Years ago, to prepare for my four (count ‘em, four) baccalaureate sermons in Duke Chapel at graduation, I assembled a focus group of graduating seniors. “I’m to preach to you at the baccalaureate. What are the issues, challenges, and concerns that you are wrestling with as you graduate?”

Students mentioned the job market, the hapless Clinton administration, overbearing parents. Then one blurted, “Graduation weekend, we’ll have loads of advice dumped on us. Please, don’t give us any more damn advice! Like we don’t have parents? I hope you’ll talk about the only subject you know more about than we do: God. I’m not sure I’m a believer but I am sure that there’s no reason to listen to you other than God. I hope you’ll talk about the one subject that nobody at Duke will be free to talk about all weekend: God.”

A group of Princeton Seminary students asked to meet with me one evening during my residence at CTI. “Do you really believe that your sermons change people?” asked one of the seminarians. Maybe because I was theologically hyped from my CTI experience, I asked, “Who told you that changing people was the point of preaching?” Before the student could respond I answered my question: “The only reason for bothering people with a sermon is theological. If preaching isn’t talk about, to, and from God it’s not Christian.”

“Just share yourself,” contemporary preachers are advised, as if that’s enough material for a sermon. “Preach from your personal [Latinx, LBGQT+, white, cisgender, wounded, Midwestern, democratic] experience.” Conventional counsel in a culture that regards personal experience as revelatory and ontologically significant. Not only is “my experience” rarely to be trusted as an accurate rendition of me, but preaching aims at offering listeners an experience (encounter with Christ) they cannot have if we preachers lack the guts to speak up for God in a bourgeoise culture that worships personal experience as God.

Theology keeps ministry as difficult as Jesus intends it to be. When I was the age of these seminarians, just starting out, somebody told me that interesting sermons “begin with a question and then offer an answer.” Worse, later I was advised, “preach the questions, not the answers.”

In the course of my preaching life, I discovered that few are born asking the questions for which the answer is “Jesus Christ.” I also found that the gospel is not the answer most hope to hear. Open-ended questions (that give listeners the delusion that they are in charge of communication between them and God) are safer than the answer, “Jesus Christ.”

Faithful Christian preaching begins, not with the preacher’s assessment of need, questions, or with the congregation’s yearnings. Preaching is instigated and authorized by a God who is loquacious, relentlessly determined (if Scripture be believed) to be in conversation with God’s people. “And God said….” is not only the beginning of everything but also origination of all faithful sermons.

How can I have a more peaceful life? Where can I find healing for my personal trauma and pain? Wherein is peace in an upwardly mobile, privileged, upper middle class, therefore stress-filled world? What’s to be done about American, white, Christian racism? Will Trump ever become truthful? Why get out of bed in the morning?

Good questions. Alas, they are of little interest to the gospel of Jesus Christ. The query of Scripture, and the good news borne by the Bible, is triune, insistently theological: Who is God? (Ontological Trinity) What is God up to? (Economic Trinity) Followed by (the anthropological): Don’t you want to hitch on to whatever God is up to?

I was Associate Minister (lackey stuck with youth ministry and running errands for the senior pastor) in a small Southern town. I had just delivered a rousing rant on how Richard Nixon is ruining America. Or, maybe my theme was, “Follow me! Vanguard of racial justice.” Or, “Don’t you have a used coat that you can cast to a less fortunate neighbor?” Something prophetic like that.

As I stood at the door after service, craving congregational reaction, pro or contra, Mrs. Bunker emerged, intimidating even though an octogenarian, predatory, under full sail, black hat, gloves, silver headed cane, contemptuous countenance.

“You call that a sermon?” she smirked. “How old are you? Not more than twenty-five, I’d say. Yet you presume to hector from the pulpit? Proffering sophomoric advice as if you were a Methodist Freud?

Really now.”

Somehow the Holy Spirit implicated herself into Mrs. Bunker’s post-sermon devaluation enabling me to say to the Lord, but not to her, “Geeze. The old lady’s right.”

The sole subject that I had just spent three years in seminary pondering, the one area that I might—even in my callow youth—know more than she, the lone reason for a kid like me insinuating into a life like hers: Talk from, to, and about God.

Mrs. Bunker and the Holy Spirit reminded me that if pulpit speech or sermonic intentions veer from the foundational, “Any word from the Lord?”, it’s doomed to be little more than advice, common sense, moralism, pop psychology or amateurish political commentary. Why get out of bed and come to church at an inconvenient hour for that? At least Rotary serves lunch.

Preaching is more difficult than a university lecture because preaching is theological: a word from, to, and about God. “How can merely mortal me presume to speak for God?” Truth is, I can’t. Only God can speak for God and wonder of wonders, in preaching, even mine, God condescends to speak.

Karl Barth won the hearts of preachers by calling preaching an “impossible possibility.” We can’t preach, said Barth, and yet God commands preaching. No word can truthfully be said about God that doesn’t come from God. Yet, the humanly preached word is, by the miraculous grace of God, God’s. Thank you, Second Helvetic Confession. Only God speaks for God and, in preachers, God speaks. Therefore my definition of preaching: A preacher joins the conversation between God and God’s people, in the sermon makes a contribution to the conversation, and then listens for where God takes the conversation in the days to come.

As Bonhoeffer said, there’s only one preacher, Christ. Luther said this one preacher, Christ, uses us preachers on Sunday to equip the whole church to preach God’s word to the world the rest of the week.

I work on my sermons. I always work from the original Greek. I got a “Superior” from Brevard Childs at Yale Divinity School. But my scholarly best isn’t good enough to preach God’s word.

Therefore, we do epiclesis, beginning sermon preparation in prayer, begging the Holy Spirit to help us speak and the church to hear. Trouble is, because the Holy Spirit is one of the three, free, sovereign persons of the one Trinity, the Holy Spirit is under no obligation to show up just because we asked. It’s not a sermon until God enters and makes my Southern accented, frail, elderly voiced words God’s word and God is free to show up or not.

You say that you’ve heard me preach and that my sermons have glaring weaknesses? True. Yet I take heart in my theological conviction that no sermon is so sorry that an incarnating, relentlessly communicative God is unable to utilize my offering, no matter how pitiful. My preaching, for reasons known only to the Trinity, is a major way God has chosen to love the world.

“You call this a sermon?” the Holy Spirit smirks, peering over my shoulder at my notes. “Give it to me, I’ll take it from here.”

As I’ve harped upon with my students at Duke Divinity School: “We’ve trained our congregations to expect a sermon to be about them and their alleged problems.” Preacher, do you really want to cast yourself as an economist, a self-help guru, or a marriage and family expert? Besides, you do well to distrust their self-assessment of their problems as well as your own sophomoric advice. Jesus has a spotty record on solving our problems, possibly because he rather enjoys giving us problems we would never have had if we were not trying to walk with Jesus.

As Barth told us preachers, the Trinity is so much more interesting than you or your listeners. Because God is so relentlessly revelatory, we know more for sure about Jesus Christ than we do about our evasive, arcane, deceitful listeners. Preachers talk for God, not our listeners. The most interesting thing about our flawed listeners is that Jesus Christ has chosen to address them through us flawed, finite, feckless preachers.

Why not engage, through your sermon, in a conversation they’ve been avoiding all week? Regular encounters with Scripture keep us from reducing our messages to subjects with which our folks are most comfortable. Through our theological endeavors, Christ refuses to let us do church as we please. So, go ahead, risk talk about the God who, in Jesus Christ, in Scripture, and now in your sermon, is the only god who ever wanted to talk to the likes of us.

About the same time of my assault by Mrs. Bunker (“Now, Miss Edith,” I said in response. “That’s Mrs. Bunker, young man,” she bit back), I learned a hermeneutical principle that disciplined my study of Scripture ever since: Scripture always and everywhere speaks primarily about God and only secondarily and then derivatively about us.

I’m stuck, with Jesus on a summer’s Sunday, at an absurdly affluent, unashamedly all-white church in Long Island. My text? Wouldn’t you know it, Mark 10:17-31. An upwardly mobile person (“Isn’t it nice when someone like you appears in Scripture?” I cackled) is invited to follow Jesus but declines discipleship. (“Only instance of a refusal of Jesus’s invitation. What does that tell you?”) Then, leaning toward them, sardonically, “and the reason was money.” Brief pause to let that sink in.

“It’s hard to save rich people,” Jesus comments casually to his disciples once the man is out of earshot.

“How hard is it, Jesus?” they ask.

Jesus replies, “As difficult as to shove a fully loaded camel through the eye of a needle.”

“That’s hard!”

“Still, with God, anything could be . . . possible,” says Jesus, “even the salvation of people who work for Goldman Sachs.”

The fight at the luncheon after the service proved that the laity really do listen to sermons.

What fun to work with a Savior who doesn’t mind throwing the furniture around. The temptation is to make excuses. “He didn’t mean, ‘Sell all you have and give it to the poor.’ That would be economically irresponsible. He meant up your church pledge from the modest Methodist 2.2 percent to a more robust 3.5.”

Give ’em the old, “Here’s what Jesus would have said if he had the benefit of a Duke Divinity School education.”

Be not led into temptation. As preachers, our job is to talk about, with, and like Jesus, whether it personally pleases us or our listeners to do so or not. Jesus has so many more interesting things to say than we do.

Will Willimon is Professor of the Practice of Christian Ministry, Duke Divinity School, and a United Methodist Bishop, retired. His most recent book is The Church We Carry: Loss, Leadership, and the Future of the Our Church. He is currently working on a book on hope which began during his time at CTI.

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Of the many kinds of prayer, petitionary prayer is among the most important. When Jesus taught his disciples to pray, what he gave them was largely a list of petitions: thy kingdom come; give us this day our daily bread; forgive us our debts; lead us not into temptation; deliver us from evil. In teaching his followers to pray like this, Christ seems not merely to invite us to petition God, but to command us to do so.

Yet for all its importance, petitionary prayer is puzzling. It raises deep questions about God’s nature, God’s action in the world, and how we relate to God. Perhaps the most basic is simply this: what is the point of petitioning God? If God is perfectly good and wise, what difference could our asking possibly make?

In what follows, I want to examine why this question is so difficult to answer and then propose a way through it. Petitionary prayer makes a difference, I will suggest, not by changing God’s mind, but by cultivating and enacting divine-human friendship.

Divine Attribute Problems

Following the philosopher and theologian Eleonore Stump, we can define petitionary prayer as “a request made of God for something specific believed to be good by the one praying.”[1] Put simply, petitionary prayer involves asking God to do something. But if that’s true, then it seems the practice of petitionary prayer makes sense only if God at least sometimes does things because someone has asked. Otherwise, what would be the point of asking?

This is where the difficulties arise, for there are several reasons to doubt that God ever does things because we ask. One worry, common since the advent of modern physics, is the thought that the world is governed by inviolable laws, and therefore God cannot intervene in the world to bring about what we ask for. Another, considerably more plausible worry is that God’s doing things because we ask seems to be incompatible with how Christians have traditionally understood God’s attributes.

For example, many Christians think God is immutable (absolutely unchangeable) or at least impassible (unable to be affected by other beings). God’s doing something because we ask seems to imply that our petitions change God’s intentions, however. So, if God is immutable or impassible, it seems God can’t do things because we ask and that petitionary prayer is pointless.

We might reject the theories of divine immutability and impassibility, of course. Many theologians do. But the same sort of problem arises from other, less controversial divine attributes. If God is all-powerful, all-knowing, and perfectly good, then it seems God will always act in the best way possible, regardless of what we pray for. We can formulate this problem as a dilemma:

1. Given God’s perfection, God will always act to make the world better (if God can), and God will never act to make the world worse (if God can help it).

2. So, if what someone prays for would make the world better, God would do it anyway.

3. But if what someone prays for would make the world worse, God won’t do it.

4. Either way, God does not do anything—or at least anything important—because we ask, and petitionary prayer is pointless.

One can quibble with the way this argument is stated. For example, I think the first premise makes some dubious assumptions about the nature of value, so it’s probably false as stated. But these quibbles could be easily accommodated by rephrasing the argument. This formulation suffices to show there is a deep tension between God’s goodness and the practice of petitionary prayer—or at least there appears to be.

Petitionary Prayer in God’s Plan

Theologians have been discussing these problems since the early church. Perhaps the most influential response was given by the great medieval theologian Thomas Aquinas. According to Thomas, God can do things because we ask even though our prayers don’t change God’s intentions, which are always perfectly good. That’s because God’s providential plan includes not only what effects will occur in the world, but also what the causes of each effect will be. In other words, God plans not just what happens but how it comes about.

