theological formation should be driven by a love for truth, not by animosity towards untruth. Truthful theology always involves polemics – but since truth takes form as love, it can never be used as a weapon to wound another person. Where this occurs, truth becomes a falsehood.

7. Friendship: Education is always competitive to some extent; but your peers should be viewed as friends and companions rather than competitors. In theological education, friends are your best unofficial teachers: one often learns more from them than from any of the curricular activities, or any of the professors.

8. Simplicity: The goal of theological education is Christian proclamation. Students sweat and labour for years through difficult texts and languages and ideas – only so that their preaching can one day seem easy and effortless and spontaneous. Preaching is not like mathematics: you do not “show your steps.”

9. Truth: Ambition for the comfort and respectability of a career is a deadly temptation which the theological student must resist. One can serve the idol of career only by compromising the call to speak the truth – that is, by sacrificing one’s entire theological vocation. Theological education is not about garnering academic favour, nor about treading the eggshells of correctness and respectability; it is about loving the truth and speaking the truth faithfully, while “taking no thought for tomorrow” (Matt. 6:34).

10. Prayer: Prayer is the theologian’s most fitting and most distinctive activity. A theologian who does not pray is a grotesque aberration – like a literary scholar who doesn’t read, or a music teacher who cannot play an instrument. Above all else, “the theologian is the one who prays” (St Evagrius).

Advice for theological students: ten steps to a brilliant career

1. As a theological student, your aim is to accumulate opinions – as many as you can, and as fast as possible. (Exceptional students may acquire all their opinions within the first few weeks; others require an entire semester.) One of the best ways to collect opinions is to choose your theological group (“I shall be progressive,” or “I will be evangelical,” or “I am a Barthian”), then sign up to all the opinions usually associated with that social group. If at first you don’t feel much conviction for these new opinions, just be patient: within twelve months you will be a staunch advocate, and you’ll even be able to help new students acquire the same opinions.

2. At the earliest possible opportunity you should also form an opinion about your favourite theological discipline: that is, you should choose your specialisation. To communicate this choice to others, you should dismiss as trivial or irrelevant all other disciplines: the systematic theologian should teach herself to utter humorous remarks about the worth of “practical” theology, while the New Testament student should learn to hold forth emphatically on the dangers of systematic theology; and so on.

3. As far as possible, you should try to avoid all non-theological interests or pursuits. All your time and energy should be invested in reading important books and discussing important ideas. (Novels in particular should be avoided, as they are a notorious time-waster, and they furnish you with no new opinions.)

4. Every successful theological student must master the proper vocabulary. All theological conversations should be peppered with these termini technici (e.g. “Only a demythologised Barthian ontology can subvert the différance of postmodern theory and re-construe the analogia entis in terms of temporal mediation”). The less comprehensible and more sibylline the sentence uttered, the better. There are some stock-in-trade terms that are de rigueur (e.g. perichoresis, imago Dei, Heilsgeschichte, Bullsgeschichte), but the really outstanding student should find creative ways to deploy a wide range of foreign polysyllabic words. Phrases of Latin, Greek or German derivation are particularly prized. (Those of Hebrew of Syriac extraction should be used more sparingly – they are usually greeted with some puzzlement, or with cries of “Gesundheit!”)

5. Now that you’re a theological student, you will discover that the world is filled with people who don’t share your new opinions. Every conversation should thus be viewed as an opportunity to persuade others of their simple-mindedness and to convert them to a better understanding. If you’re feeling shy about this, you should start by practising on your family and closest friends. And it’s not always necessary to engage in a full-blown discussion; at times a single Latin term or a knowing smirk is all that’s required to demolish another person’s argument.

6. Were you raised in a conservative Christian family? If so, your theological education provides you with the perfect opportunity for rebellion. The benefits of theological rebellion should not be underestimated: rejecting all your parents’ religious opinions allows you both to assert your independence and to imply that your parents are backward and naïve. In this respect, theological education can be every bit as effective as smoking cannabis or moving in with your boyfriend: but without all the bad smells.

7. Every true theologian is an avid collector of books. The day you became a theological student, you entered a race to amass a personal library larger and more impressive than those of your peers. Books should be acquired as quickly and as indiscriminately as possible; second-hand books are even better, since they give the appearance of having been read, which can save you a great deal of time.

8. When you are asked to preach in a parish, you should take the opportunity to display the advantages of theological education. Every good sermon should quote the words of some great theologian (a “great German theologian” is even better). And the phrase “the original Greek says…” should be used sparingly but effectively – perhaps just two or three times in a sermon.

