Michael Bauman | Peer Pressure, Confessionalism and the Corruption of Judgment

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"It is ordained in the eternal constitution of things that men of intemperate minds cannot be free; their passions forge their fetters." —Edmund Burke "The ignorance of the unlettered takes no scrutiny to establish. What we need to plumb is the ignorance of the educated and the anti-intellectualism of the intellectual." —Jacques Barzun "We forget that every age has carried with it great loads of information, most of it false or tautological, yet deemed indispensable at the time." —Jacques Barzun	Peer Pressure, Confessionalism and the Corruption of Judgment: Why Theologians Can't Think Straight I. Peer Pressure: The Unacknowledged Legislation of Theology Some things we never outgrow: a passion for deep-dish pizza, a quiet love for the mountains of Colorado, and our boyhood addiction to baseball. Unlike these things, however, some of the things that remain with us are not so unremittingly pleasant or beneficial. (Not that being a Phillies fan has been unremittingly pleasant or done me much good.) Peer pressure, for example, is not merely an adolescent phenomenon. Few of us, if any, ever outgrow it. Theologians and their students, pastors and their congregations, all are subject to its subtle, but relentless, influences.1 If you have never considered it before, consider it now. The demand characteristics of the theological classroom exert psychological, academic, and social pressure on students to conform to the viewpoint espoused by their instructors. Very few students would submit the same research paper to Professor A, if he were teaching Systematic Theology, that they would to Professor B, if she were teaching it. Their research topics likely would change; the conclusions they reached likely would change; the language in which their conclusions were presented likely would change; and the methods whereby those conclusions were arrived at likely would change. By this I do not mean to say that such a student is merely contextualizing his theology — he is not. He is changing it, at least on the surface. He does so because he is aware of his instructor's beliefs, passions, methods, and idiosyncrasies, and (perhaps knowingly, perhaps not) alters his efforts and conclusions accordingly. Pragmatically, he is no fool. Intellectually, the case is different. If memory serves, and if personal experience is a useful guide on this point, I dare say that many professors' objectivity skills are seriously defective. They seem never to have learned to distinguish between ideas they dissent from, on the one hand, and faulty or fallacious ideas, on the other. Only the foolish, the arrogant, or the unteachable assume no difference exists between the two. Such "teachers" have failed to come to grips with the possible (perhaps probable) divergence existing between the positions they themselves hold and the truth. In short, they lack perceptivity and humility. Or, to turn it around, they seem never to have learned to distinguish between good thought and their own thoughts. That failure, because it inevitably leads to inflated grades for the theological conformists in their classrooms and to deflated grades for all others, serves only to extend the professor's own intellectual thralldom onto his students. Those students are justifiably wary both of asking new questions and of answering the old ones in a new (and perhaps better) way. Thus, while the theological party line prospers, theological progress and true education flounder. And more's the pity. Professors ought to be scrupulously honest, not perpetrators of pedagogically insidious pressures that prevent or pervert real learning or discovery. In that light, Jaroslav Pelikan was exactly right: “Few tyrannies are more insidious than that of a teacher who is interested in disciples rather than pupils, who seeks to be imitated rather than transcended, and who is so sure of the correctness of his ideas that he can evaluate all his students on the basis of their obedience to his opinions rather than on the basis of their judgment and maturity. The history of Christian theology has not lacked for such teachers, who have compounded the tyranny by identifying their notions with the word of God and thus equating their authority with the sovereignty of God...no intellectual community can afford to relent in its vigil against the tyranny of the pedagogue.”2 To forestall this classroom travesty, a theology instructor must be "prepared to give the highest marks to the telling, felicitous and well-documented exposition of views he dissents from or even abominates."3 The academic study of theology should have the effect of opening the mind to truth and of gaining skills in recognizing and acquiring it. Theological study should illuminate the student by purging the student of unjustifiable prejudices and of ideas received uncritically. We do not teach, study, or publish in order merely to confirm our theological prejudices, but to expose them to scrutiny and, if exposed as fallacious, to reject them and to find a more suitable set of ideas. We must remember that the enemy is not merely error and our adherence to it, it is also truth held for all the wrong reasons (or for no reason whatsoever) and arrived at all the wrong ways. Teachers who have not learned that have not yet learned to learn; nor can they teach their students to learn. Put differently, Christian scholarship has an obligation to truth, that is, to God. Only by the careful pursuit and acquisition of truth can we begin to execute our calling faithfully and effectively. Theologians and their students must shun the naive ferocity of those who hold to opinions that cannot stand up to careful scrutiny. Do not mistake their vicious passion for intellectual virtue or courage. It is not. It is the anguished outrage of those who have been unfaithful to their commission as apostles for truth, a commission that requires fidelity to things as they are, not to things as we would like them to be. Like Nero, those theologians spend their time fiddling with the evidence while the real world, and its questions and concerns, burns down around them. But, they themselves do not worry because they believe their asbestos dogmatism will protect them, even if it does not protect the world. In truth, however, it will protect neither. That is because Christian theologizing is, or ought to be, a "reality game." The morality of scholarship demands a willingness to face the truth, even when it says that some of our most cherished beliefs are raw fiction. Without courage to face the truth and the freedom to do so, neither Christian scholars nor the students they instruct will ever stand in the vanguard of academic pursuit. They lack the intellectual virtue and wherewithal to do so. But, the pressure now existing in some theological classrooms makes any very positive outcome unlikely. Nor is the situation even as conducive to education as I have painted it. Many other pressures are exerted equally as apt to undermine effective theological navigation. Students, for example, are motivated not only by fear of failure or grade deflation to adopt their teacher's views, they are also under an even more subtle pressure (because it is a more pleasant one) to adopt uncritically the views of a professor they like or respect, for no other reason than they are his. Popularity and affection pave the way for indoctrination at least as effectively as the unarticulated threat of failure. Popularity, of course, is a two-edged sword. It cuts both students and teachers. Most teachers are not above saying and believing what will make them popular with students — and Deans. Perhaps such professors are unaware of their intellectual capitulation; perhaps they are not. My impression, however, is that the practice of pragmatic accommodation is far more widespread than its recognition. Nor is the pressure exerted on theological instructors in this fashion either subtle or weak. It often is quite powerful. It often is quite overt. Theological and administrative power is like most