Ars longa; vita brevis. This succinct Latin aphorism sums up, pretty perfectly, the inevitable conclusion of anyone who wishes to be a scholar: life is too short! Everyone who wishes to study a discipline, or learn a craft,or appreciate art, or culture, or anything, really – if they are, at all, self-aware, then they will realized their own limitations. Chief amongst these limitations is our mortality. There’s a saying that there have been many chess masters, but no masters of chess. Chess is too complex to master. As is the piano. As is medicine. As is writing. As is theology.
And, because we will die, we have to make choices. We have to choose the person we will be by killing off potential versions of ourselves. Of course, this comes with not a little bit of anxiety. This, I think, is largely the angst that teenagers face, without knowing it. Tolstoy warns about this; serfdom was bad, but at least it made society stable. Young liberated serfs could no longer rely on a menial existence – they had to find their own way in the world. The point is that we have to make choices and these choices come with consequences.
And the reality is that these choices come not only for Russian peasants and 18 year-olds, but for scholars and theologians as well. Theologians are limited by the exigencies of life. We cannot, any of us, become experts in everything…and the person who tries will be inexpert at everything. We have to limit our fields of inquiry into something that is small enough to be manageable, large enough to be significant, and relevant enough to matter.
In layman’s (finally, I get to say that literally!) terms this means: your pastor doesn’t know everything; in fact, your pastor knows very little…but he might know quite a bit about a small area of knowledge – his personal area of expertise (presuming he has one).
And this means that we make choices. When people study theology they have to pick what they will study, and not only the students, but those who write curricula. The curricula writers have to create a body of knowledge that will be manageable, significant, and relevant. All three are crucial. If you only have 2 of the 3, you’re really going to have a useless curriculum. I mean, a seminary could demand that everyone read the complete works of every major and minor theologian in history – but you’d never be able to read that all! You could, of course, just ask that people watch a 15 minute youtube video that sums up Christian theology – but that’s not significant. And of course, the seminary could abandon Western Theology and spend the whole time reading the writings of the Armenian Monophysites from pre 1000 AD – but that wouldn’t be relevant.
Seminaries (at least the good ones) try to do all three. People who are serious theologians, who wish to have a relevant ministry, spend their time studying things that need to be studied, at a manageable scale, that can offer a meaningful contribution to the state of the art.
And that’s why I grow rather weary of hearing how Evangelicalism doesn’t hear enough [insert minority group here] voices in their theological education. Perhaps there’s a reason. Why don’t seminaries have more courses focusing on Sub Saharan African Christian Theology from the pre-colonial era? Because Christianity didn’t exist there and we have no extant literature from them! Why not more Persian Christian theology from before the Great Schism – well, because a lot of what they say isn’t really all that relevant to the development of theology as it is in the West today. Why aren’t there entire courses on the theology of feminist, lesbians who identify are quadriplegic aardwolves? Well, for a whole host of reasons, but largely because they really wouldn’t have anything worth listening to.
Because this is the ugly truth: some ideas are bad. And some voices aren’t worth hearing. Particularly in theology, when you become a heretic, a demonstrable heretic, you forfeit your right for anyone to take you seriously. Some ideas deserve to be marginalized. Because they place themselves IN the margins.
Then again, some ideas are just marginal, because they don’t bear much weight in the present culture. People complain that theology focuses too much on dead, white men. Well…dead white men wrote most of the theology. If in 40 years all the people doing top level, discipline changing theology are women, I bet that’ll change. If in 40 years all the best developments in theology are coming from China or Nigeria (two places, I actually anticipate a lot of theology to come from) then there will be a curriculum change. The movement of the global center of Christianity is a real phenomenon, that will have real pedagogical (as well as everything-else-ical) impact. But some day is still not yet. And, frankly, I would expect that in Nigeria and China they focus, a lot, on what Nigerians and Chinese theologians have said and written — as well they SHOULD! I think it would be stupid for someone in Lagos to worry about the problems that face academic theologians in America, except insofar as it gets imported into their culture.
The fact is that we live in the West, a West whose intellectual geography was largely formed by white men. You don’t have to like that truth to recognize that, from roughly 500 AD to still-right-now, theology has been dominated by white European men. Ignoring everybody who comes after Augustine and Athanasius seems to be a mistake. Should we not study Luther, Calvin, Zwingli, Simons, Arminius, Wesley, the German Liberals, the Anglophone Fundamentalists?
Why should we marginalize giants to magnify the marginal? Do black and brown voices deserve a seat at the table? Well, if they have something meaningful to say that will advance the discipline, then of course. Do women? If they have something meaningful to say that will advance the discipline, then of course. Do white men? If they have something meaningful to say that will advance the discipline, then of course.
Are there non-whites and women who are changing the discipline? Yes. But none of them have time machines. And until they do, or until an awful lot of time has passed, the history of theology will largely be the history of white men. Women and black and brown people aren’t marginalized, they just didn’t contribute much to the overall development of the discipline, historically speaking, as it exists in the West today. They’re marginal, but not marginalized. For those who are currently being marginalized: perverts, commies, and run-of-the-mill heretics; they are being marginalized because they are supposed to be. The Bible commands us to anathematize them. And so we study them only enough to recognize their heresy and then move on – and, even then, only when it’s relevant.
None of us will live forever, and those of us who know that and have come to terms with that and wish to make an impact on the world of thought know that we have to pick and choose what we read and study. And so, while reading and studying marginal voices may yield fruit, until it significantly changes the discipline of theology, it will likely remain marginal, because we not only have to study the discipline as it is, but how it got here. And you don’t learn how you got there by studying people who had little to no impact on the development of the discipline.
Nobody keep stats on the benchwarmers – how many times they give a “ra-ra” for their teammates, how many practices they were on time for, how good of a scout-look they gave, how many electrolytes they consumed. There is no such thing as the Backup QB Rating. There’s no way to calculate homeruns you might have hit had you been batting. A caddy never hits a hole in one. You don’t have to be on the field to matter. But what matters most happens on the field.
Ars longa; vita brevis.