Applying this idea to prayer, Thomas reasons that God not only wills the event that is an answer to someone’s prayer, God also wills that the prayer be among the causes of that event. The prayer doesn’t change God’s intention, then, but God still brings about the event partly because the person prayed for it.[2]

To make this more concrete, imagine that God grants a mother’s prayer for her son to be healed. On Thomas’s picture, God wills the son’s recovery because it’s good. But God also wills that the son recover as an answer to the mother’s prayer. God does this because it’s a way to demonstrate God’s generosity and love for her.[3]

Thomas’s solution is ingenious, I think, but it makes a controversial assumption. It assumes that God causes not only the events we pray for, but also our praying for them. In other words, it assumes that God determines our acts of prayer. Thomas is not worried about this assumption because he thinks God’s agency does not compete with creaturely agency, and therefore that God’s determining our actions is fully compatible with our freedom. I’m inclined to agree with him on this point, but many contemporary theologians don’t. They argue that God cannot control our free actions, prayers included.

Those who adopt this more demanding, “libertarian” theory of freedom need to find another response to the worry that God’s nature is incompatible with doing things because we ask. Happily, there are various ways to modify Thomas’s solution, each of which involves claiming that God can do things because we ask without our prayers changing God’s will, at least in important respects. Let’s consider just one such way, which involves two steps.

The first step is to distinguish between God’s ends and God’s means. God’s ends are God’s general purposes, such as establishing the justice and peace of God’s reign or enabling a particular person to flourish. God’s means are the particular ways God acts to achieve those ends. On this view, God’s general ends don’t change: God always wills them because they are good, and our prayers won’t change that. But if God doesn’t control our free choices, then the means God uses to realize those ends must be influenced by what we freely decide to do.

The second step is to say that God adopts a general policy of taking our prayers into account when deciding which means to use. Suppose God wills that Jennie flourish in her vocation, and that she could do this equally well as a teacher or as a doctor. Either way, God’s end for Jennie is met. But now suppose Jennie longs to teach, and prays for God’s help in becoming a teacher. Given God’s policy of taking our prayers into account, God might answer this prayer and help Jennie into the classroom—not because her asking changed God’s purpose for her, but because it shaped which good path God used to fulfill it.

There will be constraints on which prayers shape what God does, of course. What is prayed for must actually be a way of achieving God’s ends, and it must be good enough that God can will it. Many prayers fail to satisfy these constraints. But presumably some prayers will satisfy them. It therefore seems possible that God could grant those prayers without this changing God’s overarching good purposes.

A New Problem

We have seen how the constancy of God’s perfect will is compatible with God’s doing some things because we ask. We haven’t yet dissolved the tension between divine goodness and petitionary prayer, however. We can still ask why God would want to do some things as answers to our prayers. Why not just give us good things without our asking?

Stump answers this question by appealing to divine-human friendship. God, she says, aims to draw us into a loving, intimate relationship that’s akin to friendship. But there’s a problem. Recognizing God’s perfect goodness, we might abandon our own desires and simply become God’s “slavish follower” or “lackey.” Alternatively, if God gave us everything we wanted without our asking, we might become “spoiled” and self-indulgent. Either way, our ability to participate in friendship with God is compromised.[4]

Petitionary prayer, together with the fact that God doesn’t grant all our requests, prevents this problem. It provides a sort of relational “buffer” necessary for friendship with God.[5] For this reason, it’s better for God sometimes to give us things as answers to our petitions rather than simply giving them without asking, and this explains why God would want to do so.

I find Stump’s suggestion that petitionary prayer contributes to divine-human friendship illuminating, but her way of developing the thought is somewhat puzzling. First, it seems to me far more intuitive to think that petitionary prayer fosters closeness to God rather than distance from God. Second, on her account our petitions and God’s sometimes granting them are instrumentally valuable—valuable primarily for the way they secure the background conditions for divine-human friendship.

I therefore want to explore a different way of connecting petitionary prayer to divine-human friendship. My suggestion is that human petitions and God’s granting them are not merely means of establishing friendship, but can be parts of it. They are among the acts through which divine-human friendship is enacted or realized, and therefore they are intrinsically valuable—valuable as constitutive parts of a relationship we prize for its own sake.

I’ll develop my case in three stages. First, I’ll argue that the act of petitionary prayer can itself be a way of enacting the kind of intimacy with God that is characteristic of friendship. Second, I’ll suggest that God’s granting our petitions can be an enactment of friendship with us and thus valuable for its own sake. Finally, I will argue that the authority to ask God for certain things closes a normative distance between us and God in a way that is important for genuine friendship. This final step is especially important for understanding why God might want to do some things as answers to our petitions.

Petition and Intimacy

Let’s begin by asking what it is for two people to be together—for them to be close to one another or present to one another. Among the most significant ways this happens is through what psychologists and philosophers call “joint attention.” Joint attention occurs when two people attend to or focus on the same thing and, simultaneously, are aware of each other attending to that thing. When we share joint attention with someone we love, it can be a meaningful and richly enjoyable experience.[6]

It’s easiest to understand this phenomenon through examples. Consider two lovers gazing into each other’s eyes. They’re attending to each other, but they’re also aware of each other attending to one another. This mutual awareness of each other’s attention is what makes this an experience of being together or in each other’s presence.

Similarly, imagine two friends talking over coffee. One friend tells the other about the concert she saw last night. In doing this, she establishes joint attention. She and her friend both attend to the concert, but they’re also aware of each other attending to the same thing. Again, this mutual awareness makes this an experience of being present to one another.

Let’s now return to prayer. When we pray, we address God. The very act of addressing God can establish joint attention. Of course, since God is all-knowing, addressing God doesn’t change God’s attention, such that God begins to attend to what we attend to. Rather, addressing God makes us aware of God’s attention to us and to what we pray for. Prayer makes us aware that our attention is in alignment with God’s, establishing joint attention and making God present to us.

Furthermore, petitionary prayer allows us to open ourselves to God in a way that allows us to experience God’s love in a deeper way.[7] We humans are creatures who long not only to love but also to be loved. If we are to be loved deeply, in the fullness of who we are, we must be known. Similarly, if we are to experience ourselves as deeply loved, we must experience ourselves as deeply known.

Petitionary prayer facilitates just this. By petitioning God we share our desires and concerns with God. This is not necessary to inform God of our concerns, as if we needed to make these known to God. Rather, it is a way in which we can experience ourselves as known and loved by God, and thus enjoy the good of being loved by the One we love.

So petitioning God fosters the kind of intimacy characteristic of friendship in two ways: it allows us to be together with God through joint attention, and it lets us experience ourselves as deeply known and loved by God through our self-disclosure. Notice, however, that both of these things are true of prayer as such. Prayers of adoration, thanksgiving, and lament would do just as well. And all of it concerns our side of the divine-human relationship. The question we began with also requires saying something about why God might grant petitions. So let’s turn there.

Granting as an Act of Friendship

Recall Thomas Aquinas’s suggestion that granting our petitions is a way for God to demonstrate generosity and love. The account I’ve been developing enriches that thought. For if prayer fosters intimacy with God, then God’s granting no longer takes place in a vacuum; it takes place within a loving, intimate relationship. And within this kind of relationship, the meaning and value of a gift can change.

To see this, consider my evolving relationship with my late maternal grandmother. When I was a little boy, I liked her because she gave me toys and money. My relationship with her was primarily of instrumental value to me: it was useful as a means of acquiring things I wanted. When I was a teenager, however, we became pen pals and, through our letters, friends. She continued to send me gifts, but now they meant something more to me. They became expressions of her love and goodwill for me, and thus a part of our friendship. As such, they were intrinsically, not merely instrumentally, valuable for me.

The same can be true for God’s granting our petitions. Apart from a loving relationship, granting our request might be valuable to us only for the good thing it provides us with. But within the context of intimacy and reciprocal love, God’s act of granting becomes an expression of friendship. It becomes a way God participates in friendship with us. As such, it becomes valuable as a constitutive part of a relationship we prize for its own sake.

So far, I’ve argued that both our petitions and God’s granting them can be ways of participating in the love and intimacy of divine-human friendship. These acts, therefore, can be valuable to us for their own sake. What my argument has not yet shown, however, is why this gives God a reason to do some things specifically as answers to our petitions. After all, my grandmother didn’t wait for me to ask for gifts; they came to me unrequested yet were valuable as expressions of her friendship all the same. So the question arises once again: why wouldn’t God just give us good things without our asking?

The Authority to Ask

The first thing to note is precisely what kind of answer this question requires. It’s tempting to assume an answer must show that God’s granting petitions is better than giving to us unasked. But God’s perfection requires no such thing. It requires only that God’s granting our prayers be an appropriate thing to do, even if giving unasked would have been just as good.

If granting our petitions is just as good as giving unasked, then, God would have reason enough to do either and is free to choose between them. It’s plausible to think granting our petitions is just as good, however, given the way our petitions and God’s granting them enact divine-human friendship. So, we already have enough to dissolve the apparent tension between God’s goodness and God’s doing some things because we ask.

I suspect we can say something stronger, however. I suspect we can say that God’s giving some things because we ask accomplishes something unasked giving cannot, and therefore that it is better for God to do some things as answers to our petitionary prayers.

It’s characteristic of friendship that friends can ask one another for things they cannot ask of others. I can ask a friend to help me move, for example, but it would be presumptuous to ask the same of a colleague with whom I am not intimate. This illustrates that the authority to ask things of another is itself a mark of closeness, and lacking such authority is a kind of relational distance.

So imagine a divine-human friendship in which we could share our desires and concerns with God but never ask for anything. Something would seem to be missing. We would stand at a distance from God, a distance that genuine friends have closed. The friendship we had with God would feel stunted; it would lack an important form of intimacy.

Now notice that the authority to ask someone to do something is relationally salient only if one’s requests are sometimes granted. It is God’s actual granting of our petitions, not God’s mere permission, that makes our authority to ask things of God salient and meaningful. It is this that secures the normative closeness of friendship, the intimacy of being able to make requests of one another. God’s giving us good things unasked, however loving and generous, cannot provide that good.

None of this implies that God must give us whatever we ask. As we’ve seen, God will not grant our petitions unless doing so is both good in itself and a way of advancing God’s ends. But within those bounds there is still plenty of room for us to draw near to God through petitionary prayer—and for God sometimes to grant those prayers.

Conclusion

We can now see how the connection between petitionary prayer and friendship helps dissolve the tension between God’s goodness and God’s doing things because we ask. Petitionary prayer is a way of experiencing intimacy with God. Within the context of such intimacy, God’s granting our petitions becomes an enactment of friendship that is intrinsically valuable for us. And our authority to petition, which is made salient only by God’s sometimes saying yes, removes a normative distance that no unrequested gift could close.

Petitionary prayer, on this account, is not a technique for changing God’s mind. It is a way to enact and enjoy friendship with God. Once we see it this way, we can see that even a perfectly good and wise God has good reasons to do some things because we ask.

[1] Eleonore Stump, “Petitionary Prayer,” American Philosophical Quarterly 16, no. 2 (April 1979): 81.

[2] Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, II-II.83.2.

[3] Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, II-II.83.2, ad. 3.

[4] Stump, “Petitionary Prayer,” 87–88.

[5] Stump, “Petitionary Prayer,” 90.

[6] See Charles Guth III, “Covenant and Friendship: An Essay on the Ethics of Divine-Human Relationship” (PhD diss., Princeton Theological Seminary, 2024), chap. 7.

[7] See Marilyn McCord Adams, Opening to God: Childlike Prayers for Adults (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2008), Introduction.

Charles Guth III is the McDonald Agape Postdoctoral Fellow at the Center of Theological Inquiry.

Dan Hardy was a mentor and teacher. He had to be so, as his own thought was so deep and compelling as to require deep mentoring and skillful teaching. I know that both as someone who has read his work and as someone who had the privilege of spending long periods in conversation with him. As a thinker, Dan was never satisfied: equally dis-satisfied with his own work as the work of others, he would edit and edit to create the kinds of dense formulations redolent of his work, determining that almost all his sentences function as aphorisms needing to be unpacked by pages of commentary and hours of thought. Failing to read him in this careful way, or to attend to the density of his logic fails to recognize unparalleled contribution to the field. I use the term “unparalleled” not because of the amount of published work he left us with (there was actually comparably little published) but because of the ceaseless originality with which he engaged the field—his unending rethinking of theology. His unsettled rethinking of theology has led many to fail to understand Hardy’s work with the subtlety and sensitivity it demands. All too often, I have heard people invoke Hardy’s name regarding interdisciplinary theology only to invoke something Hardy would never have assented to, never mind advocated, because what is invoked is something untheological or which places theology or theological questions and concerns into a secondary place. They attend wrongly to the interest in other disciplines without attending to the conditions of this engagement. The essays in this short collection, thankfully, do not do that. Instead, they each demonstrate the fundamental theological conditions and methods with which Hardy operates in describing and articulating interdisciplinarity.

