Remarks on Theological Education for the Diocese of Algoma Synod

Presented on May 12, 2023 to the Diocese of Algoma Synod

I’m very grateful to John Gibaut and to the Synod of Algoma for giving me a few moments today to share a bit about the task of theology and the work that we do at Thorneloe University. 

I was once asked by a friend of mine if studying theology was destroying my faith in God. This friend was worried that too much studying about God was somehow in conflict with my ability to know God. I remember being confused and, honestly, a bit offended by the question, but it’s a sentiment that I’ve encountered only too often since. “Theology” is seen by many Christians today as something that is at best, a dubious enterprise. For some, it is an obsession with the minutiae of doctrines and dogmas that just gets in the way of the more important business of ‘doing’ our faith. For others, it’s a way of dressing up hurtful ideas in fancy language that can be used to beat already far too vulnerable souls into submission. For an increasing majority, ‘theology’ is simply a word that has no meaning at all, and when I tell people I’m a theologian more often than not, I just get blank stares in response.

I don’t doubt that these perceptions of theology aren’t grounded in some concrete experiences, but for me, the study of theology might best be described as an exercise of 

love. The renowned French philosopher, Jacques Derrida, was once asked in an interview if he could say a bit about l’amour, about love. He responded simply, “le qui et quoi,” “the who and the what”. Derrida went on to discuss the difference between loving someone as an absolute singularity, loving them for who they are in all their irreducible complexity and surprising excess, vs. loving a bunch of discrete properties or ‘whats’ about somebody. Derrida does not deny that love often begins by way of seduction, as we are drawn to some particular attribute about someone, perhaps their beauty, or intelligence, or humour, but what happens when beauty fades? When intelligence reaches its limits? When the jokes aren’t funny anymore? The love of these specific attributes can only sustain one so far. But to love somebody for who they are, for their contradictions, limits, and excesses of their own being, now this is something that can draw us in, can provide a commitment for the long haul. It is undoubtedly more difficult, but it promises to perhaps be less fickle.

I think the study of theology can be helpfully understood through Derrida’s distinction of the who and the what. The study of theology is an invitation to reflect critically and care-fully on whether we love various ‘whats’ about God and God’s church, or if we actually simply love them. John Calvin once observed that the human heart is a perpetual factory of idols - we love to construct a list of attributes that ‘must’ describe God and, oh how we love our own lists! But is loving our lists of attributes the same thing as loving God? Derrida does not deny that human love often begins in the appreciation of particular attributes, but to love someone or something fully, in the irreducibility of their being, is to make a commitment to love in a way that accepts the limits of our lists and leaves us open to the possibility of being surprised, disappointed, awed, and converted by the difference of our beloved.

But how does this apply to the academic study of theology, you may be wondering? Well when it comes to loving God, we have a bit of a problem, for loving God is both like loving any other beloved, and also importantly different. God is not simply one more different thing in the universe that can be loved or ignored, God is differently different. Loving God, it turns out, is only possible because God first loved us, and has communicated that love to the world through the people of Israel through whom he sent a Son that by adoption, we Gentile believers might have some way to know and love the God who is the Creator of all that is. Because the possibility of our loving God is predicated on God’s own loving activity and revelation towards the world, we are left with the task of learning how God has revealed Godself to various people in various times and places even as God continues to reveal Godself to us today. So part of loving God is learning how to identify the voice of God by taking some time to study how other people have reported hearing God and learning to love God.

Anglicans, in particular, have an incredibly rich and varied tradition to draw from, as John has already spoken to, we have a lot of ‘sources’ for doing theology, from the Scriptures to the creeds, to the articles of our faith and our prayer books. There are many treasures to find, alongside some mistakes that need to be confronted, but none of that can be done if some time isn’t set aside to study and read, and specifically, read broadly beyond the books that simply agree with whatever we already think.

I had a mentor who explained to me that when he was a young priest, his dean made him swap libraries for a season with one of his colleagues. His colleague was an Anglo-Catholic and he himself was an Evangelical, but the dean reminded them that while it was just fine to adhere to a particular churchmanship, as priests they needed to be able to take services and be a pastoral presence to Anglicans across the spectrum. In the end, it turned out that they learned quite a bit from each other and, at least in my mentor’s ministry, that intellectual flexibility produced a lot of fruit over many decades of priestly ministry.

At Thorneloe, I intentionally set out to challenge my students' preconceptions. For the past five years, I’ve been teaching the two capstone classes for the BTh, and one of the key things that I do is make students confront parts of their tradition that they’ve perhaps been reluctant to embrace before. The point is not to make them agree with everything, but to encourage them to become charitable readers of points of view that are strange, difficult, or just different than anything they’ve encountered before. If a student is a proponent of the BAS, I make them engage more carefully with the BCP, if they’re a BCP fan, I insist that they learn what makes the BAS and other more recent liturgical resources, like those coming out of Sacred Circle, so valuable.

I’ve found it to be super helpful to assign books from different eras that can sit in constructive tension for students. So I assign Augustine’s Confessions, and Natalie Carne’s Motherhood: A Confession. Some students are drawn to tradition and find a guide in Augustine, others think he is the source of all that is wrong in the church, and those students tend to have the opposite reaction to Carnes’s feminist reworking of that classic. But the process of slowly working through these texts, in conversation with myself and their classmates, and through the process of writing about their questions, concerns, and discoveries, students find that they have encountered unlikely comrades in these ancient and contemporary guides in the ongoing quest that is our friendship with God. Students discover that taking the time to read carefully and generously opens up opportunities and possibilities of relationship with God, and with these far-flung Christian brothers and sisters, that pushes them to accept that the world is much stranger, and more wonderful than had previously been imagined. Far from creating rigid dogmatisms and hard orthodoxies, the academic study of theology approached in this way makes space for the discovery of unlikely friendships and overlooked approaches to the Christian life of friendship with God.

The Christian life of friendship with God is described by Jesus as a call to love God with our hearts, souls, and minds. Most of my students love the Lord with their hearts and souls much better than I do, what I see my job as being at Thorneloe is introducing them to thinkers from across the Christian tradition who encourage and challenge them with different ideas and different approaches to loving God. Sometimes this takes the form of a critique, and sometimes it is in the form of encouragement, but through it all, students at Thorneloe slowly grow into Christians who can articulate not just what they believe, but why they believe what they believe and can responsibly describe why others might disagree with them in good faith. They can do this because they’ve discovered in the work of theology, friends and guides that prevent us from creating God in our own image but instead, point us at the God who is irreducibly differently different than we are, who loves us, and invites us into that life of love forever.