Rowan Williams’s essay on Evagrius of Pontus was splayed across the dashboard. I finished the last pages of Stanley Cavell’s The Claim of Reason before pulling out of the Home Depot parking lot to drive through the apartment complexes in my heavily immigrant neighborhood, watchful for rental SUVs, the preferred vehicle of the masked Customs and Border Protection agents dispatched to my city to kidnap and deport my neighbors. The scene unfolding that day—children absent from school and frantic texts between volunteers patrolling the city—would not stay politely outside the theological texts I was reading.
During my academic preparation for ministry, I was under the impression that the writings of philosophy and theology could be insulated from the stuff of ordinary life, that the life of the mind floated above all that was churning close to the ground. I imagined theologians developed ideas about God that they passed down to church folk like me to implement. If we based our preaching and teaching on their scholarship, the church would be better for it.
Pastoral ministry—the practice of God-talk among living, breathing communities—taught me otherwise. Academic theology at its most fruitful recognizes the life of the church as the source, not the receiver of theological inquiry. Lutheran theologian Robert Jenson described the relationship between the practice of the church and the study of theology as a difference of orientation. The work of the church is “the speaking of the gospel,” while the work of the theologian is to reflect on this labor. Theologians go astray, Jenson writes, when they think of themselves as having an objective, third-person perch from which to assign meaning to God and God’s people. The distinction of labor is not meant to distance theology from life but to keep theology wary of mistaking its own constructions for God.