In this concluding short essay, I wish to say something about that fundamental theological approach to theology which is the very foundation of Hardy’s approach to interdisciplinary inquiry. While the term theological theology is one which owes its origins to the inaugural lecture of one of my other teachers and mentors (and later colleague) John Webster when he was appointed as Lady Margaret Professor of Divinity at the University of Oxford, the phrase could equally but differently be addressed to Dan Hardy’s approach to the discipline (much as these two intellectual giants differed in theological sensibility, approach, and perspective). The reason it is appropriate to think of Hardy’s work as theological theology is precisely because of his view and understanding of the fundamental conditions in which theology should be pursued: these must always be unapologetically theological. In different ways, each of the essays in this small collection have brought this point out. For Hardy, both the prolegomena and teloi of theology must be theological. Anyone who has wrestled with the intensity of his thought and writings will know this to be the case.

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The theological condition of theology is all the more important for Hardy’s work when one considers how important interdisciplinarity was for him. It would be easy to mistake this work for a kind of liberal acceptance of theological authority being able to be found in any and every venue or location unchecked or unbaptized. But Hardy makes plain this is precisely not the kind of approach to interdisciplinary theology he believes to be appropriate or wise. His bold statement at the beginning of his essay makes this overtly clear and is one that as the new Director of CTI (where he framed this statement) I wish to consider as determinative of the way we should engage as a center of theological inquiry which engages across and with different disciplines theologically. Hardy states:

Theological inquiry as undertaken by the Center is grounded in the self-revealing of the Triune God in creation and salvation as found in Scripture and the critical tradition of inquiry and interpretation by which Christians have continued to live as the Church. At the same time, this theological inquiry implies dedication to the truth and vitality still to be uncovered as this understanding of God’s work in the world is brought into contact with the movements of thought and life which prevail today.

The temptation to read interdisciplinary theological work as an exercise in trying to establish the reduced relevance of theology within the broader academic setting is one which must always be resisted. Most interdisciplinary work operates, indeed, with an assumption of the first two types of Hans Frei’s typology relating to theology (see his book, Types of Christian Theology). These claim that either our interdisciplinarity must involve Christian theology subjecting itself to being articulated in universal categories (philosophy or psychology, etc.); or Christian theology must justify itself by demonstrating its coherence with broader accounts of truth, meaning, or experience. So often the arrogances of contemporary disciplines outwith theology determine such approaches are the only way we can engage: theology is always the discipline listening, learning, and adapting. Interdisciplinary theology means, effectively, less theological theology—or “theology-lite.” Hardy critiques this strongly:

There are too many instances in the past, and today, where theology has simply been assimilated to other disciplines which have claimed normative authority over it—often at the hands of people whose primary allegiance is elsewhere. Passing through the sausage factory of other disciplines, it emerges as their “sausage.”

In this, he is even critical of the post-liberal emphasis, for example, on narrative.

The very extent of Hardy’s critique of weak forms of theological interdisciplinarity can be felt precisely here. For Hardy, any such approach to interdisciplinary theology associated with the first two types Frei identifies was never going to be satisfactory, but neither would the third type of theology that Frei describes. This kind of theology remains attentive both to the internal grammar of Christian faith while at the same time attending to rational intelligibility. We might see this type not only as associated with the likes of Paul Tillich and Friedrich Schleiermacher, but also, on Hardy’s own analysis, even the post-liberals themselves. Instead, somewhat surprisingly, in a sense what Hardy is offering is a version of Frei’s type 4—not because he is unconcerned with the kinds of engagement with other disciplines and the discoveries they might have for theology, but rather for two principal reasons. First, Christian theology is the condition and terminus of these external disciplinary engagements. Second, there is a certain “actualistic” or “found” nature to the forms of engagement which are needed. So, while Hardy is able to say this:

theological inquiry which is attempted through these disciplines must be deeply open to the best resources for understanding them, and yet capable of establishing the truth of the substance of Christian faith in ways appropriate to these areas and these resources.

Hardy also goes on to say:

the Center’s goals, objectives, and program are a careful formulation of what is necessary when positive theology (that is, theology with an undiminished sense of the truth of God as known in Christ by the power of the Holy Spirit) fully engages with forms of study and practice which are formative for modern understanding and life.

In this, the context for engagement with other disciplines is precisely a confident theology grounded in revelation, and—furthermore—the ends will be a better version of both theology and other disciplines. There will be a mutual transformation of the disciplines, but always orientated towards the abductive activity of divine truth based in the reality of God as the source of all that is. Thus, the origins and the end of this inquiry is the relation of truth to God:

theological inquiry through interdisciplinary study would attempt to rediscover the distinctness and relation of the spheres of understanding and life, religious and “non-religious,” theological and interdisciplinary, for the good of humankind and in that to recover their intrinsic connection to the truth of God and God’s purposes. (emphasis added)

For interdisciplinary theology to be genuinely interdisciplinary and genuinely theological, it has to understand itself in relation to the fundamental conditions of all inquiry into the truth—that is, in relation to God. As such, the conditions for inter-disciplinary engagement will always involve fundamental theological assumptions and conditions.

Dan Hardy’s own theological interests and life themselves bespeak this kind of theological confidence open to interdisciplinarity. He was not only a man of the academy, of great intellectual power, and of deep interests in all areas of human inquiry. Hardy was also a man of the church through and through—an academic’s academic, a theologian’s theologian, and a pastor’s pastor. For him, there was no tension in this. Indeed, for Hardy, the more ecclesial he was, the more theological he could be; and the more theological he was, the more open to the world his mind could be. This was interdisciplinarity of him—theological interdisciplinary theology.

For me, this is precisely the kind of engagements across disciplines CTI must have as theology’s institute for advanced study. It is the very depth of our theological thought and reasoning that makes possible our capacity for broad conversation across the big questions of the university and world. The security that depth brings does not cut us off from disagreement or difference, but roots us in a centered way that is more concerned to be open and hospitable than bounded and closed. Such rootedness does not remove or cut us off from complexity, ambiguity, or argument: such rootedness makes space for this complexity without anxiety or fear. Hardy’s confidence in what theology could offer in an interdisciplinary context should provide us all with precisely the freedom from fear or anxiety which must mark our engagements with other disciplines and fields.

Tom Greggs is Director of the Center of Theological Inquiry in Princeton, New Jersey.

Read Daniel Hardy's Essay Here

As a Canon of Durham Cathedral, Daniel Hardy’s vision for theology was rarely distant—either physically or metaphorically—from a worshipping community. Hence my suggestion that the typology developed in “The Logic of Interdisciplinary Studies and the Coherence of Theology” reflects a liturgical pulse. Dan not only encourages fruitful and appropriate interaction with other disciplines and sectors, urging theologians to remain intelligently aware of and responsive to the complexities and complications—sometimes the seeming chaos—of contemporary life. He also models practices for embodying Christian faith in the contemporary world. These practices, I suggest, may be understood as conceptually derived from the liturgy and structured by its various moments.

Mindful that the word liturgy derives from the Late Latin liturgia, which in turn comes from the Greek leitourgia meaning “public service,” the conceptual distance between liturgy and Dan’s encouragement of interdisciplinary dialogue with professionals across a range of sectors is relatively small. Every act performed in the liturgy is done for God’s sake, at least in principle. The psalmists’ repeated injunction to “bless the LORD” at both the beginning and the end of the psalm makes the point. This call to bless and praise God establishes the conditions under which worshippers proceed to make judgments about beliefs, regulations, and practices.

Similarly in Dan’s “The Logic of Interdisciplinary Studies,” the image of refracted light represents conversations with other specialists and professionals, unresolved moral dilemmas, questions without seeming answer, harms without seeming relief, and a host of other complexities moving towards the possibility of something new. This dynamic may be understood, perhaps, through an analogy with the liturgy’s own structuring moments:

· Anaphora - offering up of world to God in thanksgiving, presuming on theological grounds the proper autonomy of the secular.

· Anamnesis – the remembering of Christ’s passion, not in a manner that makes secular disciplines rivals, but in a way that orients theology and ethics toward appropriate ends while still allowing other disciplines to inform the prophetic clarity of theological critique.

· Epiclesis - the invocation of the Holy Spirit for strength to transform the perceptible world and, where appropriate, to seek to redirect or reshape agendas to overtly ethical ends.

· Communion - repentance as a moment of unadorned truth amidst multiple complexities; sacrifice as integral to reconciliation and healing; and the anticipatory consummation of the unity of all things in God.

· Dismissal - the sending out of persons into the relative autonomy of their respective disciplines and professions.

Like a pulse, or rhythmic, repeated movement of organized energy, these liturgical moments in Hardy’s approach become a recurrent act of encounter and an offering back to God in prayer.

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But how to move from liturgy to action? How does/might/should the liturgical pulse of Dan’s “Logic of Interdisciplinary Studies” shape how participants in the liturgy act in the world? My answer is found in the liturgical pulsing of Dan’s approach which shapes virtues and dispositions over time, is about embodied practices, and expects the deep, pre-conscious forming of intuitions and reactions.

Mindful of Dan’s lectures on Dietrich Bonhoeffer to undergraduate students in which he emphasized the call to obedient and responsible action, the question about moving to action amidst interdisciplinary colloquy becomes how to shun the “barren wisdom of mediocrity” whilst seeking the “fruitful radicalism” in the scrutiny of “public discussion and examination.”[1] I think especially of Dan’s lecture on Bonhoeffer’s “After Ten Years,” which included a focus on understanding the concrete experiences of people’s lives:

I want to try to give an accounting of some of the shared experience and insight that have been forced upon us in these times, not personal experiences, nothing systematically organized, not arguments and theories, but conclusions about human experience—lined up side by side, connected only by concrete experience—that have been reached together in a circle of like-minded people.[2]

There was no shying away from the “abysmal wickedness of evil” that Bonhoeffer reflected upon.[3] I recall Dan’s eloquence when recounting Bonhoeffer warnings against the extremes of naivety and fanaticism, and how responsibility is sought between these extremes; his emphasis on the importance of conscience, risks of self-deception, and why courage is not a task for theology alone.

For me, working currently at the interface between military ethics and moral injury research, the challenge of effective interdisciplinarity is considerable. A warning remains the 1970-80s call from Gilbert Harman and E.O. Wilson for ethics to be taken away from the philosophers and given to the social and biological sciences due to failure to explain how moral systems actually function. Rationalism amongst modern philosophers (and theologians, we might add), should indeed be exposed to criticism, e.g., as exemplified by Jonathan Haidt’s now-famous article “The Emotional Dog and its Rational Tail.”[4] Tensions are properly exposed between the problematic dominance of rationalist (top down) models of reasoning and inductive (bottom-up, empirically-based) accounts of how people make decisions, with particular attention paid in the latter to affective or emotional components or influences.[5]

Today the risk of moral philosophy and social psychology talking past each other is less extreme. This is due, inter alia, to growing recognition that health, well-being, and resilience have spiritual and ethical dimensions. A person’s sense of who they are; what gives their life meaning and purpose; their connectedness to one another, urban, and natural environments; how they exist in communion with others; and more, are vital to wellbeing.[6] For me, as we learn from Ukraine and elsewhere about how warfare gives rise to moral injury, Dan’s witness remains an impetus to learn from the liturgy about how to live with sorrow, hurt, and struggles to find meaning, fleeting encounters with transcendence, and disappearing glimpses of transformation toward ethical action and hope.

Esther D. Reed is a member of the theology faculty at the University of Exeter, UK.

Read Daniel Hardy's Essay Here

[1] Bonhoeffer, D., & Barnett, V. J. (2017). “After Ten Years.” Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Our Times. Fortress Press, 17-18.

[2] Ibid.

[3] Ibid.

[4] Haidt, J. (2001). “The Emotional Dog and Its Rational Tail: A Social Intuitionist Approach to Moral Judgment.” Psychological Review, 108(4), 814–834.

[5] Haidt, J. (2012). The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion. New York: Pantheon, 7, 70.

[6] Brémault-Phillips, S., Koenig, H., Pargament, K., Plante, T., Chirovsky, A., Olson, J., Pike, A., Germani Yee, T., Smith-MacDonald, L.,Scarcella, F., Weis, J. (2017). Spiritual Dimensions of Well-being, Health and Moral Injury: A Review. Veterans Affairs Canada, Edmonton, AB.

As a priest, I work primarily in a parish context whilst holding that ministry with a commitment to the work of being a theologian, whether that is in my own writing or in the service of commissions which make up part of our institutional life. In the living out of this dual vocation, Daniel W. Hardy (Dan) remains a constant source of inspiration and challenge.

Part of that is the continued dialogue—in thought and writing—with Dan’s collections of messages which reflected his own contribution to and concern for the church, the world, and the radiance of God.^[1] However, it is also in what he modelled to us of that life and commitment: rooted in the measures of Scripture and Eucharist, creative in use of language, concerned for healing at a granular level, and Spirit-led in the risky steps we take.^[2] In preaching, teaching, research, and writing, those are the ideas that form and stretch me (most recently in bringing Willie Jennings on Acts into conversation with the art of Sr Corita Kent as mediated by a Hardy-esque imagination).^[3]

One word which I will forever associate with Dan is “complexity.” It may not be written down in an essay or article, but there were frequent reminders in conversations and at the end of conferences that, however rich and illuminating the substance of our deliberations, it was more complicated than that.

