While brewing a second cup of coffee to keep alert in my Greek readings this morning, I found Chris Spinks’ post “Avoid a PhD?” His reflections were stimulated by Anthony LeDonne’s most recent attempt to dissuade prospective PhD candidates from pursuing their vocational dreams (LeDonne offers such discouragement on a monthly basis).

The gist of the matter is that those of us in the throes of doctoral work are loading ourselves with ungodly gobs of debt to be qualified for jobs that simply do not exist. Universities are raising tuition and increasing enrollment, but theology and religious studies professors are among the least paid across all disciplines. More and more academic institutions are taking advantage of “adjunct” professors who teach courses for very modest stipends and for whom the institutions provide nothing in terms of healthcare or other benefits.

Spinks (aptly) summarizes the advice of one commenter on LeDonne’s post in this way: “If you are not independently wealthy, or if you don’t have the pedigree to get an advanced degree in the humanities paid for, then please leave these degrees to those who can afford them.” But Spinks is concerned about the fallout, that “advanced degrees in the humanities become attainable only by the privileged.” He goes on to suggest that “if these less fortunate folks avoid all of this [financial/vocational] mess (not an unwise decision, I’ll grant), we will end up with privileged people educating other privileged people. That would be a shame.”

I am certainly among the (partially insane) unprivileged who are taking on hordes of debt to study the Bible at the doctoral level (though, admittedly, just the fact that I qualify for a student loan plan and can even dream about a PhD evidences a hefty degree of privilege). To be honest, I would issue the same advice as LeDonne, while hoping with Spinks that some less-than-privileged folks will end up teaching Scripture and theology in our seminaries and Religion Departments. I could never recommend this vocational path to anyone without massive financial backing—my regrets are rather acute right now; but again, theology should not be the domain only of the financially backed.

Though I see no solution to the debt-problem, here is one silver lining that may well be at play: not finding a job in the academy, some Christians may be redirected from the academic lectern to the ecclesial pulpit. Perhaps the job market and the wider culture’s disinterest in theology will have the effect of proliferating pastor-theologians throughout the church.

Obviously there are drawbacks here. For one, ministry is a calling and the pastoral office is not well-served if filled by a disgruntled academic whose dreams in the academy have been dashed by an economic recession. Secondly, the sort of training one gets as a PhD candidate is not necessarily conducive for promoting the sort of theological and biblical acuity required in ministerial labors.

But “calling” is often a matter of redirection, isn’t it? What some people might retrospectively call “divine calling,” might be understood at first as a “divine cornering or redirecting!” Saul of Tarsus, for instance, never envisioned how God would put his intensive academic training to use. His vocation as an apostle arose out of the ashes of a Christ-exploded vocational dream.

As for the sort of academic training involved in the PhD… well, a lot of it is simply unhelpful in a church context, sadly. But the greatest benefit of doctoral work in theology and Bible may well be the skill of reading hard texts and the discipline of thinking about them with nuance and care. And we could certainly use the fruit of those skills and disciplines in our pulpits today.

Theoretically, Christians working on PhDs are already plying their craft to the glory of God and for the benefit of the church. When the doors of the ivory towers are barred shut during the job hunt, will they turn to pulpits and pews?

That begs another question: will the pews and chapel doors be open to academically trained theologians and Bible scholars?

Hmmm…

I have been writing on the vocational idea of the “pastor-theologian.”  The recent series of posts was inspired by Doug Sweeney’s article at the Gospel Coalition, whose “call and agenda” should be received with both excitement and urgency.

Related to these thoughts, I recommend this post by Mark Stevens who is studying Eugene Peterson’s model of a “pastoral theologian.”  Also, here is an interview co-blogger Joel Busby and I did with Jason Byassee on “the tension between the hyphen of pastor-theologian” when we heard he was leaving Duke Divinity School to serve as a Methodist pastor in Boone, NC.  That interview is easily one of my top five favorite posts here at Hopeful Realism.

Changing the Blog’s Tagline

In the midst of my recent writing, thinking, and praying about the pastor-theologian model, I realized I needed to change the tagline of my blog.  The current one above is a temporary replacement of the previous, “Writing and Thinking as Cynic-Saints and Pastor-Theologians.”  I just felt so pretentious identifying myself with the latter (a presumption which I wrestled with openly in the “About the Blog” page).   Currently, I serve in no ministerial post, so “pastor” is not appropriate for the moment.  And as a PhD candidate, I am realizing more and more how unworthy of the title “theologian” I am!

