One project I’m considering is compiling summaries of classes I’ve taken in the past, creating a sort of easy-reference for advanced theology. In the meantime, here are some synopses I wrote during my time at Baylor of the classes I took each semester. Enjoy a taste of graduate school life.
In my first semester I took three seminars and a colloquium. The first of my theology seminars was “Contemporary Theological Problems: Pryzwara, Bonhoeffer, Tanner,” and it was a doozy. The connective tissue for the class was an interest in issues of metaphysics, how theologians talk of the transcendent reality of the Creator despite being mere creatures. For Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the key is Christ. Though we exist in the middle—unable to return to that unity with God before creation and still awaiting the triumphal return, in relation with God yet not totally with or without God—we know God and experience the divine by means of Christ. Katheryn Tanner, a theologian still working today, comes at the topic from a different vantage; she aims to show that any coherent theological system, whether it be Patristic, Lutheran, Barthian, or what have you, must abide by common rules when talking about the relation between God and creation—particularly the rule of non-contrastive language. Rather than seeing the divine-human relationship as zero-sum, whereby God’s sovereignty comes at the price of human freedom or vice versa, these two truths operate on different planes and do not conflict. Lastly, Erich Pryzwara (pronounced ʃeɪvarə for some Polish reason) pushes for the concept of analogy to orient how we discuss metaphysics, to see the Creator as both in and beyond the creature. His writing is not for the faint of heart, but in sifting through it, one discovers troves of theological richness.
The second theology seminar was “Contemporary Problems in Christian Ethics: Natural Law.” Natural law has historically been a neglected topic Protestant circles since Calvin, Catholics finding it more useful in their theology. But this neglect has been to our disadvantage, as natural law is uniquely suited to provide a thoroughly Christian methodology for operating ethically in the public or secular sphere. A theology of natural law suggests that all of creation is oriented towards God’s good ends, and everyone should be able to recognize those ends as we communally move toward them (even if some do not recognize them as God’s goal for creation).
The final seminar came out of theological history and was concerned with the Radical Reformation. Surveying such figures as Zwingli, Grebel, Müntzer, Hubmaier, Hut, Sattler, and Menno Simons, as well as the events of the Peasants’ War, Kingdom of Münster, and the persecution of the Anabaptists, the course covered a lot in a short amount of time (both in weeks of the semester and in its scope of a single century). The Radical Reformation is notable for its elusiveness and ability to escape definition; it’s difficult to categorize its various strands or to determine a singular thread in all its figures. Yet, its radicalness is never in question and the zeal of its followers undeniable.
Colloquiums in Baylor’s religion department are shorter classes, meant to dip everyone’s toes—students’ and faculty’s—into the most relevant and cutting-edge of theological conversations. (That is, admittedly, generous; theology, as with all the humanities, moves at a snail’s pace.) My first colloquium focused on ecological theology. Starting off with Lynn White’s infamous lecture published in Science and moving to voices as diverse as Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Rosemary Ruether, Deane-Drummond, Willis Jenkins, and Pope Francis, the course tried to approach ecology from a number of theological perspectives. Much of the modern discussion centers on the need to present a new meta-narrative capable of charging hearers to address the climate crisis and other environmental issues, some suggesting that we start from scratch while others claim that we can retool the current Christian narrative for such purposes.
In my second semester, I took “Interreligious Cooperation” for one of my theology seminars. 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?
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 third seminar 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 lens 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.
And lastly we have the colloquium course; this semester we looked at Latin American liberation theology, which in many ways resembled the conversations we had the previous 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.
In the first semester of my second year, colloquium turned our gaze toward political theology. While previous colloquiums looked at ecology and liberationism, representing something closer to bents or styles brought to theology, political theology captures some of the questions that hold center stage in the theological arena. Political theology is concerned with politics and government, yes, but it is also concerned with the relation of the Christian to the culture around them and their general ethical outlook. It struggles with the ideas of secularism, economics, and participation. It also pits the theological giants Augustine and Aquinas against each other—the former symbolizing pessimism and the latter optimism toward the world—and many theologians identify themselves by association to one side or the other.
