A searchable, downloadable PDF of the original article appears below. Alister McGrath is lecturer in Historical and Systematic Theology, Wycliffe Hall, Oxford, England and Research Professor at Regent College, Vancouver. This article is taken from the last chapter of The Renewal of Anglicanism, by Alister McGrath (Morehouse Publishing, 1993). It appears here with the permission of the author. McGrath sees the necessity of an orthodox and healthy seminary system for the long-term future of a denomination. We agree. And what he says concerning Anglican seminaries is true for Presbyterian schools for ministry training.
Christian theology sets out to allow the church to be true to itself. It aims to enable the church to discover for itself why it is there and what it is meant to be doing. Instead of having that meaning and task imposed upon it by outsiders, the church is being invited to discover what it means to be the church of Jesus Christ in the world. Theology allows the church to embrace, critically yet enthusiastically, its roots in the Christian past and supremely in Jesus Christ. That means rediscovering a vision – a vision of what it means to be the church and all that this entails. The new Anglican emphasis upon the church as the bearer of the good news of Jesus Christ, that is now beginning to permeate every level of the church’s self-consciousness, has brought with it the possibility of the renewal of a vision. And such a vision is needed if Anglicanism is to retain a distinctive place in modem Western society.
But who is to nourish and tend that vision? Who are to be the guardians of the Anglican theological heritage, that will undergird and inform our churches as they prepare to face the future? The only realistic answer is “our seminaries.” This, I must stress, is not the only answer; it is however, the only answer that is likely to work, especially in the longer term. There is an urgent need for Anglicanism to rediscover the distinctiveness of theological education and recognize its rightful and privileged place within the ministry and mission of the church. Many senior Anglicans still seem to think of the seminary as a combination of a second-rate university and a medieval guild of apprentices. The time has come to insist, both to our church and to the academy at large, that the seminary provides the most authentic environment in which to study theology….
Recovering a Vision for Theological Education
In his Theologia: The Fragmentation and Unity of Theological Education, Edward Farley points to a series of developments in theological education that have led to the loss of a defining theological vision characterized by the coinherence of piety and intellect. Farley argues that the term theologia has lost its original meaning, which he defines – a little lugubriously, one feels – as “sapiential and personal knowledge of divine self-disclosure,” that leads to “wisdom or discerning judgment indispensable for human living.” Elsewhere, he lapses into plain English and refers to the original vision of theology as “not just objective science, but a personal knowledge of God and the things of God.”
Christian theology cannot remain faithful to its subject matter if it regards itself as purely propositional or cognitive in nature. The Christian encounter with God is transformative. As John Calvin pointed out, to know God is to be changed by God; true knowledge of God leads to worship, as the believer is caught up in a transforming and renewing encounter with the living God. To know God is to be changed by God. The idea of a purely “objective” or “disinterested” knowledge of God is thus precluded. For someone to speak objectively about “knowing God” is as realistic as the lover speaking dispassionately of the beloved. As Spren Kierkegaard pointed out in his Unscientific Postscript, to know the truth is to be known by the truth. “Truth is something which affects our inner being, as we become involved in an appropriation process of the most passionate inwardness.”
We need to rediscover that theology does not mean “the study of theologians” but the “the study of God!’ The academy has set a purely academic agenda for too long; it is time to redress that balance.
Theology, in this classic sense of the term, is a “heartfelt knowledge of divine things” (Farley), something that affects the heart and mind. It relates to both fides quae creditur and fides qua creditur, the objective content of faith and the subjective act of trusting. But all this has changed, not on account of any fundamental difficulties with this classic conception of theology, but on account of the increasing professionalization and specialization of theological educators. The study of theology has become little more than the mastery of discrete bodies of data. It has something you just know about – where it should be something that shapes your life, provides a reason to live and gives direction to ministry. It is thus no wonder that so many seminaries report a burgeoning interest in spirituality on the part of their students, when they have been starved of the experiential and reflective dimensions of theology by the unwarranted intrusion of the academic attitude toward this subject. Yet when the Perkins School of Theology (a United Methodist school in Dallas, Texas) introduced spiritual formation as a curriculum requirement, some faculty and students expressed misgivings about the presence of the course within an academic community. The idea of theology as a purely academic subject forces issues of personal spiritual formation and Christian living – originally an integral part of the idea of “theology” – out on a limb. The time has come to welcome them back and rediscover what theology is meant to be all about.
There is an increasing recognition of the importance of spiritual formation as an aspect of a rounded theological education. The study of theology is recognized to be transformative, in that one is recognized not merely to be wrestling with texts; nor yet with ideas, but with the living God. Theology can so easily become the study of theologians; its proper subject is the study of God.
Yet the term “spirituality” needs to be used with caution. Owen Chadwick, until recently professor of modem history at the University of Cambridge, has pointed out how the origins of the modern term “spirituality” and many other related terms (such as “the inner life” or “the interior life”) lie in the French spiritual writings of the seventeenth century. From its beginnings, the term has strong associations with “a striving after the purely immaterial.” The word “spirituality” thus appears to have been associated initially with a radical division between the spiritual and the physical, between the soul and the body, between contemplation and everyday life. It implies that its subject is primarily the interior nurture of the soul, undertaken in withdrawal from the distractions of ordinary life. The older vocabulary of the Anglican tradition reflects more faithfully a central aspect of its spirituality – the total integration of faith and everyday life. Anglicanism has a long tradition of “doing theology on the ground.” Its greatest writers have tended to be poets (such as George Herbert and John Keble), clerics (such as Richard Hooker), bishops (such as Jeremy Taylor, Michael Ramsey, and William Temple) and laity (such as Dorothy L. Sayers and C.S. Lewis). It is a tradition that needs to be renewed – and the seminaries provide a unique, organic and natural context for this renewal.