Hence, the new tag line.  A benefit to the medium of a blog is its changeability, right?

Interacting with Gerald with SAET

Another benefit is the opportunity for discussion.

I was so pleased that Gerald Heistand (Exec Director of SAET and Senior Associate Pastor of Calvary Memorial Church in Oak Park, IL) read and replied to the last post.  I felt that his comments and the reply I started to submit were worthy of a post to themselves.  Gerald rightfully reaffirms his idea of an “ecclesial theologian” (see his paper here for more), and responding to him gives me a chance to let readers know of my motivations in HOW I have been writing on the “pastor-theologian” model.  I confess: there has been a strategy underway… but I hope a helpful one.

Gerald:

Me:

Gerald!  Thanks so much for the reply.  And yes, I think we are both shooting for the same target.  I have been strategically approaching the issue by intentionally trying to think of the pastor-theologian model from a varying range of angles, specifically from perspectives that would view that vocational calling as threatening (in the case of churches who may have legitimate—or even illegitimate!—suspicions toward the academy) or as disparaging (in the case of fine pastors I know who feel repeatedly belittled by higher brow intellectuals while they conduct their labors in the daily grind).  I am trying to craft my public thoughts on the pastor-theologian “from below,” I guess, in hopes of somehow increasing the receptivity (and sharpening the perception) of the pastor-theologian model.

You are right that I have been posting mainly on the pastor-theologian as a “local theologian” (to use your helpful term).  But I fully endorse your call for an “ecclesial theologian” who writes and produces the highest quality of scholarship for the wider church from the social location of the local church.  Absolutely and amen.  What you all are doing with SAET has helped broaden my own vocational imagination.  Those of us who sense a call to ministry along with a call to academic work see an inevitable fork in the road between those two institutional/social settings of church and academy.  You are helping us recognize that we bear some responsibility for making that fork less divergent than it currently is!  Bravo.

As you suggest, many doctoral students (like myself, of course) must indeed consider with great care your model of the ecclesial theologian, which will hopefully help us reconceive the pastorate as a setting for intense theological work.  It may well be divine providence that an increased degree of interest in rigorous theological study is coinciding with a situation in which the number of academic posts out there has constricted!

With thanks,

~Andy

[This is the third post in an ongoing discussion on the Pastor-Theologian in response to Douglas Sweeney's article, "A Call and Agenda for Pastor-Theologians."]

My friend Gerald Hiestand has made available an excellent paper  on the pastor-theologian.  I know of no one more devoted to articulating this vocational vision for my generation.  If you are grasped by the ongoing conversation, check it out.  It is very, very good.

His piece stirred a couple of questions for me:

What type of “theology” does the pastor-theologian produce? 

And…

How should the discipline of theology change when conducted within the church rather than the academy?

Central to the discuss about the pastor-scholar / pastor-theologian is the institutional gash between academy and church, a chasm freighted with a vast and complicated series of historical developments and visually depicted as reforged in some sense by that little hyphen in the vocational terms at hand.

(I just love that hyphen).

Now that the rigorous intellectual engagement with theology and Scripture seems to have shifted more toward the academy, Gerald makes this chilling observation:

“…not only has the church become theologically anemic, but theology itself has become, in many instances, ecclesially anemic.”

Wow.

The church-academy divide has resulted in a pastoral ministry that is more practical than theological—in other words, pastors are more focused on administration, counseling, evangelism, community development, hospital visitation than they are focused on studying and writing theology.

But are not those practical pastoral tasks articulations of theology?  If the church recovers its theological vocation, should the discipline of theology be most properly embodied in study and in writing?

The Pastoral Epistles (1, 2 Timothy and Titus) are perhaps the most sensible collection of New Testament texts to turn to for guidance on for direction on ecclesial leadership.  Within these three letters “doctrine” is of prominent significance.  But this doctrine is to be articulated not only through preaching and teaching but also through praxis.  Doctine is practically expressed.  When Paul (okay, I know this is contested, but let’s just assume the Apostle is indeed the author) writes against that which is “contrary to sound doctrine” he has produced not a series of theological propositions or statements but a list of lifestyle choices (1 Tim 1:8-11).  Theology—the crafting, assessing, and working out of doctrine—is expressed in ethical and practical terms as well as in writings and teachings.

