MichaelJinkins The End s of Theological Education Essay

The End(s) of Theological Education:

Reframing the Mission of Theological Schools

Michael Jinkins

Academic Dean and Professor of Pastoral Theology, Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary

This essay was commissioned to provide a broad perspective on contemporary conversations regarding the proper end or ends of theological education and certain aspects of the relationship between theological schools and Christian communities of faith. It explores various aspects of the “aims and purposes literature” relative to theological education culminating in the recent book, For Life Abundant: Practical Theology, Theological Education and Christian Ministry, edited by Craig Dykstra and Dorothy Bass, and it reflects on some major initiatives such as Vanderbilt Divinity School’s Theology and Practice program and Candler School of Theology’s Initiative in Religious Practice & Practical Theology..1

1 In the process of researching this essay I interviewed a number of colleagues (including professors and administrators) asking them to reflect on several questions. Their responses provided not only deep background but also keen observations about the state of theological education and practical theology, sometimes correcting, often confirming, but always informing this essay. I wish to thank the following colleagues for sharing their insights and ideas: Craig Dykstra, Senior Vice President for Religion, the Lilly Endowment, Inc.; James Hudnut-Beumler, Dean of the Vanderbilt University Divinity School, interviewed Sept. 29, 2009; Jan Love, Dean of the Candler School of Theology, Emory University, interviewed Aug. 26, 2009; Ted Smith, Director of the Program in Theology and Practice, Vanderbilt University Divinity School, interviewed Aug. 20, 2009; Tom Frank, Director of the Initiative in Religious Practice and Practical Theology, Candler School of Theology, interviewed Aug. 19, 2009; John Witvliet, Director of the Calvin Institute of Christian Worship, interviewed Aug. 10, 2009; James Nieman, Professor of Practical Theology at Hartford Seminary, interviewed Aug. 26, 2009; Bonnie J. Miller-McLemore, E. Rhodes and Leona B. Carpenter Professor of Pastoral Theology and Counseling, Vanderbilt University Divinity School, interviewed Sept. 29, 2009; Kathleen A. Cahalan, Associate Professor of Theology at Saint John’s University of Theology and Seminary, interviewed Sept. 29, 2009; and Serene Jones, President of Union Seminary, New York City, interviewed Oct. 1, 2009. I would also like to thank Timothy Lincoln, Associate Dean for Seminary Effectiveness and David White, the C. Ellis and Nancy Gribble Nelson Associate Professor of Christian Education, both of Austin Seminary, for reading this essay and making a number of suggestions.

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The End(s) of Theological Education by Michael Jinkins

Resources for American Christianity http://www.resourcingchristianity.org

Anima Magnetism Most of us will remember from elementary school a science demonstration that involved metal shavings, a sheet of paper and a magnet. We randomly scattered the shavings over the surface of the paper. When we placed a magnet under the paper, suddenly a pattern sprang into view. The magnet oriented the metal shavings, moved them, gave them order and direction. It looked like magic to eight year olds, but, we were told, it was science. Whether it is magic, science, or something else at work, theological education has long wondered what, if anything, gives focus, direction, meaning, or unity to the collection of subject areas, scholarly pursuits and skills that make up the learning concerns of a theological school. Jim Nieman has observed, it was the desire to demonstrate “unity” in theological education, and thus to legitimize theological studies (as a science among sciences) in the universities of Germany, that led Friedrich Schleiermacher to what came to be called the “clerical paradigm.” That paradigm viewed “theology” as “unified not in what it studied but in whom it prepared.”2 During the twentieth century, the search for “unity” has been transformed by a focus on the proper end (or ends), the aims, the purposes, the telos of theological education. It is this teleological orientation which now provides “the magnet beneath the shavings.” Particularly in the past two decades, this teleological focus has given rise to a shift of enormous significance. Thisshift is so far-reaching in its effects that all other conventional debates raging in theological schools – concerning alternatives in educational “delivery systems,” for example, or regarding the benefits of residential over commuter programs – pale by comparison. This new shift is one of fundamental orientation, an alteration in our understanding of the end or ends of theological education. A generation ago, it was generally understood that theological schools existed to train men and women to practice ministry. Ministry was conceived in individualized and essentially technological terms as something which someone (an individual religious specialist or expert, an ordained technologian) did to or for someone else. Today theological education is being reconceived by directing our attention from proximal to ultimate ends. Theological education is seeking first to understand biblically, theologically, historically and ethically the lived reality of communities of faith in response to the gift and call of God.

2 James Nieman, “Ministerial Paradigm Shift from the Clerical to the Congregational,” Seventh International Symposium of Practical Theology, 27 May 2007, 2-3.

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Beginning from this end, theological education is reconceiving ministry (the discipleship of the people of God) as the sustained corporate practices of communities of faith in worship, hospitality, witness-bearing and service; ordained ministry as those various forms of leadership emerging from within community and in support of the life and ministries of these communities; and theological education as a process of formation and education oriented toward the practicing of the Christian life, ecclesially and communally. A growing number of church leaders and scholars have contributed to a growing body of literature related to this shift. In just the past few years, an increasing number of theological schools have begun to explore what it means to reorient theological education to serve this end. Those of us who have been active in theological education during the past twenty years or so have discerned and sometimes contributed to this shift, especially those of us who teach in the field of practical theology. When, for example, in 1993 I moved from serving as a pastor to teaching on the faculty of Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary, I embarked not only on a new vocation, that of a theological educator, but also on a new field of study, practical theology. Though I had served as a pastor for many years, my Ph.D. was in historical and constructive theology. I knew little to nothing about practical theology as an academic discipline and was only vaguely aware that the fundamental assumptions shaping the seminary training I received in the 1970s were being renegotiated. It was my good fortune, however, to begin this new work with colleagues who did understand practical theology at the deepest theoretical levels: Scott Black Johnston (who had just completed his Ph.D. at Princeton Theological Seminary with Tom Long) and Stanley Robertson Hall (a recent product of Jim White’s tutelage at Notre Dame University). All three of us had been deeply involved in congregations and ministry throughout our lives. Both Stan, who died in 2008, and I had extensive pastoral experience. Scott, after teaching homiletics for ten years, departed Austin Seminary to serve as senior minister of Trinity Presbyterian Church in Atlanta, Georgia, and later of Fifth Avenue Presbyterian Church in New York City. Friendship provides an ideal crucible for theological formation, and the influence of these two colleagues was inestimable to my development not only as a practical theologian, but, more importantly, as a theological educator.3 We spent long lunch hours at Captain Quackenbush’s Coffee Shop on “the drag” across from the University of Texas, and even longer evenings in one another’s homes, arguing over how to define

3 What I have in mind here is informed by Diana Fritz Cates’ account of an Aristotelian concept of friendship. For Aristotle, she explains, “the friend” is “another himself.” She writes: “In character-friendship, an adult extends his self-love to ‘another himself’ with whom he shares a life.” The friend is not an extension of one’s self, i.e., not a sibling “raised in much the same way, by the same caretakers, in the same home,” nor does the friend necessarily share one’s “conceptions of the good life, interests, and so on,” but is “notably separate and distinct.” In claiming another person as friend one is exercising “virtue as an extended, inclusive self.” Cates, Choosing to Feel: Virtue Friendship, and Compassion for Friends (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1997), 65.