For one of my theology seminars, I took “New Theologies of Justice and Non-Violence.” The impetus for the class comes from the non-violent elephant in the room: John Howard Yoder. Yoder, famously, influenced the legend Stanley Hauerwas and is one of the great defenders of Christian pacifism. However, he also famously (or at least growingly so) used his position of power to abuse countless women—sometimes even drawing parallels between his theology of submission and his own actions. Since the revelation of his sins, many have tried to find a way forward for Christian non-violence, divorced from Yoder’s influence, and this work set the backdrop for our class. Our readings quickly evolved to incorporate discussions of interreligous cooperation, activism, “slow violence” in the forms of racism and unjust markets like the clothing industry, and lastly our relation to animals. All of these conversations resembled those we had on political theology, as they both include our lives in community.
Very different was my other seminar on the philosophy of language, entitled “Natural Conventions.” The reading for class was purely philosophical in content and only entered into abstract theology through our discussions every week. As the oxymoronic title implies, we studied language as socially constructed (conventional) and simultaneously reflective of the very nature of things. Those we read all draw upon Ludwig Wittgenstein in some way, but their dealings with language as we ordinarily understand it vary substantially—from analysis of words as getting at subtle truths, to language as a reflection of the logic of reality, to the problem of other minds and what it means to be unbridgeably separate from another.
My final course of the semester was “History of the Christian Movement.” The scope of the material was just as broad as the name implies; we traced the history of the spread of Christianity and its missionaries from the apostles to the present day across the entire globe. Most significantly, we gave attention to the spread of the faith outside of the standard Western narrative: Jerusalem to Rome to the rest of Europe to America to the rest of the world. Though perhaps never the majority in their different lands, Christianity (often of different forms than what we find in America and Europe) spread very early on into Africa and Asia, and its history there is both complex and fascinating.
In the Spring, in my final semester at Baylor, I took a theories of religion course, a version of which will become required for incoming PhD students. This class split its attention between the secular study of religion and the theological discourse on world religions. In the former, monumental thinkers like James Frazer, Ludwig Feuerbach, Émile Durkheim, and Karl Marx were examined for the ways they tried to understand religion as a phenomenon as well as modern sociological thinkers who emphasize the irreducible complexity of religion in all its forms. In the latter half, we wrestled with questions of how Christianity ought to understand and engage with the religions around it, particularly in terms of the good seen in them.
The “Future of Feminist Theology” began by looking at its past, as the instructor realized few of the students had ever had a course on the basics of feminist theology, let alone where it is going. With that foundation laid, however, we were able to follow current streams of thought (i.e., those in the last decade) and see what matters to the field. Outsiders to theology may be surprised that many of the concerns associated with feminist thought—women’s ordination, masculine language for God, equal rights of every kind—do not disappear but take a background role to concerns over form, method, and constructiveness. In a way, feminist theology has in its view the future of all theological reflection.
The last class happened to also be the last colloquium, not just for myself but for Baylor—they’re doing away with it. This one-hour course focused on political economy, focusing its attention on the Christian response to capitalism. We spent the bulk of the semester reading one massive book, Eugene McCarraher’s The Enchantments of Mammon, a lovely book if not a little wordy. The takeaway from the class was simple: while there may be disagreement between idealists and realists whether or not capitalism is needed, theologians univocally resent capitalism.
Each of these topics (besides, perhaps, the Radical Reformation) were mostly foreign to my theological training in Church of Christ affiliated schools. That’s not to say that I was unfamiliar with the general ideas or the figures involved, but that my schooling had been mostly unconcerned with the topics that interest the wider theological world. Even as a student that focused on theology as much as possible, my education had majored in biblical studies. I can’t say that this provided any sort of unique advantage, but what it did do is position me as a skeptical outsider for each individual theological discussion: for each seminar and each a conversation, I had to be convinced. The instructor or, more likely, the readings had the burden of proof, the task to convince me of the terms of the very conversation being had. This colored most of my course experience, and I’m confident this posture was displayed in my seminar papers as well… I’ll have to come back to those.