What Use Are Theologians?
Theologians and the Need to Listen
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.
At some point in the course of our shared life as Christians, we will encounter the question “What is the use of theology?” There are good reasons for this. The question of theology’s use is pressed by both the momentous and the mundane happenings of everyday life. In the face of war, suffering, and shattering on a global scale, what use can theology be (whatever “theology” means)? When faced with matters of material consequence, like the need to eat, drink, breathe, and rest, what can theology offer? The question of theology’s use can be posed in a distorted sense, in ways that echo the reduction of value to how something can be instrumentalized. All the same, use matters in these contexts—this question is pressed by reality.
Just as the question is pressed by reality, meanwhile, the question of theology's use should be ask it in terms of how theology is made real in the life of community. As such, I am here going to broach it in terms of theologians.
By “theologians,” I mean those who reflect on the depths of meaning that suffuse how we articulate God in the lives of creatures. There are professional theologians, who write and teach theology in church or academic contexts. There are theologians who reflect on these depths as a matter of course or curiosity, apart from any “official” context. If you are reading this post, odds-on you are a theologian in this sense. And whether professionally or otherwise, it is those who reflect on these depths that make theology real—not just in their writing and their speech, but also in their presence and their care.
Rendered this way, the question of theology’s use takes the following shape: what is the use of those who reflect on these depths of meaning? What can those who reflect in this way do in their encounters with need and desire, with violence and love? In short, what use are theologians?
I am going to dwell on two possible answers to this question, though there are many others. The first names one of the great temptations for theological reflection—a temptation grounded in a desire to be “The One Who Knows.” In reflecting on how we articulate the reality of God’s life with creatures, in devoting time to other people’s theological reflections, theologians develop a kind of expert knowledge. This can be a good and joyful thing. This knowledge can also, however, seem to communicate truths that others lack, such that theologians come to distinguish themselves from their neighbors by their knowing. When knowledge is inhabited in this way, as a mark of distinction, the problems that others face can seem to arise from confusion and error, grounded in their lack of access to the truth. Theologians by contrast know the truth, and in communicating what they know, they can give their neighbor what is needed to solve or dissolve their problems. Whether from the pulpit, the lectern, or the coffee-shop chair, theologians thus feel called to be The One Who Knows; the one who is useful because they can graciously (this is not said sardonically) give the truth to others.
A great many people primarily encounter theologians in this way. If a theologian is anything, they are someone who knows both what is and what should be when it comes to the logics of faith—and who through this knowledge can give the truth. And theologians can of course become objects of desire in this way: it makes perfect sense to desire a truth that can make flourishing possible, and it makes perfect sense to want to give others a truth that can make life easier.
Even and especially within this desire, however, there is a deeper alienation, one which people often implicitly feel as they react against the forms of relationship imposed by One Who Knows. These forms of relationship are characterized by a violence with at least two aspects. Stuart Hall articulates the first aspect in his critique of Marxist notions of “false consciousness.” Such notions ascribe “an absolute distinction between those who can see through ... the complexity of social relations ... and the vast number of people ... who are imprisoned, who are judgmental dopes, and who just can’t tell what things are.”1 In relation to those with putatively clear sight, others can only relate as the ignorant and imprisoned. Hall instead works from the assumption that one must presume that we all begin from a point of truth, even in our errors—a truth that may be partial and distorting, but truth nonetheless. Donald Winnicott notes the second aspect of violence with the example of a psychoanalyst who “find it irksome to go as slowly as the patient is going.”2 In their impatience, they begin to provide interpretations based on their accumulated expertise. But in Winnicott’s words, “this is of no use to the patient. The analyst may be very clever, and the patient may express admiration, but in the end the correct interpretation is a trauma, which the patient has to reject, because it is not theirs.”3
Taken together, Hall and Winnicott illustrate the danger of The One Who Knows—because such a One ultimately relates to others as one who gives the neighbor what is not the neighbor’s own, under the assumption that the neighbor does not have what is already theirs. This mode of relation is spiritually corrosive. Precisely in its benevolence, it is a mode of relation which can both entrench and exacerbate all the dimensions according to which a people’s existence is characterized in terms of lack—whether it is women who supposedly lack men’s supposed rationality, non-white people who supposedly lack white people’s supposed disposition for civilization, or the disinherited who supposedly lack the wealthy’s supposed work ethic and frugality. Precisely in its self-certainty it can occlude the theologian from growing in wisdom; for those who know are very rarely in a position to learn.
