hedrick@topaz.RUTGERS.EDU (Charles Hedrick) (08/26/85)
Message <1008@sphinx.UChicago.UUCP>, from Gary Buchholz has raised a number of interesting issues, only some of which have been dealt with in the responses. Among these are the proper relationship between an academic discipline, practitioners of the discipline, "end users", and others in the outside world the nature of theology and the Church basic reformation principles such as the priesthood of all believers and the clarity of Scripture I. Theorists, Practitioners, and Users Gary presents us with a model of expertise which draws a sharp line between experts and non-experts, and says that non-experts should never participate in discussions requiring expertise, nor attempt to judge experts. He implies that this model is the norm in fields such as medicine. In fact, there are few groups of people in contemporary society who can act independently of all others. Generally, academics are influenced and even judged by members of other disciplines, practioners of their own discipline, and the public as a whole. In most Universities, promotion and tenure decisions are made by the central administration, based on recommendations of an evaluation committee containing members of many disciplines. It is viewed that this promotes high academic standards, and helps prevent domination of departments by cliques. I believe that the danger of cliques is real. In many fields, there are a number of different schools of thought. Unless forced to do otherwise, there will be a tendency to want to hire and promote those who belong to the same school, and a hesitancy to reexamine the basic beliefs of that school. In many disciplines, including those mentioned by Gary, there are at least three groups of people: theorists, practitioners, and users. For example, in medicine we have researchers and teachers, clinicians, and the general public. In computer science, we have computer science researchers, programmers, and users. In theology, we have theologians, clergy, and church members. There are always ways for each of these groups to influence the others. Most research establishments encourage participation by practitioners. This tradition is particularly strong in medicine. A Ph.D. degree alone does not get you nearly as far in research as a Ph.D./M.D., with clinical experience. Any research institution that attempted to completely ignore the opinions of clinicians would soon find itself without monetary or other support. There is community involvement in making decisions at all levels of medicine, including lay membership on boards of directors, committees to decide who gets artificial organs, etc. There is an increasing emphasis in medical education and practice on patient involvement in decision-making. Finally, when all else fails, the issue is likely to end up in court, with a lay jury. The relationships among all of these interests can get very complex. However when everything works correctly, the result is that every group respects the needs and interests of the other, and the groups are mutually responsible for each other. Normally a lay group would not attempt to make specific medical judgements. But they may certainly decide that certain kinds of diagostic procedures are being used too much, or that the interests of the patient or society is not being properly taken into account. A similar complex relationship exists, and should exist, between theologians in seminaries, clergy, and lay churchmen. No church that I know of would want to dictate exactly what is taught in seminary classes, or what should be published by researchers. However churchmen may quite rightly become concerned if they detect a general lack of contact between the concerns of theology and what is going on in the church and the real world. I do not mean to suggest heresy trials and power plays (though we all know of cases where this has happened). Normally things do not come to this point. Most theologians are quite sensitive to what is going on around them, and the interplay between theologians, clergy, and the church as a whole is continuing and almost invisible. Things are somewhat more difficult in religion departments outside seminaries. In such cases, there is no institutional connection between the department and others that are interested in its work. In that sense, it is closer to a computer science department than to a medical school. However this does not mean that researchers in such departments should cut themselves off from the "consumers" of their research. In computer science, we have found that it is very useful to have direct contact with organizations that use computers. Aside from the fact that they can help fund our work, it is useful to have real-world problems to deal with. We also have to be concerned with whether we are preparing our students properly. This does not mean that we can allow outsiders to make every possible decision. One of the funnier examples of this came when I was teaching at the University of Illinois. A major accounting firm complained that the accounting department was not preparing its graduates properly for the "real world". What did he mean? Well, it seems that they were not training their students to use the particular style of mechanical calculators that his firm used (and which were even then out of date). Clearly one need not give into such a thing. But if a department consistently ignored the needs of its students, eventually something would be done. It's hard to say just how. Probably persuasion would be enough. Alumni would talk to deans, and various other informal mechanisms would be brought into play. So I claim that academics are influenced and judged in a number of different ways: - by practioners. They may not have research-level expertise, but they should have a reasonable familiarity with the discipline. - by users. They are in a position to judge whether the academics are dealing with real problems, and coming up with anything that helps. - by colleages in other fields. They will ask for opinions from other institutions, and will also try to make their own judgements as to overall methodologies and whether general scholarly canons are being followed. In some cases, these feedback mechanisms will be more formal than others. II. What is theology? I'm not going to say as much here, since several other responses have dealt with this issue. It seems paradoxical to have a theology that does not believe in God. If I decided that God did not exist, or was somehow not relevant to me, I think I would look for some other basic set of beliefs. This would likely be something like existentialism. If