Teachers, crusts and toppings - Professing the Faith: Reflections on a Vocation - Cover Story

ACROSS THE STREET from Fuller Theological Seminary, where I teach, is California Pizza Kitchen. In addition to the traditional cheese and sausage pizzas, it offers such items as Santa Fe Chicken pizza (with tomato salsa and guacamole), Peking Duck pizza (with hoisin sauce), and Tandori Chicken pizza (with tomato-yogurt curry). The only thing that connects these dishes of Latino, Chinese and Indian origin with a traditional Italian pizza is the same thing that holds each of them together--a pizza crust.

It occurs to me that the California Pizza Kitchen menu can serve as a good metaphor for contemporary culture: market mechanisms, technology and communication lines are the crust upon which diverse cultural toppings are placed, side by side and one on top of the other, partly mixed and melted together, partly in discrete chunks, with new combinations replacing the old ones and the old ones reappearing in new forms on popular demand. The student body at Fuller could equally well be compared to these pizzas: the common crust of Christian commitments and an institutional framework connects students of radically diverse cultures, denominations, ethnic backgrounds and convictions.

How do I, a systematic theologian, teach such a student body about Christian tradition and identity? In what sense do I help them develop critical skills? What is the place of the Bible, creeds and confessions in the teaching setting? With a student body in which Peking Duck and Santa Fe Chicken are offered as pizza dishes on the same menu, there is no single and proper way to approach the task; the task may not even be a single task. Diverse students require diverse approaches. Three examples, typical but not exhaustive, will illustrate:

1) I was lecturing on eschatology. My topic: "The Resurrection of the Body." After I finished, a student from the first row came up to me and confessed: she had never before heard of the resurrection of the body. I was tempted to ask what she was doing in a graduate school class in systematic theology. We are here to grapple 4th profound issues, I thought, not to learn the theological alphabet. Though I did not ask, she answered: She was a new Christian and this was her very first class in theology. All she brought to seminary besides a good mind and a degree from a prestigious college was a heart warmed by the love of God and a pair of wide-open eyes. She had never read I Corinthians 15, never recited the creed. As far as she was concerned, the Bible was unexplored, the Christian tradition terra incognita.

Clearly, one of my tasks is to teach students to think theologically. Before they can think, however, they must not only know what the tradition says, but also believe that the tradition is worth thinking about. I must therefore draw students--especially those with no Christian socialization--into the world of Christian tradition, teach them the significance of the questions which it has sought to answer, and make plausible the answers it has given. They must see the tradition as a viable and attractive way of life before they can start critically reflecting on it; their commitments must be formed and strengthened before a sustained examination of these commitments can make sense. Without a claim of the tradition on them, neither a sympathetic discovery nor a critical rejection will be possible, only inane indifference.

2) I was lecturing on ecclesiology. My topic: "The Ordination of Women." A student who could not wait until I was finished laying out the biblical and theological bases for why women should be ordained interrupted with a minilecture of his own. It boiled down to the claim that God created Eve in such a way that none of her daughters, under any circumstances, is capable of leading any of Adam's adult sons. This, he assured me, was what the Bible infallibly taught, and this, he added, was what the whole church always and everywhere practiced--until feminism replaced the word of God with the tradition of men.

How does one teach students who are deeply committed to the Christian way of life, have read a good deal of the Bible and know some of the tradition but are locked into misusing the Bible and tradition as ready-made blueprints for ordering life? If I need to lead th first kind of students into the tradition, I need to lead this second kind, in a sense, out of it--that is, out of his own understanding of the tradition and of how it bears upon life today. Such students need to distance themselves from the text of the Bible and reflect carefully before they self-righteously exclaim: "It is written." Similarly, I need to teach them to "distance" God from the text and see both that God is bigger than the text and that the text, for all its revelatory character, is also a culturally situated message addressed by one human being to another. Finally, students must learn to distance both themselves and God from their own subcultures so as to be able critically to examine those subcultures rather than unsuspectingly reading both the Bible and the world through the lenses of those subcultures. After this exercise in distancing I want the students to return, of course--to rediscover God in the text, reidentify with the tradition, and reinsert themselves into their multiple contexts. For without a return, the distancing remains barren.