the state of theology

a few reflections from a week away

One thing you might not know about me is that I do most things out of two motivations; interest and love. This is why the laundry is never done- it is boring, and the ones I love can wear something else.

I used to be “ambitious”, but the seed of that died long ago, around the birth of my second child. Up until that point I had harbored visions of myself as “successful”, but I realized that I would need to choose between traditional success and peace to do so. Peace is a horrible thing to bet against. So I tucked myself in my household and stayed there for about a decade.

Doctoral programs, or at least the kind of program I was enrolled in, entail a set of unspoken expectations. Because they are expensive and scarce by design, for the most part you are expected to finish what you started. You are expected to do it reasonably quickly- in about five years- and then you are expected to continue the legacy of your teachers, usually by securing an academic job.

It was clear to me almost from the start that I’d disappoint these expectations. I’ve always lacked… something… that would drive other people to lose sleep or friendships or walks outside for academic success. I am just not built that way. Once my children showed up, it was unthinkable that I would hire someone else to do the fun things with them. I would love to hand off the boredom and the dull tasks, but the swimming lessons and library class? No way. This was because these were interesting things, done with people I love. That’s my happy place. It wasn’t that I wanted to stay home- it was just that I couldn’t bear to miss a minute. My young children were deeply interesting, and I loved them. That decided it.

The thing that happened over time was that I realized that academic work, for me, had never been about success. It was about love. Thinking was not about ambition or professional opportunity. I am a poorly socialized academic for this reason. I do not care about credentials or pedigrees or who you know. I don’t like small talk, and I have an extremely low tolerance for things that I find boring and for half-truths. This may be a vice, but because I am not seeking full time work, I can entertain it.

I am, however, hungry to think. Ideas and people are what I love. I’ve often wished it were otherwise. For years I would wake up and immediately go to my chair and read or jot down notes before a child would need my attention. Nothing ever came of these in longform, for years- I did not write anything until my youngest was four- but it was like my brain just needed to dance a bit, before the tedium of the day began. And that was how it felt, to me- like dancing, like joy and freedom and creativity.

I just returned from the annual theology conferences. Hundreds, or in some disciplines thousands, of specialists gather in one location every year to talk about ideas, new and old. What’s interesting is how few of these ideas are interesting. I joked to a friend this weekend that I felt like the new work in theology was an infomercial trying to sell me a Shamwow!- those ridiculous towels they sell on tv. Everyone is gathered around listening to a pitch for some new theory and nodding sagely and promoting these new and exciting opportunities- and I’m sitting in the back saying, isn’t this just a towel? Don’t I already have a towel? This is embarrassing.

Among the more conservative types, the opposite dynamic is at play. What tends to happen is that the same old ideas and questions are rehashed, yet again, and the same old turf wars marked out, with jostling perhaps for a new angle but with usually more heat than light. There are so many smart people who seem to just want to say the same things in a slightly different way, and I am often bored by it.

I don’t say any of this to insult anyone. I do, however, want to draw out of my fellow theologians a desire to think differently- after beauty and truth- for its own sake. I’d like us to cast off both novelty and the unnecessary burden of tradition. And the truth is that there are many things to love about theology, and many people who want this love drawn out of them.

What has surprised me as I have reentered professional life is how many people I love there. I suspect not everyone experiences professional conferences this way (ha, ha). But when I show up I typically have a full dance card of coffees and dinners and I get to sit with people who light up when they talk about something- eschatology, the divine attributes, Creation- and when that light catches your own, the whole room for a minute lights up. There is this sparkling, refracted quality of pixellated light that catches your breath in your throat. Time stops for a minute. It feels most like love.

I suspect this is why my discipline has such a long and storied legacy of teachers (male) falling in love with their students (female)- because when your soul is lit from within alongside a friend, it feels a lot like love. It’s contagious. You can’t help but want to be with people who make you feel this way. You can’t help but love them.

Every generation must discover Lolly for themselves. Lolly is Charlotte von Kirschbaum, Karl Barth’s theological secretary, assistant, companion, and most certainly lover of three decades.¹ He was married during this time, but moved Lolly into his home and proceeded with this arrangement until they died. Just this last week two people mentioned this affair to me as something that made Barth impossible for them. I’m the only person I know who holds an opposite view. For me, this tangled and sinful and tragic affair makes Barth more credible.

Putting aside for a moment Barth’s views on gender, I wonder if what Charlotte and his tangled love for her taught Barth was about the interruptive power of revelation. God comes to humans, Barth writes, in an apocalyptic revelation. We learn of God not through nature but through God’s self-revealing, at God’s own initiative. This revelation is disruptive- it changes us and threatens our expectations and reveals us to ourselves as other than we’d thought. Knowledge of God and of ourselves does this. We are cast in a different light- sometimes quite an unflattering one, like a bad hotel mirror. We see things we didn’t know were there and are accountable for them. Barth’s love of a woman not his wife was sinful and is as tragic as it is shocking. But I feel protective of a theologian who is so deeply human and whose sin is so close, even if he is ultimately unable to make things right in this life. He lived so close to that fire that consumes and destroys, but that can also set things aflame from within.

Shared knowledge can feel like love, which is why teachers and students fall in love, I think. I’ll bet its what came up between Barth and Lolly. The Billy Graham rule was made for such occasions, and I’ve at times been grateful for it, when that refracted light hits. An older woman now, I feel more humbled by the possibility of this shared knowledge, of the synergy that comes from holding an idea in common. We need another word- not “love”, as its too loaded with romantic baggage, but maybe- affection, joy, attachment, intellectual friendship. None of these capture the half of it, though. It really is an energy all its own.

But I know what it feels like. I felt it, too, when I used to teach. When you can offer a student something that they can grab onto and realize in their own life, it also feels like love. I’ll carry it with me in my heart as long as I live. If you can steward it and guard it and beware of becoming a chapter in someone’s biography, it has a real renewing power. Students used to cry a lot with me. I think its because they felt it, too. An unguarded strength is a double weakness, as they say. But fire can generate as well as destroy.

Something odd happens when you hit forty. There is a change in the kinds of questions you ask about yourself, from “what can I become” to “what will I have been”. That past tense is a killer. It is radically disorienting to see your potential matter less than your legacy. Once you acquaint yourself to it, however, it can also be a grace. Because I get to choose what I leave behind, I’d love nothing more than to leave behind readers and students who loved God and their lives a little bit more, because they’d known me, or known my work. I’d love for them to feel a kind of lightness in their being, to drop their shoulders and take a deep breath and maybe cry a little and then move forward as themselves, as creatures dearly loved and reconciled to the Love that moves the Sun and the other stars. I want them to know what that energy of shared attention feels like, and to learn how to direct it toward God.

Practically speaking, this means I am setting about writing a few short books, but I’m also trying to carve out a little space within the discipline of theology for others who want to think about leaving a legacy of beautiful words that can ease anxious souls, and draw others to God. I want them to tell each other the truth, and to care about beauty. I’d like very much if I could help other thinkers learn to love God with their minds. When you look at it this way, thinking together is a lot like love. I’d like there to be more of it.

1. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0040573617702547