BOOK REVIEW:

By Jackson W. Carroll. Barbara C. Wheeler; Daniel 0. Aleshire and Penny Long Marler. Oxford University Press, 336 pp., $35.00

The students come excited and a bit anxious and are soon confronted with challenges to what they believe. The eagerness turns to perplexity, anger, sometimes loneliness and self-doubt, and eventually to a fresh understanding of ministry, worship, theology, faith and the church.

Theological education has been heavily scrutinized over the past 15 years, as evidenced by a growing body of literature. Some observers are concerned that seminaries are too much oriented toward professional training. Others complain that the curriculum is too trendy. Others worry that the quality of students is deteriorating. Analysts point out that the student population has shifted, as middle-aged students and second- or third-career students sign up for courses. There has been a massive influx of women into church leadership. Many seminaries seek to attract more women and racial minority students and to expose students to world cultures.

Rather than discuss such concerns or compile and analyze statistics, the authors of Being There watched and listened to and talked to the people being formed at seminaries and to the people doing the forming. Being There is an extensive empirical study in the sociology of education with theological education as a case in point.

Theological schools, whether of conservative or liberal stripe, intentionally press students into the mold of the ethos that is created by the faculty and administration. Theological education is an intense emotional experience; in some cases it is an intellectual pressure-cooker. The hope is that students emerge from the experience having absorbed a more mature and sophisticated understanding of Christianity and the church. At a time when theological educators fear being dictated to by financial considerations, the faculties in this study emerge as fully in control of education.

Three-fourths of Being There consists of descriptive accounts—with much verbatim reporting—of life in two Protestant seminaries. One is an evangelical seminary with a strong Reformed identity—called here simply "Evangelical Theological Seminary"; the other is a liberal, politically correct main line seminary—identified as "Mainline Theological Seminary." They were chosen to represent two major Protestant camps in the Association of Theological Schools.

The descriptive accounts cover classes, community life, dorm life, worship life, field placements, faculty meetings, community traumas and even, in the case of Evangelical Theological Seminary, students’ romantic lives. Four researchers spent three years visiting the two schools and participating in their life. The evangelical school was studied by researchers from the mainline, the mainline school by scholars from the evangelical world.

The culture of each school is conveyed through reports on the student assessments of teachers, the preferred styles of clothing, the marital hopes of women students, and the mannerisms and personality traits that endear or distance members of the communities from one another. This attention to detail, meant to convey the everyday realities of the schools, sometimes gives a soap-operaish feel to the narrative. We learn about Ann and Albert, who have alienated themselves from family and friends by their abrupt decision to get married, and we are prompted to worry about whether they will make it to the wedding. We also overhear faculty members as they bicker over whether a certain comment—made several years earlier by a candidate for a faculty position—was implicitly racist. This sort of vignette definitely gives the reader a taste of "being there."

The larger theme, however, is the students’ response to the faculty’s agenda. Mastering the faculty’s language, learning how to debate within the school’s ideological limits, negotiating the foibles and passions of teachers and other students, figuring out how to be accepted in this community and then how to relate to the folks back home—this struggle can be debilitating as well as exhilarating. The faculties of both institutions believe passionately in the rightness of their respective causes.

At ETS the students come formed by the evangelical youth culture. They know the songs, the lingo and the hot issues of evangelicalism. They come to ETS to get a good education. They are willing to work hard, pray hard and argue hard. They debate the ordination of women and the appropriateness of using technology in evangelism. They negotiate the conflict between the "truly Reformed"— those who articulate a highly cognitive and rationalistic version of Reformed theology—and the more heart-oriented evangelicals, especially the charismatics and Pentecostals. The professors want to put a more sophisticated intellectual and theological floor under popular evangelicalism. By and large, the students are amenable to this. They revere their teachers, even those with whom they disagree. Along with correct interpretation of scripture and a heavily cognitive faith, they learn appropriate evangelical manners.

At mainline seminary students are older and come with more varied life experiences. They too come with much church experience. They approach the church primarily as a social-service provider. At MTS they encounter in the faculty a radical liberation/justice agenda—one that is propounded precisely in opposition to the liberal social agenda the students know and trust.

As portrayed in Being There, life at MTS is a choreographed battleground. Affinity groups are hunkered down in their trenches while teachers stress issues of "justice," "liberation," "racism" and "sexism." White men especially must "duck and cover" as they are pressed to take responsibility for racism and sexism—although ageism, disable-ism and the issue of homosexuality fight for a place in the discourse of marginalization.