There is a second possible answer to the question of the use of theologians. Several years ago, my Dad came over from Britain to visit me in New Haven. He had always wanted to meet some of the professors I had told him so much about, and Willie Jennings graciously set aside some time to get lunch with us both. As our time came to an end, my Dad asked Professor Jennings something along the lines of “What do young theologians need to be doing now, for the world and such?”
I very clearly remember the Professor pausing, thinking, and after five seconds or so offering a single word: “Listening. Theologians need to be listening.”
Whether our reflection on the shared life of God and creature takes place in the academy, the church, or any other stream of life, whether this reflection involves academic study or not, theologians do learn. We gain knowledge, and if we are lucky, this knowledge brings us closer to God. Before this knowledge empowers us to speak, however, it should empower us to listen. It should empower us to listen to the depths and the density of what our neighbor is saying, to hear how the body’s words express the spirit’s life. Theological learning can help to form a sensitivity to the truths one’s neighbor already has, to the truth being created out of those truths, to how these truths compel movement through life and its vicissitudes.4
If the time does then come to speak, theologians do not need to add to, correct, or supplement this truth. Theologians can instead become closer to dance partners, not instructors—those whose movement invites movement, whose response invites response, whose thinking catalyzes thought. Listening within the theological contours of the depths of human speech, theologians can participate in an intensification of truth, like fire placed next to fire.5 Rather than imparting knowledge under the assumption of lack, that is, theologians can listen under the assumption of a dynamic and creative truth already present. The freedom given by this sensitivity can then become part of the neighbor’s freedom, as the truth of God in life intensifies in its being communicated between God’s creatures.
There are other things that theologians can do. To name just two, there are possibilities of theological creativity, which work at the very nature of possibility itself, and there are possibilities of theological critique, which seek to participate in the prophetic tradition. These possibilities should themselves, however, be grounded in listening rather than a distinctive possession of the truth. In the same breath with which we seek to create and critique, it is important that theologians remember that we can be those who listen, and whatever speech is provoked by this listening—whether a sermon, a book, a lecture, a question, a response, or a silence—should aspire to be part of intensifying the neighbor’s truth in the neighbor’s own freedom. This may well involve the communication of knowledge, of course! But this is knowledge offered for knowledge, not ignorance; truth offered for truth, not lack. It is a communication in which both interlocutors can be transformed in the intensification of their belonging together with God.
Such an intensification cannot fix problems of a global scale. Nor can it put food on the table (though sharing a meal can also be part of listening). It is nonetheless useful. For in the midst of real need, theological listening can become a catalyst for gracious power—not power over others, but power for others in the truth of oneself.
I will devote future posts to what this might look like in practice through specific theologians or themes. For now, I hope and pray that that our theological reflection might give us ears to hear the truth in each other’s lives, then to participate in the realization and transformation of this truth in our shared lives with God.
Stuart Hall, Cultural Studies, 1983: A Theoretical History (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016), 83.
D.W. Winnicott, The Maturational Processes and The Facilitating Environment: Studies in the Theory of Emotional Development (New York: International Universities Press, Inc., 1965), 51.
Winnicott, Maturational Processes, 51.
There are other and potentially contradictory approaches that can be taken for articulating what is at stake here, such as the one traced in Kierkegaard’s Philosophical Fragments.
“Intensification” is also a phrase Professor Jennings uses in his lectures.