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practical theology (not the most riveting of our conversations), the connections between theology, philosophy, literary theory and the social sciences (a better conversation), and ways to explore and understand the theologies embedded in the sustained practices of communities of faith and what these sustained practices in a variety of particular communities around the world and stretching over centuries demand of us as theological educators (the best conversations). Together we discussed Don Browning’s A Fundamental Practical Theology, Rebecca Chopp’s The Power to Speak, Edward Farley’s Theologia, David Kelsey’s To Understand God Truly, Barbara Wheeler and Ed Farley’s edited volume, Shifting Boundaries, Charles M. Wood, The Formation of Christian Understanding, Edward Schillebeeckx’s The Church with a Human Face, and Kathryn Tanner’s Theories of Culture, appropriately subtitled, A New Agenda for Theology, to mention only a selection of texts. Our faculty department (The Church’s Ministry Department) wrestled with its identity in light of the vital new understandings of practical theology and faith practices that were emerging in the 1990s, and our annual department retreats often focused on the same texts the three of us were reading and arguing about.4 Like so many others, we stepped mid-stream into a conversation that had been going on for generations, a conversation that reflects the enduring interest of theological education to understand better its role in relation to the church. We understood that theological education exists for ends beyond itself, and that these ends have the power to orient not only a professor’s pedagogy or a school’s curriculum, but the anima of theological education, its life principle. The Story of a Conversation Theological education has been engaged in a self-critical conversation about its proper ends and appropriate means since at least the middle of the last century.5 Students of 4 Don S. Browning, A Fundamental Practical Theology: Descriptive and Strategic Proposals (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1991); Rebecca S. Chopp, The Power to Speak: Feminism, Language, God (New York: Crossroad, 1992); Edward Farley, Theologia: The Fragmentation and Unity of Theological Education (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1983); David H. Kelsey, To Understand God Truly: What’s Theological About a Theological School (Louisville: Westminster/John Knox Press, 1992); Barbara G. Wheeler and Edward Farley, eds. Shifting Boundaries: Contextual Approaches to the Structure of Theological Education (Louisville: Westminster/John Knox Press, 1991); Charles M. Wood, The Formation of Christian Understanding: Theological Hermeneutics (Valley Forge: Trinity Press International, 1981/1991); Edward Schillebeeckx, The Church with a Human Face (New York: Crossroad, 1990); Kathryn Tanner, Theories of Culture: A New Agenda for Theology (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1997). 5 Jack Fitzmier’s essay, “The Aims and Purposes Literature: Notes From the Field,” on the “Resources for American Christianity” website, provides what Fitzmier describes as an “idiosyncratic” perspective on this literature. Its insights may be especially helpful for those in leadership positions. See also: Louis B. Weeks, “Traditions and Transformation: The Educating Clergy Study and Outcomes for Theological Education,” also on the Resources for American Christianity” website; Kathleen Cahalan’s April 6, 2009 grant proposal, “The Collegeville Seminars,” on behalf of The Collegeville Institute (Donald B. Ottenhoff, executive director) to the Lilly Endowment, provides a valuable survey of the “aims and purposes literature” and helpful observations on the nature of practical theology, including the sometimes overlooked contribution of congregational studies. The Lilly Endowment has supported a variety of

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theological education often refer back to two books of particular interest in the mid-twentieth century: H. Richard Niebuhr, in collaboration with Daniel Day Williams and James Gustafson, The Purpose of the Church and Its Ministry: Reflections on the Aims of Theological Education (New York: Harper and Row, 1956); and H. Richard Niebuhr, this time acting as co-author with Williams and Gustafson, The Advancement of Theological Education: The Summary Report of a Mid-Century Study (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1957).6 These two books dominated the conversation about theological education especially among Protestants from their publication through the 1970s. Developments we now take for granted in seminaries, such as theological field education and cooperative ventures among free-standing theological schools that were innovations in the 1950s and intended to foster integrative educational opportunities for those preparing for ordained ministry, were championed in these books. The then “new conception” of the minister’s role as “pastoral director,” that influenced for good or ill Protestant seminaries and judicatories in the 1960s and 1970s, originated in Niebuhr’s theological reflections on the church’s ministry and purpose. As Glenn T. Miller observes in his history of American theological education, these books, particularly The Purpose of the Church and Its Ministry, attempted to contextualize theological education’s aims and goals within the larger purpose of the Church. While Niebuhr affirmed the variety of particular values and objectives reflective of various denominations, theological traditions and Christian congregations – “the increase of biblical knowledge, the salvation of souls, or the creation of a redeemed

conferences, projects and publications in partnership with a variety of institutions: for example, The Wabash Center for Teaching and Learning in Theology and Religion, The Valparaiso Project on the Education and Formation of People in Faith, The Louisville Institute, The Lexington Seminar, and The Pulpit and Pew Research Project. Many of the books which have emerged on the subjects of Christian practices, theological formation, and the shape of pastoral leadership and ministry in the church, supported by the Endowment, are closely related to and overlap with the “aims and purposes literature.” For example: Dorothy C. Bass ed., Practicing Our Faith: A Way of Life for a Searching People (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1997); Jackson W. Carroll, Barbara G. Wheeler, Daniel O. Aleshire, and Penny Long Marler, Being There: Culture and Formation in Two Theological Schools (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997); Miroslav Volf and Dorothy C. Bass, eds. Practicing Theology: Beliefs and Practices in Christian Life (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 2002); L. Gregory Jones and Stephanie Paulsell, eds., The Scope of Our Art: The Vocation of the Theological Teacher (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 2002); Malcolm L. Warford, ed. Practical Wisdom on Theological Teaching and Learning (New York: Peter Lang, 2004); Jackson W. Carroll, God’s Potters: Pastoral Leadership and the Shaping of Congregations (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 2006); Malcolm L. Warford, ed. Revitalizing Practice: Collaborative Models for Theological Faculties (New York: Peter Lang, 2008); and Daniel O. Aleshire, Earthen Vessels: Hopeful Reflections on the Work and Future of Theological Schools (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2008). 6 The project was sponsored by what was then called the American Association of Theological Schools, now known as the Association of Theological Schools in the United States and Canada, and was funded by the Carnegie Corporation of New York. Another volume edited by Niebuhr and Williams consisted of a collection of essays appropriately titled, The Ministry in Historical Perspective (New York: Harper and Row, 1956).

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community” – he described the ultimate purpose of the church as “the increase of the love of God and the love of neighbor.”7 Niebuhr writes:

The question of the ultimate objective of the whole Church and of the seminaries of the Church does not reduce questions about proximate ends to questions about means, but it poses the problem of the final unifying consideration that modifies all the special strivings…. The conversation about the ultimate objective is many faceted. It includes many interchanges on special issues through which, however, the movement toward the definition of the ultimate issue and the final objective proceeds. There is, as we have noted, a debate between those who define the last end of the Church individualistically as salvation of souls and those who think of it as the realization of the redeemed society…. What is the chief end of man [sic], whether as redeemed individual or redeemed community? Another debate, the one about Church and Bible, is leading, it appears, to somewhat similar results…8 Is not the result of all these debates and the content of the confessions and commandments of all these authorities this: that no substitute can be found for the definition of the goal of the Church as the increase among men of the love of God and neighbor? The terms vary: now the symbolic phrase is reconciliation to God and man, now increase of gratitude for the forgiveness of sins, now the realization of the kingdom or the coming of the Spirit, now the acceptance of the Gospel. But the simple language of Jesus Christ himself furnishes to most Christians the more intelligible key to his own purpose and to that of the community gathered around him.9

According to Niebuhr, the purpose or ultimate objective of the Church is best expressed in Jesus’ summary of the law and the prophets, “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all you mind, and your neighbor as yourself” (Matthew 22:37). And it is this, the greatest commandment, which provides the necessary context for understanding the proper end of theological education. Miller observes, however, that Niebuhr’s focus on the ultimate purpose of the church and the larger aim of theological education “has removed us a long way from the actuality of schools, churches, and ministry in the churches in the United States and Canada.”10 7 Glenn T. Miller, Piety and Profession: American Protestant Theological Education, 1870-1970 (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans, 2007), 674. The genesis of Miller’s magisterial studies, Piety and Profession, and the earlier study, Piety and Intellect: The Aims and Purposes of Ante-Bellum Theological Education (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1990), like most of the studies and initiatives considered in this essay originated to some degree or received funding from the Lilly Endowment. Miller’s work was part of an Auburn Seminary project in the history of Protestant theological education, and he credits the influence and support of Robert Lynn, then Vice President for Religion at Lilly. 8 H. Richard Niebuhr, in collaboration with Daniel Day Williams and James Gustafson, The Purpose of the Church and Its Ministry (New York: Harper and Row, 1956), 29. 9 Ibid., 31. 10 Miller, 676.