There is something honest and liberating about naming the scope of our task. It reminds us that this is about the truth of the Triune God—from creation, redemption, and into the eschaton—known in our scriptures and engagement with tradition. The dynamic of such divine love is sought and known in our worship but also sought and known in the world, in all its complexity. We are invited to attend to a love that is forever in motion.^[4] It’s complex: light in radiance and refraction.

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This first image that came to mind when asked to write a brief essay for this symposium was that of Pink Floyd’s iconic album cover for Darkside of the Moon: light hitting a prism and being refracted as a band of color. It comes to mind, because it is a visual representation of a thread running through Dan’s vision for the theological task.

It’s an image that has stayed with me since I read the introduction to Hardy’s God’s Ways with the World, which picks up the theme of the fourth of his strategies worked out in relation to the future of the Center of Theological Inquiry. There he writes: “the truth and purposes of God are ‘refracted’—as it were spread like a band of colour—in other forms of life and thought; and the purpose of theology is to rediscover the dynamic of God’s life and work in this ‘band of colour’ and from it.”^[5]

It is more than 50 years since Pink Floyd released their mesmerizing album, which explored stages of human life and experience from work, travel, and money to life and death. This month, the crew of Artemis II went to the dark side of the moon and whatever we have learnt or been inspired by as a result, the themes of the album still resonate. They are part of the “refracted” truth and purpose of God, the “band of colour” Hardy exhorts us to attend to.

However, whilst they remain some of the “systematic fields or topical issues” that form that basis of interdisciplinary theological inquiry, our context is different.^[6] We continue to do this work in relation to new or developing “pressure points” as Hardy calls them. Our forms of life and thought (individually and socially) are shaped by increasing political polarization, forms of nationalism, the impact of social media, the use of artificial intelligence, and environmental or climate breakdown. These pressure points demand imagination, and a concern for truth and flourishing social life. That work of double attention—to radiance and colour—is our calling, with both patience and impatience.

In our own generation, perhaps now is a time to renew a commitment to the kind of vision for theology that Dan set out and sought to inhabit. We do it knowing that the voices we engage with will be broader, more diverse; knowing that we are human and fallible, and thus that the work is risky; knowing that the future of the endeavor might not look like what we inherited. We do it, to return as Dan did to O’Siadhail, knowing that to trust God’s love, and to seek God’s ways with the world, is to “surrender to the flow.”

In his treatise, Dan spoke of the Center as one which attracts a convergence of effort, refines its purpose, and sends with efficacy. In our own time, I hope that we can continue to be both serious and enthusiastic about the work of engaging theology with the ways of the world. This is part of the gifting of responsibility that Dan was to reflect on in Wording a Radiance. It was perhaps in those parting conversations that some of his vision for this work was refined: not leaving us with clarity but with categories to enable our engagement with complexity and our speaking of both extensity and intensity. He named the risks of our freedom, our capacity to get caught up in things, to be spread-out; he named the overwhelming choice and fragmentation, the danger of losing a sense of God’s presence with us. He named God’s response, of love in flow. This self-movement of divine love towards the world in creation and redemption calls forth a response from us. In describing the quality and dynamics of this attraction to God as “abduction” he powerfully conveys our capacity to be drawn by light (revealing Coleridge’s influence). It invites a double attention as we undertake the responsibilities gifted to us—that of cultivating attention to the light in worship of God, and the commitment to discover and work with God’s refracted light in the world.

I will end with a final word from Dan, which subconsciously shapes not only my vision for theology but also the patterns of ministry within which I work at a local level. That word is sociopoiesis. It expresses the generation and shaping of relationships in relation to the divine—and embraces all spheres of personal and social activity.

In Wording a Radiance, Dan depicts the complexity and subtly of these relations in a diagram. Arrows set out the flows of love, attraction, and energy—including the things shaped by sacramental social life in dispositions of care for the other, and the things the church relearns about its calling to healing when the kingdom is glimpsed in the world. In the last year, sociopoiesis has been made known in time spent on jury service and at seder meals, in lectures for student mental health nurses and talks at heritage societies, from funerals to faith and film podcasts, at community iftars, in community organizing, and in so much more.

Dan’s vision gifted language and ways of engaging with a love that is in motion and a light that both radiates and is refracted. We share with him responsibility for this urgent yet patient work—seeking the truth of God at pressure points, open to the Spirit and to the other. As Dan reminds us, “this is not the end of the drama… but only the beginning of the possibility of healing: an opening for attraction to meet attraction and, with the balm of the Spirit, for a wounded Church to walk with Jesus.”

We carry this life in our bodies. Sometimes we will feel afflicted or perplexed, at others joyful and buoyed up. In the words of 2 Corinthians 4:7 “But we have this treasure in clay jars, so that it may be made clear that this extraordinary power belongs to God and does not come from us.”

The Rev’d Preb Dr Julie Gittoes is Vicar of St Mary’s and Christ Church, Hendon (Diocese of London).

Read Daniel Hardy's Essay Here

^[1] I am thinking especially of God’s Ways with the World, Finding the Church, and Wording a Radiance (which, published posthumously, is a genre of its own).

^[2] In one sentence, those lines from Dan’s work evoke whole worlds of thought and imagination as we learn to inhabit them and improvise on them, discovering new meanings and challenge.

^[3] Julie Gittoes, “When I hear bread breaking,” forthcoming in Anglican Theological Review.

^[4] This line and the title of this piece is taken from a poem by Micheal O’Siadhail, cited by Dan more than once: “Rhapsody: Flow,” in Hail! Madam Jazz (Bloodaxe Books, 1992), 151.

^[5] Daniel W. Hardy, God’s Ways with the World: Thinking and Practising Christian Faith (T&T Clark, 1996), 1-2.

^[6] Daniel W. Hardy, “The Logic of Interdisciplinary Studies and the Coherence of Theology.”

There is a slightly defensive tone to that kind of explanation, and it is perhaps not surprising that theology does not come off well when we allow the world to frame the question that way. It invites the cynical response of the rationalist that theology is not useful for much of anything, especially if you want to get down to business and get things done in a world where views about ultimate reality are diverse, disputed, and often poorly understood, even—or especially—by the people who hold them most tightly.

That quick dismissal of theology has a long history. The eighteenth century used it to sideline questions about whether and why theology matters. Whatever meaning and truth may be found there, it is too contentious and disputed to be the basis for open discussion or public policy. The nineteenth century, especially in America, tried to reopen the discussion by showing that theology matters in experience, if not in terms of pure reason. Having a theology can make you happier and more effective, and it can motivate you to be a more useful member of society. This culminated in the mid-twentieth century in the power of positive thinking, and it is still very much with us, though probably not in the social media feeds that most of us pay attention to.

Theologians, especially Reformed theologians, reacted against that practical materialism, and the kind of theology that developed in Princeton tended, sometimes, to the indignant response of the prophet: God is not to be put to any use. That response became more urgent as the twentieth century saw God deployed by successive waves of ideology, nationalism, revolution, or racism. “Nein!” was the response that theologians learned from Karl Barth to all the ways that the world wanted to claim that if theology matters, it will have to matter in just the way that the world allows.

But later in the twentieth century, alongside the exploitation of theology for practical purposes or its subordination to political goals, there emerged a different way of thinking that found a home here on Stockton Street at CTI. Instead of thinking about our politics and purposes, we might explain that theology matters because God, as the source and end of all things, grounds the search for meaning in a world where knowledge is becoming increasingly fragmented into collections of facts.

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This was Daniel Hardy’s “Strategy Four,” as he set out the purposes of CTI. It is rooted in a “profound confidence” in the unity of disciplines in “truth and truthful practice as grounded in God and God’s purposes for the world.” Interdisciplinary theological inquiry so understood could encompass biological life as we know it and the possibility of life in the universe that we haven’t yet imagined. It could encompass systems of law and understandings of human society. It could explore the origins and limits of moral ideas like hope and justice.

The point is not to press theology into the service of other forms of knowledge. If all things originate in, are ordered by, and ultimately come together in God, then the orders and meanings found in honest inquiry can be understood and discussed in their own terms. Theologians need not demand agreement on ultimate meanings nor fear those who see immediate truths differently from the ways we do. But these discourses fit together into a larger framework of meaning. Nor should we be surprised if this larger framework is not immediately apparent to us. It not only waits to be discovered; it is still in the process of becoming. It is a work of reason to create the links that bind our fragmented truths together; and it is an act of faith to insist that the larger framework is there.

This kind of theological inquiry has been going on at CTI for nearly half a century now, and it has given direction to the research and careers of many of the Center’s members. CTI has enabled conversations that often do not happen in the siloed departmental environments of our prestigious research universities, and some who have learned to hold those conversations here have been able to take the model back to their home institutions where they teach and write.

All of us who have participated in these inquiries may cherish this history and pass it on to future generations. But there is also reason to worry that the conditions that have made it possible are at risk. CTI came into being as a response to the fragmentation of knowledge among specialists and disciplines. Today, the growing challenge is not fragmentation, but what we might call the polarization of knowledge – binding the search for meaning to political purposes. We know which ideas are right before we have examined them, because we know how they are going to be used. Using them becomes more important than examining them, because ideas only matter insofar as they are useful. Indeed, some might say that their truth depends on their use. In this new context, theology becomes dangerous precisely because it can be useful. It serves purposes of domination by those who are convinced not just that knowledge leads toward God, but that they have already arrived at the destination.

Against that background, it becomes more important than ever for the Center of Theological Inquiry to sustain the conviction that theology matters, because, in Dan Hardy’s words, “it brings theological inquiry and other forms of understanding and life directly to bear on each other.” The uniqueness of that strategy becomes apparent when we compare the inquiry at this Center to other institutions and programs in our neighborhood, as well as around the world.

A mile or so from us here at 50 Stockton Street, there is the Institute for Advanced Study (IAS), which helped James McCord formulate the original idea for CTI. As that might suggest, you will find discussions of religion at IAS that could equally well fit in here at CTI. But the Institute for Advanced Study is particularly the home for theoretical investigations that are not easily polarized, because they deploy scientific methods in ways that most of us do not quite fully understand. Closer to CTI in terms of physical distance, there is the Witherspoon Institute, just a block or so away here on Stockton. The Witherspoon Institute tries, with real integrity, to link important political ideas to conservative political practice in the area of religious freedom. CTI sits somewhere between them. In our programs, we resist both theoretical abstraction and political engagement. We do not resist because pure theory or informed advocacy are wrong. Many members of CTI engage in both those things in other settings. But here, we seek emergent meanings and interdisciplinary coherences that arise in discussions that encompass real differences in goals and methods. If there is a middle way between theory and advocacy, between objectivity and commitment, and if that middle way exists on the map of the universe and not just on the map of Princeton, showing the world how that discussion can develop will be one way to demonstrate the coherence of theology.

Robin W. Lovin is Cary M. Maguire Professor of Ethics Emeritus at Southern Methodist University.

Read Daniel Hardy's Essay Here

by Frederick Simmons

Daniel Hardy directed the Center of Theological Inquiry (CTI) from 1990 to 1995. In “The Logic of Interdisciplinary Studies and the Coherence of Theology: A Paper on the Future of the Center of Theological Inquiry,” Hardy interprets the then contemporary theological landscape and outlines his vision for the sort of theology CTI would foster under his direction. Given CTI’s founding mission “to engage in theological inquiry through interdisciplinary study,” Hardy naturally frames both his interpretation of late twentieth century theology and the sort of theology he sought to nurture at CTI in terms of their relationships to other intellectual disciplines. What emerges is an innovative alternative to the late twentieth century’s prevailing liberal/post-liberal methodological binary that many CTI members have instantiated and extended through their theological scholarship in the decades since Hardy published his treatise.

With this month’s inauguration of CTI’s new director—Tom Greggs—and in the wake of CTI’s recent inquiry on the future of theology, this online symposium reconsiders Hardy’s interpretation of the theological landscape and vision for the future of CTI some thirty years later. In addition to Hardy’s treatise and this introduction to the symposium, Greggs reflects on Hardy’s vision for theology and CTI, and how it relates to his own. Greggs is joined by University of Exeter Professor of Theological Ethics Esther Reed, Vicar of All Saints’ Hampton Revd. Dr. Julie Gittoes, and Southern Methodist University Cary M. Maguire University Professor of Ethics emeritus and former CTI Senior Fellow in Theology, Robin W. Lovin. Cumulatively, the symposium seeks to familiarize a new generation of scholars with Hardy’s understanding of and aspiration for theology, and to stimulate new insights into the challenge of pursuing theology as interdisciplinary inquiry.

