Uprooted Trees Usually Die

I have little intention of ever pursuing anything remotely akin to a bright and shining scholarly career. With that said, I do appreciate reading the Bible with acute attention to detail and scope. I have no interest in dissecting or for that matter vivisecting the Bible for material about which I may write an article, which may then afford me the opportunity to secure tenure. That is not the business of theology, albeit it may be the business of scholarship. 

It seems too often the case that scholarship – NT scholarship in particular since that is what currently finds itself troubling me to stay awake into the wee hours of the night – strikes me as something not dissimilar from data collection and entry. And upon entering the so-called data into rubrics of suspicion and attestation, we land upon some conjecture that may be deemed worthy by the current guild of allegedly inclusive NT scholarship. 

This bland business of shuffling dusty papers in order to secure a strangely coveted desk job seems far removed from the dangerous landscape of the gospel that finds its embodiment in the turmoil and shenanigans of the motley family gathered by a most shocking election. In other words, what’s the deal with theological scholarship being so far removed from the lifeblood of the church?

Recently, a professor who I greatly respect said with a smirk, “the church is often about thirty years behind scholarship.” Upon further reflection, I imagine I would say, “And scholarship is perpetually perplexed by and disconnected from the church.  The church may very well be clueless about current scholarly dialogue, and that may or may not be to the church’s detriment. However, scholarship simply cannot afford to be uprooted from the church. If it is, it will wither entirely.”

It has been said on a variety of occasions that when theology remains nothing more than an academic discipline it is a sort of idolatry. I will not begin using my fingers to point at things as idols, but it does seem that theology will be subverting itself if it is not rooted deeply in the unacademic and perhaps seemingly uninteresting pulsations of the messianic body, namely the topsytervy world of the church.

Perhaps up to this point, I have sounded rather negative. However, one of the invigorating and beautiful things about being at Fuller has been that the same professors who are lecturing to us on Thursday evening are in fact preaching and teaching on Sunday morning. Their lives are imbedded in the life of the church, and this has been an inspiration for doing theology well. There is simply no need to choose scholarship over ministry or vice versa. The two may very well be held together, and along the way we may discover that the two belong together. 

“Theology as a church discipline ought in all its branches to be nothing other than sermon preparation in the broadest sense.” – Karl Barth, Homiletics