other sorts of power: it can be, and often is, misused. The Deans who exert this pressure, and who often are responsible for the hiring of new faculty, are themselves under pressure. They are susceptible to the exertions of the faculty already on board and to the exertions of the Board of Governors (and they, in many cases, are the ones who ratify the statements of faith4). In that light, theological students ought to realize this about their professors: they were not born with the jobs they now have; they had to get them. All too often that getting was the result of an intellectually dangerous process whereby the Dean who hired the new faculty member was struggling to keep his superiors happy, as well as to keep his view of God and the world intact and to spread it, if possible, by means of his faculty. This, of course, is not hard to do, for he will find no shortage of "anxious young instructors who sniff the air to find which way the wind is blowing and nervously nuzzle up to the power centers."5 These erudite sniffers are nervous because they know the power and pervasive presence of theological bigotry. They know that unless they dot their "i"s and cross their "t"s just the right way, they will never work. Thus, the economic pressures of supporting a wife and family, and of paying off seminary and graduate school tuition debts, intensifies the pressure upon them for theological conformity. They begin to ask themselves if, after all, there might not be some way to sign a statement of faith that, were there no pressure to do so, they would find at least partially objectionable. This usually is done (I am not making this up. I've seen it and heard it.) by employing a hermeneutic for reading statements of faith they would properly castigate should their students employ it for reading the Bible. That method permits them to see if the words of the doctrinal statement can be stretched far enough to accommodate their own private preexisting beliefs (without anyone in authority knowing it). The surprising outcome of this humiliating theological prostitution is that it continues to be perpetrated in the classroom by that same (now employed) theologian. He, in effect, forces his students through the same process he endured. Rather than teaching his young charges the virtue of intellectual honesty and the need to combat nonsense in all its forms, he merely imposes upon them the same pressures under which he crumbled. In truth, he can do nothing else. You can take no one any further than you yourself have travelled, and this theologian seems never to have learned how to pursue truth or how to live it. Sadly, teachers reproduce after their own kind, and his kind have failed in the primary activity of discovering truth — the very thing to which he committed himself when he chose an academic career. I say this because I know of no better way to guard budding theologians from the ravages of intellectual pressure than to warn them that they must not assume uncritically that their theology professors are theologians, not if being a theologian means knowing how to theologize, and not if knowing how to theologize means knowing how to find truth and how to live it. Professors and systems like those I have described above have transformed institutions of higher education into institutions of higher indoctrination. In that light, some "theologians'" ideas are not ideas at all; they are merely the unexamined recitation of statements and viewpoints they received at the hands of those who indoctrinated them, or else the intellectual capitulations and doctrinal sleight of hand they had to perform in order to get a job. But real theologizing is more than accumulating quotations and opinions from the thinkers in one's own tradition, more than indoctrination, and more than mental gymnastics. Theologizing is faith and understanding coming to grips with reality in order to produce a Christian mind (and character) that knows the truth about things, and, because it knows the truth about things, is liberated from the shackles of error and sham. Seekers of truth are not parrots who mimic other people’s words; they are pioneers who are equipped to find truth, and who do find it, wherever it can be found.6 The sad fact remains, however, that young theologians are right to believe that if they write with candor, imagination, or creativity about certain theological realities many doors will close to them. They will not be able to make a living. They will not be allowed to participate in the life and activities of various important institutions and professional societies. Participation in new research and in publication programs will be denied them. Influential people will be alienated, and the opinion that a particular young theologian is unsound and unsafe will be disseminated quickly, widely, and slanderously — all under the pretense that evangelical scholarship is objective, reflective, and teachable. Pressure is exerted either to accommodate (i.e., to dissemble) or to leave: "We'll have none of that kind of thinking around here!" they are told. Those who agree, and those who can and do accommodate, become the teachers of the next generation; and they perpetuate this sinister tyranny on those who follow. Those who do not accommodate are excluded and are believed to be the enemy. The danger to truth and to integrity can hardly be greater. In theology, as in politics, there are dictatorships it is our sacred duty to oppose, if not overthrow. We must not succumb to the temptation to treat theological truth as our own school's private property, something we dispense in our classrooms along with our syllabi and lecture notes. But that is exactly what happens in a large number of theological classrooms all across the nation. And, if you are a theological student, this might be happening to you (even now, as you read this book). Think about it: different syllabi, different lecture notes, different theologies all are being distributed with equal confidence to students everywhere, and those students readily and uncritically accept them as truth, when it must be the case that on some very significant issues most of them are dead wrong. Truth, I am convinced, is one thing, and not many others. Where these theologies differ, they cannot all be true. Luckily for us, of course, the other guy's views that are wrong. It just distresses me that he thinks that about us. Won't he ever learn? Won't you? II. Pilgrim Theology and Confessionalism To assume that we already have most of the important theological answers is intellectually hazardous. We may not even have most of the important theological questions. Nor should we blithely assume that all that is yet to be disclosed or discovered will be either consistent with what we now believe or else wrong. But, that is precisely the effect produced by our misuse of statements of faith. If you are a Fortress Theologian and not a Pilgrim Theologian, you will treat your tradition's confession as if it were the wall or boundary around truth: whatever lies outside the walls, or whatever cannot be smuggled somehow into the castle precincts must be, for that very reason, untrue. The problem here is not that theologians are confessional, but that they treat their confessions as if they were impregnable and unassailable truth rather than well-established, but still provisional, working hypotheses for further theologizing. The difference here is between "confessional" and "confessionalism." The former is an academic virtue, the latter is not. Confessions of faith are a means of identification; they state what it is we believe and they identify us as a cohesive group. Of course we think that what we believe is true, otherwise we would not believe it. But, our confessions should not be construed either as absolute truth or as absolutely true. They probably contain, like many other humanly devised statements on difficult subjects, an admixture of truth and error. Precisely because we are so intensely committed to our beliefs, and precisely because we perceive the consequences of believing and disbelieving in our way to be so momentous, we, of all people, might