Although both schools exemplify how educational institutions socialize their students, the situation at Mainline Theological School calls for special consideration because it seeks to transform mainline Protestantism in radical ways. At ETS, I would argue, the faculty is trying to ground students more deeply in the intellectual heritage of their own tradition and to think through the issues of the day in the terms of’ Reformed theology and piety. This is not to say that ETS is not the site of heavy debate. But those debates take place within parameters set by the Reformed tradition. At MTS, on the other hand, serious departures from traditional Christianity and academic study are assumed to be appropriate, even normative, and do not even need to be argued for.

The teaching style at MTS is confrontational, designed to evoke guilt and shame. It seems like the medieval penitential system in multicultural dress—except that at MTS sinners are offered no clear practice of penance that can lead to absolution and reincorporation into the community. Offenders are left to twist in the wind.

No wonder students get confused. One student asks, "Is it my responsibility to penetrate the black community and interact with my black brothers and sisters, or is it my responsibility to withdraw and let them work out their anger, or should I make myself available to be a scapegoat for their anger?" MTS offers no theological guidance for this dilemma. The effectiveness of the formation is evidenced by the fact that after three years some white male students are grateful to the institution for opening their eyes and leading them to the truth about racism and sexism in themselves and the church.

Rarely does anyone at MTS cross the race and gender barrier to offer comfort and support in the war between the sexes and the races. When the Community Committee at MTS selects Asian-American relations as the theme for an annual retreat, without input from Asian-Americans at the seminary, the transgression is treated with deadly seriousness. The bar of judgment comes down on whites (although we are not told the racial make-up of the committee): "MTS is under ‘white dominance.’ Whites ‘let’ the minorities have some power, but on their own terms," one student opines.

A strict policy on inclusive language is announced to students when they arrive at MTS. Being There records an event at which that new orthodoxy is challenged. A veteran faculty member is retiring and a farewell service at which he will preach is planned. He requests that a hymn he wrote—probably during the days of protest against the Vietnam war—be sung at the service. The problem is that the hymn includes the words "Lord," "Father" and "Almighty God"—now strictly taboo according to the language police. A great struggle ensues. In the end the hymn is included in the service, but students who object pin a protest message to their clothing. There is apparently no thought given to the notion that, in a Christian community, celebrating a faithful and dedicated professor might be more honorable than fighting yet another skirmish in the great gender war.

All in all, MTS comes off as a grim place. The thought of spending three years there, let alone a career, is daunting. The real issues of injustice are obscured by an ethos of hypersensitivity in which each group is encouraged to point out how insensitive the others are. The school seems to be drowning in a symphony of self-righteous complaining.

Exit interviews with MTS graduates suggest that the faculty is somewhat successful in inculcating the gospel of pluralism, inclusivity and diversity. One student remarks that he now has "a fuller understanding and appreciation of the gospel of Jesus Christ." Another summarized the gospel according to MTS in two points: "God does have a sense of humor, and it is possible to be good and dear friends with people whom you disagree with theologically."

Yet other students, especially white men, may be reinforced in the traditional views they brought with them. As one student put it, "at MTS being white, male and middle-class is taboo." Another said, "We white males feel absolutely marginalized. Stomped on, spit on, emasculated." Not only male students are put off by the approach. One female student who came from a "peace and justice" orientation found the divisions and bickering so debilitating that she took refuge in the congregations she pastors and stopped trying to find a place for herself at school. The school’s radical stance drove her to a more centrist position.

One wonders, too, about the effect of this seminary experience on the congregations these students will serve. The polemical and divisive pedagogy of MTS is not easily transferable to local congregations. Unlike students in seminary or delegates to a denominational convention, members of local congregations have to live together over the long haul. They do not have the luxury of leaving town after the fights and caucuses are over. The authors of Being There work hard to remain neutral not only in their interactions with the subjects of the study but also in their assessment of the culture-forming authority of the institutions. At no point do they ask the normative question: Is this what ought to be happening in a theological school? Perhaps this would have betrayed their covenant with their informants.

Because theological schools are the training ground for church leaders they are de facto the intellectual centers of the church. The stakes are very high. The study of MTS, if it represents what is happening in comparable institutions, illustrates why the mainline Protestant denominations are experiencing such turmoil and fragmentation. Polarization and conflict are being intentionally injected into the churches through the seminaries.