Hardy delineates his understanding of and aspiration for theology by distinguishing four strategies for relating theology to other academic disciplines. In the first strategy, theologians utilize a non-theological discipline to study an aspect of theological tradition. In the second, they eschew such non-theological collaboration. The third strategy, by contrast, immerses theology in other disciplines and transmutes it into religious studies. Finally, the fourth is “theological inquiry through interdisciplinary studies” (8). This strategy clearly differs from the second, which is not interdisciplinary, and the third, which is not theological. However, Hardy maintains that theological inquiry through interdisciplinary studies also diverges from the first strategy, since use of a non-theological discipline to study an aspect of theological tradition effectively combines the second and third strategies, at once controlling the other discipline as in strategy two and subjecting the aspect of theological tradition under study to “reductive methods … [that sow] the seeds of secularization” as in strategy three (5).

According to Hardy, these first three strategies are all inadequate because they:

reinforce the impasse between religion/theology and the disciplines which have most profoundly influenced modern life. The evidence for such an impasse is that those most knowledgeable and committed to religious understanding do not know how to address the issues which—largely because of the pervasive effect of the disciplines—occur in modern life, except in the ways with which they themselves are familiar. And those most knowledgeable and committed to the disciplines which have shaped modern understanding and life do not know how to take religion and theology seriously, because their disciplines do not incorporate such issues (7).

As a result, Hardy concludes that when theology is pursued by means of the first three strategies, “faith is treated as an abstract and naïve contributor to [modern] issues, assimilated to other disciplines, or left aside as hopelessly out-of-touch” (12).

Hardy therefore commends strategy four and announces that under his leadership “the Center [will] have as its goal the uncovering of the dynamic of the work of the Triune God in the refraction of modern life and understanding as that occurs in other disciplines” (8). Yet desirable as such a strategy may seem in abstraction, how is it to be implemented without succumbing to one of the alternatives that Hardy would eschew?

Hardy offers an optical image to explain how theology as interdisciplinary inquiry may be pursued. Likening “the disciplines which form modern understanding and life” to a glass prism, Hardy maintains that theology as interdisciplinary inquiry “must allow itself to be refracted or deflected through [this disciplinary prism] and repossess itself in and from these forms” (8, 11). Such a strategy may initially seem to fracture theology into an array of discrete endeavors. However, Hardy counters that “to undertake such a process is not to dissipate the tradition of Christian faith into a series of fragments. What prevents that is the coherence of the God whose truth and purposes can be found within the vast and expanding range of modern understanding and practice” (11).

Although Hardy presents strategy four as a beleaguered theological orientation—“[buffeted both] by those anxious to preserve [theology’s] orthodoxy, for fear that it will be overwhelmed by contact with disciplines not usually related to traditional theology, and by those more concerned with these other disciplines than with fundamental theological issues”—theology as interdisciplinary inquiry enjoys august antecedents and warrants (2). Augustine, of course, characterized knowledge of the material world based on observation and reason as the “Book of Nature,” a second source of divine revelation that complements and properly informs interpretation of the “Book of Scripture” (e.g. Reply to Faustus the Manichaean 32.20; Teaching Christianity II.16.24; Literal Meaning of Genesis V.8.23). And Aquinas famously described theology as the knowledge of God and all things in relation to God (Summa Theologiae I.1.7). Hence, it is unsurprising that theology as interdisciplinary inquiry also boasts an array of distinguished contemporary exponents, many of whom affirm a theological realism that proceeds from the conviction that the order all things have by virtue of their relation to God is somewhat intelligible and potentially relevant to the knowledge of God.

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A salient example of such contemporary theology pursued as interdisciplinary inquiry is exemplified in a volume by that name published twenty years after Hardy issued his treatise, Robin Lovin and Joshua Mauldin’s Theology as Interdisciplinary Inquiry (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2017). Drawn from research conducted at CTI as part of its “New Approaches to Theological Inquiry” project, the volume exemplifies this theology, explains the Christian convictions that support it, and explores how this kind of theology may fruitfully be undertaken. The volume’s subtitle—Learning with and from the Natural and Human Sciences—indicates the collaborative sensibility and receptivity constitutive of the theological method it commends. Yet distinctive and indeed ambitious as such a theological strategy proves, Hardy thought it promised still more. According to Hardy, the intellectual renaissance afforded by theology as interdisciplinary inquiry is not only poised to reinvigorate Christian thought and thereby Christian life and community. It stands to inform and reinvigorate the non-theological disciplines as well. As Hardy envisioned it, theology as interdisciplinary inquiry “recover[s] the contribution of faith intelligently conceived to … the forces most influential for modern understanding and life” (1). At a time when the faiths that inform many of these forces are scarcely recognized—let alone intelligently conceived—Christianity and modernity alike have reason to appreciate and cultivate such theology.

Read Daniel Hardy's Essay Here

Workshop convener Rebecca Dorsey introduces the panel, which begins with CTI Associate Director Joshua Mauldin in conversation with CTI Director Tom Greggs about the workshop and its contribution to the broader From Despair to Hope project. Mauldin then considers computational theology and its relationships to digital theology and the digital humanities generally with Clifford Anderson, former Director of Digital Research at CTI and current Director of the Yale Divinity School Library.

Next, Gretchen Huizinga discusses hosting the Microsoft Research Podcast from 2017 to 2025, in which she spoke with scores of scientists and industry leaders concerning artificial intelligence, ethics, and faith. Mauldin then interviews Bishop William Willimon (Duke Divinity School) about the ecclesiological implications of AI and the prospects for building spiritual capital in ways that may forge paths from despair to hope.

The panel concludes with Greggs’s reflections on how CTI’s current AI and Technology inquiry and overall From Despair to Hope project are advancing the Center’s founding mission to catalyze a theological renaissance in church, university, culture, and society.

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Jennings’s principal claim is that modern Christian doctrines of creation have been fundamentally misdirected. Rather than attending to lived existence, they have been preoccupied with questions of origins—how the world began and how God relates to those beginnings. While not dismissing such questions, Jennings argues that this focus has distracted the doctrine from its proper subject: life “on the ground.” A sound doctrine of creation, he contends, should address how human beings inhabit the world, relate to other creatures, and participate in the ongoing work of building shared life under God.

This reorientation prioritizes practice over abstraction and foregrounds that creation is not simply a past event but an ongoing, participatory reality. Jennings observes that this shift aligns with his understanding of human beings as called to an “artisanal” mode of existence that involves building, weaving, and cultivating forms of life in communion with other creatures. Jennings evocatively describes this theological anthropology as “being with God in the dirt,” conveying at once the materiality of human existence and the significance of God’s uniting the divine life with God’s creation through the incarnation.

Jennings identifies the modern condition of “displacement” as a primary obstacle to recovering a sound doctrine of creation. Describing contemporary people as “geographically adrift,” Jennings maintains that contemporary ethics reduces morality to individual volition and obscures the values, responsibilities, and virtues that arise from relationships with land, community, and nonhuman life. The result is a disembodied moral vision that “lives in no place.” In a kindred vein, Jennings draws on Latin American decolonial theory to critique the epistemological posture he terms “zero-point thinking,” a mode of thought that conceives of knowledge as originating from a neutral, universal standpoint and thereby obscures its contextuality. Jenkins counters that Christian theology should not begin with assertion but listening and learning from others, especially those whose lives are deeply rooted in particular places. He provocatively suggests that even the incarnation models this posture since in Jesus, God comes not as a teacher imposing knowledge but as a learner formed within a specific community and environment.

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Jennings’ reoriented doctrine of creation also provides the context for his engagement with anthropologist Tim Ingold’s distinction between “transport” and “wayfaring.” Modern life, structured by efficiency and mobility, treats movement as the mere transfer of bodies between destinations. Wayfaring, by contrast, emphasizes attentive movement within and through place. Jennings uses this framework to criticize contemporary ecclesiology. Many churches, he argues, function as “destination sites”—disconnected from their surrounding environments—rather than as “knots” where the lived trajectories of people intersect. This disconnection contributes to the current crisis of church identity, especially as congregations grapple with declining membership and the maintenance of underused buildings.

Relatedly, Jennings maintains that modern property relations distort Christian understandings of creation by encouraging a view of the world as inert and possessable rather than as belonging to God—not as property but as an extension of divine life. According to Jennings, the logic of ownership not only occludes creation’s animate and relational character; it facilitates creation’s exploitation. As an alternative, he highlights the practice of sharing illustrated in the story of Zacchaeus as a means of “crumbling” ownership structures from within. Jennings extends his critique of property to the concept of stewardship, which he regards as entangled with notions of ownership, and commends in its stead a Christian environmental ethic of care based on reciprocity. Given a doctrine of creation wherein human beings participate in a web of mutual giving and receiving, Jennings contends that environmental ethics should replace pretensions of management and control with relationality.

Finally, Jennings describes his doctrine of creation’s implications for theological anthropology. By reconnecting bodily existence with the materiality of land, Jennings’s notion of “bone and dirt” challenges the dualisms that separate human identity from ecological context. Furthermore, the incarnation, in which God assumes “dirt flesh,” affirms the enduring significance of material existence. For Jennings, this has profound implications: if God is eternally bound to the material world, then creation cannot be treated as disposable or exploitable.

Cumulatively, Jennings’ radical reimagining of the doctrine of creation supplants longstanding assumptions about knowledge, ownership, and human identity with an ecological, communal, and incarnational theology that is rooted in place, shaped by practices of listening and learning, and oriented toward the cultivation of shared, flourishing life.

Willie James Jennings is Andrew W. Mellon Professor of Systematic Theology and Africana Studies at Yale Divinity School.

Gifts of grace are added to those of nature in such a way that they do not destroy the latter, but rather perfect them; wherefore also the light of faith, which is gratuitously infused into our minds, does not destroy the natural light of cognition, which is in us by nature. For although the natural light of the human mind is insufficient to reveal those truths revealed by faith, yet it is impossible that those things which God has manifested to us by faith should be contrary to those which are evident to us by natural knowledge. In this case one would necessarily be false: and since both kinds of truth are from God, God would be the author of error, a thing which is impossible.

Thomas Aquinas, Commentary on the De Trinitate of Boethius

My second suggestion—from Karl Barth—was more provocative: not because I have antipathy towards the great Swiss theologian (not at all), but because Barth’s reputation so much rests on raising Christ—and revelation, and the content of the Christian faith—above every other concern and above every other source of knowledge. If we know anything about God, Barth was so insistent in saying, that is not because we reasoned it out, or joined the dots in nature, but because God has spoken to us. Here he is in Dogmatics in Outline:

God is always the One who has made Himself known to man in His own revelation, and not the one man thinks out for himself and describes as God…. The world with its sorrow and its happiness will always be a dark mirror to us, about which we may have optimistic or pessimistic thoughts; but it gives us no information about God as the Creator…. When God has been known and then known again in the world, so that the result was joyful praise of God in creation, that is because He is to be sought and found by us in Jesus Christ. By becoming man in Jesus Christ, the fact has also become plain and credible that God is the Creator of the world. We have no alternative source of revelation.

Karl Barth, Dogmatics in Outline

That is also Barth’s message in the early Commentary on Romans, and it runs like a thread through the Church Dogmatics. It’s the Barth I know, and have taught. Imagine my surprise, then, when I found him, towards the end of his life, going out of his way to commend attention to other disciplines, stressing that they too bear witness to God.

In Church Dogmatics volume IV/3, part 1, Barth offers a superlative discussion of God’s speech “beyond the walls of the church.” Asking “whether there really are other words which… are true in relation to the one Word of God,” he gives a marvellously provocative answer, almost mischievously provocative: of course there is revelation beyond “the one Word of God,” since God speaks in the Bible and the utterance of the Church. Love the Bible, and love the Church, Barth will say, but don’t forget that they are not God’s word like Christ is God’s word. Christ, and Christ alone, is the true Word of God. In relation to that, even the Bible is strictly secondary, and valuable precisely because it rises to offering “parables” about that Word; even the Church is strictly secondary, even when speaking with the fullness of her authority.

That’s not quite an answer to our question—about attention and discussion with other disciplines—but it opens the way for an answer. Even to have the Bible before us, even to think as members of the Church, is already to be triangulating the truth of God in Christ. The scriptures and the Church are already an echo—a faithful echo, but not the Word itself—and we can expect to find further echoes of that Word, out in the world: echoes of the Word by whom all things were made, reflections of the light who enlightens everyone who comes into the world.

That is Barth’s prelude to a discussion of what we might call interdisciplinarity. He recognizes that this is a complicated question—“more complicated” than thinking about the Bible or the Church. We must acknowledge, and assess, the other “true words which are not spoken in the Bible or the Church, but which have to be regarded as true in relation to the one Word of God, and therefore heard like this Word, and together with it.”

Barth’s position is resolute: the Church “not only may but must accept the fact that there are such words and that it must hear them too.” Ignoring them would be a kind of turning one’s back on the Word. Barth gets there from several different angles. One looks at what we find in the Bible, which often “introduces witnesses to the truth… from outside the community of the elect and called.” (Aquinas makes the same point in the text I mentioned above, listing Pauline use of pagan sources in Titus 1.12, 1 Cor. 15.33, and Acts 17.28). Another route involves the doctrine of salvation, asking whether God would remain silent in a world he has so loved, and reconciled in Christ. The doctrine of creation is also important for Barth. The Church’s task is to work out how to live well in and among the ways in which God the creator speaks in all places and situations.