be the least able to see if, or where, our confessions are faulty. This inability to acknowledge the blindspots in one’s own theology is not a problem reserved only for theologians of other traditions. That problem, sad to say, we all share. While confessional theology cannot, indeed should not, be banished, it should be exercised with humility and teachableness. We are the hunters of truth, after all, not merely its custodians. For a useful Pilgrim Theology, wisdom dictates that we must not prescribe, beforehand, the direction the path of knowledge will take. After all, something might conceivably contradict our theology without contradicting Christianity. It is insupportably arrogant to assume the two are identical. My thoughts about God are not to be confused with God. Neither are yours. Remember, the facts themselves might contradict your understanding of the facts; they will not contradict the God of all facthood. How else can a theologian grow except by making sure his commitment to his confessional tradition does not close the door to further knowledge? The theologian must remain in a position to determine if some of the discoveries he has made need to be unmade; and he must be willing to do so if that is what truth demands. The scholar who can do that is indeed a scholar because he is still a true learner. Therefore, if your most precious mental reconstructions of reality are overturned, if your intellectual house of cards collapses into rubble all around you, rejoice and be exceedingly glad, for you have been mugged by truth. As a theologian, nothing better can happen to you. That undeception, though momentarily grievous, is a necessary rite of passage. By it you have been changed by reality. So were all the greatest theologians before you. Thus, to be a Pilgrim Theologian, one who is a path finder and a pioneer, you must permeate all your theological endeavors with scholarly virtue. The first condition of scholarship of any kind is an unqualified respect for evidence. That evidence, at this moment, tells us that we ought to maintain an appropriate humility about our alleged familiarity with the Divine Mind and to moderate our certitude accordingly. Until we do, we probably cannot travel any further. Our cherished views, even those we ostensibly derive from Scripture, must not be advanced in such a way as to preclude an increase in knowledge. We periodically must subject our theological procedures and conclusions to the refining fires of fresh analysis and criticism. Any Christian scholar or Christian school not willing or not able to do so is unworthy of the name. As Helmut Thielicke declared, "I detest the defeatism of the "orthodoxy" which fortifies itself in the closet of seemingly unshakeable but unrealistic formulas. I am proud of the freedom of a Christian who may dare heresy to gain the truth. The freedom to which the gospel calls us also includes the freedom of bold and venturesome thought. God will not despair of us when we err."7 Thus, while academic freedom has its dangers, none loom so large as its abandonment. Although Martin Luther thought Copernicus a fool, a judgment Luther based on his own pious, well-intentioned, but mistaken, reading of the Bible, Copernicus, not Luther, undeceived us.8 But, this does not mean that the truth ever changes, only that our understanding of it can change and perhaps should. Our statements of faith should be open to examination and to revision. We who subscribe to them should be teachable (though never gullible). Who knows how many Copernican revolutions still await us? We must be sure to allow ourselves the wisdom and vantage point necessary to welcome them when they come, not merely to react in disgust or horror because they upset a whole cart load of ideas that, while they are dear to us, are (like Luther's) flatly wrong. We must reject any attitude or approach that renders our beliefs unfalsifiable in the future. After all, the final chapter on Christian intellection has not been written, and we must not allow ourselves to close the book of knowledge before it is. Premature closure is a mental vice. Repent of, and arm yourself against, sins of the intellect. III. Pilgrim Procedure: Confessionalism and the Pursuit of Truth So much for warnings and negation. I now must explain the Pilgrim Theologian's rules for handling and implementing statements of faith and theological confessions properly. I mention but three. A) The Monkey-momma Rule Statements of faith should be used the way baby monkeys use their mothers: as a base from which to explore. Whether it stretches out its right hand to grab a banana, a branch, a leaf, or even another monkey, the baby monkey clings to its mother with its left. New items are brought back to the safety of mother for investigation, use, and enjoyment. That is how monkeys learn and grow. Eventually, monkeys leave their mothers, and well they should. Any monkey that clings to its mother's neck its whole life is a freakish and unnatural example of arrested development. In the same way, any theologian who has not, or does not, outgrow at least some aspects of his statement of faith (perhaps even major aspects of it) is perhaps languishing in a state of arrested development. No one hits upon the whole truth and nothing but the truth on the very first try. Thus, you must use your statement of faith as a vehicle for further exploration and understanding, and not simply as a way to reconfirm how great your "mother" is. Confessional statements are an excellent point of departure for learning; they are not its limits. You must use your statement of faith as a short summary of the present state of your tradition's theological understanding or knowledge, not as an unscaleable wall around doctrinal truth, or as an indication that whatever lie within its precincts is not to be questioned and cannot be overturned. B) The Courage and Candor Rule If an institutionally favored position is seen to be a minority viewpoint when it is set against the backdrop of the entire theological endeavor of modern scholarship (or indeed against the backdrop of modern culture at large), a competent theologian will acknowledge that fact to his students and give good reasons both as to why he believes as he does and why others do not. In doing the latter, he should never indulge in adhominem attacks, as if all dissenters were benighted, prejudiced, or willfully blind. Nor should he use theological dissenters as evidence that "the natural man cannot understand spiritual things because they are foolishness to him." After all, some things seem foolish simply because they are. Not all of those (perhaps not even many of those) who dissent from an institutionally favored belief are uneducated, unreasonable, or unfair. They might, in fact, be quite amiable and quite brilliant. Students should know that about the enemy. Students should learn to treat theological dissenters with respect, not with pity or disdain. They should learn from their instructors that humility, not arrogance, is the proper response to the undeniable existence of theological pluralism, and that one must not mistake narrow mindedness for single mindedness. As Allan Bloom has taught us, "Freedom of the mind requires not only, or not even especially, the absence of legal constraints but the presence of alternative thoughts. The most successful tyranny is not the one that uses force to assure uniformity but the one that removes the awareness of other possibilities, that makes it seem inconceivable that other ways are viable, that removes the sense that there is an outside."9 Young theologians must be taught to study their opponent's ideas carefully so that they can feel the weight of the dissenting arguments and feel the force of their opponent's strongest punch. What cannot stand up to the best barrage of analytical dissent deserves to fall. When students are taught to study all sides of a case (and not simply to hear about them from a biased lecturer who never studied them first hand for himself), they actually increase the number of their teachers. Those who reject our views can be useful and insightful guides to our