The Ivory Tower Comes to the Windy City: In Chicago, Scholars Hunker down to Have a Look at God

Theologians are indeed an endangered species.

—Carl F. H. Henry

Twilight of a Great Civilization

It has been a while since a theologian was on the cover of Time. That thought crosses my mind as I sit in my office on a fall day flipping through the 304-page catalog for the 1988 meeting of the American Academy of Religion (AAR) and Society of Biblical Literature (SBL). In Chicago on November 18–22 there will gather thousands of theologians, biblical scholars, professors of comparative religion, historians, and philosophers of religion—Christians, Jews, Muslims, agnostics, atheists, Buddhists, Hindus, and probably a few of the forgot-what-I-believed-some-where-along-the-way-but-had-already-spent-a-fortune-on-graduate-studies-in-religion variety. You just don’t know exactly. After all, one of the first persons to declare God dead back in the sixties, Thomas J.J. Altizer, was an English teacher who apparently decided grammar and Moby Dick were not big enough game any longer.

At any rate, the only guarantees about AAR/SBL are that a real array of religious thinkers will be on hand and that at least two tons of pipe tobacco will go up in smoke. Between puffs, these scholars will sample a smorgasbord of sessions, with special selections for liberation theologians, for evangelicals, for gay and lesbian theologians, for thinkers enamored of the theology of the nineteenth century, for disciples of Paul Tillich, for Wesleyans, and even—my catalog tells me—for students of Ugarit (who will be presenting papers on “RS 1929.1,” “Keret, Tablet 3, Column III,” and the creatively titled “Reading KTU 1.2 IV = CTA 2.4 = UT 68”).

It is said in Joshua 10:12–14 that the sun stood still “and did not hasten to go down for about a whole day.” I guess the presupposition for AAR/SBL’s November meeting is that for four days God will stand still and let a few thousand acute observers, hunkered down in a Chicago hotel, get a better look at him—or, depending on whom you ask, her/it/them.

My main objective is to watch and listen to both the theologians (knowers of God) and the theologian-logians (knowers of knowers of God), and scurry back with a report about the state of their art, or science, or whatever it is these days. Theology no longer holds the lofty position of “queen of the sciences” within the academy. I am wondering how comfortably it is now fitting within the ivory tower. What exactly are theologians up to? Are they saying anything that is relevant to the church, and if so, is the church listening?

So my pencil is poised, calendar at hand, to rough out a schedule for this four-day extravaganza. The catalog is not exactly a Christmas wish book, but it is revealing of some treasures. There are always several sessions going simultaneously, so some hard choices are unavoidable. Being a fan, I would like to hear “Love and Death in the Films of Woody Allen.” But how do I juggle that and “Are They Just Cows? Agricultural Biotechnology, Bovine Somatratopin, and the Common Good”?

I’m getting dizzy leafing through the catalog. My mind wanders, and I imagine what my church-going relatives from off the farm in downstate Illinois would think of this religious convention. What would they make of a room filled with men and women whose hands are powder white and callus free, expostulating that “fundamentalism is most broadly delineated as a universal urge to react, to protest, against the modernist hegemony” or that “four exegetical questions can be answered in a comprehensive way if 1 John 2:12–14 is understood as an example of the figures of thought called expositio and distributio used in combination with a variety of other stylistic figures”?

I can almost hear my outspoken cousin let off steam: “What has all this stuff got to do with anything? It has nothing to do with the real world. I can’t understand every other word they say. And they’re so highfalutin’. None of it’s any use to the church.”

Twisting slowly in and out of my reverie, the catalog heavy on my lap, calendar still gaping, open in anticipation, I can’t agree with my voluble, dreamy relative. Though we may not always understand the specialists’ lingo or concerns, I have the feeling that it translates into something that is actually quite essential. But I have to admit, it has been a while since a theologian appeared on the cover of Time magazine.

Unless you count Jim Bakker.

Entering The Ivory Hilton Towers

Now the weeks have passed and I really am at Chicago’s Hilton and Towers, paddling my way through the sea of tweed and clouds of pipe smoke. I have heard a sociologist of religion declare that Jim Bakker is our premier postmodernist theologian. The meaning was obscure, and I can’t fully elucidate it, but then you pick up a lot of murky references meandering through the hallways, in and out of sessions. The snatches, clinging like lint to the memory, include “messianic materialism,” “separate ontologies,” something about whether or not a particular Babylonian word should be translated “navel,” and a man calmly insisting we must get at the “compulsive and anal tendencies of the text.”