Having said that, Barth then scoops up all that he has allowed by way of open-hearted generosity, and brings it back into relation to Christ, and indeed into subjection to Christ. The Church cannot but live among all those other ways in which God speaks; on the other hand, it cannot live “by them”: it lives by Christ, as communicated by scripture and the Church.

For Barth, the key to living in this two-sided situation is the relationship between the abiding and the temporary, between the axis and that which turns around it. What we find outside the scripture and Church can aid us, even “illumine, accentuate or explain the biblical witness in a particular time and situation.” It is always of its place and situation, however, and therefore lacks any “final validity,” in contrast to the voice of the Bible in the Church.

As we would expect, Barth’s encouragement for Christians to be open to all learning, and whatever knowledge and wisdom can be found in any form of life, is a very theological encouragement. It keeps Christ at its heart. To him alone will Barth accord allegiance and enduring permanence. That, however, makes it no less an exhortation to open-hearted, open-minded interdisciplinary conversations. They do not supplant “the faith that was once for all entrusted to the saints” (Jude 1.3), but they are useful, even necessary, for living in our time and place as those who have inherited that faith, and guard it, and live by it.

Barth’s discussion is called “The Light of Life.” It is found in Church Dogmatics: The Doctrine of Reconciliation (IV/3, Part 1), trans. Geoffrey W. Bromiley (London: T&T Clarke, 2007), pp. 38–165.

Andrew Davison is Regius Professor of Divinity at the University of Oxford. For 2022-2024 he was Distinguished Visiting Fellow in Science and Theology at the Center of Theological Inquiry.

Jackson, a Deputy Editorial Director at the New York Times, begins the conversation by recounting the origins of her newsletter Believing. Explaining that she named the newsletter with a present participle to emphasize that belief is a continuous, often contested process rather than a static status or state, Jackson notes that while traditional religious affiliation has declined in the United States, spiritual curiosity remains remarkably robust in the country. As one metric of this curiosity, Jackson references a recent Pew study that found 92% of American believe in some form of divinity, spirits, or afterlife.

A significant portion of the conversation concerns Jackson’s reporting on “chatbot chaplaincy.” She describes how early AI experiments like chatwithgod.ai or Twitch’s “AI Jesus” allowed users to interact with a digital simulacrum of the divine. Jackson contends that people are drawn to these bots because they mimic traditional divine attributes such as omniscience (they possess seemingly infinite information), omnipresence (unlike human clergy, a chatbot is indefatigable and always available), and omni-benevolence (they are designed to be affirming and compassionate, and hence can function as a supportive interlocutor). While most chatbot users presumably recognize they are not interacting with a divine being, these bots’ popularity suggests that many find discussing spiritual matters with an AI worthwhile all the same.

Just as spiritual convictions remain widespread in the United States despite declines in traditional religious affiliation, Jackson observes that although some 40 million Americans have left their houses of worship since 1990, this “Great De-churching” seems to have paused around 2020. Jackson conjectures that this may be due to an increasingly pervasive despair attributable to several factors, of which she enumerates three. First, owing to the Covid-19 pandemic and increased digitization, many people have found themselves profoundly isolated, which has prompted some of them to seek religious community. Second, significant swathes of those who previously identified as “nones” have become anxious about the prospects of the American project and accordingly are exploring alternative self-understandings. Third, this isolation and anxiety have foregrounded the relevance of perennial questions about human meaning and purpose that theology has long addressed.

Jackson concludes the conversation by calling for a reinvigoration of public theology. Suggesting that theologians too often relegated themselves to addressing academic or religious cloisters during the Great De-churching, Jackson contends that burgeoning secular interest in spiritual questions and the new options afforded by AI offer an opportunity for and impose a responsibility upon theologians to venture courageously beyond their colleagues and co-religionists to make their traditions’ wisdom available to the growing sectors of society that are seeking deeper insight into the human experience.

Lauren Jackson is an editor of The Morning and the host of Believing for the New York Times.

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“Who is Jesus Christ for us today?” This was the question Dietrich Bonhoeffer posed in the dark days of the Second World War. The collective self-reference, “for us,” and the immediate temporal horizon, “today,” expressed his conviction that the question of Christ’s identity is no speculative puzzle for the theoretically curious. It is a question of utmost existential and practical import, whose answer is given, not in a propositional belief or verbal declaration, but in a life led. The “christological question” presses for more than a statement about Christ. It calls for a personal answer to him: “Who do you say that I am?” (Mk 8:29).

Although in many respects a representative of a quite different tradition than Bonhoeffer’s high German Lutheranism, Sarah Coakley, Anglican priest and former Norris-Hulse Professor of Divinity at Cambridge, wishes to renew this basic christological approach. In The Broken Body: Israel, Christ and Fragmentation, a collection of working papers that accompany and anticipate her multi-volume project in systematic theology, she stresses the eminently self-involving character of any christological inquiry adequate to its subject-matter. In no way eschewing traditional metaphysical concerns about natures, person, and hypostatic union, she invites her readers to locate these technical considerations within a more fundamental spiritual encounter. As the title indicates, Coakley believes such an encounter is necessarily an ascetic one, simultaneously renunciative and transformative, in which “initial human presumptions or attitudes have to be broken in order for any proper response to emerge to these core riddles of Christian faith in relating to Jesus Christ” (xv).

The book does not attempt a full-scale Christology. It is rather, she insists, a “prolegomena to any future Christology” (a playful though revealingly ambitious nod to Immanuel Kant’s philosophical project). The chapters conduct “preliminary explorations” meant to identify methodological and substantive desiderata for further theological reflection. For those who have read the first installment of her systematic theology, God, Sexuality, and the Self: An Essay ‘On the Trinity,’ the present volume provides an advance glimpse into the planned fourth and final volume on Christology, which promises to be the “climax” of the work (xvi, n.1).

The Broken Body exhibits many of the traits we have come to associate with Coakley’s work and which are responsible for her reputation as one of the most exciting and distinctive voices in contemporary theology: attentive reading of the classical era of patristic theology, with a special focus on the Greek Fathers; an uncommon combination of analytic philosophical concerns with themes from various postmodern, feminist, and post-Freudian psycho-analytic approaches; a grounding in questions of spiritual practice and asceticism, especially prayer; a championing of the apophatic and mystical traditions of Christian thought; and a bracing readiness to face head on some of the thorniest issues in modern culture and intellectual life, especially gender and sexuality. What is new in this volume, however, is the serious and sustained engagement with the Jewish intellectual tradition.

The second half of the twentieth century was marked by a deep dissatisfaction, often repulsion, among many Christian theologians and believers with traditional ways of conceiving Christianity’s relationship to Judaism. Though by no means unanimous, there was a widespread sense in the trans-Atlantic world that conventional supersessionist models of the church as the replacement of Israel were profoundly out of step with the New Testament and provenly disastrous in their ethical and political ramifications. Discontent, however, has been slow to generate resolution, and so the task of rethinking the relationship between Christianity and Judaism remains an outstanding one. Coakley situates her own efforts in relationship to a prior generation of post-liberal theologians who took up this question in earnest (Robert Jenson, Kendall Soulen, Peter Ochs—and we might add John H. Yoder and Stanley Hauerwas), though we can also see her as representative of a recent wave of contemporary theologians who, across ecclesial divisions, have centered the rethinking of Christian-Jewish relations (Ephraim Radner, Ellen Charry, Katherine Sonderegger, Matthew Levering, Paul Griffiths, and Karen Kilby, among others). What all these figures share is a conviction that the trinitarian and christological commitments of credal orthodoxy are less an obstacle than a resource to the present task. Coakley’s distinctive contribution lies in her thought that a pneumatologically-driven, incorporative understanding of the trinity, in which the Spirit names “a reflexivity-in-God which precisely enables the ecstatic participation in God of the elect,” is the key to conceiving the relationship between Jewish and Christian traditions. The model of the trinity developed in God, Sexuality, and the Self—derived from Romans 8—is here applied to the subject of Romans 9-11, the eschatological future of the church and Israel. According to Coakley, “the Spirit is the wedge, the guarantor, of the ‘apophatic’ openness of the Christ event to a yet-unknown fulfilment” (98). She argues that the notion of reflexivity internal to God’s life is not a Christian discovery, but something already contained in the Jewish tradition concerning temple worship, which suggests a possible convergence.

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Whatever the merits of this particular proposal, it illustrates a defining feature of Coakley’s approach, showing the tight weave of apophaticism, Christology, and pneumatology. Genuine encounter with the risen Christ, she claims, requires “a breaking open of apophatic consciousness” (xxv). Divine revelation, the knowledge of Christ as God incarnate, entails a “paradoxical combination of revelatory brightness and enduring dark,” in which “these are not opposites, but inexorably twinned and entwined in Christ’s manifestation of his person” (xxxviii-xxxix). Apophatic consciousness, which is the necessary condition of authentic knowledge and response to Christ, is itself a work of the Holy Spirit. A person must undergo a “profound epistemic transformation,” an “interruptive, undoing of epistemic blockage,” in order to “truly ‘see’ ‘Jesus,’ and not merely my own face at the bottom of the well” (17). Wrought by the Spirit, Coakley nevertheless insists that this process takes place through fleshly mediation and bodily practice. The necessary transformation is not merely epistemic but affective, purifying human desire, and so it works in the medium of bodies—especially, she says, following the Cappadocians, through embodied acts of mercy. Seeing Christ, knowing him in his divine-and-human identity, engages the whole person and, indeed, the whole of one’s life. It is not a settled cognitive state, reached once and for all in a moment of propositional assent, but an ongoing movement, a way that one traverses as the Spirit incorporates one’s life ever more fully into Christ’s body.

I have only offered a sample of the themes and discussions addressed in this very learned, wide-ranging, and impassioned book. There is an important, now classic essay on the nature of the Chalcedonian Definition; a section of searching chapters on sacrifice, gift, and the eucharist; and a powerful paper on the exclusively divine possibility of forgiveness. Throughout the work, Coakley’s reflections are consistently stimulating and yet, as she warns, often unsettling—not merely because the topics addressed are controversial, but because of the sheer difficulty in grasping precisely what her proposals amount to. One finds her pointing in a certain direction, marshalling a host of important considerations and gesturing where we might go or look, but there is marked tendency to resist closure. That there is something unsatisfying in these essays is perhaps to be expected. It is, after all, a series of preliminary explorations, stages on the way to a future articulation. However, if Coakley is right, even her planned work of Christology will refuse us at least a certain satisfaction. The encounter with Christ is not a matter of tidying up one’s life, of clicking the box on one’s intellectual inquiries, but of being broken open before the dazzling darkness of the broken and raised body of God enfleshed.

John Walker is a doctoral candidate at Princeton University, writing a dissertation on Augustine and the ethics of mercy. He is a Fellow of the Templeton Pluralism Fellowship and a co-organizer of the Oxford-Princeton Seminar in Christian Ethics.

Reflecting on the volume’s reception since its release in 2019, Greggs notes a surprising “allergy” among some reviewers to his conception of the sacraments. Drawing on what he characterizes as a “high Zwinglian” tradition, Greggs maintains that although baptism and holy communion are significant symbols that should be treated with “absolute reverence,” the divine presence is found in the active act of remembrance rather than in the physical media of bread and wine. He expresses caution regarding the term “sacrament” itself, fearing it can either “aggrandize” these rituals into magical categories or lead to a vague “sacramental universe” where nothing is distinct.

Mauldin observes that Greggs expounds a “full systematic theology” through the specific prism of the church. Greggs agrees and contends that individual doctrines cannot be explored in isolation because they exist within a “nexus” of connections. He describes the systematic theologian as a “parasitic” figure who listens to biblical scholars, historians, and ethicists to rearrange the “colored beads” of the Christian tradition into a coherent pattern for the contemporary moment.

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Greggs draws on the initial chapters of the Book of Acts to contrast two aspects of ecclesiology. Acts chapter 1 focuses on the “human empirical reality” of the church—its structure, polity, and practices of human management. Acts chapter 2 focuses on the freedom and agency of God through the Holy Spirit, which propels the church outward into a diverse economic and socio-political reality. The tension between these aspects is a central motif of the conversation, and it leads Greggs to claim that belief in the church involves a “leap of faith” similar to belief in the Trinity or creation. After all, just as one might look at the world and perceive only “matter” rather than God’s “creation,” one can look at the church and see only a flawed social group rather than the Body of Christ. However, Greggs holds that the church is a sui generis community—a place where God reconciles people not just to Himself but to one another across deep differences.