theology because they (perhaps) can see some things about it better than we ourselves can see. We ought to remember that he who knows only his own side of the case probably knows little even of that. An intensely parochial or theologically repressive atmosphere will obscure, perhaps even obliterate, the opportunity for fruitful theological investigation — a paradoxical situation in what is designed to be the very arena for advanced religious study. We need to capitalize on our theological diversity, not eliminate it by prior doctrinal fiat. These disagreements ought to be carried out in a spirit of honesty, not in inter-confessional sniping, committeeizing, or inquisitorial kangaroo courts. Without a spirit of teachable camaraderie nothing useful will be gained from these everlasting and acrimonious debates over issues we think are important but might not be. Both by his academic methods and his life, a theologian should display the courage to let the chips fall where they may. The demands of truth and the good of his theological students (Those two things are the same.) should be always before him. In no other way will the theologian’s students learn the difference between Christian dogma and dogmatism. In no other way will they learn to learn. They must be encouraged to shake down their false gods and their intellectual idols and to winnow and to sift the impurities in their own beliefs and practices. Not to allow this is tantamount to irreligion. Among the outsiders, our reputation for such sifting is very poor. While researching for my book on one of John Milton's theological heresies, I met (and later became friends with) Maurice Kelley, surely the best student of Milton's theology in our century. We had not spoken together for two minutes before Kelley asked me if I were a Christian. When I said I was, he replied that, in that case, he did not think I would be able to handle this issue fairly or properly. He said so because he had butted heads with Christian scholars for 40 years over this very point in Milton's theology, and they invariably proved to be careless and uncharitable. They were unwilling to recognize that Paradise Lost, perhaps our language's greatest religious poem, was the product of a heretical mind. And not only had they employed every academic subterfuge imaginable in their effort to rehabilitate Milton by winning him back for orthodoxy, but they had continued to abuse Kelley in private conversations and in print all the while. Justifiably, Kelley was skeptical. He had seen us in action and he was not impressed.10 We must not shun the truth or shrink from calling things by their real names.11 In theological scholarship, courage and candor are the definition of excellence. C) The Precipitous Involvement Rule This rule is named for what it tries to prevent: doing before you know what you are doing. To prevent this failure, you must move to the cutting edge of your academic discipline. Scholarship at that level requires keeping abreast of developments in your field, not simply "to see what those blasted infidels are up to now," but in order to become, and to remain, well-informed and properly aware of the latest ideas and insights in your academic area, from whatever quarter they emerge. For a teaching or publishing theologian, failure to achieve this widely informed level of competence is an arrogant dereliction of duty. Such "scholars" pose as teachers when they are not even students. Only the neophyte still believes that scholarship flourishes in confessional isolation. No matter how long they wait, those who enter the teaching and preaching arena only narrowly informed do so precipitously. Unless you are very lucky, you will not do well until you know well. Knowing, however, is the one thing a confession- bound teacher or preacher does not do. Precipitous theologians do not realize that the only choice a scholar has is between truth and rest. You cannot have both. END NOTES 1 Those who object to calling the pressure that instructors exert on their students "peer" pressure because professor and students are not really equals (or peers) are, I believe, condemning themselves. Any teacher who is not a student of his students is, for that very reason, not really a teacher. Unless you are a learner, you will not be an instructor. 2 Jaroslav Pelikan, The Christian Intellectual (London: Collins, 1966), 126. As he further explains on the next page, "It is no tragedy for a teacher to be mistaken. It is a tragedy if he is so afraid of being mistaken that he refuses to take risks, or if he imagines that his offices [or his skills have] endowed him with infallibility." That this indoctrination rarely needs to be imposed and that many people actually welcome indoctrination is forcefully explained by Gilbert Highet, Man's Unconquerable Mind (New York: Columbia University Press, 1954), 57-59. What happens to those who, like the apostle Paul, resist this mindless indoctrination, Highet explains in the paragraphs that follow those just cited. 3 C. S. Lewis, An Experiment in Criticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1961), 86. 4 We must not confuse administrative power with true theological authority. Some seem to think that because they have the organizational power to generate an institutional statement of faith that they have the divine authority to do so and that dissent from their opinions therefore is dissent from God's. They have no such divine imprimatur. 5 Chad Walsh, The Literary Legacy of C. S. Lewis (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1979), 119. 6 An interesting example of this parrot phenomenon in evangelical circles is the tendency for some conservative publishing houses to reprint old theological works instead of commissioning new ones. Rather than being on the cutting edge of theological scholarship and investigation, rather than helping to extend the boundaries of knowledge, they are only looking for clean copies of old books that can be photographically reproduced (at little expense). Not that old books are bad. They are not. I own more than 5,000 books myself, almost every one of which is used or antiquarian. I love old books. But, judging from some publishers' lists, one would get the impression that evangelicals had learned nothing new since the last Puritan died. 7 Helmut Thielicke, African Diary: My Search for Understanding (Waco: Word, 1974), 171. 8 As Luther once said of Copernicus ("who wanted to prove that the earth moves and not the...sun"), "So it goes now. Whoever wants to be clever must agree with nothing others esteem. He must do something of his own. This is what this fellow does who wishes to turn the whole of astronomy upside down. Even in these things that are thrown into disorder I believe the Holy Scriptures, for Joshua commanded the sun to stand still and not the earth." Luther's Works (Vol. 54): Table Talk (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1967), 357-358. See also Karl Heim, Christian Faith and Natural Science (London: SCM, 1953), 13, who says that Luther characterized Copernicanism as “the over-witty notion of a Fool, who would fain turn topsy-turvy the whole Art of Astronomy.” 9 Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind: How Higher Education Has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today's Students (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987), 249. 10 I am pleased to report that he now thinks differently. 11 To do this properly, the language of scholarship should be that of articulate precision. We must be unafraid to show the world (and ourselves) what the truth is, and unwilling to claim a total victory when only half is to be had.	"...progress, that is, radical progress not just hardware improvements — progress involving change — does come about only when we question (and because we question) our fundamental assumptions." —Owen Barfield "...because he is intelligens the Christian, of all men, has to learn to discover with agonizing clarity what is conceivable by him about God." —Karl Barth
	Copyright © 2006. Michael Bauman. All rights reserved.	date modified: 6 July 2006 Peers peering

