the scandal of the pastoral mind

A few years ago, I taught an adult education class called “Theology of Mammon.” My church did not need a money-management seminar or a stewardship series. Our questions were deeper, questions about the structured racial violence of capitalism and how that violence shapes us and our politics. We wondered what that had to do with us, people who follow Jesus. In other words, we had theological questions.

I began to read what I could find on theological investigations of money. I read Devin Singh’s Divine Currency and struggled through Philip Goodchild’s Theology of Money, then Credit and Faith. I dusted off my red-covered Marx-Engels Reader from undergrad and tackled Cedric Robinson’s Black Marxism before I turned to McCabe and Gutierrez. I read and read and read.

I was challenged by the readings, and I was lonely. I didn’t have colleagues engaged in this learning project. I was on my own to peel back the layers of text and to puzzle through difficult arguments. Instead of conversation partners, I had YouTube lectures and podcasts that offered at least a form of collegiality.

The translation of these ideas to people beyond the academic field was another challenge, but one that is familiar to pastors. We’ve taken up a vocation of interpretation – the territory is well-worn. Because the audience of academic theology is the academy, pastors are in the unique position to sort through what this work does or does not (or cannot) do.

I’m thinking of “Theology of Mammon,” of learning alongside my Mennonite congregation about the contours of money as I’m reflecting in two directions on the first academic conference I’ve attended since before the pandemic.

First, this conference made me extraordinarily grateful that my theological life has unfolded among ordinary people – blue collar workers, refugees, incarcerated people, teachers, climate scientists, parents, retirees. After a century of a theological vision that believed (preposterously) that “real” theology happened in the academy and eventually trickles down to ordinary people for our absorption, theology as an academic discipline is on the defensive. Theologians are finding they have to justify their existence. And they are struggling (as we are witnessing in the closure of dozens of theology and religion departments).

I take no delight in this turn of events because, as far as I have seen, I don’t see the disillusionment of theology departments leading to a reckoning of the structured remoteness of the academy’s internalized debates (alienation!), or the materialist realities that have brought us here (endowments!). Instead, I’m hearing “the end of theology” or deconstruction projects with no political ends – perhaps another chapter in an elitism that has always assumed that if a theological question does not fall in the academy, no one is there to hear it.

But second, I’m wondering about pastors getting to think. I told someone from my church this conference was a strange experience for me because I got to think about things for four days. I typically like doing other things with my time in addition to thinking. But I also lament that for many pastors the work of study is something we do when the rest of our work is done, which can translate to never.

I don’t know the genealogy of religious professionalism, as to when clergy and theologian diverged as a single profession. I do know that for centuries these vocations were intertwined (it gives me immense joy to read Augustine’s sermon complaining that people are not coming to church because they’re at the games, and I think there’s something to the formation of a theological voice that has to deal with convincing ordinary people to get to catechism). I was laughing with a friend about how Karl Barth wrote not one but two versions of the Romerbrief while he was pastoring a working-class church in Safenwil. He decided one summer he’d take up this writing project. I told my friend, “this is what pastors did with their time before email.”

I get the sense that Barth was not a great pastor (a friend of mine on the Barth translation team tells me he starts off his confirmation lecture with Kant. Insufferable). But I think we all know that churches are shifting from places of intentional theological production to fee-for-service non-profits. In most cases, pastors’ daily lives look nearly identical to non-profit management. I know a pastor who recently hosted a “thank you volunteers” appreciation event – a tactic taken right out of non-profit management textbooks. I’m flooded with similar suggestions of how to leverage these tactics for church growth, or at least survival.

You may be thinking, “so what? Let people go to church to get community, charity, vibes, etc. Theologians are doing the theologizing.” Except that theology as an academic discipline is on a precipitous decline. And even then, I use the language of “intentional theological production” as a former expectation of churches because theological production is still happening. Churches that are doing Dave Ramsey courses are engaged in a theological production of economic life. People singing the same hymns for 30 years, as if nothing happened since 1989? That produces forms of God-talk. Hierarchical ecclesial authority that invites assumed but unearned authority? That’s a political theology. Liturgies are God-talk. Prayers are God-talk.

Add into this the pressure to keep up declining membership, upkeep ancient buildings, hold factionalism at bay and you’re in a real pickle when it comes to time to think about what it means to have membership, why we keep ancient buildings, how we understand unity and truth. I think a lot of pastors feel as if they rarely get the chance to ask the deeper questions below the surface.

Part of the reason is that theological engagement is work – it is hard work. At least for a few more years, people do this professionally! It takes time and grit to take up theological investigation. I’m not sure most churches are interested in development of a pastor’s mind (or even their own) as intrinsic to the theological production of their church. What we got instead is this slim margin of a movement towards a scholar-priest, which usually means a pastor with a terminal degree and one foot in academic spaces (teaching adjunct, presenting at academic conferences).

I don’t want more theology classes or degrees (I don’t think?). And whenever I think I do want this, I eventually realize that what I actually want is for ministry and worship to be taken seriously for what it is -- a locus for producing the theological that has something to do with how we form the world. I don’t necessarily mean “how we form the world” as something as blatant as Christian nationalism. Everyone seems to have something to say about that these days. Instead, I wonder about climate change action that continue to treat other creatures as commodities instead of partners in gift-bearing. I wonder about the fear of institutional death that animates capitalist models of church-survival. I wonder about a politics beyond unity and “getting along.” I wonder about the absence of worker organizing in the church.

I don’t have models for what this will look like or suggestions for where we go from here. Instead, I have longing – not to be lonely in my learning, to uncover the arguments with others, to participate in difficult work that takes seriously the responsibility for the material realities that theologies produce.