Be a Theologian

by Catrin Harland-Davies.

Today is Epiphany. It’s the time of year when we remember the arrival of Magi from the East – professional theologians, albeit from a different religious tradition, who had come to visit the Christ-child.

When I’m asked for my job title, one of the many possible answers is ‘theological educator’. I tend not to say theologian, though I do see myself as training theologians. But then, I have always seen my task in ministry as helping to equip theologians, so perhaps my job title has always been ‘theological educator’. Because I don’t believe that ‘theologian’ is a job reserved for the ordained or for those with a formal qualification in theology. Every Christian is (or should be) a theologian. To be a theologian is simply to be someone who speaks about God. Surely it is the task of every Christian to think about God, to learn about God, and to speak about God. Whether that be speaking of God to one another within the church, or speaking of God as a means of sharing our faith, it is a privilege and a responsibility which belongs to us all, not just to a team of perceived specialists.

But speaking of God doesn’t mean learning a list of received or ‘correct’ doctrines. Yes, it’s a collective exercise, and the wisdom handed down through the church across 2000 years is a vital part of the picture. But one thing that we have learned in the world of professionalised, academic theology over the last couple of decades is that what we tend to think of as received doctrine comes from a very narrow pool. It is the product of thinking done mostly by university-educated white men in Europe and North America, building on the thinking done by men in Europe, the Middle East and North Africa a couple of millennia ago. That doesn’t make it necessarily wrong (though much of it is internally debated, of course), but neither is it complete. As a biblical theologian, I’ve recently learned a lot from those whose voices are (from a European perspective) relatively new to the theological conversation.

It was from Black, Womanist scholars that I learned to notice the character of Hagar in the story that I had previously thought of as belonging to Abraham and Sarah. From those used to noticing the voices of the marginalised and oppressed – indeed, to seeing themselves reflected in those characters – I learned to notice that this ill-used Egyptian slave girl, whose very name means ‘the Foreigner’, is the only character in the Hebrew Bible actually to name God.

It was from those whose cultures still have a strong tradition of oral storytelling that I learned a lot about how the stories of the Hebrew Bible may have been handed down from generation to generation, before ever they were committed to paper. From some of my students steeped in such cultures, I gained real insights into how the stories of Jesus may have been treasured and retold until they reached the Gospel writers, and how this might have shaped the form in which we receive them, including why we have such interesting versions of the same stories.

It was from looking at the stories which apparently held particular importance for enslaved Africans in North America and the Caribbean, those fighting against apartheid in South Africa, those resisting the evil of Nazism in 1930s and 40s Germany, or persecuted Christians in many parts of the world today, that I learned to see more fully the sheer power of God’s liberative acts. Come to that, it was a friend who comes from a marginalised community in South Asia who taught me to read more empathetically the sheer desperation in the cry for violence at the end of Psalm 137.

And from all these new (to me) insights, I realised something else – that I can bring my own insights to the collective task of theology. God invites us all to be theologians. God doesn’t invite us to be unthinking recipients of other people’s theology or biblical interpretation. Nor, of course, does absolutely anything go. Rather, we are invited to join a theological conversation, in which every insight is valued, and every insight is tested against other insights. That’s why, for me at least, Theology Everywhere is such a valuable resource. It enables me to think aloud (in a manner of speaking) and then to receive the wisdom and insight of other theologians, including those who wouldn’t think of themselves that way.

So please, let me know – what have you discovered about God recently? What insights, rational thoughts or crazy ideas can you bring to the conversation? Why not make it your New Year’s resolution to talk more about God – to be the theologian God calls you to be?