"It is ordained in the eternal constitution of things that men of intemperate minds cannot be free; their passions forge their fetters."
—Edmund Burke

"The ignorance of the unlettered takes no scrutiny to establish. What we need to plumb is the ignorance of the educated and the anti-intellectualism of the intellectual."
—Jacques Barzun

"We forget that every age has carried with it great loads of information, most of it false or tautological, yet deemed indispensable at the time."
—Jacques Barzun

Peer Pressure, Confessionalism and the Corruption of Judgment: Why Theologians Can't Think Straight

I. Peer Pressure: The Unacknowledged Legislation of Theology

Some things we never outgrow: a passion for deep-dish pizza, a quiet love for the mountains of Colorado, and our boyhood addiction to baseball. Unlike these things, however, some of the things that remain with us are not so unremittingly pleasant or beneficial. (Not that being a Phillies fan has been unremittingly pleasant or done me much good.) Peer pressure, for example, is not merely an adolescent phenomenon. Few of us, if any, ever outgrow it. Theologians and their students, pastors and their congregations, all are subject to its subtle, but relentless, influences.1

If you have never considered it before, consider it now. The demand characteristics of the theological classroom exert psychological, academic, and social pressure on students to conform to the viewpoint espoused by their instructors. Very few students would submit the same research paper to Professor A, if he were teaching Systematic Theology, that they would to Professor B, if she were teaching it. Their research topics likely would change; the conclusions they reached likely would change; the language in which their conclusions were presented likely would change; and the methods whereby those conclusions were arrived at likely would change. By this I do not mean to say that such a student is merely contextualizing his theology — he is not. He is changing it, at least on the surface. He does so because he is aware of his instructor's beliefs, passions, methods, and idiosyncrasies, and (perhaps knowingly, perhaps not) alters his efforts and conclusions accordingly. Pragmatically, he is no fool. Intellectually, the case is different.

If memory serves, and if personal experience is a useful guide on this point, I dare say that many professors' objectivity skills are seriously defective. They seem never to have learned to distinguish between ideas they dissent from, on the one hand, and faulty or fallacious ideas, on the other. Only the foolish, the arrogant, or the unteachable assume no difference exists between the two. Such "teachers" have failed to come to grips with the possible (perhaps probable) divergence existing between the positions they themselves hold and the truth. In short, they lack perceptivity and humility. Or, to turn it around, they seem never to have learned to distinguish between good thought and their own thoughts. That failure, because it inevitably leads to inflated grades for the theological conformists in their classrooms and to deflated grades for all others, serves only to extend the professor's own intellectual thralldom onto his students. Those students are justifiably wary both of asking new questions and of answering the old ones in a new (and perhaps better) way. Thus, while the theological party line prospers, theological progress and true education flounder. And more's the pity. Professors ought to be scrupulously honest, not perpetrators of pedagogically insidious pressures that prevent or pervert real learning or discovery. In that light, Jaroslav Pelikan was exactly right:

“Few tyrannies are more insidious than that of a teacher who is interested in disciples rather than pupils, who seeks to be imitated rather than transcended, and who is so sure of the correctness of his ideas that he can evaluate all his students on the basis of their obedience to his opinions rather than on the basis of their judgment and maturity. The history of Christian theology has not lacked for such teachers, who have compounded the tyranny by identifying their notions with the word of God and thus equating their authority with the sovereignty of God...no intellectual community can afford to relent in its vigil against the tyranny of the pedagogue.”2

To forestall this classroom travesty, a theology instructor must be "prepared to give the highest marks to the telling, felicitous and well-documented exposition of views he dissents from or even abominates."3

The academic study of theology should have the effect of opening the mind to truth and of gaining skills in recognizing and acquiring it. Theological study should illuminate the student by purging the student of unjustifiable prejudices and of ideas received uncritically. We do not teach, study, or publish in order merely to confirm our theological prejudices, but to expose them to scrutiny and, if exposed as fallacious, to reject them and to find a more suitable set of ideas. We must remember that the enemy is not merely error and our adherence to it, it is also truth held for all the wrong reasons (or for no reason whatsoever) and arrived at all the wrong ways. Teachers who have not learned that have not yet learned to learn; nor can they teach their students to learn.

Put differently, Christian scholarship has an obligation to truth, that is, to God. Only by the careful pursuit and acquisition of truth can we begin to execute our calling faithfully and effectively. Theologians and their students must shun the naive ferocity of those who hold to opinions that cannot stand up to careful scrutiny. Do not mistake their vicious passion for intellectual virtue or courage. It is not. It is the anguished outrage of those who have been unfaithful to their commission as apostles for truth, a commission that requires fidelity to things as they are, not to things as we would like them to be. Like Nero, those theologians spend their time fiddling with the evidence while the real world, and its questions and concerns, burns down around them. But, they themselves do not worry because they believe their asbestos dogmatism will protect them, even if it does not protect the world. In truth, however, it will protect neither. That is because Christian theologizing is, or ought to be, a "reality game." The morality of scholarship demands a willingness to face the truth, even when it says that some of our most cherished beliefs are raw fiction. Without courage to face the truth and the freedom to do so, neither Christian scholars nor the students they instruct will ever stand in the vanguard of academic pursuit. They lack the intellectual virtue and wherewithal to do so.

But, the pressure now existing in some theological classrooms makes any very positive outcome unlikely. Nor is the situation even as conducive to education as I have painted it. Many other pressures are exerted equally as apt to undermine effective theological navigation. Students, for example, are motivated not only by fear of failure or grade deflation to adopt their teacher's views, they are also under an even more subtle pressure (because it is a more pleasant one) to adopt uncritically the views of a professor they like or respect, for no other reason than they are his. Popularity and affection pave the way for indoctrination at least as effectively as the unarticulated threat of failure.

Popularity, of course, is a two-edged sword. It cuts both students and teachers. Most teachers are not above saying and believing what will make them popular with students — and Deans. Perhaps such professors are unaware of their intellectual capitulation; perhaps they are not. My impression, however, is that the practice of pragmatic accommodation is far more widespread than its recognition. Nor is the pressure exerted on theological instructors in this fashion either subtle or weak. It often is quite powerful. It often is quite overt.