In Titus, we are encouraged to “adorn the doctrine of God” (2:10).  This clothing of ourselves in theological garb (what a great image!) means treating each other respectfully and lovingly (see the wider context, 2:1-10).  The church’s theology is to be expressed relationally and ethically, as well as homiletically and textually.

The discipline of theology within the academy is ultimately textual; that is, academic theologians are working with texts and producing texts.  You are not regarded a professional theologian in the academy if you are not publishing (the rite of passage for the PhD is a publishable thesis or dissertation).

The call for pastor-theologians is a call for theology to become once again moored within the harbor of the church.  But surely the endeavor will be sabotaged if the church recovers a robust interest in rigorous theology but allows the (secular) academy to define the discipline.  Theology published is one of the primary measures of the discipline as plied in the academy.  Theology adorned (lived and practiced) is one of the primary measures of the discipline as plied in the church.

This is not to say that writing and publication are theological projects to be viewed with suspicion—we know the image of adorning doctrine because we read it in a canonically published text!  I am contending, rather, that as the church seeks to think as rigorously about theology as academic theologians, then it will need to redefine theology as a discipline, which will include a broader imagination as to how theology is articulated.  Visiting the sick in the hospital and reading Scripture at a graveside are powerful demonstrations that “he has borne our griefs and carried our sorrows’ (Isa 53:3).  Taking the time to meet with a couple in a disintegrating marriage embodies the reality that God is a “wonderful counselor” (Isa 9:6) and that Jesus is maritally bound to His people.  These theological articulations may bear much greater fruit over a lifetime and beyond the parish than even a published work.

So… the theology of the pastor-theologian: doctrine published?  Sometimes.  Doctrine adorned?  Always.

This should come as an encouragement to those pastors who are not so inclined to write.

It should also comes as a tremendous challenge….

Articulating robust theology through writing may not be included within our pastoral calling, but the articulation of robust theology is indispensable.  For our “practical” labors to be expressions of expansive, rich theology, however, they must be sourced in a rigorous life of studied fixation on the Gospel and the God the Gospel announces.

[To be clear, I am not writing against anything in Gerald's essay.  He is calling for "ecclesial theologians" who write theology out of the "steady rhythm" (p. 10) of dealing with the dire needs of the flock.  He is well aware that many pastors will not have the gifts or inclinations to write publishable theology.  Much of what I am saying in this post applies to the model of the pastor-theologian as "local theologian," as he defines it in his paper.]

[This post follows another inspired by an article at Gospel Coalition by Douglas Sweeney.]

Pastor, or Pastor-Theologian? 

A number of the most helpful books on the pastor’s life and work that have weighed in my hands have been written by Eugene Peterson.  I recently finished his memoir which recast the wisdom and insight I have learned from books like Under the Unpredictable Plant or The Contemplative Pastor into a narrative structure.  Roughly three decades of service in a local parish, another handful of years devoted to serving as theologian at Regent College, a decade and more devoted to translating the Bible from its original languages into the lingua franca of the parish and workplace alike—few ministers embody the vocational vision of the pastor-theologian than Peterson.

Yet his memoir is entitled The Pastor [1], not The Pastor-Theologian or The Pastor-Scholar.

In the previous post, I asked if aspiring to work as a “pastor-theologian” rather than as your run-of-the-mill “pastor” was pretentious.  My motivation in framing the question this way is to express a degree of sensitivity to the church-academy divide that haunts many a heart and many a pew.  The university is a threatening institution for a large number of believers when it comes to matters of faith; seminaries, divinity schools and Christian colleges/universities are often tainted by their academic associations and viewed with some suspicion.  The hyphenation between “pastor” and “theologian” can seem counter-intuitive.

But I believe mightily in the vocational role of the pastor-theologian.  The question for this post is whether or not we should use the hyphenated term or simply re-adjust and reform the vocational identity of “pastor.”

That is what I believe Peterson is doing in his memoir.

He acknowledges that you cannot flip to such and such a chapter in the New Testament to learn who a “pastor” is and what a “pastor” does.  Though a range of ecclesial positions and leadership principles are certainly featured in the New Testament (the Pastoral Epistles particularly come to mind) our contemporary post of “pastor,” though certainly not novel, is a vocation that developed after and in the wake of Scripture’s prescriptions for and descriptions of church heirarchies.

Peterson recounts angst and frustration over the lack of resources for defining and guiding his work as a pastor.  A momentous breakthrough seemed to occur when he and a company of other local pastors decided to stop letting non-pastors tell them how to ply their craft.  They met regularly year after year (that “company” is still meeting, as I understand it) to sort out the pastoral vocation together (pp 130-60).

