Semester 2: Major Topics in Theology

As I did last semester, I want to share some of the topics I’ve been researching this Spring. I’ll go through each class I took and the paper I wrote for it. More than giving you a lens into how I’ve spent the last few months, hopefully these overviews give you an idea of what topics are popular in theological circles right now and lead you to some of the interesting questions worth asking.

Each semester, every student in the program is enrolled in a colloquium course in which we reflect on one of the major subjects in our field. It’s as close to “cutting-edge” as one can get in a discipline that moves at a snail’s pace. This semester we looked at Latin American liberation theology, which in many ways resembled the conversations we had last semester in our ecological theology colloquium. A main concern was noticing that liberation theology is not monolithic—some follow Marx, others reject him; some are concerned with economics, others with politics; some defer to the Church, others push-back. Liberation theology has become one of the dominant voices in Christian theology, and so this nuanced representation is necessary as we wrestle with its prophetic vision.

For this class, my major assignment was a book review of Steve Long’s Divine Economy. Rather than dealing with the work of the Trinity, as some classical theologians may assume from the title, the book critiques the two dominant ways Christians have paralleled theology and economics, one in line with classical liberalism and sympathetic to capitalism (think Michael Novak, Reinhold Niebuhr), and the other deeply critical of capitalism (think liberation theologians like Gustavo Gutiérrez). He suggests a third approach following John Milbank’s radical orthodoxy project dependent on Christian theology for economic guidance. While I agree with some of his criticism of the former two, I reject his overall analysis for ignoring the realities of economic planning. (Nonetheless, I would strongly recommend the book to any interested in the intersection of these two fields, with the qualifier that it is exceptionally dense.)

For one of my theology seminars, I took “Interreligious Cooperation.” The title for the course was specifically chosen by the professor to steer away from interreligious “dialogue” or pure academic “studies.” He insists that all interreligious work should be geared toward activism of some sort and that the gains for simply dialoguing are limited or short-sighted. To these practical ends, our class combined over Zoom with another class in Indonesia, mostly consisting of a mixture of Christians and Muslims, also studying interreligious cooperation. (Fun fact: Indonesia is the largest Muslim majority country in the world.) Both at Baylor and in the Indonesian context, we find ourselves asking the same questions: How do we cooperate with people of other beliefs? What would that cooperation even look like? How do we eliminate religious-based violence in our country?

For this class, I wrote a weird hybrid of book review and research essay over the recent publication of Interreligious Studies by Baylor Press. It’s an anthology with over thirty contributors discussing the future of the titular emerging academic field. While each author had a different take, some themes emerged, namely that the field would need to be interdisciplinary and pluralistic, it would need to study lived religious rather than formal doctrine, and that it should bend toward activism. There is a lot to say about each of these trends, but the middle idea—that lived religious experience is more useful for study than formal doctrine—is a simple yet profound idea worth emphasizing. Religion is highly contextual and few practitioners look like their governing body or the creeds they’re associated with. To understand religion, look at people, not documents.

Very different was my other seminar on the Apostolic Fathers. This course is only slightly removed from a New Testament course with the same attention given to the content of ancient documents, textual criticism, background studies concerning the author and setting, and understandably so as this short corpus represents the bulk of Christian writings contemporaneous with and subsequent to the New Testament writings. The list of documents is pretty short, but for those interested, I would most recommend the letters of Ignatius and Polycarp, 1 Clement, the Didache, and the Epistle to Diognetus.

My research paper for this class concerned 2 Clement, a letter almost certainly not written by anyone named Clement. The Second Epistle of Clement is an odd book, not terribly well-liked among scholars, particularly for its perceived legalism. I argue, however, that the letter does have a theology of grace administered through Christ (rather than works-based righteousness), but even as such, it displays a conception of relationships rooted in reciprocity—that is, we have faith, we love, we follow Christ, because it results in heaven and avoids hell. This warrants the questions, is this theology of reciprocity a bad thing? Need our faith be less self-interested? Must we love God simply for the joy of loving God?

The last course I took was a historical religion course, “Women and Gender in American Evangelicalism.” Starting with Puritans in colonial Massachusetts (way hornier than you would think), we marched through the history of evangelicalism in the United States with a specific interest for issues of gender, touching on turn-of-the-century fundamentalism and coming right up to the present day. There was a lot of interesting ground to cover, but most of my favorite material dealt with the Religious Right and how it framed family values for political ends.

I completed a shorter paper for this class, based primarily in oral histories I collected from faculty and leaders in higher Christian education. Specifically, I was concerned with how Church of Christ universities approach issues of women’s leadership. (Most COC affiliated universities are inclusive to some degree of women’s leadership in chapel.) The difference between higher education and the practices of most congregations is striking, and it demands an answer to the question of the relationship between universities and churches. What ought the dynamic to be? Should universities cater to their constituents or should they act as prophetic voices leading them forward?

And with those behind me, I get something of a break for the summer. I will be working with a professor on a research project of theirs and taking French to pair with my unused German from last summer, but I can look forward to a little bit of rest and a lot less reading for the next few months.