Theological and administrative power is like most other sorts of power: it can be, and often is, misused. The Deans who exert this pressure, and who often are responsible for the hiring of new faculty, are themselves under pressure. They are susceptible to the exertions of the faculty already on board and to the exertions of the Board of Governors (and they, in many cases, are the ones who ratify the statements of faith4). In that light, theological students ought to realize this about their professors: they were not born with the jobs they now have; they had to get them. All too often that getting was the result of an intellectually dangerous process whereby the Dean who hired the new faculty member was struggling to keep his superiors happy, as well as to keep his view of God and the world intact and to spread it, if possible, by means of his faculty. This, of course, is not hard to do, for he will find no shortage of "anxious young instructors who sniff the air to find which way the wind is blowing and nervously nuzzle up to the power centers."5 These erudite sniffers are nervous because they know the power and pervasive presence of theological bigotry. They know that unless they dot their "i"s and cross their "t"s just the right way, they will never work. Thus, the economic pressures of supporting a wife and family, and of paying off seminary and graduate school tuition debts, intensifies the pressure upon them for theological conformity. They begin to ask themselves if, after all, there might not be some way to sign a statement of faith that, were there no pressure to do so, they would find at least partially objectionable. This usually is done (I am not making this up. I've seen it and heard it.) by employing a hermeneutic for reading statements of faith they would properly castigate should their students employ it for reading the Bible. That method permits them to see if the words of the doctrinal statement can be stretched far enough to accommodate their own private preexisting beliefs (without anyone in authority knowing it). The surprising outcome of this humiliating theological prostitution is that it continues to be perpetrated in the classroom by that same (now employed) theologian. He, in effect, forces his students through the same process he endured. Rather than teaching his young charges the virtue of intellectual honesty and the need to combat nonsense in all its forms, he merely imposes upon them the same pressures under which he crumbled. In truth, he can do nothing else. You can take no one any further than you yourself have travelled, and this theologian seems never to have learned how to pursue truth or how to live it. Sadly, teachers reproduce after their own kind, and his kind have failed in the primary activity of discovering truth — the very thing to which he committed himself when he chose an academic career.

I say this because I know of no better way to guard budding theologians from the ravages of intellectual pressure than to warn them that they must not assume uncritically that their theology professors are theologians, not if being a theologian means knowing how to theologize, and not if knowing how to theologize means knowing how to find truth and how to live it.

Professors and systems like those I have described above have transformed institutions of higher education into institutions of higher indoctrination. In that light, some "theologians'" ideas are not ideas at all; they are merely the unexamined recitation of statements and viewpoints they received at the hands of those who indoctrinated them, or else the intellectual capitulations and doctrinal sleight of hand they had to perform in order to get a job. But real theologizing is more than accumulating quotations and opinions from the thinkers in one's own tradition, more than indoctrination, and more than mental gymnastics. Theologizing is faith and understanding coming to grips with reality in order to produce a Christian mind (and character) that knows the truth about things, and, because it knows the truth about things, is liberated from the shackles of error and sham. Seekers of truth are not parrots who mimic other people’s words; they are pioneers who are equipped to find truth, and who do find it, wherever it can be found.6

The sad fact remains, however, that young theologians are right to believe that if they write with candor, imagination, or creativity about certain theological realities many doors will close to them. They will not be able to make a living. They will not be allowed to participate in the life and activities of various important institutions and professional societies. Participation in new research and in publication programs will be denied them. Influential people will be alienated, and the opinion that a particular young theologian is unsound and unsafe will be disseminated quickly, widely, and slanderously — all under the pretense that evangelical scholarship is objective, reflective, and teachable. Pressure is exerted either to accommodate (i.e., to dissemble) or to leave: "We'll have none of that kind of thinking around here!" they are told. Those who agree, and those who can and do accommodate, become the teachers of the next generation; and they perpetuate this sinister tyranny on those who follow. Those who do not accommodate are excluded and are believed to be the enemy. The danger to truth and to integrity can hardly be greater. In theology, as in politics, there are dictatorships it is our sacred duty to oppose, if not overthrow.

We must not succumb to the temptation to treat theological truth as our own school's private property, something we dispense in our classrooms along with our syllabi and lecture notes. But that is exactly what happens in a large number of theological classrooms all across the nation. And, if you are a theological student, this might be happening to you (even now, as you read this book). Think about it: different syllabi, different lecture notes, different theologies all are being distributed with equal confidence to students everywhere, and those students readily and uncritically accept them as truth, when it must be the case that on some very significant issues most of them are dead wrong. Truth, I am convinced, is one thing, and not many others. Where these theologies differ, they cannot all be true. Luckily for us, of course, the other guy's views that are wrong. It just distresses me that he thinks that about us. Won't he ever learn?

Won't you?

II. Pilgrim Theology and Confessionalism

To assume that we already have most of the important theological answers is intellectually hazardous. We may not even have most of the important theological questions. Nor should we blithely assume that all that is yet to be disclosed or discovered will be either consistent with what we now believe or else wrong. But, that is precisely the effect produced by our misuse of statements of faith. If you are a Fortress Theologian and not a Pilgrim Theologian, you will treat your tradition's confession as if it were the wall or boundary around truth: whatever lies outside the walls, or whatever cannot be smuggled somehow into the castle precincts must be, for that very reason, untrue. The problem here is not that theologians are confessional, but that they treat their confessions as if they were impregnable and unassailable truth rather than well-established, but still provisional, working hypotheses for further theologizing. The difference here is between "confessional" and "confessionalism." The former is an academic virtue, the latter is not. Confessions of faith are a means of identification; they state what it is we believe and they identify us as a cohesive group. Of course we think that what we believe is true, otherwise we would not believe it. But, our confessions should not be construed either as absolute truth or as absolutely true. They probably contain, like many other humanly devised statements on difficult subjects, an admixture of truth and error. Precisely because we are so intensely committed to our beliefs, and precisely because we perceive the consequences of believing and disbelieving in our way to be so momentous, we, of all people, might be the least able to see if, or where, our confessions are faulty. This inability to acknowledge the blindspots in one’s own theology is not a problem reserved only for theologians of other traditions. That problem, sad to say, we all share. While confessional theology cannot, indeed should not, be banished, it should be exercised with humility and teachableness. We are the hunters of truth, after all, not merely its custodians.