Another breakthrough occurred in a church business meeting of sorts when Peterson tendered his resignation.  When pressed as to why, he offered an impromptu speech which encapsulated his vision of the pastoral identity (pp. 277-282).  The church decided they were quite pleased with that pastoral model and asked him to stay on and put it into practice.  And so he was freed to pursue the path of a “contemplative pastor” as opposed to the “competitive pastor,” a model getting more press at the time—and perhaps even now (p. 214).

The “competitive pastor” seems much more pretentious than Peterson’s model of the “contemplative pastor.”  The former employs an impressive skillset and perhaps also a charismatic personality to perform pastoral wonders.  The latter must acknowledge that those “competitive skills and achievements [are] virtually worthless.  Worse than worthless: actively destructive” (p. 208).

Distinguishing Pastor from Pastor-Theologian

But most pastors are not going to write 30 or so books and translate the entire Bible.

Peterson’s memoir is not just a narrative about his life.  It is an untidy, reflective re-forging and re-casting of the vocational identity of the pastor.  But his “contemplative” model is not a cookie-cutter mold.  Clearly, he challenges the culturally-mandated formulations of the pastoral way of working and being, but he is not urging all pastors to conform to a well-honed image of his own example.

Not all pastors are inclined to read poetry and Barth, Melville and Dostoyevsky.

So in this reworked vision of the “pastor,” should all pastors really be pastor-theologians?

I think the notion of “contemplative pastor” should be universally embraced for ministers.  But in this spacious vocational identity there exists also the notion of a “(contemplative) pastor-theologian” for whom the daunting labors of theological study hold an even greater urgency (I say “an even greater” because theology must be of rigorous urgency for any pastor, in my view).  Writing certainly seems to be a distinctive mark as well (though one of the most brilliant, theologically-inclined pastors I know reads more commentaries than I do as a NT doctoral student but simply dislikes writing).

Do these distinctive inclinations of pastor-theologians render them more or less helpful in the parish?  Are churches willing to take on an “unbusy pastor” (p. 277), a contemplative pastor, a contemplative pastor-theologian?

Re-forging the pastoral vocation requires more than pastors figuring out who they are and what they do.  It means helping churches understand, appreciate, and endorse the contemplative model.  And the pastors need to be learning from the churches themselves about their roles—as Peterson found when he once tried to resign, the flock may already know the role of the shepherd better than the shepherd.

[1] Eugene H. Peterson, The Pastor: A Memoir (New York: HarperOne, 2012).

(Hodges Chapel, Beeson Divinity School)

As soon as I read Douglas Sweeney’s article, “A Call and Agenda for Pastor-Theologians,” I shared it on Facebook wall with the comment:

“Why I am doing a PhD.”

What I meant is that the vocational vision of the “pastor-theologian” is one of the most compelling motivations for my current endeavors as a doctoral student in biblical studies.  The logistical, emotional and financial upheaval of the doctorate should certainly have some reasonable sort of grounding, and the sense of calling to serve in some way as a “pastor-theologian” is one of the footings for my new life in England at Durham University.

But I am not exactly sure what a pastor-theologian is.

I am grateful to have been able to interact with Sweeney and handful of other folks with Society for the Advancement of Ecclesial Theology (or “SAET”; see this article by their Executive Director, Gerald Hiestand).  SAET is are deeply invested in re-presenting the vocational vision of 1) a theologian who is intractably bound not only to the church at large but to a localized parish, and of 2) a pastor whose theological competence is commensurate with those whose working context is a campus and a classroom as opposed to a parish and a sanctuary.  And much of the conversation concerns how these aforementioned redefinitions of “pastor” and “theologian” can be conjoined into one office.

Perhaps an even bigger task than clarifying the pastor-theologian’s vocational identity is explaining why such a vocation is relevant for the church—why do we need one of these pastor-theologians or whatever they are behind our pulpit and in our pastorium?  Here is how Sweeney alerts us to the need for the pastor-theologian:

There have never been this many Christians around the world, yet few know much about God, the actual contents of the Bible, or the ways in which God’s people have interpreted and applied the Bible historically. Many Americans, at least, still go to church and read the Bible–as their social lives permit. Even more in the Global South do so with fervency and zeal. Still, despite our apparent esteem for the Bible’s status and authority, few believers know as much about its contents as they do about Hollywood movies, popular music, or athletics.