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This removal or distancing need not abstract us from reality. Niebuhr wants us to step back from the immediacy of every day concerns in order to gain an appropriate sense of proportion. “Since all schools follow proximate and limited goals, a deeper understanding of the ultimate purpose of the schools allows us to put those proximate goals in some perspective.”11 The lessons of The Purpose of the Church are, therefore, of particular value for contemporary theological education in that they may (to use Miller’s phrase) “lead theological schools in a collective examination of conscience.”12 The relative values and various penultimate goals and objectives that compete for allegiance among church leaders, seminary board members, administrators, faculty members and students, must contend with that higher purpose of the church that defines the end of theological education. As Miller explains, “before Niebuhr and his colleagues turned to the actual analysis of theological schools [in the subsequent volume The Advancement of Theological Education] – and Purpose appeared one year before the summary volume – Niebuhr was calling the seminaries to ask whether their most serious problem was not ‘bad faith’ rather than finances, faculty salaries, or the quality of students. The first question a school’s leaders must ask is not how many FTEs (full-time equivalents) a school may have; it is whether that school has striven to be loyal to the ultimate purpose of the church.”13 Niebuhr calls both church and theological school to account. He charges: “our schools, like our churches and our ministers, have no clear conception of what they are doing but are carrying on traditional actions, making separate responses to various pressures exerted by churches and society, contriving uneasy compromises among many values, engaging in little quarrels symptomatic of undefined issues.”14 Denominational loyalties, advocacy of particular theological, cultural and social perspectives (liberal, conservative or otherwise), as well as the press of pragmatic and economic concerns, he reminds his readers, all take a backseat to “the more substantial question” as to whether our churches and seminaries “served to increase the love of God and the love of neighbor.”15 Niebuhr grants a vision of theological education that is churchly, without being merely and superficially churchy. When Niebuhr turns to describe ministry itself, however, one finds an understanding of ministry that is both largely clerical and individualistic despite Niebuhr’s interest in and concern for social contexts. Ministry, it seems, is largely something an ordained person does for, among or to other people. And a theological school exists primarily to prepare people for ordination (clergy education) so they can do these things, hopefully, well and with the benefit of an appropriate knowledge base.16 There are, no doubt, Christian

11 Ibid., 676. 12 Ibid., 677. 13 Miller, 677. 14 Niebuhr, Purpose, 101. 15 Miller, 677. 16 Niebuhr, Purpose, Chapter 2, “The Emerging Conception of the Ministry,” 48ff.

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traditions that uphold a strong distinction between clergy and laity. There are aspects of ministry that are “professional,” for lack of a better word. There are elements of a theological education that are (again for some Christian traditions) essentially clerical, even sacerdotal, and for most others (especially most Protestant traditions in North America) there are elements that are as much preparation for the duties of a profession as any law school or medical school. Nevertheless the next thirty years of church life and theological studies (Protestant and Roman Catholic) will yield a far more theologically interesting concept of ministry than Niebuhr’s “emerging new conception,” as we shall see. Having said this, Niebuhr’s work (and that of Williams and Gustafson also in the subsequent volume, The Advancement of Theological Education) provides a salient reminder that there is an underlying fullness and wholeness, an integrity and unitive drive within theological education beyond every particular academic discipline and methodology and toward that ultimate purpose theological education shares with Christ’s church in the world. This purpose or end has the continuing effect of periodically renewing and reforming, reorienting and sometimes revolutionizing theological education. The conversation about theological education from the 1950s through the 1970s often relied on Niebuhr, Williams and Gustafson to provide a more or less “authoritative” compass, especially among mainline Protestants. But the conversation since the 1980s, in true postmodern fashion, has gone in several different directions. In almost any survey of this literature one book in particular stands out, requiring virtually all others to respond to its arguments. That book is Edward Farley’s influential 1983 study Theologia: The Fragmentation and Unity of Theological Education.17 “The central theme” of Farley’s essay “is the recovery of what would restore unity and criteria to theological education, namely theologia, or theological understanding.”18 He argues against an educational approach, largely inherited from the Enlightenment, in which education consists of the “communication of the many regions in which scholars and scientists divide up the cognitive universe.” This approach, in the theological realm at least, has led both to fragmentation and distortion regarding the core purpose of theological schools.

Absent from this view is the ancient Greek ideal of culture (paideia), according to which education is the “culturing” of a human being in areté or virtue. The question which guided this approach was simply: What type of education leads to areté? The education whose center is theologia is an ecclesial counterpart to paideia, focusing as it does, not on arête, but

17 Edward Farley, Theologia: The Fragmentation and Unity of Theological Education (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1983). This study was, as Farley indicates, “born in interchanges with Robert Lynn of the Lilly Endowment and it continued to develop under his encouragement and closely formulated criticisms” (xii). 18 Ibid., 151.

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on a sapiential knowledge engendered by grace and divine self-disclosure. The view that education (the course of studies) means the exposure to sciences or realms of scholarship tends to promote a technological view of education. Education as mere scholarly learning is not a process affecting and shaping the human being under an ideal, but a grasping of the methods and contents or a plurality of regions of scholarship. The loss, then, of theologia to theological study resembles the older loss of education as paideia.19

Farley’s argument is carefully nuanced, and any attempt to summarize it briefly is fraught with many dangers, not the least of which is caricature. To characterize his proposal, for example, merely as an exercise in pedagogical nostalgia (harkening back to an unrecoverable classical age) would be unfair and inaccurate. Farley, though critical of certain aspects of the Enlightenment’s educational legacy, values the knowledge conveyed in disciplines such as history, ethics and biblical studies, and he makes it clear that “there is no suggestion that the ‘disciplines’ which have been so central to theological education should be abandoned.”20 His concern is to restore theologia, to theological education, i.e., to recover that profound “personal, sapiential knowledge (understanding) which can occur when faith opens itself to reflection and inquiry,” defining “faith” as “the way in which the human being lives in and toward God and the world under the impact of redemption.”21 Farley does not argue for a theological education less exacting, less academically disciplined and rigorous. Farley believes that intellectual and imaginative space must be made in theological education for the development of habits of reflection and inquiry that lead to theological understanding. The education of persons flows through deep living channels, patterned lives that convey meaning as well as knowledge. Farley’s thesis might be recast in terms of T. S. Eliot’s poetic questions: “Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?”22 Reading Farley one senses the struggle of an experienced teacher and scholar straining to assemble a vocabulary to express core convictions about how a school can accomplish the complex task of preparing people for ministry. The task requires a body of knowledge, a variety of skills, but knowledge and skills inseparable from something else and something deeper: virtues, characteristics, qualities of person, of spirit, of soul. Farley recognizes the value of traditional academic scholarship, but within and beyond the fruit of traditional scholarship he recognizes also the need for a learning environment in which wisdom and theological understanding can be inculcated. He speaks of habits and dialectical activity in a way that brings to mind the patience of the Socratic instructor but within the context of a theological vision that is also distinctively 19 Ibid., 152-153. 20 Ibid., 154. 21 Ibid., 156. 22 T. S. Eliot, “Choruses From ‘The Rock’,” (1934), The Complete Poems and Plays (London: faber and faber, 1969, 147.

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Christian. While one might grow weary of what could be considered a rather rarified jargon at points, one also senses in Farley a concern to take the reader outside of conventional educational terminology (the fairly straightforward language one finds in Niebuhr, for example) in order to create space for a new vision in theological education. Farley connects theological education in church and academy in a constructive manner. He helps the reader to see how theological understanding is always context specific (though Farley’s own explication of context remains pretty abstract) and that the end of all theological understanding (whether through Christian education in a local congregation or through clergy education in a graduate theological school) is essentially similar. But it is here, of course, that Farley is ultimately unable to break free from seeing ministry as something done by an individual (whether a professional clergyperson or by a lay person) for, or on behalf of, or to others. Whether engaged in the literary hermeneutical project or the social hermeneutical project, whether reading a text or a congregation, one senses that for Farley, it is the minister who stands over-against the object of consideration, trying to understand. David Kelsey’s twin studies, To Understand God Truly (1992) and Between Athens and Berlin (1993) provide a sort of conceptual MapQuest to the terrain Farley broadly described. The philosophical address of most theological schools today is someplace on the road between Berlin (dominated by the idea that the theological education which occurs in graduate level theological schools is simply an enterprise like any other graduate level enterprises) and Athens (guided by a process of enculturation through which shapes and forms persons with a particular understanding and wisdom).23 In some sense, H. Richard Niebuhr represents the high-water mark of the Berlin model, especially in his essay, “Theology in the University.”24 Farley, of course, represents the Athens model. For those of us who entered theological education in the early 1990s, Kelsey’s books clarified the landscape and allowed theological faculties to reflect in a manner that was, at least, taxonomically comforting. But there was still a sense that something was missing, something lacking in our understanding. This was especially true for those of us whose vocations straddled the boundaries between so-called “traditional disciplines” (such as biblical studies, history or theology) and “practical theology.” Just prior to the publication of Kelsey’s books, however, another resource was published which raised the stakes in the debates then raging and presented a radically new way of conceiving of the end of theological education.