For a useful Pilgrim Theology, wisdom dictates that we must not prescribe, beforehand, the direction the path of knowledge will take. After all, something might conceivably contradict our theology without contradicting Christianity. It is insupportably arrogant to assume the two are identical. My thoughts about God are not to be confused with God. Neither are yours. Remember, the facts themselves might contradict your understanding of the facts; they will not contradict the God of all facthood.

How else can a theologian grow except by making sure his commitment to his confessional tradition does not close the door to further knowledge? The theologian must remain in a position to determine if some of the discoveries he has made need to be unmade; and he must be willing to do so if that is what truth demands. The scholar who can do that is indeed a scholar because he is still a true learner. Therefore, if your most precious mental reconstructions of reality are overturned, if your intellectual house of cards collapses into rubble all around you, rejoice and be exceedingly glad, for you have been mugged by truth. As a theologian, nothing better can happen to you. That undeception, though momentarily grievous, is a necessary rite of passage. By it you have been changed by reality. So were all the greatest theologians before you.

Thus, to be a Pilgrim Theologian, one who is a path finder and a pioneer, you must permeate all your theological endeavors with scholarly virtue. The first condition of scholarship of any kind is an unqualified respect for evidence. That evidence, at this moment, tells us that we ought to maintain an appropriate humility about our alleged familiarity with the Divine Mind and to moderate our certitude accordingly. Until we do, we probably cannot travel any further. Our cherished views, even those we ostensibly derive from Scripture, must not be advanced in such a way as to preclude an increase in knowledge. We periodically must subject our theological procedures and conclusions to the refining fires of fresh analysis and criticism. Any Christian scholar or Christian school not willing or not able to do so is unworthy of the name. As Helmut Thielicke declared, "I detest the defeatism of the "orthodoxy" which fortifies itself in the closet of seemingly unshakeable but unrealistic formulas. I am proud of the freedom of a Christian who may dare heresy to gain the truth. The freedom to which the gospel calls us also includes the freedom of bold and venturesome thought. God will not despair of us when we err."7 Thus, while academic freedom has its dangers, none loom so large as its abandonment. Although Martin Luther thought Copernicus a fool, a judgment Luther based on his own pious, well-intentioned, but mistaken, reading of the Bible, Copernicus, not Luther, undeceived us.8

But, this does not mean that the truth ever changes, only that our understanding of it can change and perhaps should. Our statements of faith should be open to examination and to revision. We who subscribe to them should be teachable (though never gullible). Who knows how many Copernican revolutions still await us? We must be sure to allow ourselves the wisdom and vantage point necessary to welcome them when they come, not merely to react in disgust or horror because they upset a whole cart load of ideas that, while they are dear to us, are (like Luther's) flatly wrong. We must reject any attitude or approach that renders our beliefs unfalsifiable in the future. After all, the final chapter on Christian intellection has not been written, and we must not allow ourselves to close the book of knowledge before it is. Premature closure is a mental vice. Repent of, and arm yourself against, sins of the intellect.

III. Pilgrim Procedure: Confessionalism and the Pursuit of Truth

So much for warnings and negation. I now must explain the Pilgrim Theologian's rules for handling and implementing statements of faith and theological confessions properly. I mention but three.

A) The Monkey-momma Rule

Statements of faith should be used the way baby monkeys use their mothers: as a base from which to explore. Whether it stretches out its right hand to grab a banana, a branch, a leaf, or even another monkey, the baby monkey clings to its mother with its left. New items are brought back to the safety of mother for investigation, use, and enjoyment. That is how monkeys learn and grow. Eventually, monkeys leave their mothers, and well they should. Any monkey that clings to its mother's neck its whole life is a freakish and unnatural example of arrested development. In the same way, any theologian who has not, or does not, outgrow at least some aspects of his statement of faith (perhaps even major aspects of it) is perhaps languishing in a state of arrested development. No one hits upon the whole truth and nothing but the truth on the very first try. Thus, you must use your statement of faith as a vehicle for further exploration and understanding, and not simply as a way to reconfirm how great your "mother" is. Confessional statements are an excellent point of departure for learning; they are not its limits. You must use your statement of faith as a short summary of the present state of your tradition's theological understanding or knowledge, not as an unscaleable wall around doctrinal truth, or as an indication that whatever lie within its precincts is not to be questioned and cannot be overturned.

B) The Courage and Candor Rule

If an institutionally favored position is seen to be a minority viewpoint when it is set against the backdrop of the entire theological endeavor of modern scholarship (or indeed against the backdrop of modern culture at large), a competent theologian will acknowledge that fact to his students and give good reasons both as to why he believes as he does and why others do not. In doing the latter, he should never indulge in adhominem attacks, as if all dissenters were benighted, prejudiced, or willfully blind. Nor should he use theological dissenters as evidence that "the natural man cannot understand spiritual things because they are foolishness to him." After all, some things seem foolish simply because they are. Not all of those (perhaps not even many of those) who dissent from an institutionally favored belief are uneducated, unreasonable, or unfair. They might, in fact, be quite amiable and quite brilliant. Students should know that about the enemy. Students should learn to treat theological dissenters with respect, not with pity or disdain. They should learn from their instructors that humility, not arrogance, is the proper response to the undeniable existence of theological pluralism, and that one must not mistake narrow mindedness for single mindedness. As Allan Bloom has taught us,

"Freedom of the mind requires not only, or not even especially, the absence of legal constraints but the presence of alternative thoughts. The most successful tyranny is not the one that uses force to assure uniformity but the one that removes the awareness of other possibilities, that makes it seem inconceivable that other ways are viable, that removes the sense that there is an outside."9

Young theologians must be taught to study their opponent's ideas carefully so that they can feel the weight of the dissenting arguments and feel the force of their opponent's strongest punch. What cannot stand up to the best barrage of analytical dissent deserves to fall. When students are taught to study all sides of a case (and not simply to hear about them from a biased lecturer who never studied them first hand for himself), they actually increase the number of their teachers. Those who reject our views can be useful and insightful guides to our theology because they (perhaps) can see some things about it better than we ourselves can see. We ought to remember that he who knows only his own side of the case probably knows little even of that. An intensely parochial or theologically repressive atmosphere will obscure, perhaps even obliterate, the opportunity for fruitful theological investigation — a paradoxical situation in what is designed to be the very arena for advanced religious study. We need to capitalize on our theological diversity, not eliminate it by prior doctrinal fiat. These disagreements ought to be carried out in a spirit of honesty, not in inter-confessional sniping, committeeizing, or inquisitorial kangaroo courts. Without a spirit of teachable camaraderie nothing useful will be gained from these everlasting and acrimonious debates over issues we think are important but might not be.

