The Lost Enlightenment

To the extent that the current leadership of the United Methodist Church was trained in American theological seminaries, then those of us in theological education must admit that we have failed. 

We have failed to train leaders capable of engaging in fruitful dialogue across complex cultural and theological divides. Indeed their skill level appears to be just a little lower than that of our current US president and his North Korean counterpart. 

I expect one reason for this is that while Enlightenment paradigms still dominate our construction of theological knowledge (objective, rational, historically conscious, and divided into theory and practice) we have actually lost touch with the most important shift in human consciousness of the Enlightenment.

That shift was to recognize that knowing, while it may begin with the work of the individual mind, is inevitably social. It is democracy, not science, that is the greatest fruit of the Enlightenment. Indeed the bedrock of science is the demand that it be democratic: that it engage in public observation and public reason for its products to be considered worthy of consideration as shared knowledge of reality. All else is mere esotericism. 

The core of a truly enlightened education isn't universal truths. It is the necessary skills to engage in a universal discourse on the nature of reality. To be enlightened isn't to know the answers, it is knowing how to seek them with others.

One need only read the references and authors of a modern scientific paper to see just how universal that discourse can really be. One recent proof of an important mathematical theorem (Fermat’s Theorum) drew on well over 2 dozen scholarly works by authors ranging from China and Japan across to India, Africa, Europe, the Americas and England. It is quite typical of the genre. No biologist, physicist, mathematician, for chemist would dare be unfamiliar with the work of her peers around the world. 

One only need look at a contemporary American work on theology to see how narrow our world of discourse really is. Even references to Europeans are likely to be few, and typically those published in English. In certain specialities Latin American references might be found. Africans? Almost never. South Asians? Almost never. East Asia? Even fewer. Southeast Asians? Even fewer. Which American scholar has ever learned an Asian language or an African language? Which theology school gives more than a cursory glance (if that) to theological work being done in Kenya, Brazil, Indonesia, Korea, or India? How many graduate schools of theology teach Swahili, Portuguese, Bahasa Indonesia, Korean, or Hindi? 

We’re quite at home with Latin, Greek, and Hebrew: happily in engaging in a discourse with the dead (who almost always agree with us.) And our graduate students must learn German or French, usually to access theologians long passed from this world. It is hardly surprising that we have no idea how to talk to those who are living. And that is our graduate schools. Our students in MDiv and DMin programs? Those who we expect to lead the church? 

They will graduate with little or no cross-cultural experience, no contemporary language skills to speak of, and a knowledge of the largest and most populous Christian continents gleaned from a couple of weeks on a mission trip. If that. 

Of course a chosen few, bishops for example, may travel widely. Most will have the cross-cultural knowledge that can be gained by a few days in a conference room of an international hotel chain and an outing for photo ops among the indigenes. They may actually have long conversations with their counterparts, but even these will be distorted by the ubiquity of a Western education among non-Western leaders and vast differences in financial resources.

This must change. First, at the core of theological education we need to have engagement with the voices of theologians, speaking out of the Africa, Latin American, and Asian contexts. And no - Saint Augustine doesn’t count as African. Their works need to be in our libraries and in our syllabi, and their voices need to be heard on our campuses. 

Second our students need to learn cross-cultural skills as fundamental skills in pastoral ministry and congregational and church leadership. 

Third, substantial, intentional, supervised cross-cultural engagement needs to be a required part of theological education. 

And finally our classrooms must be diverse. They must become the laboratory in which students learn to engage with fellow Christians and pastors from other cultures and other theological convictions. They must become the beit midrash where the universal capability of humans to learn from their fellow humans is fostered rather than marginalized. An international student presence isn't an option, it is a necessity if we're going to prepare leaders in ministry.

In our time the church does not need to train men and women toward sectarian purity. That is available as the cultural norm. We need to train leaders with both the confidence that knowledge, not least knowledge of God, will emerge among us if we engage in open dialogue with others.  Faith is a hope in things unseen.