23 David H. Kelsey, To Understand God Truly: What’s Theological About a Theological School (Louisville: Westminster/John Knox Press, 1992); and Between Athens and Berlin: The Theological Education Debate (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1993). Both volumes benefited from encouragement and funding from the Lilly Endowment under Bob Lynn’s leadership. 24 H. Richard Niebuhr, “Theology in the University,” in Radical Monotheism and Western Culture (New York: Harper & Row, Torchbook edition, 1970), 93-99.

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Reconceiving Practice In 1991, Barbara Wheeler and Ed Farley edited a volume, Shifting Boundaries: Contextual Approaches to the Structure of Theological Education. Here one finds the logical extension of many of Farley’s fundamental ideas and more since in one its essay, “Reconceiving Practice,” Craig Dykstra provides a persuasive counter-argument to or at least qualification of Farley’s Theologia. Dykstra asks those studying theological education to take two steps back from the canvas to rethink their whole framework. He begins his essay by arguing:

Theology and theological education are burdened by a picture of practice that is harmfully individualistic, technological, ahistorical, and abstract. This current picture, implicit in our imaginations and explicit in our actual ways of doing things, is implicated in many of the problems that communities of faith, theology as a body and activity of thought, and theological education in all its contexts are now struggling to overcome.25

“What,” then, “is the current picture?” he asks. When one thinks of practicing ministry, for example, what does one imagine? One imagines “someone doing something like preaching to a congregation, teaching a class, moderating a meeting, or visiting someone in the hospital.”26 The first problem with this picture, according to Dykstra, lies in the assumption, made all too easily, that it is a clergyperson who practices ministry, “evidence of the pervasiveness of what Edward Farley calls ‘the clerical paradigm,’ which he says governs theological education in general and practical theology in particular.”27 But there’s another problem in this picture, and it is a problem that is less apparent because it is so deeply engrained in our culture: “Closer to the heart of the problem,” Dykstra writes, “is the fact that we almost automatically see someone doing something.”28 We reflexively think of the practice of ministry technologically as “something” that one does “to something or someone in order to gain some desired outcome or result.”29 The efficacy of practices of ministry is evaluated according to “whether it produces the effects we expect.”30 This understanding of practice “prescinds moral questions,” and it tends to render our conception of practices to be “ahistorical and abstract” in

25 Craig Dykstra, “Reconceiving Practice,” Barbara G. Wheeler and Edward Farley, eds. Shifting Boundaries: Contextual Approaches to the Structure of Theological Education (Louisville: Westminster/John Knox Press, 1991), 35. 26 Ibid., 35-36. 27 Ibid., 36. 28 Ibid., 36. 29 Ibid., 38. 30 Ibid., 38.

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character.31 Even our concern about history is reduced to “the history of the current situation,” rather than “the history of practice.”32 The problem with this way of understanding practice lies in our focus and orientation. As Dykstra says, “From the point of view of an alternative understanding of practice that I will be developing, practice is not the activity of a single person. One person’s action becomes practice only insofar as it is participation in the larger practice of a community and a tradition.”33 The implications for theological education of this shift in focus are particularly profound. If the practice of ministry is something an individual does (and this individual is ordinarily understood to be a clergyperson), and ministry is something such an individual does to, for, or on behalf of someone else, then the duty of theological education is to equip these individuals with the correct technology so that their actions have the desired outcomes or produce the right results.34 The ways in which we conventionally have conceived of the practice of ministry, then, can actually undermine the ends of theological education loftily described by Niebuhr, et al, and by Farley, and can subtly erode the integrity of ministry. This is why Dykstra insists on stepping back to reconceptualize, at the most fundamental level, our theological understanding of practice before speaking of theological education. He takes his cue from Alasdair MacIntyre:

By a ‘practice’ I am going to mean any coherent and complex form of socially established cooperative human activity through which goods internal to that form of activity are realized in the course of trying to achieve those standards of excellence which are appropriate to, and partially definitive of, that form of activity, with the result that human powers to achieve excellence, and human conceptions of the ends and goods involved, are systematically extended.35

For MacIntyre one cannot separate ends from means in “a practice” because means inherently express their ends. Consequently, then, not every group activity is a practice. And not every practice is identical with a group activity. “Practice,” Dykstra writes (paraphrasing MacIntyre) “is participation in a cooperatively formed pattern of activity that emerges out of a complex tradition of interactions among many people sustained over a long period of time.”36 Thus baseball and prayer are both practices, though it’s hard to play baseball unless you are in a group, and it is possible to pray alone. There is an epistemological aspect to practice which Dykstra also observes. There are, he tells us, certain things one can only know from within a practice, again understanding

31 Ibid., 38. 32 Ibid., 39. 33 Ibid., 37. 34 Ibid., 38. 35 Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, second edition, 1984), 187. 36 Ibid., 43.

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practice itself as participation in a sustained communal pattern of activity. If one is a stranger to a particular practice, one does not know certain things even if one knows a great deal about the history or tradition from which the practice has developed. For example, it is possible to know the historical, theological and literary background on that aspect of spiritual life described by St. John of the Cross as “the dark night of the soul.” But the reality that John names with this phrase is only accessible through an existential and experiential practice of faith. What one knows, in this sense, is historically embodied. It is inseparable from the times and places and persons in which a community’s practices live. Dykstra observes Farley’s contribution to this epistemological dimension of practice in Farley’s discussion of “the situation of faith.” Even more strikingly, however, Dykstra recounts, in the work of Marianne Sawicki, the significance of the way “the practice of service is a condition for the knowledge of a reality absolutely central to faith – the reality of resurrection presence.”37 Dykstra’s “argument’ with Farley is particularly constructive when he takes up Farley’s suggestion that “we recover an understanding of theology as habitus.”38 Farley understood, as Jim Nieman has explained, that “[g]ood ministry involves being formed toward an ecclesial purpose.”39 But Dykstra goes much further when he writes:

I suggest that what such habitus involves is profound, life-orienting, identity-shaping participation in the constitutive practices of Christian life. If theology is habitus, then it follows that we learn theology (are formed in this habitus) by participating in these practices. Participation in these practices, certainly participation at any significant level of depth and understanding, must be learned. We need more than just to be included in the practices. We need to come to understand them from the inside and to study and interpret carefully the realities we encounter through engagement in them.40

This understanding of practice resists abstraction, not least at the point of theological education. It demands that we pay attention in particular ways -- that we pay attention theologically and biblically, historically and ethically -- to what the practices are saying to us and to others in particular places and at particular moments, in continuity with (and in distinction from) a trajectory that has its own history and that is self-conscious to some extent regarding its relationship with its tradition(s) and those of others. Dykstra’s reconception of practice asks that we take a second step back to reorient our focus on practice, to pay attention to the constitutive practices of Christian life, ecclesially and communally understood. He reminds us that we all live in and among a

37 Ibid., 46. 38 Ibid., 50. 39 James Nieman, “Ministerial Paradigm Shift from the Clerical to the Congregational,” p. 3. Also see: Bonnie J. Miller-McLemore, “The ‘Clerical Paradigm’: Fallacy of Misplaced Concreteness?” International Journal of Practical Theology, Vol. 11 (2007) Issue 1, pp. 19-38. 40 Dykstra, “Reconceiving Practice,” 50.

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variety of social contexts and institutions, as he says: “We all live our lives in an intersection of many practices.”41

Theological study and theological education are appropriate to and necessary for all Christians. Once we recognize that a more significant and fruitful conception of practice refers to the ongoing and central practices that constitute the community’s very life and that all its members are called to be participants in that practice, we are led to a broad vision of theological inquiry and education. The idea that theological inquiry and education is only for scholarly researchers and clergy begins to evaporate. But clergy, like others, do require theological education…. Clergy, like all Christians, need to be formed and schooled in the practices of the life of Christian faith. This should not be just beginning when candidates enter a theological seminary or divinity school…. The theological education of clergy is dependent upon and should be continuous with the theological education these same people receive as lay people.42

Dykstra’s vision for theological education relates directly to the fact that “clergy have some responsibilities and roles that not all of us do”; specifically, clergy “are uniquely responsible for the participation of whole communities” in practices of Christian life.43 Clergy, as teachers and preachers, engage members of their communities in a deeper understanding of the histories of their communities’ faith practices, but they also must be mindful that “Christian teachers are not ultimately teachers of practices; they are teachers of the gospel.”44 The end of our life together is consistent with the means through which it is embodied, but the means is not the end. When practice is reconceived communally and ecclesially as sustained, as traditioned and embodied across centuries, one is inevitably moved away from an individual and technological conception of practice, and one avoids the disintegration of theological education that Farley and others have critiqued. Every field of study (biblical studies, history, ethics, homiletics, theology) presently taught in seminary, then, is necessary to our understanding and engaging more deeply and knowingly the practices of Christian communities, because every discipline keeps in view that its purpose is “to articulate these practices, describe them, analyze them, interpret them, evaluate them, and aid in their reformation. It would also be their focal responsibility to help students participate actively in them in actual situations of the kind they do and will face in their roles as clergy.”45