Both by his academic methods and his life, a theologian should display the courage to let the chips fall where they may. The demands of truth and the good of his theological students (Those two things are the same.) should be always before him. In no other way will the theologian’s students learn the difference between Christian dogma and dogmatism. In no other way will they learn to learn. They must be encouraged to shake down their false gods and their intellectual idols and to winnow and to sift the impurities in their own beliefs and practices. Not to allow this is tantamount to irreligion.

Among the outsiders, our reputation for such sifting is very poor. While researching for my book on one of John Milton's theological heresies, I met (and later became friends with) Maurice Kelley, surely the best student of Milton's theology in our century. We had not spoken together for two minutes before Kelley asked me if I were a Christian. When I said I was, he replied that, in that case, he did not think I would be able to handle this issue fairly or properly. He said so because he had butted heads with Christian scholars for 40 years over this very point in Milton's theology, and they invariably proved to be careless and uncharitable. They were unwilling to recognize that Paradise Lost, perhaps our language's greatest religious poem, was the product of a heretical mind. And not only had they employed every academic subterfuge imaginable in their effort to rehabilitate Milton by winning him back for orthodoxy, but they had continued to abuse Kelley in private conversations and in print all the while. Justifiably, Kelley was skeptical. He had seen us in action and he was not impressed.10

We must not shun the truth or shrink from calling things by their real names.11 In theological scholarship, courage and candor are the definition of excellence.

C) The Precipitous Involvement Rule

This rule is named for what it tries to prevent: doing before you know what you are doing. To prevent this failure, you must move to the cutting edge of your academic discipline. Scholarship at that level requires keeping abreast of developments in your field, not simply "to see what those blasted infidels are up to now," but in order to become, and to remain, well-informed and properly aware of the latest ideas and insights in your academic area, from whatever quarter they emerge. For a teaching or publishing theologian, failure to achieve this widely informed level of competence is an arrogant dereliction of duty. Such "scholars" pose as teachers when they are not even students. Only the neophyte still believes that scholarship flourishes in confessional isolation. No matter how long they wait, those who enter the teaching and preaching arena only narrowly informed do so precipitously. Unless you are very lucky, you will not do well until you know well. Knowing, however, is the one thing a confession- bound teacher or preacher does not do. Precipitous theologians do not realize that the only choice a scholar has is between truth and rest. You cannot have both.

END NOTES

1 Those who object to calling the pressure that instructors exert on their students "peer" pressure because professor and students are not really equals (or peers) are, I believe, condemning themselves. Any teacher who is not a student of his students is, for that very reason, not really a teacher. Unless you are a learner, you will not be an instructor.

2 Jaroslav Pelikan, The Christian Intellectual (London: Collins, 1966), 126. As he further explains on the next page, "It is no tragedy for a teacher to be mistaken. It is a tragedy if he is so afraid of being mistaken that he refuses to take risks, or if he imagines that his offices [or his skills have] endowed him with infallibility." That this indoctrination rarely needs to be imposed and that many people actually welcome indoctrination is forcefully explained by Gilbert Highet, Man's Unconquerable Mind (New York: Columbia University Press, 1954), 57-59. What happens to those who, like the apostle Paul, resist this mindless indoctrination, Highet explains in the paragraphs that follow those just cited.

3 C. S. Lewis, An Experiment in Criticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1961), 86.

4 We must not confuse administrative power with true theological authority. Some seem to think that because they have the organizational power to generate an institutional statement of faith that they have the divine authority to do so and that dissent from their opinions therefore is dissent from God's. They have no such divine imprimatur.

5 Chad Walsh, The Literary Legacy of C. S. Lewis (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1979), 119.

6 An interesting example of this parrot phenomenon in evangelical circles is the tendency for some conservative publishing houses to reprint old theological works instead of commissioning new ones. Rather than being on the cutting edge of theological scholarship and investigation, rather than helping to extend the boundaries of knowledge, they are only looking for clean copies of old books that can be photographically reproduced (at little expense). Not that old books are bad. They are not. I own more than 5,000 books myself, almost every one of which is used or antiquarian. I love old books. But, judging from some publishers' lists, one would get the impression that evangelicals had learned nothing new since the last Puritan died.

7 Helmut Thielicke, African Diary: My Search for Understanding (Waco: Word, 1974), 171.

8 As Luther once said of Copernicus ("who wanted to prove that the earth moves and not the...sun"), "So it goes now. Whoever wants to be clever must agree with nothing others esteem. He must do something of his own. This is what this fellow does who wishes to turn the whole of astronomy upside down. Even in these things that are thrown into disorder I believe the Holy Scriptures, for Joshua commanded the sun to stand still and not the earth." Luther's Works (Vol. 54): Table Talk (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1967), 357-358. See also Karl Heim, Christian Faith and Natural Science (London: SCM, 1953), 13, who says that Luther characterized Copernicanism as “the over-witty notion of a Fool, who would fain turn topsy-turvy the whole Art of Astronomy.”

9 Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind: How Higher Education Has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today's Students (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987), 249.

10 I am pleased to report that he now thinks differently.

11 To do this properly, the language of scholarship should be that of articulate precision. We must be unafraid to show the world (and ourselves) what the truth is, and unwilling to claim a total victory when only half is to be had.

"...progress, that is, radical progress not just hardware improvements — progress involving change — does come about only when we question (and because we question) our fundamental assumptions."
—Owen Barfield

"...because he is intelligens the Christian, of all men, has to learn to discover with agonizing clarity what is conceivable by him about God."
—Karl Barth

date modified:
6 July 2006

Peers peering