It can get exotic. And overwhelming. The hotel is packed: Convention organizers say a record 5,533 attendees have shown up. Scholars swarm up and down the Hilton’s ornate open staircases. Straggly lines of scholars maintain a vigil before the registration desk, kicking suitcases, shifting overcoats and caps from one arm to the other, shouting greetings across the lobby to suddenly sighted friends. Knots of scholars have mounted a relentless assault on the half-dozen elevators; every few minutes a bell sounds, doors open wearily, one knot surges off the elevator and another bobbles uncertainly on, losing a member here and there.

Going downstairs with the masses, you navigate between pockets of scholars who sit on the steps like boulders in a stream, trying to decipher schedules and maps. (No easy proposition, since meetings are situated over six floors of the labyrinthine hotel.) In the basement there is buried a massive exhibit hall with a bare concrete floor where nearly 70 publishers display their books and hundreds of scholars browse with all the relish of children in a toy store. (I’m feeling childish myself.) It is lunchtime, and the hotel’s restaurants are full, too. Even the snack bars bustle with men who now eat hot dogs, squeezing mustard into their beards, and in half an hour will argue about Whitehead’s epistemology.

Sleepwalking In An Exotic World

I need some air, and so I hit the street. It is a misty Saturday, the sidewalks are damp and Michigan Avenue buzzes with shoppers. I pass one, then two small restaurants, both crammed. Inside a third, I learn that no tables will be open for 30 minutes. So I veer off Michigan, make my way to State Street and turn north again. Eventually I land in Ronny’s Grill and find a spot for me and my cheeseburger. But Ronny’s is crowded too, and a long-haired stranger in a pullover sweater takes a seat across the table. I eat and thumb through a book I just bought. The stranger himself extracts a book from a sack, a Taoist volume on the strategy of war.

He is glancing furtively at the name tag pinned to my lapel, taking in the religious connotations. I sense he wants to talk, and soon he initiates a conversation. He says he is exploring all sorts of spiritualities and religions, “trying to discern where the world is going.” He works as a computer programmer “to make money.” But his heart is in the search. In fact, he has published in astrological magazines (“technical pieces—I’m no inspirational writer”). Standing beneath Ronny’s garish yellow sign after lunch, my companion eagerly unloads a few last words about his interpretation of the Hebrew word Elohim, being the first-person plural and feminine. The implication is clear: Just what does that say about God? We part, heading opposite directions in the grayness of the city and our theological notions.

On the route back to the hotel I pass the Fine Arts Theatre and stop to read the posters, idly wondering if a movie would be a good diversion that night. Ken Russell’s The Lair of the White Worm is showing. It is something about snake worshipers who inhabit a Victorian mansion and draw a young woman into their grasp for a night of fun. Roger Ebert, scaling the oxymoronic heights only movie critics can reach, deems it “delightfully kinky.”

A few moments later, sucked into the Hilton’s revolving doors, I am thinking that, yes, AAR/SBL gets exotic, but is it any more exotic than the world we all live in and so often sleepwalk through?

Polite Englobbing

Martin Marty is the 1988 president of the American Academy of Religion. He is a church historian at the University of Chicago and, since this year’s meeting is in Chicago, has had a lot to do with its organization. Marty is a diminutive, bald-headed man, but what he lacks in size and hair, he makes up for by being nearly omnipresent and omniscient. He is everywhere at the conference, speaking at this panel or that, listening earnestly to bright young stars such as Elaine Pagels, beaming and swaying in his seat while a black choir raucously sings the gospel.

When he does speak, it is always worth listening. At a session on “Religion and the Public Schools,” Marty stresses the difficulty of teaching religion in pluralistic America. “What is the consensus from which public school teachers should teach? Is it Judeo-Christianity? If so, do you emphasize the Judeo or the Christianity? If Christianity, do you emphasize Protestant or Catholic Christianity? If Protestant, which Protestant? If Baptist Protestantism, then whose interpretation—Jesse Jackson’s or Jesse Helms’s? Mark Hatfield’s or Jerry Falwell’s? Jimmy Carter’s or Pat Robertson’s?”