Gary's a/theology is trying to find such a non-religious basis for living, one would expect it to be called philosophy. If it is studying religious beliefs from the outside, it would look more like sociology of religion. If it is simply treating traditional theology as an abstract game, i.e. playing with it as an intellectual business without believing in it, then I would continue to call it theology, but it is hard to see that there there is much of a future in it. Most theoretical disciplines presume a certain sympathy with the underlying subject. It sounds like a tone-deaf person trying to be a musicologist. It would have several problems: - it would be hard for such a person to make sense of what was being said - it would be hard for such a person to have any criteria for evaluating changes - it would be hard to keep many people's interest up in such a discipline There are times when Gary has made it sound like he is trying to do something more sinister, namely to construct a religion from the outside, as a means of control. That is, Gary has a superior understanding. He knows that God really doesn't exist. But he realizes that there are lots of people around who still believe in God and try to follow a religion. So Gary is going to construct a religion for them that will bring them as close as possible to the truth, using language about God as a symbol or possibly even a tool. I certainly hope I have misunderstood him, and he doesn't mean this. It might be OK if we were really sure that he had the final Truth. But I, for one, am not. If he is going to create a religion for me, I want to make sure I know what beliefs of his own are behind this thing that he is making for me. In order for his illusion to work, he is going to have to hide them. I refer you to C.S.Lewis' book, "The Abolition of Man", which is essentially about this topic. III. What is the Church, and how does it relate to the Experts? Gary seems to suggest that the Church is a group of people who are practicing theology without a license, incompetently. That is far from the way I see things. Rather, the Church is a group of people who are trying to live their lives in accordance to God's will. In order to do so, they obviously have to have some theological ideas. But that doesn't immediately put them into competition with professional theologians. Take as an example New Testament source criticism. I think it is important for our average church member to have some idea about how the Gospels came into being. They should realize that the authors each had their own viewpoint, and that they do not have a simple tape recording of what Jesus said. This point can be made fairly simply by showing corresponding passages in each of the gospels and looking at how they differ. Indeed this is now commonly done in Sunday school material. But we are certainly not going to expect them to be able to do a complete analysis of a passage on their own. That's what the pastor is for. And even there, I would expect the pastor to make use of standard commentaries in preparing sermons, and not to go off doing his own, unless he has a genuine new insight, which he has tested appropriately. This is a sort of messy area, because the Protestant churches have in fact spent a lot of effort arguing against exactly this idea of deferring to expertise. Luther and the other Reformers believed that all members should read Scripture for themselves, and that the Holy Spirit will speak to them directly through it. They objected strongly to the idea that the "experts" should dictate ideas to the man in the pew, and he should be forced to accept them without question. However I don't think the Reformers were ever trying to do away completely with expertise, or to suggest that church members should do their own theology from scratch. I think the Reformers were trying to make two points: First, they felt that there is a difference between reading the Bible for yourself, and hearing everything indirectly. The Bible is a very "powerful" document. Many people who read it are profoundly changed by the experience. The Reformers wanted to be sure that all Christians had this experience directly. Second, the Reformers felt that even average people had a reasonable ability to make sense out of what was being said. They felt that much of what the Church was preaching as Gospel was so obviously contrary to Scripture that any Christian would see that fact immediately. They did not mean to get rid of Biblical scholarship completely, but they did feel that the average man in the pew should be able to verify that the results of that scholarship were at least plausible. It would be unreasonable for me as a church member to expect that I could judge all of the scholarly products of our seminaries. But it should be possible to produce popularizations of the major ideas that would make sense to the average church member, that would (possibly with some explanation) have a connection with what Scripture was saying, and that would have some relevance to his faith. But the average church member is not in church primarily to act as a control on theological scholarship. He is there to worship God, and to try to find meaning and guidance for his life. This process involves the emotions, spiritual intuition, and reason. If we are lucky, theological scholarship will have things to say that will help this process. If it does not, the church member may well wonder what it is doing. But this hardly puts him in competition with the academics. We want him to be an intelligent and critical user of the results of scholarship. I hardly see how this makes the church member into an incompetent competitor to the professional theologian. The clergy and lay leadership have a special role here. They are the "practitioners", the equivalent in the medical world of the M.D.'s. It is their role to help mediate the dialog between the theologians and the average church member. As part of this, we would expect them to have some influence on the way theology is conducted. However this influence would not be via competition but via feedback. The theologians that I have met are interested in such feedback. IV. PS on churches and ice cream socials I have belonged to several different churches. I have to say that the people I have met in them have been as competent and serious-minded as the members of any academic department that I know. I don't mean that they were all theological scholars. Far from it. But they were seriously trying to learn how to live so as to benefit their fellow man and give glory to God. I have no reservations about eating my ice cream in their company.