Ted Smith’s timely, compelling, and important book does two kinds of service. First, it serves theological education in North America by providing a critical survey of its current state. Second, it serves as a witness to a prevailing hesitant mood in contemporary theology and theological education. The book is part of the Theological Education Between the Times series that Smith commissions and edits. That series is the outcome of a multi-year research project on the current state and future of theological education in the United States led by Smith and funded by the Lilly Endowment.
The first chapter provides historical context for the current form theological education in the U.S. takes. The historical story Smith tells is one of the transitions from an eighteenth-century configuration orientated to forming ministers as public office holders in the context of church establishment to one focused on the church as a voluntary association in the nineteenth century. Within this latter context, ministry became conceived of as a professional career.
The second and third chapters tell a sociological story rather than a historical story. This story identifies the processes of modernisation (and individualisation) by which the minister as a professional and the church as a voluntary association unravelled. This sociological process renders religion into an expressive identity – the world of the spiritual but not religious – rather than a communal, institutionally mediated way of life. Echoing Ferdinand Tönnies’ narration of the shift from Gemeinschaft to Gesellschaft and Emile Durkheim’s story of the change from mechanical to organic solidarity, however, Smith’s is not a story of decline. Rather, it is an accounting of the changing material and social conditions of theological education and the contradictions these produce.
In Smith’s telling, the process of individualisation is situated within a wider framework of neoliberalism whereby education in all its forms is commodified. Theological schools no longer serve the needs of denominations and congregations. Instead, they are now credentialing mechanisms serving the self-branding needs of consumers in a religious marketplace.
However, easily missed is the more subtle but arguably more important flipside of the story Smith tells, which is how individualisation produces a mass society. Paradoxically, individualism is a form of homogenisation: in becoming individuals we all become the same. We think, act and orientate our lives in the same kinds of ways, with even deeply felt ideological differences serving as no more than the political equivalent to the choice between Pepsi and Coke. To take a trivial example, although our choice of clothing is no longer dictated by our place in society or our position or role in an institution, to express our individuality we all buy blue jeans. We see a parallel process of homogenisation in forms of church life and the substance of theological education. The clearest example is the near-universal role of Clinical Pastoral Education by all religious traditions in North America as the basis of pastoral formation.
After the sociological analysis comes a homiletic interlude based on Jeremiah 31:31-34. This shift to a constructive theological register is welcome; but, it is not clear why a sermon was the best genre through which to do it. At the heart of the sermon is the message: ‘[W]e are called to relate to theological education as a fallen, fallible venture that is still illuminated from within by God’s promise to be known by all people’ (p. 127).
It is at this juncture that Smith’s theological commitments come through. Despite what is said in places, Smith’s position is that proclamation precedes the call for penitence. The sermon invites renunciation. To parse Karl Barth, God’s ‘yes’ in Jesus Christ to sinful humanity precedes God’s ‘no’ (they do not come together, as Smith contends at one point, contradicting the theologic of the text). The homiletic announcement emerges in the middle of an account of the fallen and fallible character of theological education and in turn sets up a call in Chapter 4 for a season of repentance and renunciation in theological education. The rest of the book thereby enacts the central message of the sermon itself.
Smith’s theological commitments generate an apophatic stance. This orientation means there is an absence in the book of any cataphatic sense of the meaning and purpose of theological education, who it should serve, and what quality and character of relations are needed if its ends are to be fulfilled. The presence that is missing is one determined by the question of what it means in the modality of theological education to participate in Christ, who is present here and now through the actions of the Spirit.
That said, part of what Smith’s critical framework does name in chapter 4 are the ways in which theological education is always a mode of social reproduction riven with and partly driven by class-based, racialised, and gendered divisions and hierarchies. He asks those of us involved in this process of reproduction whether we can renounce these hierarchies to make space for something new. Smith’s framework in this chapter is a powerful articulation of an abolitionist vision of theological education, one that seeks the dismantling of the current institutional framework and the ways it inscribes into the bodies, appetites, and minds of its participants habits of white supremacy and identification with the professional-managerial class with its aligned anti-working-class politics and processes of extractive indebtedness.
The final chapter sets out various affordances that shape the terrain on which the Holy Spirit might blow to bring new life. A term more commonly used in the philosophy of technology, Smith defines affordances as ‘a set of concrete, historically contingent, morally ambivalent forms that can make possible a range of actions’, which ‘invite but do not determine what we make of them’ (p. 169). The affordances Smith explores are the quest for individual authenticity, the changing demographics of the church in North America, the opportunities for non-professionalised ministry and mission, and involvement in movements for social justice. However, situating constructive possibilities within a set of culturally determined affordances makes it difficult to see what place there is for counter-cultural and pre-figurative forms of theological education that constitute modes of annunciation. Again, in an apophatic key, it seems as if for Smith the only prophetic gesture is one of renunciation.
Of the affordances Smith lists, the most problematic is the quest for authenticity. Smith acknowledges and is critical of this: authenticity is an affective symptom of late capitalism and a substitute for its failed promise of freedom (pp. 171ff). Yet it is also the ground on which theological education must pitch its tent, and hence, Smith makes a case for how to engage the felt need for authenticity as an animating motivation for those coming into theological education. However, more needed to be said about how authenticity is not a Christian virtue.
The account would have been strengthened further by some reflection on how the very response Smith calls for directly echoes a pre-modern form of theological education developed in cathedral schools and medieval universities, one based on confessio and professio: that is, a confession leading to a profession of faith worked out in a vocational setting. Indeed, there is a striking absence of how pre-modern forms of theological education might shape and inform the analysis Smith sets out.
Overall, Smith’s book helpfully historises theological education in the U.S. British and Continental European readers can learn much from his account, even as they have a different story to tell. Through his historicising, we are able to see and name the contours of the world we inhabit so as to be able to act more faithfully within it, for (as Wittgenstein teaches us) we cannot act in world we cannot describe. For many of us, the institutional configurations of theological education just are the water we swim in. We shore up and perpetuate them even as we feel the ground falling away under our feet. Smith provides a framework both to see the ground we stand on and the forces eroding it. What he counsels is that we must overcome our sense of institutional vertigo and our desire to secure the terrain. Instead, we must embrace the void and in doing so, make room for the Spirit to breathe new life into what is turning to dust in our hands. In effect, what Smith offers is a negative theology of theological education. And perhaps, at this moment, that is exactly what is needed and all that can be said.
