Freed From and For the Church
The Theologian's Task in the World
About the author: Morgan Bell is a doctoral candidate at the University of Toronto (Emmanuel College). His research explores the doctrine of the First Person of the Trinity in the theology of Karl Barth. He is a minister in The United Church of Canada, an adjunct faculty member at the Vancouver School of Theology, and the Resident Visiting Scholar in Theology at the Atlantic School of Theology from January–May 2024.
Karl Barth famously opens his Church Dogmatics with a succinct description of the theological task: theology is “the scientific self-examination of the Christian Church with respect to the content of its distinctive talk about God.”1 Barth emphasizes theology’s character as an inherently ecclesial activity done by, in, and for the Church. Even those not much given to Barth’s own theological orientation have taken up his commitment to the ecclesial responsibilities of theology and have lamented the seeming loss of “churchliness” in much contemporary theology.
Others, however, encourage and have welcomed an environment in which theology is liberated from its supposed subservience to the Church—a dogmatics freed from dogmatism. There are greater things in heaven and earth than dreamt of in the Church’s life and teaching! Theologians ought to be free to explore and pursue them. That contemporary theology is relatively freed from the Church—its orthodoxies, its politics, its power-structures—is, in this view, a good which makes possible free and expansive theological inquiry.
Whether we bemoan the loss of theology’s ecclesiality (as I tend to) or celebrate it, the fact of the matter is that we live in an age when “theology” primarily names an academic discipline studied in and shaped by the higher education complex. Theologians’ freedom from the Church is far more evident than the fact that they hold an ecclesial office. Indeed, “the office of theologian” more usually describes the room on the third floor of the local university’s humanities building rather than the vocation for which some are set apart for the good of the Church and for the glory of God.
Bemoan it, celebrate it, work to reverse it, seek to cement it, the theologian’s freedom from the Church seems a fact of “theological existence today.”
Barth wrote much about the freedom that must attend any theology grounded in the Gospel. That freedom, Barth is clear, is not in the first instance what Isaiah Berlin termed a “negative freedom”: a freedom from any constraint on or circumscription of the theologian’s intellect and imagination. To be sure, there is an element of this in theological freedom. By the working of the Holy Spirit, the theologian’s imagination and intellect is liberated from the swirl of ideological demands, political pressures, and intellectual dogmas that demand our fealty and hamper a full-throated intellectual response to the God who encounters us in Jesus Christ. These pressures are relativized by theology’s lordly Object: the living God.
Still, theological freedom is not primarily a negative freedom because Christian theology is irreducibly bound to the Word of God made flesh in Jesus Christ as attested by Holy Scripture; it is subject to the Holy Spirit as Lord and Giver of life. Theology is not unfettered imagination, but forever bound to its Liberator. Primarily, then, theological freedom is a “positive” freedom. It is a freedom for. One’s imagination is liberated to think after the living God made known in Jesus Christ. One is freed up to think through the implications of Christian confession in one’s time and place. And one is freed up to offer the fruits of one’s thought for the good of the Church.
It is precisely that freedom—being set free to think and to offer one’s thought to the Church’s benefit—that should characterize how one thinks of the current structural and intellectual independence theology seemingly has from the Church. While this state of affairs may not be ideal, nevertheless it may afford certain possibilities to animate theological inquiry and its role in the Church. Perhaps theology’s relative distance from the Church may enable theologians to see that they are not, in fact, the Church itself. At the end of the day, theologians are not the theological nor magisterial authority of the Church. While bishops or episcopal authorities may be theologians, theologians are not bishops or episcopal authorities. The theologian is not, finally, the presbytery, not the synod, not the house of bishops, not the magisterium. In their churchly office, the theologian serves these authorities as advisor, counsel, and resource. “Since theology is called to serve,” a mature Barth counseled, “it must not rule. It must serve God in his Word as the Lord of the world and of the community, and the [one] loved by God and addressed by God’s Word. It may rule neither in relation to God nor in relation to [humanity].”2 Any and all theological proposals require adoption and sanction by the Church under the guidance of the Holy Spirit in order to be binding for or normative within the Church.
This may, of course, come across as truistic (especially given theology’s current state of affairs, at least in the West). Of course university professors and private scholars are not church authorities! But that knowledge ought to shape our theological sensibilities. Because any given theology is, in an important respect, a proposition put to the church for its discernment and consideration, theologians are freed from self-seriousness. The theologian does not make theological pronouncements ex cathedra in their writing or teaching. As Barth wrote, “any questions and proposals” and “findings” that theologians generate “will be presented for consideration only as well-weighed suggestions.”3 Theologians are not finally the arbiters of our theologies’ utility, fidelity, or veracity.
Thus theologians need not carry the weight of the world (nor the Church) upon their shoulders. This is not to say that the theological task is not of utmost seriousness: theology has to do with the Living God who slays and makes alive (1 Sam 2:6–7). But theologians serve that slain and risen Body that is given Christ’s mind for its own; they are not that Body itself, theirs are not its mind. To the extent that the theologian enjoys (!) a relative freedom from the Church, that serves the end of the theologian’s freedom for it.
Therefore, while theological existence is a serious and serving existence, perhaps the distance theologians have from the Church at present may serve as a reminder that the theologian is freed to take up their task in searching and far-ranging ways. Theologians are freed up to exercise their creative faculties with integrity and passion. Indeed, there should be a certain playfulness to theology, knowing that at the end of the day, the worth of our work is judged by God through the ministry of God’s Church. Theologians ought to feel freed to take intellectual risks, then; to pursue innovative lines of inquiry and engage a wide variety of knowledges and issues as they carry out their work. Because our work, as rigorous and hard-won as it may be, is but provisional with respect to the Church to which we freely offer up our labors. And in claiming this feature of theological freedom, perhaps theologians may rediscover that the “leeway” we are granted in fact liberates us to pray, think, write, teach, and act “for the good of the community itself.”4
Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics, trans. ed. G.W. Bromiley and T.F. Torrance (Bloomsbury: T&T Clark, 2009), I/1, 1.
Karl Barth, Evangelical Theology, trans. Grover Foley (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1963), 187f.
Barth, Evangelical Theology, 43.
Barth, Evangelical Theology, 43.
I heard Morgan preach at the Atlantic School of Theology a few weeks ago. His writing is as dynamic as the preaching! Looking forward to hearing more from Rev. Bell.