41 Ibid., 52. 42 Ibid., 53. 43 Ibid., 54. 44 Ibid., 55. 45 Ibid., 57.

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Toward the end of “Reconceiving Practice,” Dykstra quotes Alasdair MacIntyre, again, as saying that “a living tradition … is an historically extended, socially embodied argument,’ and that the argument is ‘precisely in part about the goods which constitute that tradition.’”46 In many ways, the research, conferences and conversations that have flourished from the 1990s through the turn of the current century, giving rise to books such as Practicing Our Faith: A Way of Life for a Searching People (1997), edited by Dorothy C. Bass, and Practicing Theology: Beliefs and Practices in Christian Life (2002), edited by Miroslav Volf and Dorothy C. Bass, and culminating in the publication in 2008 of For Life Abundant: Practical Theology, Theological Education, and Christian Ministry, edited by Dorothy C. Bass and Craig Dykstra, represent the logical extension of the shift in focus championed in “Reconceiving Practice,” which, in turn, allows us to reconceive the end of theological education.47 “Life Abundant” as the End of Theological Education For Life Abundant opens with an italicized paragraph that serves not only as a summary of the book’s thesis, but also as a lens through which the church’s ministry and theological education can be seen anew.

God in Christ promises abundant life for all creation. By the power of the Holy Spirit, the church receives this promise through faith and takes up a way of life that embodies Christ’s abundant life in and for the world. The church’s ministers are called to embrace this way of life and also to lead particular communities of faith to live it in their own situations. To do this, pastors and other ecclesial ministers must be educated and formed in ways of knowing, perceiving, relating, and acting that enable such leadership.48

The ordering of this paragraph is crucial:

God’s purpose for all creation is abundant life. God calls and empowers the church, communities of faith, historically, culturally

and socially embedded, to receive this promise and to embody this abundant life in and for the world.

The church, in and through the lives of the communities which constitute it and which embody this abundant life to which God calls it, are led by pastors and other ecclesial ministers, who embrace this same abundant life because they are of the communities of faith they lead.

46 Ibid., 58. 47 Dorothy Bass, ed. Practicing Our Faith: A Way of Life for a Searching People (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, Publishers, 1997); Miroslav Volf and Dorothy C. Bass, eds. Practicing Theology: Beliefs and Practices in Christian Life (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 2002); For Life Abundant: Practical Theology, Theological Education, and Christian Ministry (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 2008). 48 Bass and Dykstra, For Life Abundant, 1.

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These pastors and other ecclesial ministers, if they are to live in and lead

communities of faith as they are called to do, must be educated and formed so as to understand biblically, theologically, historically and ethically the practice of their communities of faith, recognizing the sustained traditions that are embodied in the contemporary context.

The opening paragraph of For Life Abundant also represents the culmination of the shift referred to at the opening of this essay, from proximal to ultimate ends. It invites us to begin our reflection with a vision of that life for which God created humanity. It challenges us to ask: What happens to theological education if one believes that the ultimate telos of church, of the ministry of faith communities and of theological education is the living of a particular kind of life in response to the gift and call of God? What does it mean for the teaching of biblical studies, or Church history, or systematic theology, or Christian ethics, if this ecclesial telos is not only never out of the picture, but also provides the picture’s frame? As the editors explain: “Together, this set of claims puts Christian theological education in its proper place – a place of service to ministry, which is itself undertaken to foster discipleship, which in turn exists not for its own sake but for the sake of God and all creation.”49 Some have argued recently that theological schools need the church, but that the church does not need theological schools. For Life Abundant reflects a far deeper perspective, one informed by a concept of discipleship dependent on knowledge and wisdom borne of sustained community.50 In order “for life abundant” to flourish, we must foster the deep understandings of our common life and history, the deep knowledge of Bible and doctrine that nourish a robust “ecclesial imagination.” Conversely, “if theological schools are to serve church and society well,” as the editors of For Life Abundant argue, they must foster “rich ecclesial connections,” so that the pursuit of knowledge is oriented toward the end of nourishing that “life abundant” for which God created us.51 Ted Smith, Director of the Program in Theology and Practice at Vanderbilt, recently observed that the “teleological vision that comes out of For Life Abundant” understands “the life of faith and redemptive work of God” as the telos of theological scholarship. Theological education is appropriately focused, as the editors of For Life Abundant assert, insofar as it sees itself in service to this ecclesial and communal way of life,

49 Ibid., 1-2. 50 Ibid., 5-13; See also: Daniel Aleshire, Earthen Vessels, 161-172 for a substantive and sensitive analysis of the relationship between church and theological school. 51 The structure of For Life Abundant reflects its teleological vision, moving the reader from questions focused on the shape of that life for which God created us, such as, “What is the shape of a contemporary way of life that truly is life-giving in and for the sake of the world? And how can the church foster such a way of life, for the good of all creation?” (in Dorothy Bass’s opening essay) to concerns related to the education of ordained leaders, such as what it means to teach history in a practical class (Ted Smith) or to teach practice in a history class (David D. Daniels III).

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“fulfilling its calling to understand and love God truly, to explore the depths and range of Christian faith and life, and to serve church and society.”52 What does theological education, especially at the “professional” Masters Degree level, look like when oriented to this end? From the outside looking in upon a theological school, nothing may appear to have shifted at all. This must first be understood, and this may be particularly perplexing to those who believe that the most significant issues of our time relate to educational delivery systems. As an academic dean of a seminary committed to the proposition that education must be delivered face-to-face in a residential community if we wish to provide the best possible theological education for the practice of ministry, I recognize that one has a greater chance of preparing persons for leadership of Christian communities if that preparation occurs in and through Christian communities. But the theological education delivered in many residential seminaries at times has been fragmented along disciplinary lines, sometimes apathetic to ecclesial aspirations and concerns, even ignorant of the deeper sense of practice as sustained ways of living and flourishing that are both particular to specific Christian communities and shared with communities across time and around the world. To recall Dykstra’s description, theological education has been “burdened by a picture of practice that is harmfully individualistic, technological, ahistorical, and abstract.”53 Theological education that orients itself toward the end of “life abundant” can best be glimpsed as an alternative by reflecting on what happens when professors translate this end into specific courses, examples of which can be found in the pages of For Life Abundant. John Witvliet, for instance, teaches liturgics at Calvin College and Calvin Theological Seminary. His essay in For Life Abundant reflects what he describes as “a pedagogy of and for deep participation.”

Walk into a worship service in any given congregation on any given Sunday morning, and you will encounter a world that even a lifetime of study cannot fully comprehend. Cultural anthropologists have methods to assess some of this complexity: the interplay of symbols, texts, gestures, rites, power relations, gender, ethnicity, tradition, and culture. Perceptive psychologists and social workers perceive other dimensions of the gathering: the interplay of anxiety, hope, ambition, fear, shame, and gratitude that powerfully shapes how both entire communities and individual participants will experience it. Artists of various kinds sense still other layers of significance: the way in which fabrics, melodies, rhythms, metaphors, and architecture reflect beauty, evoke emotion, and convey convictions. Theologians offer yet another perspective, drawing on biblical narratives and several centuries of theological reflection to hone language

52 Bass and Dykstra, FLA, 7. 53 Dykstra, “Reconceiving Practice,” 35.

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for describing the ways in which God’s Spirit works through all of this to comfort, challenge, disturb, or nourish the faith of those gathered. The complexity of it all resists complete understanding. Yet in any given congregation in any given week, some people walk into this assembly not merely with the task of understanding it, but with the holy challenge to give shape to what happens there. These are the people – the preachers, musicians, artists, pastors, deacons, and others – who will form the language, select the texts, choose the music, offer the gestures, and prepare the space, all to make possible this central activity in a congregation’s life. Given all of the event’s complexity, what could ever prepare them adequately for such a task?54

The instruction that reflects the end of theological education assumed in For Life Abundant displaces the student from the position of objective observer and demands that he or she become an observant participant. Rather than placing the student in the position of a potential technologian who possesses those techniques that will allow him or her to act upon others for the end of getting specific, predictable results (that is, ministry imagined as an individualistic, ahistorical practice), it requires the student to enter into the community’s own deep practice of the worship of God. Witvliet’s instruction is guided by the question: “How would the teaching of worship change if it were more firmly rooted in a theologically robust understanding of Christian practice? That is, if vital Christianity is truly about participating in practices that comprise a life-giving way of life in and for the world, then how should teachers of worship present and probe Christian worship?”55 The theological educator’s understanding of the “product” of theological education must also shift. We are not working to produce ministers who will serve as “catalysts.” A “catalyst,” in chemistry, is an agent that produces certain effects upon a substance while itself remaining unchanged. In contrast, we are working to evoke “full, conscious, active participation” in the leadership of the community’s worship of God, in the community’s proclamation of the gospel, in all aspects of Christian education and formation, understanding worship, preaching and Christian education as aspects “of faithful Christian communal life.”56 Witvliet’s vision for teaching toward the end of “life abundant” is undergirded by an ecclesiological assumption “that congregations are a source of healing in a world that desperately needs it.”57

54 John D. Witvliet, “Teaching Worship as a Christian Practice,” For Life Abundant, 117. 55 Ibid., 118. 56 Ibid., 118. 57 Interview with John D. Witvliet.