9. The goal of theological education is a good career: preferably an academic career, although in some cases you might have to settle for pastoral ministry (or worse, just a regular job). It’s never too early to get your career on track: every essay, every conversation with a professor, every question you ask in class – these are the opportunities to show the professor how deeply you share their opinions, and how superior your own insights are to those of your classmates. In all circumstances you should revere, admire and emulate your professors. Even if they are neither wise nor virtuous, your goal is to become their perfect reflection, mirroring back to them their own opinions, preferences and prejudices. To show that you are the professor’s true protégé: this is the beginning of wisdom, and the bedrock of any good career.

10. Under no circumstances should you resort to old-fashioned pieties like daily prayer and Bible-reading. There are far too many important things to be thinking about, and far too many important things to be reading. (Church attendance is acceptable, however, since it gives you the opportunity of improving your pastor’s theological education.)

On education

Aaron has an excellent 10 propositions on education. “There is nothing to which education is subordinate save more education...”

Hauerwas on education

“As a way to challenge such a [liberal] view of freedom, I start my classes by telling my students that I do not teach in a manner that is meant to help them make up their own minds. Instead, I tell them that I do not believe they have minds worth making up until they have been trained by me. I realize such a statement is deeply offensive to students since it exhibits a complete lack of pedagogic sensitivities. Yet I cannot imagine any teacher who is serious who would allow students to make up their own minds.”

—Stanley Hauerwas, “Christian Schooling or Making Students Dysfunctional,” in Sanctify Them in the Truth: Holiness Exemplified (Nashville: Abingdon, 1998), p. 220.

Schleiermacher, textbooks and oral tradition

In his charming little book On the Glaubenslehre: Two Letters to Dr Lücke (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1981), Schleiermacher makes a humorous observation about textbooks (p. 75): “Not only must we always take care that there is enough room to shelve these printed pages, but in my opinion it is important that our students have books that they can carry around comfortably…. Moreover, in our universities there is a great deal of oral tradition about both the teachers and the texts, and it seems to have quite an influence on our beginning students.”

I love this tongue-in-cheek reference to “oral tradition.” And he’s right, too: when you talk with first-year students in a theological faculty or seminary, it’s often very striking to see that they have already formed crystal-clear opinions about which books and authors are important or unimportant, which teachers should be taken seriously, which ideas are childish and naïve, and so on.

It would be interesting to know something about the sociology of all this. What is the precise nature and function of such oral traditions in academic institutions? How formative is the role of oral tradition in the development of students’ education?

Some discouraging statistics

“The impact of this book [Wayne Grudem’s Systematic Theology] on evangelicals should not be underestimated. Over 135,000 copies have been sold, and the abridged version, Bible Doctrine, … has sold over 35,000 copies. The former is now the most widely used systematic theology text in evangelical seminaries and Bible colleges in North America and most other English-speaking countries.”

—Kevin Giles, Jesus and the Father: Modern Evangelicals Reinvent the Doctrine of the Trinity (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2006), p. 20.

Kim Fabricius: on investing in the arms trade

[NB: The following is a paper given by our friend Kim Fabricius at the University of Swansea last week, at a teach-in on the university’s investment in the arms trade. He shared the platform with a Marxist and a Muslim. I think the paper beautifully models the character of Christian “witness.”]

On the Self-Contradiction of a University Investing in the Arms Trade

It is good to share a platform with people who are committed to a university free from all investment in the arms trade. Whether that commitment extends to an equal zeal for non-violence altogether – including whatever strategies of protest or resistance that some of you may adopt as a result of this meeting – I do not know. If not, then I would argue that your commitment is, in fact, totally compromised, indeed self-contradictory – as, indeed, is any commitment whose terms are dictated by what one is against. But that is another platform! For today, I am glad that we are united in our horror at an institution of higher learning that makes money out of mass murder.

I myself am a pacifist, a Christian pacifist. That is to say, my pacifism cannot be abstracted from my discipleship, from my being a follower of Jesus, which in turn cannot be abstracted from the being of God. To re-phrase 1 John 1:5, “God is non-violent, and in him there is no violence at all.” Put another way, my ethics of peace derives from an ontology of peace, which specifically derives from Christology – from the nature of the Prince of Peace. I say this in witness, but also in warning – the warning that, really, there is no reason why my ad hoc ethical solidarity with you should have any purchase whatsoever if you do not share my theological convictions.

