Communing With the Dead

On Reading Old Theologians

Apr 22, 2024

About the author: Ed Watson is a PhD candidate at Yale University, focusing on questions of theology and conceptualization. He is currently working on a dissertation exploring the relationships between Christian talk of grace and racial difference.

I sometimes find myself caught in the middle of a particular argument, one which I have seen crop up in church spaces, academic spaces, and daily life. It might be familiar to some people reading this blog. On the one hand, someone will argue that we do not need to read dead theologians to think theologically, or to live fully as Christians. On the other, some will argue that this reading is an essential part of arriving at a truly mature faith, since without at least some familiarity with someone like Augustine, Aquinas, Calvin, or Barth, there will be a shallowness to one’s faith akin to the shallowness of a politician who neither knows nor understands their nation’s history. There are reasons to be sympathetic to both positions. The idea that one needs to read old theologians to substantiate one’s faith can imply that those who have neither the time nor the resources for such reading but who imitate Christ in the fullness of their lives might require instruction from experts in patristic Christology. Conversely, seeking to understand the faith of Christians from ages past can make it easier to avoid positing “Christianity” as an ahistorical phenomenon, the essence of which happens to collapse into whatever understandings predominate at a particular moment (we might think here, for example, of commitments to Biblical literalism which elide two millennia worth of complex and creative approaches to Biblical interpretation).

There are also good reasons to fear each position. Too often, older theologians are wielded against other Christians as cudgels. I have met too many people who have primarily experienced Augustine and Calvin as weapons, used to curtail the legitimacy of theological questioning or to affirm the absolute correctness of an orthodox view. This is one of the reasons why, as Hanna Reichel reflects in their recent book After Method, a great many young people associate “theology” with “things that had actively hurt and scarred them or their communities.”1 When canonical theologians are wielded as the standard for adequate theological reflection, meanwhile, it can feel as though whether one is sufficiently Christian depends on whether one is sufficiently Barthian or sufficiently Tillichian. The fact that so many canonical theologians are men, and that so many canonical interpretations of these theologians are Western, deeply intensifies the feelings of alienation that can be produced by this regulative deployment of theology.

At the same time, a condescending rejection of pre-modern theology can foreclose the possibility of thinking beyond the limits of one’s world. I have also known a good many people who were treated with bemusement or contempt for thinking that they could find anything worthwhile for faith in patristic or medieval theologians. In a decent number of cases, the opinion also seemed to prevail that one could know what Augustine thought without engaging that thought. This contempt and disregard can disastrously miss the fact that part of the appeal of figures like Maximus the Confessor and Gregory of Nazianzus is often that they illuminate a world of theological possibility beyond what many Christians have been given to understand. Discovering the words and worlds of pre-modern theologians can be a means of escape in the most beautiful sense—not an escape from reality, but an escape from the constriction of reality, into a deeper freedom.

Part of the real difficulty here, however, is that the various fears and desires at stake here can all too easily blur into one another. I might begin my exploration of pre-modern theologians through a desire to expand the boundaries of the Christianity I have been taught—and this can easily develop into a desire to impose new boundaries on others. By the same token, I might reject the idea that Christians need to read past theologians to safeguard the integrity of lived faith. And this can easily become contempt for those who find that reading theology written by those now dead deepens their relationship with God. It can lead to isolationism in one’s life of faith, in adopting another version of the idea that one has nothing to learn from others that one does not already know (whether individually or as a community). In all, the question of whether Christians should read the works of dead theologians can be woven into economies of fear and desire, internecine struggle, and mutual suspicion. I have known communities that look with scorn on those who take different positions in this regard; I have known individuals who have been seriously wounded by hearing from others either that they cannot be taken seriously without knowing old theologians or that they are foolish for seeking spiritual wisdom in these places.

I have been drawn to reflect on this question because, in the course of writing my dissertation, I have found myself spending a lot of time with the work of Nahum Chandler. Across several decades of work, Chandler has not only sought to critically transform philosophical thinking about race—he has worked to show that W.E.B. Du Bois is one of the 19th and 20th centuries great thinkers. Chandler argues that Du Bois has been significantly neglected in this regard, not due to a lack of attention, but because he has been predominantly deployed “as a political figure, one that can be used and abused for contemporary purposes.”2 More specifically, engagement with Du Bois typically involves quoting him “in order to use his authority to throw perspective on a contemporary debate.”3 Du Bois’ writing thus becomes a script that we are always already entirely capable of understanding, and which has no questions to pose us regarding the shapes of our own thought. To my mind, Chandler’s approach to Du Bois charts a middle course through the arguments traced above. Because the question Chandler poses is not whether one needs to read Du Bois or not, but what it means to read Du Bois as someone whose thought can inform one’s own, without being transmuted into a source of immutable and near inhuman authority. What Chandler proposes, that is, is a mode of reading that does not seek answers to our questions in Du Bois’s thinking, but a way of enlivening and enriching our thinking through conversing with a now-dead writer.

Christians need not approach the question of whether to read pre-modern theologians in terms of answers or authority (whether desired or rejected); we need not approach this question in terms of whether such reading is necessary for growth in Christianity. We can approach it in terms of what it means to seek communion with those now dead—what it means to seek communion with someone like Augustine, in such a way that we need neither accept nor reject what we take to be his conclusions, but instead allow Augustine’s thinking inform how we understand our own thought. This is, after all, fundamental to the openness of human relationships: that we encounter others not as objects to be known, evaluated, or controlled, but as persons who deserve to be listened to seriously in their thought.

One implication of all this is that, whether we need to read dead theologians, when we do read them, we must read them as alive. The night before his death, Barth was writing on a lecture which, in Eberhard Busch’s paraphrase, said that “in the church it is always important to listen to the Fathers who have gone before in faith. For ‘God is not a God of the dead but of the living. In him they all live.’”4

To commune with the dead by allowing their thought to put our thinking into question is to read them as alive, as living in God, as part of our own life. And in this, the question of whether or not to read Augustine or Aquinas or Calvin or Barth is really a variation of the question of whether or not I should listen to my neighbor in church as they struggle to think through their life as a Christian—not because I can give them answers, nor because they can solve my problems, but because listening in this way is part of what it means to be in communion with one another in God. It might be argued that there is a difference between listening to my neighbor in the pew and reading someone of Karl Barth’s theological stature. Barth is certainly distinguished by the breadth and creativity of his theological thought, by the time he was able to devote to his craft.

But insofar as I am listening as a theologian, the reasons for listening to him and my contemporary neighbors are not distinct. I read Barth because his wrestling with what it means to think our thoughts of God deepens and challenges my sense of what it is to think and live these thoughts in the present. I read him because he is a fellow creature whose life informs my capacity to love God and neighbor. After all, he is a creature who should be read with care and with love.

I listen to my fellow Christians in the present for the same reasons, the only difference being that I can be a part of their lives as they are a part of mine. Whatever difference in degree there might be here, there is no difference in type. In this, I am firmly convinced that we do our theologians a disservice when we see them as authorities rather than fellow travelers whose words we should receive with love and care, precisely as they can challenge and deepen our thinking of the thoughts of grace. And by seeing theologians as neighbors, my sense is that we avoid seeing them as either weapons to be feared or giving us power to wield over others.

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