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Whither the Minister-Theologian Today?

Matthew Dowling

“Remember your leaders, those who spoke to you the word of God. Consider the outcome of their way of life, and imitate their faith. Jesus Christ is the same yesterday and today and forever.”

(Heb 13:7-8)

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The great Notre Dame historian Mark Noll famously stated in his 1995 book The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind, “The scandal of the evangelical mind is that there is not much of an evangelical mind.”

More than a quip, it was a lament, and it hit a raw nerve with many people. Allow me an observation in the spirit of Dr. Noll which will hopefully strike a similar nerve:

The scandal of the Church of Christ minister today is that he or she is rarely a theologian.

Where is the minister-theologian today, and what is this potentially extinct species all about?

In my opinion, the dearth begins with the common reality that many ministers in churches see themselves primarily as counselors, leaders, and motivators. This focus often comes at the expense of the theological office — the teaching and preaching roles in which our people are formed in the doctrinal and theological distinctives of the Christian faith. The lack has even led to the phenomenon of the “theologian-in-residence” in many Mainline churches. Notably this resident theologian is usually someone other than the resident minister, a point lamented by pastor and The Message translator Eugene Peterson, who says “my gut feeling is that the pastor should be the theologian in residence.”

We need ministers who are theologians. What I am advocating for is a minister who is comfortable navigating the grammar of the Christian faith from the perspectives of biblical theology, church history, historical theology, and systematic theology. To what end? To feed our people on a diet fit for a richer life of faith by uniting our pastoral ministry with theological formation. If you’re still not sure what I envision, then consider the union of theological formation and pastoral ministry as typified by Athanasius, Augustine, Aquinas, Luther, Calvin, Jonathan Edwards, Wesley, and Karl Barth and you will get the idea. Remember that all these folks were ministers and theologians.

In their book, The Pastor Theologian: Resurrecting an Ancient Vision, authors Gerald Hiestand and Todd Wilson write the following about this lack of and need for minister-theologians:

Pastor theologians aren’t extinct, but sightings are rare. This is because pastors no longer traffic in ideas. They cast vision, manage programs, offer counsel, and give messages. We expect our pastors to be able to preach; we expect them to know how to lead; we expect them to be good at solving problems and giving direction. None of this is inherently wrong. Indeed, all of these are important pastoral tasks.

But we no longer view the pastorate as an intellectual calling. To be sure, we still expect pastors to know more about the Bible than your average congregant. And we usually expect pastors to know a bit of theology and apologetics to be able to speak winsomely to a student or a skeptic.

But we don’t expect pastors to be theologians, certainly not scholars, at least not of a professional variety. Intellectually speaking, we expect pastors to function, at best, as intellectual middle management, passive conveyors of insights from theologians to laity. A little quote from Augustine here, a brief allusion to Bonhoeffer there. That’s all.

This vision of the pastor as intellectual middle management is understandable, as far as it goes. A pastor ought to translate the ideas of the theological community into the language of the average Christian. But here’s the rub. We no longer expect a pastor to be a bona fide, contributing member of the theological community. Sure, he may have spent a few years on the academic mountaintop, listening to the voice of the scholarly gods, before descending to his own congregation with a few choice oracles from heaven. But that heady atmosphere isn’t his natural habitat; he’s called to more pedestrian concerns like budgets and buildings, small groups and services, leadership meetings and pastoral visitations.

As Heistand and Wilson argue, the vocation of pastor and theologian have historically been united. It should be so today.

So why does this matter?

First, the unhealthy vocational bifurcation between theology and pastoral ministry ultimately hurts the church. Without theology, the study of the gospel and its implications for all of life, churches will be less healthy, stunted in their growth, and more distracted by false gospels.

Second, the minister theologian can help combat the rise and dominance of what Christian Smith and Melinda Lundquist Denton calls Moralistic Therapeutic Deism (MTD) — the set of beliefs common to the 3,000 teenagers studied in the National Study of Youth and Religion, and now recognized as a wider phenomenon in American churches today. Of MTD, these researchers note, “a significant part of Christianity in the United States is actually only tenuously Christian in any sense that is seriously connected to the actual historical Christian tradition, but has rather substantially morphed into Christianity’s misbegotten step cousin, Christian Moralistic Therapeutic Deism.” Writing of the phenomenon in her book Almost Christian: What the Faith of Our Teenagers is Telling the American Church, Kenda Creasy Dean says:

The problem does not seem to be that churches are teaching young people badly, but that we are doing an exceedingly good job of teaching youth what we really believe, namely, that Christianity is not a big deal, that God requires little, and the church is a helpful social institution filled with nice people…if churches practice MTD in the name of Christianity, then getting teenagers to church more often is not the solution (conceivably it could make things worse). A more faithful church is the solution…. Maybe the issue is simply that the emperor has no clothes.

The minister-theologian can help dress the emperor, so to speak, by reinvigorating the Church theologically.

Third, this matters because the minister-theologian is well-prepared to address a crisis in the church today related to the rise of MTD: apathy toward doctrine and the lack of theological and doctrinal awareness in our churches. Recent Pew, Gallup, and LifeWay Research studies (infamously the “nones” studies) have noted trends in American religion that many church leaders have been aware of for some time: the increasing disaffection of all believers from doctrine. Not just doctrinal distinctives pertaining to denominational affiliation, which you would expect. But most doctrine. That is especially true for teachings that may come off as divisive, are difficult to understand, or lack a readily apparent and practical application to daily life. This is where the minister-theologian can help, by encouraging more robust theological reflection in our churches and not falling prey to the all-too-common tendency to eschew doctrine and sideline theology as inconsequential.

We need minister-theologians. There’s much more which can be said about this need. Let me close by recommending a few book titles and readings which will take you further into this growing discussion and will hopefully convince you of this need: