I turn 50 later this year. As you can imagine, this particular birthday is occasioning reflection on many things, especially my vocation as a systematic theologian.
My life as a theologian involves, basically, Bible teaching and writing about the Bible’s great themes. I articulated this in a previous piece for Covenant, “My Life as a Bible Teacher.” After reflecting on the piece in the weeks after its publication, I recognized that it was somewhat incomplete. What Bible teaching requires is, as I wrote in my subsequent piece for Covenant, purity of heart. But there is more. Teaching Holy Scripture involves consideration of the Great Tradition. It means, in a sense, being a generalist.
A few months ago I revealed to an esteemed colleague at another institution that I still feel a bit ashamed about being a generalist. His (wise) response was immediately forthcoming — words to the effect of “Well, isn’t that what a theologian is?”
In this little piece I reflect, rather personally if I may, on what I understand a generalist to be, and how the vocation is related to the place I call home and the state-funded institution in which I exercise my vocation.
Although I’m originally from Ontario, Canada, New Zealand has been home for nearly 15 years now. My young family and I immigrated here in 2010 for me to take up a post in systematic theology. At that time, I was very much immersed in the world that Karl Barth and his idiosyncratic young friend, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, had made. While I’m not as committed to that world as I once was, I’m grateful for their emphasis upon Scripture, and indeed their deep commitment to read and unfold it for the sake of gospel proclamation and church edification.
Each one in his own way taught me to look back, and that’s what I’ve been doing for the past decade and a half. But how does one look back into the Tradition, and why?
Well, I read a work like Augustine’s Confessions with a mind to Scripture. What Scriptures does he cite and why? Where in the canon does he naturally gravitate? What can I learn about his manner of inhabiting Scripture? When I teach Basil’s The Holy Spirit, I take it as an occasion to do a Bible study. What passages does he cite? What do they indicate about the Spirit of God and us in relation to that same Spirit? In short: I teach snippets of their works as a means of indwelling Holy Scripture’s great doctrinal themes.
Now as we all know, the Catholic Tradition is big, somewhat unwieldy, and not always immediately accessible. That’s important to acknowledge as it encourages in us a disposition of humility. Indeed, the only way I know to meaningfully encounter great works in the tradition (such as Augustine’s The Trinity) is via their use of Scripture. And that’s, I think, what generalists do. They read a particular work (or part of a work, more realistically) with the Scriptures in hand.
But there is an existential dimension to this as well, one that’s taken and is still taking me a long time to appreciate. Simply put, it means that you don’t quite fit anywhere, at least in a guild sense. You’ll gladly (re)read Barth’s Römerbrief as he captures something vital about Paul’s letter, but you’ll also happily turn to Hildegard of Bingen’s Selected Writings not only for its dogmatic insights but also for its spiritual intensity.
One of the consequences of this is that the generalist gives up on vain hopes, such as acquiring any sense of the “field.” Indeed, I don’t really know what constitutes the field of contemporary theology anymore. And I certainly could never keep up with specialist knowledge of only one — let alone all — of the great teachers of the church catholic. But that is okay, and is liberating for heart, soul, and mind.
The generalist looks, ultimately, to the goodness of God. The generalist recognizes that Scripture’s perspicuity is such that the doctors of the church hold to the same faith, though the idioms by which they expound it may vary. For example, Bonhoeffer reads the Psalms much like Aquinas does. That shouldn’t surprise us — though it did me for quite a while — because each thinker seeks to imitate and love the same God via what he writes in Scripture.
Also, it means that handwringing about what texts to use in a given course somewhat dissipates because God’s truth is present to the Tradition’s doctors in every age as they write about what they see in Scripture. Sometimes, I think back to words that a friend said to me about a seminary for which he had taught at in Melanesia. “We do not have money for or access to textbooks, but that is okay because we have Scripture.” Now, that is not to say that my friend did not want a more robust library for himself and his students. It is to say, however, that the library has a goal, and that is inhabitation of the Scriptures that lead us back to life.
There is, ultimately, a form of Christian spirituality concomitant with being a generalist. The generalist must want to “blaze” and indeed see students and the congregants they serve blaze “all the more fiercely in love of [God],” as Hildegard notes. Love of God is the beginning, midpoint, and end. Since love of God is better than approbation, the generalist may learn to sit content with a relative degree of scholarly anonymity.
The generalist will never be known as a great scholar of doctor X or Y, and that’s okay. God raises up scholars who, due to disposition, opportunity, and appropriately funded training (to say nothing of an institutional home) can linger for decades with one doctor, biblical writer, or “genre.” That said, the institutional conditions that make such inquiry possible are, as we all know, diminishing. Even so, the generalist remains grateful for specialist studies but recognizes their limits.
Because the time is short, and fierce love of God rare, the generalist becomes, ultimately, a catechist. Putting unbelief to flight, one simple “prooftext” at a time, becomes the order of the day. And such labor is never in vain. As Calvin reminds us, “Although the melancholy desolation which confronts us on every side may cry that no remnant of the church is left, let us know that … God miraculously keeps his church as in hiding places” (IV.1.2).