Despite all the pitfalls, Marty thinks religion should be taught. He concludes with a story, saying that when he was associate dean at the University of Chicago’s divinity school he was charged with raising funds and once asked how he could go around begging money for the study of religion in a world where children were starving. A colleague said religious education was like sex education—if you don’t teach it, the consequences are dangerous. The truth is, Marty says, if you get sex education or religious education right, it may make some other things come out right.

I go across the way to listen in on a famous German theologian. He is speaking in a cavernous exhibit hall, in a space cordoned off with blue curtains on aluminum poles. This session, like so many, is filled past capacity, and a couple dozen people are standing behind the chairs, 30 yards from the speaker. His accent is heavy and he is extremely soft-spoken, meaning I cannot make out much of what he says, but the gist is this: How do we talk about God and know God in our pluralistic world?

The next day I attend a session on “The Restructuring of American Religion Since World War II: Cultural Conflict, Denominational Decline, and the Future.” It is a discussion of sociologist Robert Wuthnow’s new book by that title. Martin Marty is here again. He and Wuthnow are joined by George Lindbeck, who teaches at Yale, and Stanley Hauerwas, a Yale alumnus now teaching at Duke.

Appropriately, Wuthnow begins. He exposits on the declining significance of denominationalism and the growth of special-purpose groups in religion. Then he talks about the resurgence of fundamentalism, noting the degrees of difference between fundamentalists. Some are white supremacists; others stoutly oppose racism. Some now major on prolife issues; others do not. He moves on to evangelicalism, cataloging differences among that clan, then to secular humanists, doing the same thing. Eventually he steps back to see the wider, national picture, observing that liberals take a strong stand on the Constitution’s clause forbidding the establishment of religion, while conservatives focus on the free exercise clause. Neither side speaks persuasively to the other, so we can expect continued conflict.

Marty responds first. He is glad Wuthnow is pressing the issue. It is important to recognize that religion is often used to legitimize an ideology, and we are certainly seeing plenty of this today. He agrees with Wuthnow that denominations are increasingly less significant. Now, instead of simply being split from other denominations, the denominations are splintering from within. So the issue “is in one sense about knowing what trench you’re in and who you’re going to shoot at.”

The crisis of the day is the collapsed middle. Marty says the majority of the population is fluid between extremes, gravitating toward a moderating position. But now, he laments, the center does not hold. He facetiously suggests that given our present, difficult situation, the most crucial difference is not between liberal and conservative religionists, but between the mean and the nonmean. The desperate question is, Who will fill the center? Fundamentalists, Catholics, evangelicals, liberals—Marty thinks no one group is going to run the country by itself, so how do we fill the center? At least if people were nicer we might move toward some healthy compromises.

Lindbeck, white haired and white bearded, next steps to the lectern. His candidate for the middle is what he calls Anselmian Scripturalism, a not easily explained position that looks to Scripture to provide a world view, without accepting its historicity on details. Lindbeck insists this perspective is acceptable to moderns and, if conveyed to the masses, would be congenial to their biblical piety. So Lindbeck disagrees with Marty’s prescription—a fluid public theology—but agrees with his and Wuthnow’s diagnosis that we are in dire straits.

Now it is Hauerwas’s turn. He alternately cups his beard and his own shiny pate; then, speaking in a robust Texas accent that belies his philosophical and theological sophistication, declares that Wuthnow, Marty, and Lindbeck are all wrong. Wuthnow comes to the crucial question: Given all this division, what do we do to recover a nation that is strong and free? Hauerwas thinks that is the wrong question for Christians; for them the right question is how to recover a church that is strong and free. As far as Hauerwas is concerned, American Christianity set out to be a religion that would sustain a liberal democracy, and now we’ve got the mess we wanted.

Hauerwas goes on to complain that theology has been rendered harmless by desiring to become just another academic discipline. “The Southern Baptists have this to say for them: their theologians still think their work should influence the church, and the church still cares what its theologians say.” Then he fires a broadside at Marty: “We don’t need more nice Christians—we’ve already got too many nice Christians.”

Marty and Hauerwas go to it. Marty, playing a different tune than he did the day before—or at least another verse—says there is much from which to build a vital center. The people of this country have common suffering, common stories, common propositions. He cites the national mourning, enabled by television, after the space shuttle Challenger blew up.

Hauerwas, a pacifist, replies that if anything drew the country together, it was World Wars I and II, “And for Christians, that’s just not right.”

Well, replies Marty in so many words, I agree with that, and Hauerwas shakes his head. “It’s so hard to disagree with Marty. He just keeps …” Hauerwas searches for a word adequate to his frustration “… englobbing you.”