The account of MTS raises for this writer a basic question: Is the gospel of Jesus Christ reducible to the gospel of political correctness? At MTS it seems to be taken as self-evident that it is. Little theological writing before James Cone’s A Black Theology of Liberation seems to be taken seriously. At the time of the research, Cone’s book was used to teach the first-year courses in both "Mission and Ministry" and "Introduction to the Old Testament."

One student makes explicit the faculty agenda: "I was so glad that I had no theological background per se until I got to MTS. Because it enabled me to embrace liberation theology to the point [that] I have embraced it. It became so apparent to me in the beginning of my relationship with theology that this could be the only way that all people despite sex, race, gender discrimination could be freed through Christ." But how could the student be so sure of this judgment, having been exposed to nothing else? All of Christian literature and doctrine has been refracted through the lens of multicultural politics.

It is this reductionism that is the most disturbing part of the portrait of MTS. The testimony of scripture appears to have no autonomous voice. The concerns and insights of Paul, Origen, Augustine, Aquinas, Luther, Calvin and Wesley apparently no longer have anything to contribute to Christian understanding. The doctrinal foundations of the Christian faith—the Trinity, the incarnation and the atonement—become so many knickknacks gathering dust on the shelf, perhaps needing to be put out in a yard sale.

At an annual consciousness-raising event a feminist student declares that "since Jesus’ death on the cross was not necessary for salvation, God is a divine child abuser."’ This prompts a strong, polarized debate on the atonement in the campus journal, though one observer comments, "What started as a debate about the nature of the atonement moves to more typical MTS concerns about feminism, justice, liberation and praxis."

The philosophy behind the pedagogy at MTS seems to be that we learn to make peace by making war. Moments of cooperation and reconciliation stand out in bold relief, since they are hard won. There is little grace here, little forgiveness, little comfort or salvation. There are passing references in Being There to a more conservative strain in the faculty, but it is barely in evidence. The faculty appears incapable of criticizing its own ideology.

Ephesians teaches that in Christ the hostility between Jews and pagans, on which each group staked its identity, has been destroyed. It is not the combatants who present their grievances to one another and obtain whatever concessions from their opponents they can before suing for peace; it is God who has created a new meeting ground, and without asking the parties to the dispute which is most aggrieved. Those who realize that the situation they live in has been radically changed by God are forced to come to terms with the reality that they are no longer enemies but friends who together celebrate the reconciliation wrought for them by Christ. What their ethnic, racial and gender histories urge them to proclaim as ultimate has been subordinated to the unity of all people in Christ Jesus. Theological schools might be teaching students how to put on Christ, how to adjust to this new eschatological reality, this new creation, the reign of God that they neither create nor have the power to withhold from one another. I remain unpersuaded that MTS is using the best strategy to achieve this goal.

The two schools studied here both want to transform their constituencies: one cultivates a cognitive theological agenda, the other a political agenda. But these are not the only two options. A school might seek to shape the spiritual identity of the church by nurturing students’ knowledge of God through prayer, study and worship.

The authors of Being There have painted vivid pictures of theological education, taking us well beyond impressions, nostalgia and theory. There is no doubt that, positively or negatively, theological schools do form students. The question this book leaves readers with is: On what basis are they being formed and toward what end?

I am interested in education particularly from the standpoint of the deep sadness I feel when seeing students in theological declamations from the very day they are ordained. They will never know as much theology as they do in their senior year of seminary. Ten years later their general culture has been localized; their reading has been vastly diminished; their effort to understand what is going on in principal fields of inquiry -- New Testament, church history, theology-is in many cases nonexistent. In places where I have been asked to help in adult education, I have tested this observation by bluntly putting a question to the group: "How many of you have read a New Testament introduction since you left the seminary?" Fewer than 10 per cent will raise a hand.

In the ministry we somehow have the feeling that the intellectual, historical and literary part of our preparation is something that can be deposited in us, or stuffed into us, in a period of three or four years; and we presume to run a whole lifetime on the original tankful.

When suddenly I had the job dropped in my lap of teaching Christian ethics, I had never read an entire textbook on the topic, and I knew it was too late to start scrounging around through 10 or 12 such books.