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For James Nieman this end begins with two claims: (1) “that teaching the practices has as its aim faithful ministry that impels the church’s mission in the world”; and (2) “that the [communal] practices of ministry” in which pastors and other congregational leaders participate “operate in several publics at once, a matter that calls for rigorous, sustained scholarship in practical theology in the years to come.”58 Nieman’s remarks regarding teaching are especially illuminating:

When it comes to sound teaching, I suspect that most theological educators agree that information-dumping and self-glorification are not legitimate aims. I imagine we also know that more adequate teaching treats students as agents in their own learning, not as objects; as resources in a mutual process, not as hindrances to otherwise smooth sailing. I hope it is also clear by now, though that this teaching is a demanding and sophisticated task. It calls for instructors with the scholarly competence and confidence to risk what unfolds and to meet it with a kind of generous, patient, inductive readiness.59

Just how animating this focus on “life abundant” is for theological education (both in seminaries and in the church itself) is made clear when Nieman reminds us that “while awareness of and excellence in ministerial practices is important, the real aim is to teach through these practices so that all participants, ordained and lay, can sense new ways to declare the mercy of Christ in unforeseen settings…. Anything less leaves the church mute at the doorstep of the world.”60 While the concept of integration is a frequent topic of conversations in theological schools, the shift required by (as Ted Smith said) holding together “theological education with the life of faith and redemptive work of God”61 gives integration a much more concrete meaning. John Witvliet, for example, speaks of the need in theological education for cultivating a “habit of thought or being that brings together thinking and praying as not opposed to each other.”62 Ted Smith observes that the “valorization of lived theology and concrete practices of faith” in the academy is one of the most significant developments in theological education in recent years. However, he also raises a concern that has tremendous implications for meaningful integration of scholarship and Christian practices: simply put, this integration will not be fully realized until we find ways for pastors to be full conversation partners in our academic exploration into Christian practices and preparation of persons for ministry. Perhaps we need to give academics a more thorough intellectual grounding in “situated cognition” so they are better prepared to

58 James R. Nieman, “Liturgy and Life: An Account of Teaching Ritual Practices,” For Life Abundant, 163-164. 59 Ibid., 163-164. 60 Ibid., 164. 61 Interview with Ted Smith. 62 Interview with John Witvliet.

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listen to the distinctive ways of knowing that pastoral practitioners bring to the table.63 And, perhaps, as Smith observes, we need to do some further work with pastors (especially those who work closely with theological schools in supervised ministry programs and as adjuncts) in developing rhetorical genre for them to use to convey the knowledge and wisdom appropriate to the practices of their communities.64 Tom Frank argues for an even broader integrative task: that of making room in theological education for the communities of faith themselves through the privileging of the study of the material practices of congregations. According to Frank, often the most pressing issues of actual communities of faith are excluded from theological discussions in our rush to describe constitutive practices, “the practices that purport to constitute Christian faith.”65 The attention we are giving to developing viable models to integrate theological scholarship and lived faith in the theological academy brings into sharper relief the need to address integration on the ecclesial side. As Witvliet observes:

Many congregations resist theological engagement at a time when it is as important as ever. Theological literacy was higher a generation ago in many places. Yet now many churches are likely to approach any number of leadership, management, and even ethical issues on the basis of secular resources, with little awareness of the theological implications.”66

Indeed the manner in which Witvliet, Smith, Frank and Nieman speak of integration gathers us “around a common purpose for theological education in the church” which (according to Nieman) “is to equip people to show, soundly and authentically, the gift of lasting love we know chiefly through Christ Jesus.”67 The publication of For Life Abundant represents a print version of conversations that have flourished for some time about what it would mean to make a fundamental teleological shift in the focus of theological education. In order to actually achieve this shift, however, other changes are necessary. As a growing number of theological educators have realized, if we wish to change theological education at the masters degree level, i.e., the level of so-called professional ministerial education and formation, changes must also be made in the graduate programs that prepare men and women to teach masters degree students.

63 See, for example: John Seely Brown, Allan Collins, and Paul Duguid, “Situated Cognition and the Culture of Learning,” Educational Researcher, January-February 1989, 32-42; Also Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger, Situated Learning: Legitimate Peripheral Participation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991). 64 Interview with Ted Smith. 65 Interview with Tom Frank. 66 Interview with John Witvliet. 67 Nieman, “Liturgy and Life,” For Life Abundant, 165.

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Institutional Wagers When two professors from Vanderbilt Divinity School, Bonnie Miller-McLemore and Ted Smith, wrote an essay, “Scholars for the Church,” for Christian Century in 2008, they did more than provide the intellectual rationale for a graduate studies program in their university, although they did that with passion and precision. They also entered into this conversation about the proper end, the aim, goal and purpose, the telos of theological education, which can only really be understood as in service to “the larger telos … of enriching the life of faith in the world.”68 Perhaps most important, they placed a substantial wager on the ability of practical theology to mediate integration in the preparation of churchly scholars. And they did all of this, in the first instance, by raising a very simple question.69 The question they raised is as familiar to seminary presidents and deans as it is to faculty members who have served on faculty search committees because it is one of the most common questions asked in interviews with prospective faculty: “How would your introductory course in your field help prepare students for ministry?”70 Not so long ago this question would have been considered a slow pitch right across the interviewee’s plate, but to the increasing frustration of faculty search committees around the country this question is often treated these days as though it were a fast-breaking curve ball. Many graduates from some of the best theological Ph.D. programs in the country are simply unable to articulate how they would go about teaching the basic or survey course in their field in a way that will connect with future congregational ministers. We have largely succeeded in schooling them into a kind of irrelevance, placing the theological education they are prepared to provide at odds with the needs of the communities in which Christian practices are embodied and to which their future students will be called. “Doctoral education plays an important role in perpetuating the divide between academy and congregation…,” write Miller-McLemore and Smith. “Graduate programs reinforce divisions between areas of study and establish deep commitments to specialized scholarship. ‘You hear so much about the gap between seminary and ministry,’ one Ph.D. student at Vanderbilt said. ‘But the real gap is between seminary and doctoral work.’”71 How, asked Miller-McLemore, Smith and others at Vanderbilt, can a respected university divinity school better educate and form its Ph.D. students to educate and form men and women for congregational ministry? Vanderbilt responded by developing its graduate level program in Theology and Practice. This program keeps the institution’s

68 B. Miller-McLemore, “Practical Theology,” ERA. 69 Bonnie J. Miller-McLemore and Ted Smith, “Scholars for the Church,” Christian Century, February 26, 2008, 36-41. 70 Ibid., 36. 71 Ibid., 36.