That is the truth of the matter, and that is why I share it with you: because violence is always inextricably linked with lies. The tree of war always has deceit for its roots. And that is the single, fundamental point of principled practice that I want to make to you today: that for a university, an institution of further education, a community whose very raison d’être is the pursuit of truth (notwithstanding post-modern nihilists who, with Pilate, mockingly ask, “What is truth?”), for such an institution to be making profits from a business whose own raison d’être is mendacity and mayhem – this is a prodigious oxymoron, an undertaking of extreme bad faith, and indeed an act of academic suicide. For how can a school of virtue do deals with an industry of vice without its own spiritual death being the bottom line?

Therefore there can be no justification whatsoever for any university investing in the arms trade, for even if the operation is “successful” (in the sense of “lucrative”), it is a mortal blow to the patient. Even if one is not a Christian pacifist, or even a pacifist, even if one’s appeal is to so-called Just War Theory, the theory itself rejects that appeal, for the WMD we are talking about demonstrably, flagrantly violate the Just War criteria of proportionality and discrimination. And if the appeal is to so-called “realism” – well, how cynical can you get? The reality of the matter is that we make our own reality of the matter: for it is not that ethical policies have been tried and found wanting, they have not been tried at all.

Things have to be the way they are only if we concede that things cannot be different. But they can be different, because in fact they are different – forgive me if I end where I began – because Christ is risen, and therefore the impossible is not impossible, in fact it is practical. So that, finally, I am not suggesting that the university sacrifice financial prudence to moral purity. Rather I am saying that in rejecting all investment in the arms trade, the university will actually be going with “the grain of the universe” (John Howard Yoder). In short, to disinvest in the arms trade is not only to be right, it is to “get real.”

Species of doctoral students

A humorous column by Monica Dux in today’s Weekend Australian classifies several species of graduate students (called “postgrads” here in Australia). Here are some of the species:

The Departmental Darling: “ … given unspoken patronage by the department due to family or old school connections.”

The Phantom Postgrad: “… supposedly enrolled in a postgraduate course, but … you start to doubt if they really do exist.”

The Gifted One: “… universally hated by their fellow postgrads.”

The Show Pony: “… their greatest skill is the ability always to present their exploits in a positive light.”

The Interminable Scholar: “… their poignant cry of ‘I will be submitting my thesis next year’ has echoed through the university since time immemorial.”

The exodus to Scotland continues

Via Novum Testamentum, I’ve just heard that yet another leading scholar will be abandoning England for Scotland: Markus Bockmuehl, currently Professor of Biblical and Early Christian Studies at the University of Cambridge, will be joining the Divinity School at the University of St Andrews.

As far as theological studies are concerned, Scotland is definitely the place to be these days. (And there’s a nice poll about this at Theologoumenon, in which Edinburgh, Aberdeen and St Andrews are all currently miles ahead of Oxford.)

For the love of God (11): Why I love Thomas Groome

A guest-post by Aaron Ghiloni

Thomas Groome makes me hot. Unlike Patrik, who met his love prematurely, I encountered Groome belatedly. I had already been involved in faith education for some time, when I finally discovered what it was all about. Though I had met Groome before, we had only flirted. Reading Thomas Groome in the summery shadow of Presidio Park’s cypress pines, I was peeved that we hadn’t had this conversation sooner, relieved to find that my work was legitimate, captivated by his comprehensive approach, and, yes, I was in love. Like Augustine, my adoring heart confessed: “Late have I loved you!”

I love Thomas Groome because he helps me to see—in theory, practice, and praxis—what real Christian education might be. I love Thomas Groome because he enables me to envision a church that truly knows its God and a world that is becoming the kingdom of God.

Groome’s education for the reign of God draws on the best of resources available to educators. He is part Deweyan and part Huebnerian; fully Catholic and yet patiently catholic; completely liberationist and yet more than just political. Groome enables us to remember our selves, healing the “forgetfulness of being” that has so marked Western intelligentsia. Groome’s “shared Christian praxis” connects with our very marrow, and, for lovers, it connects deep within the heart.

In a field delirious with “tricks of the trade” and “how-to” simplicities, Groome provides a theoretical basis for practical theology that is fully informed by the Western philosophical tradition, by the Hebrew and Christian Scriptures, and by theological landmarks.

Thomas Groome makes me hot: hot to teach, hot to learn, hot to grow, hot to remember, hot to be, hot to become.