So I thought of a way to make the whole process of ethical thinking concrete. I selected four or five pieces of contemporary literature having ethical problems as themes, and then dismissed the class to read. I remember I gave the students Conrad's Lord Jim, Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea, a series of short stories by Chekhov, Ibsen's The Master Builder and Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman. The dramatic content of these works revolves around a moral core: a moral problem, a failure, an act of dishonor or betrayal, a vague sense of a meaningless life.

Having read the material, the students were ready to hear me talk about ethics and what canons of obedience are appropriate for the Christian message. I didn't have to spark interest in the ethical questions; that was done by the artists.

I would use the same approach for continuing education. That is, don't start off simply with lectures, but find some way to evoke the kind of question that requires a better answer than the students have received from their earlier education. For instance, why not send out reprints of a case study that concludes with an agonizing problem in medical ethics about whether to prolong life or let die. Ask, "At what point is the problem ethical, Christian? What has God got to do with the matter?" This is real education.

There are few things more futile than answering questions no one is asking. When I am called on to do two or three evenings with a group of people, whenever I know far enough ahead, I say to the inviter, "If you will have your people read a couple of things I will send you, then I will come." Otherwise, I come and am expected to be a kind of high-level entertainer. Well, I have enough debts, and my rent is steep enough that I would gladly take the money for it, but I don't feel good about it. The people are not sitting there open, precise, sharpened-up to hear someone address a pressing question.

People do not always respond as I might wish. For example, I was once asked by a group of pastors to discuss Reginald Fuller's The Formation of the Resurrection Narratives and responses to it. And I said, "I will not come unless you promise, every last one of you, to read Reginald Fuller" (this was months ahead of the event). The group inviting me had about 90 members, but only about 40 said they would read the book. (I went anyway.) However, the 40 who said they would do it -- and did -- spent a day in discussion and then wanted another. It was a real educational experience for them. I served in the capacity of ink; they were the blotter.

How can one's college years be spent in such a way that they are not a period of diminishment from religious understanding or a laming of true piety? Most students at our denominational schools have come from families in which, with greater or lesser intensity, the Christian tradition has been represented. In college a student presumably multiplies his or her person, joins the human race, moves away from a province into a great world. These are years of growth in which the individual progresses from a personally centered idea of the self into a notion of selfhood that is constituted by a vaster and profounder world than he or she knew as a child. The college years should indeed offer the opportunity for such opening outward.

Now while this growth is taking place, the whole religious tradition comes under scrutiny; in fact, it often comes under such scrutiny as leads to its rejection. Often this happens because the student's religious tradition may not seem able to keep pace in its intellectual structure with what he or she is learning in college. During such a period, what a student's intellectual maturation demands is an expanding doctrine of God. The simpler doctrine of God that is rightly and necessarily the one we learn as children remains tightly enfolded within the language, within categories that are simply incapable of filling the space of one's growing intellectual experience.

However, neither lamentation nor castigation of the students is the right way to get at the problem. The way to do that is to ask the faculty to come together to talk about theological enrichment and growth in theological discourse. In fact, these teachers were probably victims of the same circumstances during their own college years.

I meet many faculty people who, despite the enormously sophisticated research they do, are living with an adolescent or childhood notion of God, which is seemingly unable to open any discourse with their learned discipline. Therefore they simply create a compartment. On Sunday they are devout, pious Christians. During the rest of the week they are physicists, chemists, biologists or whatnot, and there is no intersection or crossover among the categories in which they live.

Fundamentally, one cannot live in this fragmented way. One may seem to bring it off. But the first result of these sealed compartments of discourse is that one's own area of specialty suffers. Second, the interior stress creates an intolerable personality tension (one which I have sensed in many of my university colleagues).

Thus the church-related college and its faculty must make conscious efforts to incorporate high-level theological study into the institution's general curriculum. For, indeed, the Christian faith is entirely capable of the ever more capacious interpretation that can parallel a student's or a teacher's expanding needs and understandings.

Wherever did we get the idea that only the "childish" is available or accessible to children? Where did we get the notion that only the absurdly reduced symbol is open to the child's imagination? We teach the children to sing "This is my Father's world," which is a good theological statement, but then we follow it up with little stories about the pansies and the kitty cats. Children can also know something beyond playthings.

Students eventually come to us at the seminary in such a riddled condition, with such an inadequate theology, because we have not thought the growing child's mind capable of including larger references to the meaning of the Word of God and the church.