This argument is solved like many in the academic setting: time runs out. Afterward the panelists shake hands and clap each other on the back. It is all quite civil but not, in my judgment, ultimately englobbing. I can’t shake off the sense that the differences expressed are not any smaller for the politeness of their expression. These men are not just politely agreeing to disagree, but politely agreeing to play in different ballparks, with unsettled rosters and under different rules. No wonder it’s hard to find an umpire.

Pluralism In The Elevators

The third day, Monday, will be my final day at the convention. I decide to go for maximum variety. I go to a liberation-theology session and hear, “Objectivity many times simply covers over the subjectivity of those who hold power.” I listen to a stimulating talk on Jacques Ellul. For lunch I eat chicken with two or three hundred Baptist professors of religion, in a sprawling ballroom with low-slung chandeliers and false balconies. (Later I find out, from convention organizers, that during AAR/SBL there were about 25 luncheons like the one I attended; 45 to 50 receptions, with hors d’oeuvres and drinks; 12 dinners; and 30 breakfasts. At least I could tell my cousin that theologians are useful for keeping cooks and waiters employed!)

After lunch I wend my way through the now-thinning masses, past the marble-veneered walls, the museum-sized paintings, to the elevators and up to the eighth floor. There awaits the epitome of diversity.

In one room, with participants crowded out the open door, evangelicals are discussing George Marsden’s history of Fuller Theological Seminary. Directly adjacent, the feminists are meeting, and on the other side of that “The Gay Men’s Issues in Religion Consultation.” I check out the gay men’s seminar first.

There are no chairs remaining, so I take a seat on the floor. The lecturer is saying that America is in decline, and that when proud nations lose their power internationally, they may seek new ways to exercise their power at home. Lesbians and gays have made gains in civil rights because of the nation’s largess; if things take a turn for the worse, there may be more harassment and even persecution. Considering the enduring historical popularity of scapegoats, this sounds like an all-too-plausible argument.

I skip over to the women’s group and stumble onto two provocative papers. One, called “Towards a Hermeneutic of Childbirth,” challenges the predominant associations of pregnancy and childbirth with sickness, fatness, and so forth. Then the radical feminist Naomi Goldenberg is introduced, with an air of eager anticipation. She is a small, enthusiastic woman, with large, horn-rimmed glasses and closely cropped black hair, and I soon understand why everyone seemed ardent to hear her.

She starts with a witty apocalyptic commentary on the tale of Chicken Little, then proceeds, for the next half-hour, to strew gleaming insights indiscriminately, like a gardener sowing cheap seed. There is one on the mechanization of relationships, the television and computers that push us toward “private cocoons in front of flickering screens”; an aside on the “prison architecture” of most universities; a quick exegesis of the B-movie classic The Blob; and more. I am enjoying all this tremendously, so Goldenberg’s conclusion is a real disappointment. She avers that we (women especially) must reject the distant, transcendent God of the biblical faiths just as Chicken Little should not have sought the advice of the king. (A move, you will remember, that resulted in the fox’s having Chicken Little for lunch.) In other words: Grow up, ladies, forget about God, and trust yourselves.

By the time Goldenberg is finished and I make it down the hall, the evangelicals are already dispersing. I stand briefly in their empty room, looking at the unoccupied and jostled chairs, the upended drinking glasses. Conferees from the women’s session and the gay session shuffle by behind me, and once more the jarring pluralism of the entire meeting hits home. While the homosexuals worried over potential persecution, people in the movement they probably consider their greatest threat were convening two rooms away. And as those would-be persecutors calmly discussed how well or poorly a seminary has served God and the kingdom, a brilliant woman next door pointed a finger at God and that kingdom as the central source of the Western world’s problems.

Down and around the hallway, evangelicals, gays, and feminists helped one another mount the elevators.

Who Would Miss Them?

There were gathered, in a single building, the best North American minds in religion. What if (for whatever reason) the earth opened up and swallowed the Hilton—the marble cracking, staircases corkscrewing, the walls heaving out and down like divers, room imploding on room imploding on room? Just like that, the brightest theologians on a continent, disappeared, gone. Would it make any difference? Would the church or the country suffer for it, after a few obligatory days of television-facilitated national mourning?

