This was the question posed on Twitter by Jonathan Dowie (who has recently written a book on multi-lingual church which I hope to review soon).
Jonathan then went on to highlight the problem with academic writing, in short, he said “it sucks.”
His big issue was the tendency for academics to be verbose, hiding behind the argument that they needed to be in order to enable technical precision. He also observed that academics have a habit of writing for other academics.
His thrust was that academic theology was unhelpful and so we would do well to rescue the discipline from academia.
I have significant sympathy with his concerns as regular readers here will be unsurprised to hear. One of my primary reasons for developing Faithroots was to make theology accessible, to enable church members who would never go to seminary or study theology at degree level access to the subject and to provide training for those who would find academic teaching unhelpful in preparing them for Gospel ministry, especially in urban ministry.
I also sympathise because I would go further in my critique. It’s not just that academics write for other academics. If that was what they wanted to do, then that would be their business. If someone gets pleasure from research and writing and other people get pleasure from reading that research and writing then it doesn’t matter if you and I don’t, providing that directly or indirectly we aren’t paying the cost.
However, it goes further than that. There has been a tendency at times to go to the academics and ask them to write book and speak at conferences not just for other academics but at a popular level. I would broaden that out further, how much Christian theology, if not written by professors comes from those whose primary experience of Christian ministry is in large church contexts where their primary role is preparing sermons and how much is provided by those who really operate at the coalface of missional, pastoral work? The result is that in my experience, much of what I written ends up being remote from the experience and needs of those serving in the hardest contexts.
And what I’ve personally experience when reading a few of these books is that their attempt to popularise sucks too. I mentioned in one review how the author seemed to confuse down to earth, accessible and readable with gossipy. They still failed to communicate the big points without resorting to their jargon.
So, with that said, I want to offer a small defence for the place of theology in academia and academia in theology. Now, if it is going to have that place, then it is going to need to do it properly. I don’t think that academic writing needs to suck. It can be readable, it doesn’t have to be verbose. It doesn’t have to slip into jargon, though the use of technically precise language can help with precision and done properly should reduce rather than increase verbosity.
So, why do I think the academics have a place? Well, it comes back to something I’ve commented on before. I remember an OT tutor at theological college who used to be asked in every lecture “but how do we preach this”? And he encouraged a bit of patience, he suggested that we slowed down on the “but will it preach?” question. I believe he had a point. We could be in such a pragmatic rush to get our sermon together, or use a text for pastoral advice that the blinkers would go on and we would miss so much.
There are two risks here. The first is that we end up with eisegesis, reading into the text (whether that’s Scripture, the theological text book, creed or historical theologian) the answers that we are looking for and so misreading what is actually there. This is true in other disciplines too. For example, I think that we saw a lot of this in regards to the ICJ case of South Africa v Israel.
Secondly, we can lose curiosity. We can be so quick to rush to the “so what?” and “how is this useful?” questions that we can lose the place for “this is interesting?” Now, don’t get me wrong, I believe that even the academics have to get to the “so what?” at some point but there is a place for slowing the pace down and not rushing to get there. You see, just because how something is useful and the difference it makes isn’t immediately obvious doesn’t mean it isn’t there.
My dad has talked about a colleague who was incredibly intelligent. There probably wasn’t anything about his field that he didn’t know that was worth knowing. He would have made a brilliant academic. However, the guy wasn’t an academic, he worked in a factory and this was deeply frustrating for all concerned. Whenever someone came with a problem, he would respond “how interesting, the answer could be x, or maybe y, or even z” and off he would go to write a paper whilst the factory ground to a halt.
But that doesn’t mean that his learning and gifting were useless, it just means that they were being employed in the wrong place. Given space and time to explore all the possible options and answers, he would have provided the resources and foundations for others to evaluate, distil and apply, to contextualise.
So too with theology. I would argue that there should be space for people to pause and consider the possibility that something is interesting, even if no-one can immediately see if it is useful. The so what will come in its own time.
Faithroots 