Our humane education has shriveled under the pressure of our bureaucratic obligations. Our humanity itself becomes bureaucratized, routinized. This shrinkage of our educated and clerical humanity is one of the most discouraging aspects of my life. It is not that I expect the clergy to become theologians in the professional sense, though every ordained one should be a theologian. Nor do I expect them to be great scholars. But I do expect them to be alive human beings; and I do not find this aliveness in proper intensity among many of today's improperly educated clergy.

When I refer to intellectual content, I do not mean big words. For example, consider St. Augustine's sentence, "Thou has made us for thyself, 0 Lord; and our hearts are restless until they rest in thee." That is not incomprehensible to anyone. But how many preachers might reach or explore the depths of it with the common people? I preach to congregations of working people as much as I do to those at colleges and universities. And I preach the same sermons. I might use illustrative material that is more appropriate and intelligible and evocative here than there, but the content of the thought is the same. By intellectual I do not mean abstract, multi syllabic, cerebrally impenetrable. I mean reflective -- articulating the way something is. That can actually be done very simply.

If you ask me what makes a good teacher, I can tell you that he or she gives off the notion, "What I'm talking about is enormously important and alluring and exciting, and I wish you knew more about it." When that happens in a classroom, there is something worthwhile going on.

I remember a great, great teacher I once knew. He was a little, wispy, absentminded fellow who taught Romantic and Victorian poetry. The rest of the faculty regarded him as somewhat odd, and he was. He was so wrapped up in 19th-century pastoral poetry that he didn't pay much attention to grades. Therefore all the football players took his courses.

One day I sat in on one of his classes. At the end of the period, the professor said, in his soft voice, "Next Friday, gentlemen, you will have read when you come to my class, 'The Intimations of Immortality,' by Wordsworth. I wish you to come with your minds gloriously adorned." The funny thing was that those hulking, generally not-too-bright football players made the effort. For the man took the students more seriously than they took themselves. He didn't see why a fellow who was a tackle on Saturday shouldn't love Wordsworth. He invested his students with his confidence and the possibility that Wordsworth is every person's possession. This is teaching at its best.

College faculty should be educated persons. This is often not the case. Many of them are trained -- not educated. You can train dogs to jump, and you can train people to report what is going on in chemistry and transmit that information. But education means training the mind to unfold to the multiple facets of human existence with some appreciation, eagerness and joy. It is, in essence, the opposite of being dull. We've got plenty of trained, dull people on our faculties, but not many educated people.

Theology has been in a state of disarray since the passing of the theological giants of the so-called neo-orthodox movement. The discipline has been characterized by a dizzying diversity, and practitioners of the craft have too often been attracted to fleeting intellectual fads. There has been little agreement among theologians about the sources, norms and critical standards of the discipline. Methodological disputes have flourished, but no consensus has yet emerged from among the contending parties. In light of this confusing situation it is no surprise that theology continues to play a marginal role in American intellectual life and that theologians have little influence on debates about our public affairs. Indeed, it appears that theologians exert a diminishing influence within the life of American churches as well.

If theology is to regain its status as a significant intellectual and practical activity within the church, the university and our broader cultural and public life, then seminaries and divinity schools will have to give renewed attention to this venerable but threatened discipline. The restoration of theology would greatly enrich the cultural, intellectual and spiritual life of our society, and it would help overcome the gap between the academic and the ministerial, between the scholarly and the pastoral, that so bedevils American theological education.

Theological education has traditionally been organized around a fourfold curriculum which makes a familiar distinction between theory and practice. In this curriculum, three disciplines represent the theoretical side of the dichotomy (biblical studies, church history and systematic theology), while practical theology represents the task-oriented program providing the requisite skills for those preparing for the professional ministry.

The theory/practice distinction has dominated theological curricula since the founding of independent divinity schools and seminaries in the early 19th century. Prior to that time, theological training was simply an integral part of university education. University students were instructed in classical languages, rhetoric and grammar, and natural philosophy—studies that prepared the students for a better grasp of God’s revelation within Scripture and the natural world.

By the beginning of the 19th century, however, natural philosophy had given way to the natural sciences and a new understanding of critical reason emerged, one that did not so easily support the faith and piety that undergirded studies in divinity. By the time separate programs of graduate ministerial studies were established, it was not self-evident that theological training ought to be a fundamental aspect of a general university education. Training in divinity was no longer essential to those studies constituting a liberal education but had become the course of studies appropriate for those entering into a specific profession, the Christian ministry. Thus, precisely as the ministry gained professional status, the intellectual justification for theological education became blurred.

