Buy a Field: The Future of Theological Educators

Abstract

Buy a Field: The Future of Theological Educators Willie James Jennings Then my cousin Hanamel came to me in the court of the guard, in accordance with the word of the LORD, and said to me, “Buy my field that is at Anathoth in the land of Benjamin, for the right of possession and redemption is yours; buy it for yourself.” Then I knew that this was the word of the LORD. (Jeremiah 32:8 NRS) What is the future of theological educators? This seems to me to be the urgent question pressed on us now, between the times. I prefer to focus in on the complexities that now attend being a theological educator as a way to consider the situation of theological education today. It is important to state the obvious—theological education continues unabated from the moment that humble rabbi opened his mouth and taught them, saying… We who operate in the distinction between formal and informal theological education need to remind ourselves that this is a distinction within a scholastic universe (as Pierre Bourdieu would say) and, while important, it often blinds us to the vital energies of Christian and religious cultivation that are flowing through churches, mosques, temples, barber and beauty shops, music, dance, sport, and a host of other contexts and venues. We are yet in a world filled with people not only eager to talk and think about God, but also willing to press their lives (and their talent, time, and treasures) into the endeavor in belief that such talking and thinking will make a difference for them and for this world. This is a fact. It is also a fact that formal theological education was never intended for that multitude. Even with all the historical qualifications and exceptions we might offer, it is still the case that formal theological education in the west was imagined primarily for white men and even when imagined for others it was yet in approximation of white male subjectivity. This meant the joining of two deeply incongruous visions of the desired student, one born of an undomesticated God who calls people of the multitude to lead, and another vision born of an elitism that would insure a properly ordered church and society executed through individual (masculine) genius. The suture of financial endowment and cultural assumption that held these visions together has unraveled and left us without a clear path that connects the multitude to formal theological education. There is a point of connection—theological educators. This however is precisely where we can begin to see fractures of vision but also the sites from where theological education must be rethought. Becoming a Theological Educator? The formation process of theological and religious scholars lives in the nineteenth century while we inhabit the twenty‐first century. Worlds collide in doctoral study, and we have not done a good job in acknowledging and thinking about that collision. I have seen this problem through my years of being an academic dean and in my consulting work with the Wabash Center for Teaching and Learning in their Graduate Program Teaching Initiative. This collision affects everything from recruitment to job placement. It begins with the unexamined assumptions of who should be encouraged and recruited to enter doctoral study. The apprenticeship tradition that continues to inform doctoral ecologies has its strengths, but it also perpetuates myopia that severely weakens our perception of who should be a doctoral student, who doctoral students are, and who they are becoming in our programs. The selection process of doctoral students should have some element of reproduction: We will inevitably look for students whose mental architecture to some extent mirrors our own. Yet programs need to do a much better job of laying bare the assumptions of that shared mental architecture and being cognizant that we and our forms of evaluation are already embodied, already participating in antagonisms of race, class, and gender. We need forms of evaluation of potential doctoral students that reads people holistically holding together their talents, their potential to be good researcher‐teachers, and their desire to connect with people. We also need forms of evaluation that challenge our myopia and that consider students whose mental frames...