In addition to attempting to synthesize these two aspects of ecclesiology, Greggs devotes Dogmatic Ecclesiology to attempting to address Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s question about what it means to be the church in a “religionless” world. Although sermons and religious music are now available anytime online, Greggs emphasizes the concrete and communal character of the church, for according to Greggs it is as an embodied reality that the church proleptically instantiates the fulfillment of God’s kingdom and so serves as a flawed signpost pointing toward a future redemptive reality that always outstrips human institutions.

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The episode begins with a live demonstration of Scriptural Reasoning using Psalm 82. Rather than seeking a definitive historical or academic meaning, Ochs and Mauldin explore how the text “hits” or “perplexes” them. They discuss the plural nature of the word Elohim—which can refer to God, divine beings, or human judges—and consider various interpretations, ranging from ancient pre-Israelite contexts to modern Christian perspectives like the Trinity. Ochs emphasizes that Scriptural Reasoning creates an “in-between space” that is neither strictly devotional within one tradition nor purely secular and academic. This allows participants to remain rooted in their own faiths while being open to transformation through the insights of others.

Ochs recounts the history of Scriptural Reasoning, which began some 30 years ago at CTI. The practice emerged from “Textual Reasoning,” a Jewish method of communal study, and was expanded through Ochs’s collaboration with David Ford and Daniel Hardy to facilitate interfaith dialogue among Christians, Jews, and Muslims. Scriptural Reasoning developed by trial and error, prioritizing “doing” the practice before theorizing about it. This “performance-first” approach is inspired by the rabbinic interpretation of Exodus, where the Israelites commit to “doing” before “understanding.”

Looking ahead, Ochs anticipates two primary opportunities for Scriptural Reasoning: sharing the “elemental practice” with more congregations and colleges globally, and deepening the academic reflection on how this communal reasoning can reshape discourse within universities and religious traditions. Ochs concludes by identifying CTI as a vital “home” for pursuing these possibilities.

The uneven traffic between biblical studies and theology continues to be mourned as a casualty of theology’s modern fragmentation. Divided into relatively autonomous and often non-conversant sub-disciplines, even scholars with a desire to transgress these boundaries often find the exchange-rate too high to be worth the trouble. The great exception, if there has been one, has been the study of Paul’s letters. In particular, the rediscovery of the New Testament’s eschatological outlook has had a dramatic effect upon theology in the twentieth century and into the present day. Even among the two dominant blocs of Pauline scholarship, the so-called salvation-historical school and the apocalyptic school, there is agreement on one point: eschatology is decisive for understanding the apostolic kerygma. Whatever else theologians have learned from their biblical studies colleagues, this stands at the top of the list. It is hardly an overstatement to say that the schema of the already and not yet has become common currency across confessional and ecclesial-academic divides. The schema is filled out in different ways, but the notion of an overlap between an old age and a new age is almost universally assumed.

In Paul and Time: Life in the Temporality of Christ, L. Ann Jervis wants to overthrow this consensus. Despite claims to the contrary, she contends the apostle did not think in terms of two overlapping ages and so did not maintain that believers co-exist simultaneously in a passing old age and an-inbreaking new age. According to Jervis, a simple fact has escaped the rival interpretations of Pauline eschatology: in the uncontested writings, “Paul does not speak of the new age” (p. 48). In those places where commentators identify references to the new age, Paul himself speaks of Christ. Jervis believes that Paul’s interpreters mistakenly subordinate Christology to eschatology and so reverse the order of Paul’s own thinking. For Jervis, Paul is first and foremost a Christological thinker, not an eschatological one.

To foreground Christology is not, however, to deny the centrality of historical and temporal categories for Paul. It is rather to place them in new light. The tendency has been to assimilate Paul to a chronological framework thought to be ubiquitous in second-temple Jewish apocalyptic texts. The strategy is reasonable but overlooks the diversity among apocalyptic conceptions of history and historical periodization. Drawing on the work of Loren Stuckenbruck, Jervis argues that we are not justified in importing into Paul a two-age framework solely on the basis of apocalyptic features in his thought. We need to ask how the Pauline texts conceptualize temporality on their own terms. Jervis’s argument is that, instead of two ages, Paul thinks in terms of “two types of time,” or “two temporalities”––what she names “life-time” and “death-time.” This is not merely another label for the two-age framework. It is an alternative, a way outside that framework. “Paul conceives of believers living not in an age but in the being of Christ” (p. 117). Christ shares with believers his own mode of temporality, which is equally God’s temporality. His time is the “now time” of unending life (Rom 8:18). Thus, union with Christ is entry into a new form of temporal existence.

The crucial contrast between Jervis’s two-times interpretation and the standard two-ages view is that she denies any possibility of overlap. There is a clean break between death-time and life-time. “There is no both/and but only either/or” (p. 133). When one enters into fellowship with Christ, one leaves death-time behind. To put this in more familiar terms—which admittedly Jervis might resist—she is attributing to Paul a more “realized” eschatology than many have claimed to find in him. She does not deny the presence of a future eschatology, but she qualifies and relocates it. She writes, “creation’s current situation is drastically different from what it will be, whereas the circumstance of the children of God is not” (p. 112). Believers are already living in life-time, wholly free from the grip of death-time. The future will bring about certain changes, but the “unveiling that believers await at Christ’s day/parousia will not, however, change their temporality” (p. 126). The central consequence, then, for Jervis, is that Paul underscores the “completeness and adequacy of Christ’s present life for believers” (p. 132). The apostle’s view of life in Christ is not concerned with a not yet. His attention, according to Jervis, is fixed on the life-giving presence of Christ for believers now.

She concedes that an attraction of the two-ages view is that it provides an accessible framework for thinking about evil and suffering. If believers exist simultaneously in the old age and the new, then the miseries and horrors of life can be attributed to the ongoing subjection to evil powers. If Jervis is right, however, Paul does not think this way. “The apostle does not source suffering in the present evil age” (p. 136). For Paul, the suffering and death of the faithful has been radically transformed. It is now “with-Christ suffering” (p. 137) and “the death of believers’ bodies is not fatal” (p. 129). Despite the air of paradox, the pains and injuries of believers exist within life-time. Influential interpretations of 1 Corinthians notwithstanding, “Paul does not think believers’ death is a problem” (p. 105).

Undoubtedly, Jervis has authored an ambitious book. In under 200 pages she attempts to overthrow a central pillar of New Testament scholarship. Even the unpersuaded will be grateful for the provocation to revisit fundamental questions deserving more careful scrutiny. I count myself among the unpersuaded but grateful. My doubts are both conceptual and exegetical. Since, as one might expect of a theologian, I have more to say about the conceptual, I will begin with the exegetical concern. There is a Pauline text that does not appear in the book’s Scripture Index that I would suggest is central to Paul’s sense of temporality: Philippians 3:10-14. Quoting the NRSV,

I want to know Christ and the power of his resurrection and the sharing of his sufferings by becoming like him in his death, if somehow I may attain the resurrection from the dead. Not that I have already obtained this or have already reached the goal; but I press on to make it my own, because Christ Jesus has made me his own. Beloved, I do not consider that I have made it my own; but this one thing I do: forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead, I press on towards the goal for the prize of the heavenly call of God in Christ Jesus.

We can note that this text was important both for Heidegger, who was struck by the emphasis on futurity, and for Augustine, who seized on the notion of an intentio toward an absolute future that stretched the soul and drove his understanding of time as distentio animi. In Jervis’s telling, the forward tilt of the Christian life is downplayed. The restless hope for a divine fulfilment that is on the horizon, still ungrasped, is out of place. Philippians 3 is only one text, but it is an important one and it is indicative of the challenge facing any reorientation of Paul away from eschatology. She is right that Paul is resolutely Christological, but that need not compete with eschatology.

Conceptually, it is unclear what advantage thinking in terms of two times has over two ages. Is the thought of two co-existing temporalities any more immediately intelligible than that of two overlapping eras? Neither of these schemes are directly supplied by Paul’s texts. They are heuristic and, therefore, to be judged by their ability to make sense of what we find in the letters. But the question is whether the notion of two co-existing times does make sense. If not, then we are in the terrain of the ignotum per ignotius, explaining the obscure by the more obscure. Jervis introduces a third category that might render the picture more plausible. Alongside death-time and life-time, she speaks of human “chronological time,” which means something like phenomenal time––time as it appears to us apart from the eyes of faith. We are invited then to imagine a shared human experience of time, chronological time, which can be modified in two different directions, either by subjection to death-time or life-time. The secret of faith, then, is the realization that the life-time is “the only real time” (p. 161).

One can stipulate a notion of temporality that allows for this. I wonder though if another category might be more useful. Since Jervis is open to a kind of Sachexegesis that permits philosophical borrowing, she might find assistance in the tradition of phenomenology which has been preoccupied with temporality and shown a remarkable interest in the Pauline corpus. The French phenomenologist Jean-Yves Lacoste speaks of “time-styles” or styles of time alongside lifestyles. He accepts the basic Husserlian account of the a priori constitution of time through the fusion of originary impression (present), retention (past), and protention (future), which would correlate with Jervis’s “chronological time,” shared by all human beings. But, according to Lacoste, the way we inhabit this basic structure of time is variable. We give a certain style to time by the way we live, by our character and dispositions, and this modifies our experience of temporality. He offers the example of the monk whose experience of time differs radically from that of the captain of industry. Perhaps life-time can be thought of as a distinct style of temporality.

Whether or not this suggestion is illuminating, one virtue of Jervis’s book is to press the reader to reflect more deeply on assumptions too easily taken for granted. Paul’s letters evidence a strange and unfamiliar experience of time’s constitution and unfolding. Jervis is right to point this out and we can hope that her provocative proposal will yield increased attention to this theme.

John Walker is a doctoral candidate at Princeton University, writing a dissertation on Augustine and the ethics of mercy. He is a Fellow of the Templeton Pluralism Fellowship and a co-organizer of the Oxford-Princeton Seminar in Christian Ethics.

The eminent church historian Jaroslav Pelikan once noted that when we pray we do not address our prayers “to whom it may concern.” We pray with some divine name in mind, even if that name is simply “God.” But how can we as creatures claim the ability to name the divine, which surpasses all our understanding? Is it even possible to name the divine, and if so, how do we do so rightly?

Such questions are central to Janet Soskice’s book, Naming God: Addressing the Divine in Philosophy, Theology and Scripture, published by Cambridge University Press in 2023. The book recovers the venerable tradition of the “divine names,” long central to Jewish, Christian, and Islamic thought, but in the modern period eclipsed by a focus on divine “attributes.” If the modern theological question is something like “does God exist?”, an earlier tradition of thought focused on the question, “how can we rightly name God?,” in prayer, supplication, and praise. Naming God directs our attention to this question, exploring its relevance for contemporary thought and practice.

For the forms of modern thought that arose in the wake of Descartes, one must begin by coming to an understanding of the basic nature of God, defined by divine attributes. The basic idea of what or who a “god” is must be foundational, according to this view, and grounded in reason, without relying on revelation. This leads to a number of problems in modern theology, as Soskice suggests, including that the question of how to name God is endlessly postponed, if not forgotten entirely. Reading this book, and trying to understand the issues at stake, involves temporarily bracketing questions of epistemology and turning instead to questions of meaning and semantics. As Soskice pithily puts it, while discussing Gregory of Nyssa’s Life of Moses: “God, it seems, does not want epistemologists, but followers.” (132)

Highlighting the central problem, Gregory of Nyssa writes, “No name would have a meaning that would reach Him Whom we seek. For how can He be discovered by a name when He is beyond all names?” (134) There is a tension here between two claims that the tradition wants to uphold: (1) God is ineffable and unknowable by creatures and therefore in some sense also unnameable; yet, (2) God can be named in the sense of being “called” on by creatures, in the way we “call” on a friend, even without fully understanding the nature of that friend. God’s nameability is, moreover, a gift that God gives us, for in scriptural revelation God has even told us what to call God, paradigmatically speaking to Moses from a burning bush in Exodus 3, and telling him that God’s own name is “I am Who I am.” Even we who are incapable of adequately understanding God are given a name by which to call on the divine. Glossing the work of Gregory of Nyssa, Soskice writes, “God is not nameable by essence but is named by those who call upon him.” (122)

The subtitle of this book mentions “addressing the divine,” but another possible subtitle would have been “being addressed by the divine.” The conversation between God and Moses in Exodus 3 (a central text for the tradition of the divine names) begins not with Moses calling out to God but with God calling out to him, “Moses, Moses,” to which Moses responds “Here I am.” Central to Soskice’s thesis is that we are able to name God, and speak to God at all, only because God has first spoken to us. Indeed, given the implications of creatio ex nihilo, another idea central to this book, our very ability to exist at all is a participation in the divine reality. We name God not as an attempt to fully define the divine essence, which would be a futile endeavor; rather, we name God because we are in relation to God as God’s creatures. We speak to God because God first speaks to us.