The fourfold curriculum offered a means of relating theological education both to theoretical developments within cognate fields of the university, and to the practical demands of ministry. But as questions of faith, commitment and value became increasingly alien to "objective" critical studies, the internal connection between theology and practice was severed. The so-called theoretical fields have developed into discreet disciplines with their own professional societies and journals; and the technical, specialized research emerging from these disciplines has little or no relevance for ministry in religious communities. At the same time, practical studies, unleashed from their theoretical counterparts, have become in their own way technical and specialized, focusing, on the technical skills of communication or counseling or administration. Insights for these courses are often borrowed from the related professional fields of communications or psychology or business administration, and their theological and religious aims and rationale have begun to disappear. The final consequence of the separation of theory and practice is the detheologizing of divinity school and seminary education.

It is scarcely surprising, then, that seminary and divinity school students complain that practical courses lack intellectual rigor and that scholarly courses seem irrelevant to their vocational and professional goals. The classical fourfold curriculum creates an enormous gap between the academic and practical aspects of a ministerial curriculum. Just as important, this standard curriculum eliminates theology from the core of both practical and academic studies. Theology as a theoretical discipline appears disconnected from the skills needed to be a successful parish pastor. Theology as an inquiry emerging from faith and piety appears to lack the marks of an impartial and critical discipline.

In order to address the problem of integration, we need to reassess the capacity of theology to unify theory and practice, critical studies and pastoral concerns. In particular we need to address three closely related issues. First, in what sense is seminary and divinity school education genuinely theological? Second, how is theology, rightly understood, a critical discipline, and how might it serve to unite the various aspects of our curricula? And finally, what do we mean by ministerial studies, and how are such courses to be integrated into a critical theological education?

We can begin addressing these issues by articulating a broader and more inclusive understanding of theology. We need to recover a sense of theology as a generic term, describing not simply one discipline among others but the common task in which we are all engaged. whether in biblical studies, constructive theology or comparative religion. Theology, rightly conceived, is a communal, formative and critical activity that can serve both as the integrative factor in seminary teaching, and as a key link to the rest of the university and the wider society. That is a rather sweeping claim, so let me highlight each of the elements within this definition.

Theology is a communal activity. Theology has traditionally been understood as the product of religious communities. Yet the notion of community that has undergirded that view has been narrow and exclusive. Among modern theologians the community of faith has been essentially defined as the community of elite, male, Anglo-European clerics. The effects of this narrow definition of community have been manifold. Women and people of color have been effectively eliminated from the conversation that serves to define the nature and goals of the community. Theological discourse has become the language of elites, with little relevance either for church congregations or for the broader secularized society. The marginalization of theology within our culture has been aided and abetted by this narrow definition of the community of faith.

During the past two decades, various liberation movements have demanded greater inclusiveness within religious communities. These movements have met with partial success, and religious communities have certainly become far more diverse. Nonetheless, traditional patterns of domination and subjugation continue to reign within religious and educational institutions, and so the situation of traditionally disadvantaged groups remains precarious. That is why the kind of community that exists at theological institutions is so important. The tradition of open and unbiased inquiry should be extended to include voices not previously heard in academic and theological conversations.

One important benefit of living in a diverse and occasionally cacophonous environment is that it guards us against a false ideal of community. Too often we think a community means a group of people who share a common history and a set of well-defined beliefs and aims. While members of a community must have some aims in common, their diversity and disagreements are signs that they are a vibrant community. True communities are, in philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre’s useful phrase, "historically extended, socially embodied arguments"—arguments precisely about the aims and goods the community should seek. Theological thinking within such a community is inescapably temporal. Theology is a thoroughly historical discipline, which does its work in the midst of communities and their traditions. Such a theology acknowledges the diversity of faith’s expressions and the pluralistic environment within which that faith must operate. It sees temporality as a crucial dimension of faith, and it accepts the culturally conditioned character of all human knowledge (including the knowledge of faith) as a sign that the transcendent God has become incarnate in human history and culture. Theology, then, is the discourse by which the arguments of these diverse perspectives are voiced.