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focus above the relative claims of academic disciplines on the ecclesial context, “foregrounding” the practices of faith in congregations as a legitimate, even indispensable, subject of concern for theological education and study. This “foregrounding” of Christian practices is complemented with a personal “foregrounding” on the part of the graduate students in the program, the way in which they reflect regularly on what it means for them to engage in the academic enterprise with a view toward teaching in seminaries. Kathleen Cahalan, who served as principal author of the mid-term evaluation of Vanderbilt’s Theology and Practice Program, spoke optimistically about what such a program might mean for the future of theological education, noting the example of a Korean Ph.D. student in the program whose passion for “teaching Bible in congregations in Korea” exerts a transformative force on every aspect of her research. Like other students in this program, she is among the brightest graduate applicants Vanderbilt is getting, but she refuses to understand herself narrowly as a scholar of the Hebrew Bible. Eschewing what Cahalan called “the rigidity of disciplinary walls” this student longs to contribute to the church’s practice of biblical study and education that fostered her Christian life.72 While such thinking may still be contested among some faculty members teaching in Ph.D. programs, it is championed by many of their students who bring the lived faith and practices of congregations into their graduate seminars as a matter of course. James Hudnut-Beumler, like Kathleen Cahalan, spoke of the difference it makes to students in the Vanderbilt Theology and Practice program to foreground their vocation to teach in a seminary and the vital connection between that teaching and the communal practice of Christian life. He observes:

Graduate education is often thought to be education for research in a discipline but the places one vocationally gets to do that research … just happen to be teaching institutions [like seminaries] and the scholarship that one does often has its greatest meaning for and impact upon living communities of faith. They way we’ve been doing graduate education since Berlin73 has been a kind of false or partial preparation for the vocation of teacher and scholar.74

When you bring into graduate education the end or uses to which your teaching and research will be put, Hudnut-Beumler said, and when you invite “the questions that emerge from life worlds that support” communities of faith, you change the graduate school. “The great thing is that once our professors recognize this and once our students recognize it, it isn’t hard to move on to some real, interesting and vital questions about what should we teach, who should know this?”

72 Interview with Kathleen Cahalan. 73 Referring to the classic distinction between “Athens and Berlin” noted in David Kelsey’s work. 74 Interview with James Hudnut-Beumler.

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Vanderbilt Divinity School is not alone in responding to this question. What sets Vanderbilt apart from many other schools, however, is its decision to wager significant institutional resources and reputation to provide an answer to the question. In the fall of 2006, with support from the Lilly Endowment, Vanderbilt launched its Theology and Practice initiative. This program awards “fellowships to students pursuing the Ph.D. in any of the eight areas of Vanderbilt’s Graduate Department of Religion (GDR).” 75 Vanderbilt’s intention was to gather the energy already generated in “powerful currents within and beyond the academy” and to “channel them toward forming doctoral students in every discipline who can cross the gap between studying in a Ph.D. program and teaching in a seminary.”76 Arguably the two greatest strengths of the Vanderbilt initiative are that they instill precisely the kind of gap-bridging habits essential to good ministry: (1) Students learn together in collegial cohorts and in cross-disciplinary seminars, such as the “Core Seminar and Theology and Practice Colloquy.” They are also introduced to important new ways of understanding practices, which will “inform work in their ‘home’ fields or disciplines” in courses such as “Theories of Practice” taught by Ted Smith, Director of the program.77 (2) And, not only do students in this program cross-train with other students from various disciplines, they also work with experienced scholars and teachers from various disciplines and with congregational ministers. The program is structured to remind all participants of the vocational goal shared by the students, especially of teaching in seminaries, and the vital relationship between the ecclesial and academic, the pastoral and scholarly contexts which the program seeks to reaffirm and strengthen.78 Bonnie Miller-McLemore has provided significant leadership from within the Vanderbilt faculty for this program. She said that it was “ingenious” of those who have provided funding for the Theology and Practice program to turn to graduate level theological education, to see that so many of the problems with theological education could be traced to structural issues, and to understand that if you want to enrich and support the life of congregations, you have to make changes in the education of the people who educate congregational leaders. Four years before Vanderbilt launched its program, the Candler School of Theology at Emory University developed its own “Initiative in Religious Practices and Practical

75 Kathleen A Cahalan and Michael Jinkins, “Evaluation Report: The Program in Theology and Practice, Vanderbilt Divinity School, December 26, 2008, 1. 76 Miller-McLemore and Smith, 41. 77 Students in the Vanderbilt program, in interviews conducted by Kathleen Cahalan and I, overwhelmingly singled out this seminar as among the most valuable they have taken in their Ph.D. studies. Smith’s bibliography for this course includes Pierre Bourdieu’s Outline of a Theory of Practice, Michel de Certeau’s The Practice of Everyday Life, Kathryn Tanner’s Theories of Culture, as well as W.E.B. DuBois’s classic, The Souls of Black Folk. 78 Cahalan and Jinkins, 3.

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Theology,” also with substantial support from the Lilly Endowment. The focus of the Candler program is not so much on educating and forming scholars from the broader range of theological disciplines to prepare persons for ministry as it is to address the projected shortage of faculty in practice-related fields such as homiletics, religious education, and pastoral care, and to advance the study of the religious practices of communities of faith. Research conducted by Candler confirmed an earlier study by the Auburn Center for the Study of Theological Education which discovered that “more than half of faculty … teaching in practical theology were scheduled to retire by 2006. The study also found an inadequate supply of qualified candidates to fill those vacancies.”79 Candler recognized that research and teaching in practical theology “embraces a complex task” requiring scholars to be “educated in multiple disciplines and capable of making critical connections between diverse bodies of knowledge.”80 Thus the Candler initiative recruits graduate students with a lively interest in the practiced faith of religious communities. The program is distinguished by its commitment, as Russell Richey said in a press release in January 2002, to study “the needs of congregations for effective leaders in the practices of their religious traditions,” by its commitment to prepare graduate students to teach and conduct research in practical theology and by the value the program places on descriptive research into the practices of various religious communities.81 It is in its commitment to “descriptive research” that Candler’s program arguably promises to make its most significant contribution to practical theology and to the church, dispelling the idealism and the theological abstraction that constructs ecclesiologies out of thin air (the ecclesiological idealism often common in theological faculties). The Candler initiative recognizes the shift “from an individual/professional approach to a congregational/communal approach” of understanding “the arts of ministry,” as Thomas Frank, the current Director of Candler’s Initiative recently observed.82

79 Initiative in Religious Practices & Practical Theology, “About the Initiative,” gdr.emory.edu/practices/about/ p. 3. See also: Barbara G. Wheeler, Sharon L. Miller and Katarina Schuth, Signs of the Times: Present and Future Theological Faculty, Auburn Studies, No. 10, February 2005, in the conclusion of which the authors observe: “The advancing age of faculty and doctoral students will soon create pressure for replacements, and in certain fields, notably practical ministry studies, it may be difficult to find replacements who are highly trained and who fit into the religious culture of the school.” 25. 80 Ibid., 3. 81 Emory University Office of Media Relations, press release, January 8, 2002. Jan Love, Candler’s current dean, also noted in an interview for this essay that the initiative is particularly enriched by the fact that so many of its students came from ministry positions into the Ph.D. program; and several, upon graduation, have returned to church positions. She sees the traffic between church and academy as being good for both. The tightening of budgetary belts at seminaries across the country, however, may be another reason why graduates are returning to congregational and other forms of ministry rather than embarking on academic careers. The implications of this economic issue deserve further critical study. 82 Dykstra, “Reconceiving Practice,” 35-46.

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The Candler initiative, according to Frank, seeks to correct an imbalance between “the study of material and constitutive practices” (that is, “the practices that purport to constitute Christian faith”). Again, as Frank observes, it is a distinctive of the Candler initiative to focus on material practices, observing and describing what a community of faith actually does. “Students are hooked,” he continues, “by actually looking at living community,” by using ethnographic and other methods drawn from the social sciences to inquire deeply into the lived and living faith of religious communities.83 Candler’s commitment to produce descriptive scholarship is never far removed from its concern to “prepare leaders for religious institutions,” according to Frank. This point was underscored by Jan Love, Dean of Candler, who sees Candler as occupying a particularly advantageous position to contribute to scholarship and leadership because of the “rare and remarkable long-standing partnership between the religion department [of Emory University] and Candler,” and the close relationship between Candler and the Church. Dean Love noted the importance of future seminary professors not only having a solid grounding in Christian practices, and a deep ethnographically-informed consciousness of these practices, but an awareness of other faiths as well. The church’s leadership must know how to relate to persons of other faiths in this increasingly pluralistic culture, she observed. Theological education has a duty to prepare pastors for the public dimensions of their leadership, understanding from within the communities of faith in which they are called to express leadership. The Candler initiative features not only a seminar, “Introduction to the Interdisciplinary Study of Religious Practices,”84 but also requires a research experience or internship in religious practices and participation in a leadership role in religious practice prior to admission to candidacy. It also provides opportunities to: “participate in colloquia and consultations organized by the Initiative in Religious Practices and Practical Theology” which … include interdisciplinary presentations and conversations on issues in the study of religious practices and practical theology.”85 83 These points were made in my recent interview with Frank, but they are also illustrated in his book, The Soul of the Congregation: An Invitation to Congregational Reflection (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 2000). 84 The catalogue description of this seminar reflects precisely the concern for the real-world practices of particular communities of faith which Tom Frank emphasized in his interview: “This course serves as an introduction to the study of religion through an examination of religious practices. We look comparatively at a variety of approaches and lenses, within religious and theological studies, reading both work describing theory and method and works studying religious practices. Throughout we keep trying to be attentive to how religions are lived and practiced and how best we can understand these practices. As their major project, students study one religious practice, drawing upon one or more of the theoretical and methodological frameworks presented. The course is conducted in seminar format. Students are expected to participate in seminar discussions, be co-presenters of the weekly topics, and prepare a research project.” This seminar is co-taught by two faculty members from different courses of study in the Graduate Division of Religion. Texts for the course include resources on Christian practices such as Volf and Bass, Practicing Theology, and deep ethnographic studies such as Courtney Bender’s superb study, Heaven’s Kitchen: Living Religion at God’s Love We Deliver (Chicago: University of Chicago, 2003). 85 “Initiative in Religious Practices & Practical Theology, Concentration Requirements,” Candler School of Theology, Emory University, 2007-1020.