After all, as theologians will be the first to tell you, theology is in a predicament. On the one hand, it must convince the academy it is academically respectable—objective, disciplined, adding to that great store of knowledge that dyed-in-the-wool academics refer to with mystical awe. On the other hand, theology must convince the church it is faithful and serving the faith—committed, bold, vital to the discernment of the sovereign God’s will.

Add to this the dizzying array of convictions theologians present and promote. What theologian do you trust? What school of theologians do you trust? As Marty and Wuthnow observed, it is no longer a matter of simply disagreeing among denominations (though even that gives hundreds of options). Now there is profound disagreement within denominations. Methodists, Southern Baptists, Anglicans, Presbyterians, Lutherans, even Roman Catholics—all have suffered from major intramural strains in recent decades, and all remain far from unity.

The litmus tests for true Christianity proliferate. And in many cases, the litmus test adopted by some who call themselves Christian is diametrically opposed by the litmus test of others equally certain they represent the genuine faith. Thus radical feminists say the true Christian works to eliminate patriarchalism, while some evangelicals virtually make the traditional, patriarchal family the sign of true faith. Liberation theologians say you are not loyal to the Bible unless you promote proletarian revolutions; establishment theologians say real Christians respect the rule of government. Gay theologians say those against the ordination of practicing homosexuals fail the spirit of Jesus; many other thinkers say they could not continue to worship within a communion ordaining practicing homosexuals. The list goes on. Some Christians use biblical inerrancy as the litmus test, others use nuclear pacifism, yet others an unqualified antiabortion stance, and still others faithful submission to the declarations of the pope. Things have come to a pretty impasse.

And you must add to the theologian’s burden my farm cousin’s complaint that theologians simply don’t talk the language of people in the pew, that they are stuck in their ivory towers.

All told, theologians may be among Earth’s most beleaguered creatures. They are members of the only endangered species that has one group (academics) trying to throw it out of its roost (in the ivory tower) while another group (laypersons) stands below and yells for it to jump.

Let’s start from the bottom and take the complaint that theologians are too esoteric and prideful. Theologians can be arrogant. In a technologically advanced society, knowledge is power, and theologians ply a certain kind of knowledge. They sometimes do act as if ordinary churchgoers are hopelessly naive and need nothing so much as to be disabused of their humble faith. But, on the other hand, there is no solvent as effective for cant and pomp as humor, and certainly there was an abundance of that at AAR/SBL. Theologians can mock themselves, and that alone bounds their pride. What is more, they are keenly sensitive to their cruel contemporary predicament. Many want desperately to be heard by the church, and yet at the same time they believe they can best serve the church by doing respectable work within the academy. Is the Christian faith true to life and the world or not? If Christians cannot make compelling arguments to that effect, then we are as much as admitting we cling to a delusion. Theology may no longer be at the heart of the academy, but all Christians have an interest in seeing that it is not dismissed as a mere vestigial organ.

What about technical language? Again, there are grounds for criticism, since theologians often use fancy words when plain ones would do. But that is not always the case. Technical terms focus inquiry, sharpen concepts, enable arguments. Without them each concept introduced into a discussion would have to be laboriously described, then described again each time it was reintroduced. We readily accept technical language from doctors, realizing no one needs a surgeon who would ask a nurse for that thingamajig so we can slice off this whatchamacallit. We also don’t berate mechanics for referring to fuel-injection or gear differentials, and it is shortsighted not to accept a similar precision in theology.

Consider next the bewildering variety of theologians and theologies. This feature of the theologian’s predicament may tempt us to gloat, to say it proves we do not need to listen to theologians since they are in such discord. But again there is no place for gloating: the theologian’s predicament is every Christian’s predicament. AAR/SBL, in its radical plurality, is only a microcosm of the world we all live in. At least in that respect theologians are very much engaged with the “real world,” a world bereft of common metaphysical presuppositions, with passengers who have had to abandon the great ship of shared meaning to the separate lifeboats of contested meanings.

All pursuit of meaning in this modern world (now postmodern, by virtue of this predicament) is fragmented and arguable. As demonstrated by the potentially shattering arguments over, say, abortion, the church and the nation need urgently to build a new ship of common meaning, or at least learn how to row our lifeboats in formation. In a world that has forgotten most of what it knew about shipbuilding, that can barely remember how to use oars for paddles rather than weapons, it makes little sense to kill off sailors. If there is any way through our predicament, surely theologians and philosophers are essential to finding it.

Have something to add about this? See something we missed? Share your feedback here.