Communities of the sort I am describing are constituted by the practices in which their people are engaged. A divinity school or seminary community is defined by its practices in a double sense. First, it is engaged directly in the practices constitutive of theological education—the transmittal of knowledge, the development of the capacities required for critical inquiry, the formation of skills for ministry, and the nurturing of the virtues of honesty and integrity that are essential to serious academic work. Second, it is influenced indirectly by those practices characteristic of the broad range of ministries for which students are preparing. The requirements of ministry are constantly shifting, and we must seek to respond as best we can to those changing demands.

Theology is a formative activity. Theology is a peculiar form of cognitive reflection, for its goal is not simply the expansion of knowledge. Theology has a quite practical goal—what I would call the formation of religious identity.

It is a commonplace to observe that human identity is formed within the matrix of roles and structures that constitute a society. Our identities are formed as we identify with the various social forms that bestow meaning on a society and its participants. Religious communities have traditionally played an important role in identity formation, a role sufficiently central to socialization in Western cultures that Kant and Schleiermacher could still argue, in the 19th century, for the social necessity of religion.

More recently, religious communities have exercised only marginal influence in the broader socialization process and have had a decreasing impact on the formation of their own members. There are surely multiple causes of this phenomenon, but one major factor has been the separation of theology from the communities and practices that form religious identity and character. It is not surprising that communities cut off from the critical and reflective guidance of theology have become aimless and uncertain. Nor is it surprising that theology, cut off from communities of practice, has become the esoteric discourse of academic elites.

Theology must once again become an activity forming religious identity and character. For it to play that role, theologians must be engaged in reflection upon religious practices. Some of those practices will be located within religious communities, while others may be broadly distributed within society. Theologians need to attend both to the practices of congregations—worship, preaching and counseling, for example—and to societal practices that have religious and moral dimensions—political discourse, public-policy decisions, behavior in the professions. By analyzing the structures and language of those practices, theologians can identify the basic convictions that operate within them and seek to subject them to analysis and criticism. In so doing, theologians can then seek to contribute to the reformation of those practices and of the human identities shaped within them. In that activity, theology can make a direct contribution to the ways in which human beings actually live out their lives.

The demands of contemporary ministry are exceedingly complex, and seminaries and divinity schools cannot possibly equip students with every practical skill they will need. They can, however, provide a broad-based theological education that will help develop the qualities of mind and character that clergy will need in an increasingly complex and pluralistic world. They can equip students with the intellectual and personal flexibility they will require for the challenges they will face.

These observations lead me then to my final point: theology is a critical activity. I have already indicated that I understand theology to be critical reflection on religious practices. If theology is to be a truly critical inquiry, then the standards according to which theologians make their critical judgments must be articulated. Given the current diversity within divinity school and seminary communities, and the broad range of practices for which our students are preparing, the task of reaching consensus about our critical standards will not be easy. But as we begin to build theological faculties for the 21st century, we must ask some hard questions about the future of theology. How can we continue to diversify theological education while developing rigorous standards of excellence? How can theology continue to serve the needs of the churches while it addresses broader social, cultural and political questions? How might theology contribute to the revitalization of the churches precisely as it assumes this broader, more ambitious agenda? These and other questions about the intellectual integrity of the theological disciplines can easily be set aside as we face the more imminent challenges of recruitment, placement and finances. But we must face these perplexing intellectual issues if we hope to secure a future for theological reflection.

Discussion of the criteria of a truly critical theology can be an important contribution to the university-wide reflection on the nature of a liberal education. As we develop our conception of theology as a critical discipline, we have an opportunity to raise new queries about the relation between the descriptive and the normative, and between the critical and the moral dimensions of human understanding. In so doing we can contribute to the ongoing discussion about the moral applications of critical thinking, but we can also pose fresh questions about the fiduciary and moral presuppositions inherent in all critical inquiry.

By moving in the directions I have outlined, we could make a major contribution not only to the coherence of theological curricula but also to theological education more generally. Theology, understood as critical reflection on religious practices, can serve an indispensable integrative function within our divinity school and seminary curricula. The relation between the study of ancient Near Eastern cultures and the practice of preaching, for example, needs to be given theological articulation. The significance of the study of Judaism, Buddhism or Islam for the practice of Christian ministry needs to be highlighted through theological reflection. The justification for public-policy studies within a religious curriculum must be given in theological categories. As we seek to offer those theological reflections, we will discover a new and more inclusive notion of theology emerging—a notion of theology that may once again engage the attention of the wider society as well as that of the church.