This point must be allowed to have a direct bearing on seminary faculty recruitment policies. Some Anglican seminaries still work on the basis of the highly problematic assumption that the best candidates for teaching posts will be those who are the most highly academically qualified. But what of his or her commitment to ministry? What of his or her understanding of the role within the church? My own experience, in England and North America, suggests that some seminaries still regard their faculty as potential university teachers who have yet to find their niche and see their seminary teaching position as an interim half-measure between unemployment and a tenured university appointment. There is a real need for Anglicanism to make its seminary professors feel valued and encourage them in the vision of forging a truly pastoral theology, in which the full resources of the Christian tradition are brought to bear on the pastoral and evangelistic tasks of the church.
Anglican theology can be renewed, provided that it is root- and task-oriented. In other words, it must be faithful to the Christian tradition on the one hand and must apply itself to the pastoral and evangelistic tasks of the church on the other. We need to rediscover that theology does not mean “the study of theologians” but the “the study of God.” The academy has set a purely academic agenda for too long; it is time to redress that balance.
Anglican theology has always been at its best when it is conscious of its theological roots, its ecclesiastical identity and its pastoral concerns. In his Republic, Plato argued that the world would be a better place only when “philosophers were kings and kings philosophers.” There is a sense in which the church would benefit considerably if pastors were to be theologians and theologians pastors. Yet precisely this insight is found in classical Anglicanism, before modernity imposed its alienating idea of “professionalization” on the discipline of theology and insisted that theology should be an academically neutral discipline conducted in isolation from the church. That experiment has been unsuccessful. As historians of twentiethcentury Anglicanism have pointed out, it has led to the production of a theology that is a pastoral irrelevance and spiritually barren and of late has not even been distinguished by academic excellence.
The academic study of theology has forced an artificial division between theology and spirituality. Karl Barth is rumoured to have been in the habit of beginning his lectures with prayer, or even a hymn. This practice would probably be outlawed in North American faculties of religion today. Yet it points to the close link between theology and adoration, a link brought out so clearly by the Methodist writer Geoffrey Wainwright in his deservedly acclaimed work Doxology.
The same point has also been made by Anglican writers, both catholic and evangelical. The noted Anglican evangelical theologian James I. Packer is a case in point. In a published lecture entitled “An Introduction to Systematic Spirituality,” Packer stressed the utter impossibility of separating theology and spirituality:
I question the adequacy of conceptualizing the subject-matter of systematic theology as simply revealed truths about God and I challenge the assumption that has usually accompanied this form of statement, that the material, like other scientific data, is best studied in cool and clinical detachment. Detachment from what, you ask? Why, from the relational activity of trusting, loving, worshipping, obeying, serving and glorifying God: the activity that results from realizing that one is actually in God’s presence, actually being addressed by him, every time one opens the Bible or reflects on any divine truth whatsoever. This… proceeds as if doctrinal study would only be muddled by introducing devotional concerns; it drives a wedge between… knowing true notions about God and knowing the true God himself.
Packer’s point is that a genuine experience of God makes the detached study of God an impossibility – a point appreciated by medieval mystical writers, who often spoke in rapturous terms of their experience and knowledge of God. It is like asking the lover to be neutral about the beloved. Commitment is not merely a natural outcome of an authentically Christian experience and knowledge of God; it is a substantiating hallmark of such experience and knowledge.
Anglican seminaries, by their very nature, provide an ideal context in which to pursue this vision. Theology is taught in the context of a worshipping and prayerful community, that is aware that to speak of God is potentially to end up adoring and worshipping him and proclaiming him to the world. God is at his most real when he ceases to be an object of inquiry and becomes one who addresses us as his beloved, beckoning to us and inviting us to discover him in his fullness. The study of Christian theology in a committed liberal context, such as that found in most North American state university faculties of religion, must therefore be regarded as inauthentic, imposing totally artificial limitations upon what the “knowledge of God” might be like and what its consequences should be. The systematic exclusion, as a matter of public polity, of prayer and adoration from such teaching results in a truncated and deficient understanding of theology. Seminaries have a unique opportunity to “let God be God” and respond to him accordingly. They need to regain a sense of their distinctiveness at this point and to get rid of the outmoded and unjustified belief that they are somehow second-rate contexts for the learning of theology. The seminary provides a unique environment in which theology is taught by the committed to the committed, in a nourishing atmosphere of prayer, adoration, and pastoral care, with a view to going out into the world convinced that the church has something distinctive to say and do.
The seminaries have a vital role to play in the future of Anglicanism – not by mimicking the values and attitudes of secular academia, but by fostering a quiet confidence in the intellectual, spiritual, and moral relevance of the Christian faith to communities and individuals in the modem world. They must regain a sense of calling and of distinctiveness, appreciating that they provide an environment in which the cognitive, experiential, and personal elements of faith can be nourished, stimulated and sustained. It is worth recalling, in this context, that many of the greatest theologians to have served the Roman Catholic church in the present century, such Yves Congar and Hans Urs von Balthasar, never held university appointments. Academic excellence implies neither an exclusively academic context nor pastoral irrelevance. An Anglican seminary, by recollecting its foundational vision of its purpose, can recreate the best possible environment in which to study and be shaped by Christian theology.