A couple of years back Onsi Kamel, in a much-read article, bemoaned the lack of a Protestant Intellectual ‘Ecosystem’ to rival the Catholic one.
He pointed out some of the reasons for this, not least the strong populist streak in evangelical varieties of Protestantism, and some of the organisations that were striving to do their part in either popularising academic thought for the church or constructing theological thought with the church in mind.
I think he has an important point that’s relevant for us in the UK. We are anti-intellectual to a fault, and that increases in charismatic circles. We had a thriving Christian intellectual life in our universities not all that long ago, but it’s almost entirely dwindled. Reviving it is unlikely in our lifetimes, if that’s even a worthwhile goal.
Even when it existed, I would question how good we were at connecting it to the church. There is still valuable Christian work being done in a few universities around the country, but the average pastor doesn’t know about it. Which itself isn’t a problem, they don’t need to, but no one is connecting this thought to the church and the layperson in ways that they can and will connect with. Neither are the institutions forming thinkers—in an array of subjects, but certainly in theology—who are consciously doing work for the church.
As a result, the majority of pastors are largely untrained. I understand why the second generation of pastors in the British New Church Movement didn’t go to seminary of one sort or another. I think they were right not to do so. They were trained by those who did though. The third and fourth generation pastors we have now haven’t been trained by those who value deep reflection and thinking. That’s a problem, though not the primary topic of this post—I’ve written on this extensively elsewhere.
It does mean that our appetite for encouraging and supporting the highest levels of thinking has diminished. We’re impoverished in our tastes. This is, of course, an unprovable claim: the child fed on McDonalds has little taste for quality food and so would react to it as though it were rubbish.
However, I am convinced, as a bookish tweedy type, that if we want to revive the church in the nation (and therefore revive the nation as a consequence) we will require a revival of our intellects. I’m reminded of Lovelace’s insistence that good theology is part of the matrix needed for renewal in the church (it’s not all that’s needed, but it’s not less than what’s needed).
If that’s the case, what do we need? We need to be able to support thinkers financially, in order to give them the time to think, write, and teach. We need to do this outside of the institutional forms of either the university or the traditional pastorate. That’s because these roles mould those who participate in them. That moulding is a good thing that should be encouraged, we just need to make sure we understand what we’re being moulded into.
The university is not ordered to the good as Christians would understand it, not anymore at least. They were founded for this purpose, but—and I know this well from the inside of multiple of the UK’s best universities—they are ordered towards different ends now. They exist largely as middle-classed finishing schools, required to get a certain kind of job, but not to create a certain kind of life of the mind. Depending on the department these is also a formation into a certain kind of theopolitics, but that’s a side note. Suffice to say that becoming an academic will form you in certain directions that won’t serve the church’s ends.
This may be less the case at a bible college, but they are almost all underwritten by universities and so face similar challenges (or are going to soon) even if a step removed.
The pastorate isn’t ordered to these goods either, though perhaps that sounds more controversial. Being an elder is supposed to make you the sort of person that an elder is supposed to be, that’s the nature of the institutional role of the church, and fulltime pastoral ministry is a good thing. It is good to be formed into that mould. But that’s not the primary mould for the intellectual life.
There will be some exceptions here, but if we take those we want to be our teachers and thinkers and make them pastors they may do a very good job of that but they will—most likely—do a weaker job of being teachers and thinkers and writers. There are other kinds of exceptions, churches big enough to employ a teaching pastor are putting someone in a hybrid role where a good portion of their time is devoted to the intellectual life for the sake of the church. That’s great when you can do it and should be commended.
What do the rest of us do? The answer came to me when listening to Jonathan Pageau and Mary Harrington discuss symbols. Their topic isn’t really the point, but in a section later in the podcast they were discussing our post-literate age and Mary commented that writers will need to be supported in what feels like a medieval way: Patronage.
Churches should do the same thing. It’s not that foreign to most of us, we already support missionaries via the same method. Whether we give directly or via a missionary society it is common, at least in more traditional churches, to be the patron of a missionary. Unless they’re somewhere where the exchange rate is extremely favourable, they probably require support from multiple churches to operate.
We should support teachers, thinkers, and writers in the same way. Churches should consider supporting via patronage figures that bless them. We should in time set up institutional equivalents to the missionary societies—I doubt we have much that’s fit for purpose yet.
There are some potential pitfalls; writing for money produces preaching to the choir. Few churches want to be challenged and we need thinkers to challenge us much like we need prophets to challenge us. Few of us are going to want to keep paying someone who challenges a sacred cow or doesn’t pass the shibboleth test. At the same time if someone changes their mind on issues of orthodoxy, orthopraxy, or the confessional standards of the circles they are operating within (if a Presbyterian became a credobaptist or if I became a cessationist for example) it would be just and right to stop paying them.
Some of that will need figuring out, and institutions should help us here, but I think we have to start organically. Who does your church provide patronage for?
If you’re wondering who you would fund, perhaps consider giving to the work of Alastair Roberts, or Paul Kingsnorth, or Hadden Turner, or Rhys Laverty. There are also a host of great American thinkers I could mention, but that would rather defeat the point.
Photo by Juan Rumimpunu on Unsplash
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