Evangelicals, Premarital Sexual Ethics, and My Grocery List

Tue, 14 Aug 2012 00:01:00 -0400

One of the more vexing issues facing Evangelical pastors today is premarital sexual ethics. Simply put, we pastors are not quite certain how to counsel singles and teens regarding appropriate boundaries. Of course, we clearly teach that sexual intercourse should be reserved for marriage. But beyond this, there is no consensus among Evangelical clergy about where the boundaries should be drawn. Instead we tend to push the burden of this question back onto singles. One pastor typifies the counsel regularly given by Evangelical clergy:

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The Pastor as Wider Theologian, or What’s Wrong With Theology Today

Mon, 03 Jan 2011 00:01:00 -0500

Pastors, not professors, should be setting the theological agenda of the church. This is, of course, a loaded statement, and one that requires more nuance than I’ll be able to give it here. But I stand by it nonetheless. As a pastor who cares deeply about theology, I’ve become convinced that the present bifurcation between theological scholarship and pastoral ministry accounts for much of the theological anemia facing the church today.

Robert Jenson, in his Systematic Theology , defines theology as the church’s “continuing discourse about her individuating and carrying communal purpose.” A typically dense Jensonian statement, but one that rightly captures the essence of theology. Theology is “church speak” about the God who calls and constitutes the church and about the message she proclaims. Reflection on this message”its meaning and specific cultural application”constitutes the church’s theology.

What’s more, guardianship of this message is vital to the health of the church. Yet while all Christians are called to guard the apostolic trust, there is an ascending level of theological responsibility within God’s economy. At the most basic level, all Christians are called to draw a circle of theological protection around their own lives. Beyond this, some have been entrusted with a family and are called to draw a larger circle of protection around a spouse and children. Elders and pastors among us are called to draw a still larger circle, encompassing an entire local Christian assembly. And finally, there are those who are tasked with the theological care of large swaths of the Christian tradition, or even the whole of the tradition itself (think Athanasius, Augustine, Thomas, Luther, and Calvin). These we may call, after a fashion, “wider theologians””theologians who have been tasked with caring for the theological needs of the wider church.

And so we arrive at a pressing question, one that I believe speaks to a significant shortfall in Christian theology: Who should the church call upon to serve as its wider theologians?

Postmodern theology”on the whole”makes too much noise about the effect of social location on theological formation. But one need not drink the entire cup of Derridian Kool-Aid to see that postmodernity has a valid point here. Social location plays a key role in shaping the agenda of one’s theology. And, while perhaps obvious, it must be stated that the social location of pastoral ministry is different than the social location of the academy. Simply put, the questions facing clergy are not always congruent with the questions facing professors. This is not in itself troubling. We need not discount the validity of either set of questions. What is troubling is the fact that nearly all of our theologians have entered the academy, expending the greatest part of their energy answering academic questions. And when academic theologians do get around to addressing ecclesial questions, they tend to do so in academic ways. The chronic “disconnect” between the academy and the church is the inevitable result.

Historically, the church’s most influential theologians were church men”pastors, priests, and bishops. Clerics such as Athanasius, Augustine (indeed, nearly all the church Fathers), Anselm, Luther, Calvin, Zwingli, Edwards, and Wesley functioned as the wider theologians of their day”shaping not only the theological vision of their own parishes, but that of the wider church. In their day, the pastoral community represented the most influential, most insightful, and most articulate body of theologians.

But since the nineteenth-century (in North America, at least) the center of theological reflection has shifted from the parish to the university. The pastoral community is no longer called upon”as a matter of vocation”to construct theology for those beyond their congregations. Instead, our present context views the academy as the proper home for those with theological gifts. Those with shepherding gifts are directed toward the pastorate. And those who are gifted in both areas? Well, they’ll have to choose. But can this be right? Do we really mean to suggest that the proper home of a theologian is in the academy, disconnected from the pastoral vocation?

The drain of our wider theologians from the pastorate to the academy has resulted in a two-fold problem. First, the theological water-level of our local parishes has dropped considerably. Inasmuch as the pastoral vocation is no longer seen as a theological vocation, pastors no longer bring a strong theological presence to their local parishes. The net effect (particularly in the evangelical tradition in which I reside) is a truncated understanding of theology and its import among the laity. Theology has largely left the local church.

The second part of this problem is perhaps more even troubling. Not only has theology left the church, but the church has left theology. To be sure, many academic theologians view themselves as self-consciously serving the theological needs of the church. But on the whole, academic discourse has lost its way, becoming preoccupied with questions”especially questions regarding its right to exist”that minimize its ecclesial relevance. As Karl Barth noted in his Evangelical Theology ,

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Evangelicals, Premarital Sexual Ethics, and My Grocery List

The Pastor as Wider Theologian, or What’s Wrong With Theology Today