As far as how the pastor-theologian plies the craft, and what exactly that craft is, and how church and academy serve as dual domains for forming the craft, Sweeney avoids definitive answers and instead offers 15 “theses” to pique interest and stir up some constructive dialogue.  I appreciate the approach.

What I want to address in this post is a concern that showed up in the comment streams.  Some readers seemed to feel as though the model Sweeney is suggesting is that of a high profile intellectual (the photo of John Piper and Don Carson perhaps contributed to this interpretation more than Sweeney’s words; the photo is understandable, however, since the two have written on the issue together).

A certain degree of elitism is evoked by the perception that a pastor-theologian might be a high profile intellectual.  In all honesty, I feel extremely pretentious even to write about my interest in serving as a “pastor-theologian” as opposed to a “pastor” or a “theologian/professor.”

I can imagine the questions at a pastors’ conference:

“Oh, so you are one of those ‘pastor-theologian” -types, eh?  Did you get a special name tag? Are you are staying at the nicer hotel up the road?  Is there a ‘green room’ for you and your kind?  Shouldn’t you be at the pastor-THEOLOGIAN conference next month at the more posh hotel where they serve sherry instead of soda and let you smoke pipes?”

(Or the questions at the next academic conference:”Oh, so I hear you are not just a scholar, but a pastor-scholar? Does that put you on a faster tenure track?  How do you pastor the students you have to fail for inadequate work?  Does this mean you are better at serving as a department head, since you have all these shepherding gifts?”).

The vocational idea of a pastor-theologian may seem elitist: you have your run of the mill pastors, but then you have the Special Forces militia, the few and the proud, the P-T unit.  There are Buicks and there are Mercedes, pastors and pastor-theologians….

But sort of pretentiousness that comes with the expansive (excessive, some might suggest) educational investments of a pastor-theologian would have to be entirely squashed.  Integral to the vocational identity of a pastor-theologian will have to be a palpable and conscientious humility.  The elitism of higher education (though often unfairly caricatured, the stereotyping sometimes does fit) perpetuates this cyclic bifurcation between church and academy (see my chapter, “Anti-Intellectualism” in Faith Without Illusions).  Pretentiousness will sabotage the vocation of pastor-theologian from the onset.

I heard a sermon not long ago by an exceptionally bright doctoral student.  It was rich, deep, solid, biblical….

…and almost incomprehensible.

Is high-falutin’ verbiage in the pulpit par for the course for a pastor-theologian?  (Of course, I should acknowledge, that, in terms of high-falutin’ verbiage, I myself just used the words “aforementioned,” “bifurcation” and “verbiage” and even referenced a book I’ve written.  Hmmm.)

If the comments after a pastor-theologian’s sermon are “wow, that preacher is sure smart” rather than, “wow, our God is so mysterious and loving and glorious,” then there is a devastating problem.

But “high profile,” “pretentious,” and “pedantic” (that is, incomprehensible to normal folks) need not characterize the pastor-theologian… right?  As far as “high profile” goes, it is quite likely that a pastor who “leads theologically” (I love Sweeney’s way of putting it), may not draw such massive numbers into his/her local congregation.  A rather low profile on a theologically ambivalent ecclesial landscape might actually be more realistic!

And the reason “pretentious” and “pedantic” must be avoided is that these terms capture the church’s impression of the academy.  The anti-intellectualism many of us bemoan in the church has reasonable foundations, and to adopt any sort of academic elitism will only distance the church more from the great resources the academy can legitimately offer.

So, I am affirming Sweeney’s wisdom and answering his call for dialogue.  For this post, the questions I am adding to the conversation are these: is the model of a pastor-theologian intrinsically pretentious?  And if not, how can pastor-theologians avoid operating out of the elitist tendencies of their intense academic training?  

Coming up:

Part 2: How does Eugene Peterson’s model of a “Contemplative Pastor” compare with that of the “Pastor-Theologian”?  Should we scratch the title “pastor-theologian” or “pastor-scholar” and simply redefine the model of “pastor” by our contemplative, theological labors?

Part 3: Is the Pastor-Theologian a vocational model that expects too many gifts from just one member of the body of Christ?  Should every pastor be able to write and think with the sharpest of minds in the Christian theological tradition?  Can the office of pastor-theologian be fulfilled by a pastoral team with differing gifts?