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The Vanderbilt model attempts to form integrative scholars and teachers from various disciplines (including Church history, systematic theology, ethics and biblical studies); the Candler model concentrates its focus on the integrative nature of the practice-related fields. Candler’s “Initiative in Religious Practices and Practical Theology” enters into the same conversation to which Vanderbilt makes its contribution, but Candler’s Initiative does so with its own distinctive institutional wager. And it does so explicitly articulating a sometimes contested but potentially transformative understanding of practices:

Practices are not theories about action, nor are they merely activities. They are patterns of action sustained over time in the shared life of communities, developing a history and integrity that makes them recognizable even while they are always adapted and extended in various contexts. Thus the field of practical theology must encompass wide variations in practices and contexts, while exercising varied methodologies and interpretive frameworks for understanding them. This complex task requires supple scholars trained in multiple approaches and sensitive to context and culture.86

The Candler and Vanderbilt initiatives represent two sustained institutional responses to one of the greatest challenges facing theological education today: the education of scholars and teachers who possess not only the right competencies and capacities, but also the kind of scholarly and pedagogical imagination to prepare people for ministry in the church. Each initiative manifests its own distinct trajectory. Candler presses towards the education of practical theologians with a deep understanding of religious practices bolstered by research to be found in the initiative’s journal, Practical Matters. Vanderbilt leans toward the formation of professors to educate persons for ministry, especially in seminaries. Both responses understand the need for the highest possible degree of academic excellence. Both are committed to the education, formation and apprenticeship of scholar/teachers who are capable of reverencing the rich, deep communal practices of faith. The structures of the Candler and Vanderbilt initiatives assume that practical theology, as a discipline, is well-placed to mediate the kind of integration needed among various theological disciplines, and between the academic and the congregational contexts, for the sake of an end that transforms our academic tasks. Serene Jones, president of Union Seminary, New York City, praises the role that practical theology plays in orienting theological schools toward “the deep logic of healing.” It reminds theological education as a whole of its teleological orientation, because practical theology is “sensitive to manifestations of faith in the world.”87 According to Bonnie Miller-McLemore, practical theology as a discipline has always asked larger “aims” questions

86 Ibid., 3. 87 Interview with Serene Jones.

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beyond academic scholarship. Thus its advocacy for “life abundant” as the end of theological education, one might say, is in keeping with practical theology’s long-standing commitment to teleological, ethical and eschatological concerns. Practical theology, as James Nieman notes, both reintroduces a “transcendent vocabulary back into public discourse” and provides integrative leadership in theological education “bringing theological education into the public realm.”88 No Contest A few years ago, in one of those intense meetings that occur in the midst of any curriculum review process, a trusted senior faculty member said to his other colleagues on the curriculum committee: “I think you’re trying to turn the whole seminary into the Church’s Ministry Department.” We were a little more than halfway through a five-year process of curriculum revision, and we were looking at proposals that would add a required first-semester team-taught class on vocation and ministry as well as a required senior year integrative capstone seminar focusing on a particular faith practice. At the next coffee break I pulled him aside so I could explore his concerns and (I hoped) respond in a way that he would appreciate. He repeated his concern, that we were turning the whole seminary into a church’s ministry or practical theology department, and after listening I said: “Yes, that’s true – and no, of course not.” “Yes, it’s true”. We were reorienting our Master of Divinity program so that from the moment students walk through our doors at the beginning of their first semester they will be challenged to reflect on their calling and will be supported in exploring the shape and direction that calling gives to their education and formation. From their first class, our new Colloquy on Vocation, to their senior capstone seminar, they would be called upon to encounter deeply the practices of Christian life as these are sustained in real communities of faith and would be required to understand how these contemporary practices relate to the lived practices of communities of faith throughout history and around the globe. So, “yes,” we are trying to reframe the whole educational mission of the seminary in accord with “the Church’s ministry” in the sense that we are a seminary, a school of the church. For that reason we are primarily dedicated to the work of equipping persons to understand the lived faith practices of communities at the deepest possible levels and to participate in leadership in the corporate exercise of Christian ministry in these communities. But, also, “no, of course not” because we are convinced that every theological discipline has its own distinct contributions to make to the education and formation of well-integrated ordained leaders in the Church, and that the Church would be poorer were the seminary ever to retreat from the search for truth embodied in the vocation of scholarship as it is expressed through the variety of disciplines represented among the 88 Interview with James Nieman.

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faculty. The ecclesial imagination (and the pastoral imagination that emerges from it) requires deep and extensive knowledge of the Bible and of critical biblical studies, of doctrine and of the various theological disciplines, historical, constructive and philosophical, of ethics and education, of homiletics and liturgics, evangelism and missiology, and more. We cannot expect to make disciples of all nations if we neglect the knowledge and wisdom assumed in discipleship, and every aspect of the seminary’s scholarly program is necessary to do this well. We need the knowledge and expertise each discipline brings to our understanding of the church’s practices if we are to continue to participate in and lead in the church in years to come. This conversation continued through the process of our curriculum review and the tensions represented in it have contributed significantly to the improvement of our Master of Divinity curriculum. But the tensions are real, and they remain. Attempts by practical theologians and other theological educators to orient theological education toward ecclesial ends that serve to better understand and enrich the faith practices of Christian communities are likely to meet with some resistance for several reasons. First, practical theology represents a commitment to integration (e.g., scholarly and churchly, theoretical and practical, particular and catholic) in its own collection of specialized fields of research and teaching. Second, this commitment to integration is at times contested in an academic world sometimes insecure about the status of certain disciplines not the least of which are biblical studies, church history and Christian theology. Moreover, this commitment to integration requires that practical theology’s approach relativizes the very specializations that give credence to academic disciplines. Resistance is inevitable even if the members of a particular faculty dealing with the challenge are themselves churchly, deeply committed in their own lives to participation in the practices of the church at a congregational level as well as in various other ecclesial forms. But this resistance is not the whole story. In the course of doing the research which led to this essay, it became clear that certain issues remain contested. For example, the precise meaning, significance and place of “practical theology” in the academic world is contested by some; while the meaning of commonly used terms such as “theory” and “practice” or “practices” is contested by others. What is not generally contested is even more significant however. The students emerging from the new Vanderbilt and Candler initiatives are among the brightest students in either of these universities. They also appear to be more inclined to integrating reflection and practice, to building bridges between their preparation as scholars and their vocation as teachers, and to spanning the gaps between scholarship and the life of Christian communities. Students in these programs, whatever disciplines they may “represent,” appear more committed to exploring and understanding theologically the practices of lived faith.

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Conversations among faculty members in many theological schools in a variety of contexts around the country have shifted from discipline-centered to integration-oriented. It is not impossible, but it has become increasingly difficult for professors in any discipline in a divinity school or theological seminary simply to ignore or marginalize this shift in conversation. New notes and emphases have entered into the strategic discussions of many theological schools in the past twenty years, the most important of which are likely to include a deeper appreciation for the “rich ecclesial connections” necessary for good theological education, as described in For Life Abundant.89 The shifts we are witnessing to “the end of theological education” may well mark a new beginning.

89 Bass and Dykstra, For Life Abundant, 5.

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MichaelJinkins The End s of Theological Education Essay

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