While most of the book’s eight chapters present a feast of learning in the long tradition of the divine names, Chapter 5 serves as a kind of philosophical way station, where we examine what it means in general to use names in our forms of speech, whether in addressing other human beings or addressing the divine. Titled “Is ‘God’ the name of God?”, Chapter 5 provides many insights that will stick with me. One interesting point Soskice makes, for example, has to do with the question of why we typically refer to God as “God,” using a generic noun, capitalized, rather than the Tetragrammaton, the name God gives for Godself, speaking to Moses from the burning bush. That name came to be considered unutterable in the Jewish tradition, but even beyond that, Soskice notes how in many intimate relationships it is common that we do not in fact use someone’s proper name, but rather something closer, having to do with their relationship to us. Most commonly we might think of the “mama” and “papa” children use for their parents, but there are many other names we use for those we love. Indeed, in many instances, to use a proper name would be oddly cold and distant. Soskice suggests that the name “God” functions in this way, as a title befitting a relationship and thus highlighting God’s closeness to us. Think here of the use of “my Lord” or “our God” in prayer and communal worship.

More central to the overall thesis of the book is the suggestion that we just don’t need a very adequate understanding of a person (or even an inanimate object) in order to use a name correctly. Consider the three-year-old child who addresses a prayer to God. The child might not possess an adequate understanding of God (which of us does?), but would we want to deny that God accepts the prayer of the three-year-old as rightly addressed to God? Surely we would want to say that just as a small child can say “mama” and “papa” rightly without fully understanding the meaning of motherhood and fatherhood, the child can likewise address God. And those of us who are adults can do so as well, and for the same reasons.

Never attempting to hide her own Christian convictions, Soskice nonetheless ventures across the Christian, Jewish, and Islamic traditions, noting in passing how various concepts and names are deployed across the Abrahamic faiths, and usually noting their similarities and their shared usage. This is done not merely out of a multicultural concern but also because the traditions themselves can only be understood in light of their shared histories. Thomas Aquinas, for example, deepened his understanding of creatio ex nihilo through his study of the medieval Jewish philosopher Maimonides. Another important thinker featured here is Philo, a Hellenistic Jewish philosopher whose thought had a profound impact on later Christian thought, not least on the topic of naming God. Also discussed is the eleventh century Muslim scholar Al-Ghazali and his book, The Ninety-Nine Beautiful Names of God. It is true, of course, that there are also divergences and disagreements among these traditions as to how God is properly named, but Soskice does not dwell on these.

Naming God is a wonderful tour through the tradition of the divine names alongside a philosophical exploration of what it means to use names in our everyday speech. The book is an important contribution to scholarship, with learned analyses of thinkers such as Philo, Franz Rosenzweig, Gregory of Nyssa, Augustine, and Thomas Aquinas. But the book also has practical impact, not least in demonstrating that we can address God by name, even when our understanding of the divine essence falls short, as it always will.

Reading this book reminded me of another book published several years ago, titled When God Talks Back. Using ethnographic methods with exceptional rigor and sensitivity, the book was framed by the unspoken assumption that while praying to God might be acceptable enough in polite society, only a rather strange group occupying the religious fringe would go so far as to believe that God actually speaks back to them. In reality, of course, the idea that God has spoken—and does speak—to God’s creatures is no theological outlier. As Soskice shows so well, the idea that God speaks has been foundational to the Jewish, Christian, and Islamic traditions from the beginning. Indeed, it would make just as much sense to publish a book titled, When Humans Talk Back. For, well before Moses spoke to God, God spoke to Moses, calling him out by name.

Although confined to the dogmatic contest over the Procession of the Holy Spirit within the Blessed Trinity, Bulgakov gives voice to a general dis-ease about Christian theology as a whole. Is it in truth a species of logomachy, a war of words, that in the end bears no fruit, and worse, bears no “life-significance?” Although I too have spent my life in theology, and share Mr. Jakim’s unembarrassed admiration for the work of Sergei Bulgakov, I cannot shake the impression that Bulgakov has spoken truthful words about our common discipline, words I must hear. Who has not read, or heard in synod, in lecture hall and in consistory, an exchange over doctrinal matters that in the end appears immensely learned and utterly futile? And much worse, have we not watched in grief, or even stolen pleasure, as lofty theological dispute has in truth divided and destroyed, not edified or healed? I imagine the readers of this essay will easily conjure up sad memories of just this kind.

And just so the question, Why Theology Matters?, is hardly an idle one. Jesus Christ is the Way, the Truth, and the Life; our words about Him, the Living Word, must be true —and they must also live. Theology must matter: this is a central preoccupation Bulgakov shared with other European intellectuals in the Inter-War Years. One thinks here of Franz Rosenzweig, of his collaborator in the great work of Bible translation, Martin Buber, of Erich Przywara, of Hannah Arendt and Edith Stein, of Camus and Kafka and Mother Skobtsova, and of Karl Barth. These are philosophical thinkers for whom the intellectual questions of their era —central Europe in the midst of collapse —meant life and death. Christian theology should matter in just this way. For in it we properly take up the elemental question of all life —the Krisis, Barth called this —our existence before the One Holy God. There is no “unengaged” theology, for its Subject Matter is the Origin and the Judge of all creation, God the Pantocrator. We may imagine, of course, that Christian theology is merely a discipline, an intellectual method and study program that fits, perhaps uneasily, within the university system of the arts and sciences. Most certainly, theology is demanding! The thought of God requires our highest intellect; indeed it is for this Thought that our minds were created. But this field of study, the scientia Dei, the science of God, cannot avoid the iron testing of its discipline, the encounter with the Living God. In that Fire, all metal is tested. When we read theology that has crossed the true River of Fire, we recognize it immediately. It is a summons. Such theology is written in every Church and tradition; it belongs to no single school or allegiance. It is rigorous, demanding, learned; yes. But it is the intellect at prayer, the whole of a life, born of God and borne by Him. That theology matters; nothing matters more.

[1] The Comforter, trans B Jakim. Wm Eerdmans Publisher, [originally published, 1936], pp 129, 130, 131.

[2] ibid, p vii.

Our faith, in the persons of Moses and Jesus, tells us that we are to love the Lord our God with all our heart, soul, mind and strength, with the whole of our being, in other words. Love is to be at the center of it all. We are to trust as deepest knowledge kinds of experience that objectivity disallows. If God honors the whole human person as worthy to participate in sacred love by every means given to us, then theology should do the same.

We have talked about “dehumanization” for generations now, and given ourselves many occasions to ponder the word. Now many of us fear that the bizarre inventiveness of our period will indeed accomplish a virtually categorical dehumanization by means of artificial intelligence. All-transforming innovations most of us dread are suddenly presented and accepted as inevitable. Any self-respecting baby would show more outrage at the theft of a gumdrop than we show at being told that we are about to be deprived of our essential nature. We have been prepared for this by a careless undervaluing of the human person, for which religion and theology bear an important responsibility. If we grant their limited influence, we must also acknowledge that they are responsible for that as well.

As always, the mystery is, inescapably, human nature. Not the side of it that might choose to obey a commandment or defy it—defiance is always an option—but the side of it that prefers to have no freedom. The creature to whom God, or nature, has given moral agency is often eager to deny, passively but decisively, that she has any choice at all. This is a dehumanization we perform on ourselves. From the Creation to the Incarnation and Resurrection, through the whole of the Bible we are told that what we do matters, not because we are sinful but because we are precious. Talk of heaven and hell distracts from the fact that God wants us to be human, to do justice and love mercy, to act on those exquisite competences that make us worthy to live among our neighbors.

Do we have any nature other than the one God knows in us? “Even before a word is on my tongue, lo, Oh Lord, thou knowest it altogether.” Why would God have made us so transparent to Himself that the moments of our lives are hardly more ours than His? Because He finds joy in us, because we are wonderful. God’s absolute proximity is frightening to consider, but to evade the fact of it, as we always do, is to err profoundly in our understanding of the nature of creation, of Being itself, and to undervalue ourselves and humankind in ways and degrees that make us insensible and brutal. Theology should remind us of what we are.

Beautiful old theology still has the atmospheres of polemic about it. It is still shaped by the loci communes of past controversy. Now, for our purposes, no one polices the boundaries of what can be thought or believed, and insofar as theology continues to be of other than historical interest, it can be looked at from a certain distance with the thought of a freer exploration of it, Scripture being the great resource as well as the one constraint.

David was the master of a poetry that is so intensely inward that it is universal. In Psalm 22, which Emily Dickinson called “that scalding one, Sabbachthani,” a figure undergoing a terrible death, an execution, expresses faith, then amazed fear and helplessness, then exultation and praise at a rescue of some kind and vindication of the faithfulness of God even to him “who cannot keep himself alive.” Any death is a fearful thing, overpowering and often humiliating. The poem evokes its horrors, then offers an assurance that joys succeed them and that they will be felt even by “people yet unborn.” The psalm has the shape of prophecy. The suffering figure descends to the darkest extreme of human rejection and loneliness, until he is “no man.” Then his rescue, which is God’s deliverance of him, becomes in effect the deliverance of “generations.” Dickinson was like many interpreters in reading the cry from the cross as despairing, but to any contemporary of Jesus who knew the psalm it would be an assurance that the terrible death was not an ending. Any pious Jew, in extremis, might have recited this psalm, expressing his faith that God will not forsake him. So it is not Christian supersession to read the psalm in this way. The individual becomes universal, the compassion of the voice’s identification with this most despised and despairing man opens—beautifully and inexplicably—into a gracious vision that embraces the humanity that had shown him appalling cruelty.

So, a thing I never say, Dickinson was wrong, and so is the whole tradition that has shied away from this psalm. What meaning is there for our conception of humankind, of the importance of the individual human being? The humanism of the Bible is, I think, a beautiful discovery not yet fully made, which would be a balm to the troubled modern soul.

This essay was written by Marilynne Robinson for the opening of CTI’s new building on June 1, 2024.

In this inaugural episode of CTI’s new podcast, CTI Director Tom Greggs speaks with host Joshua Mauldin on the contemporary task of theology in an era fraught with anxiety, fragmentation, and diffidence. He presents this task as addressing a prevailing sense of despair prompted by various political, cultural, environmental, and spiritual conditions, and articulating and cultivating hope despite them. Rather than do this by summoning a simple or specious optimism, Greggs contends that theology should offer intellectually rigorous and spiritually sound resources that are capable of sustaining individuals and communities amidst rapid change, polarization, and intensifying peril.

Greggs connects his sense of this theological vocation with the mission of the Center of Theological Inquiry (CTI). He characterizes CTI as a unique, interdisciplinary research institute where theologians collaborate with scholars from other fields to confront exigent global challenges. According to Greggs, CTI’s aim extends beyond even scholarship at the highest level to embrace the generation of “spiritual capital”—forms of wisdom, imagination, and moral vision that can shape public life and help societies move from despair toward hope.

To achieve this ambitious aim, Greggs maintains that theology must resist both isolation within confessional enclaves and reduction to a purely descriptive study of religion. Instead, it should proceed with confidence as an intellectually robust, constructive endeavor that engages the deepest questions about reality, meaning, and the common good. Such theology is inherently interdisciplinary—actively learning from the natural sciences, politics, economics, and technology while also offering these fields valuable insights in turn. So understood, theology proves an integrative, cooperative, and socially relevant discipline that is poised to make vital contributions to redressing the intellectual and moral challenges of our times.

Greggs also recounts his own educational and professional path, noting how personal faith, intellectual curiosity, and social context shaped his sense of vocation. These autobiographical reflections corroborate his conviction that theology is not an abstruse or sheerly theoretical enterprise, but a practice grounded in communal life and ordered to personal and social transformation.

Greggs concludes the episode by outlining CTI’s principal current research project. Entitled “From Despair to Hope,” this project convenes successive cohorts of scholars to examine how theology may constructively respond to a pervading sense of cultural despair provoked by technology, politics, education, medicine, and economics. Greggs regards the project as a harbinger of what theology may be at its most promising: collaborative, interdisciplinary, publicly engaged, and devoted to nurturing hope in a troubled world.

To hope is to recognize (usually with lament) the condition in which we find ourselves while at the same time to have expectation and desire for something better ahead of us. This is an age in which we need hope.

At least in the Western World, the new millennium came with such anticipation. The zeitgeist was one of “delirious optimism.”^[i] The Cold War had ended. Apartheid had ceased. The Internet was in its nascence and offered such possibility. Democracy and capitalism seemed to be the global consensus. Education levels were rising globally. Universities were opening up to people (like me) who could never have anticipated college education just a couple of decades before. Quality of life was on a clear upward trajectory which seemed never ending. Such was the newly perceived global norm that Francis Fukuyama could declare The End of History and the Last Man, transforming political science and historical study in that book. The (perhaps naïve) sense was that the world had arrived at a shared late capitalist, democratic, global reality. Hope abounded.^[ii]

But the reality has been otherwise. The new millennium itself has not fulfilled these anticipations. Arguably, the opposite has been true. Indicatively: 9/11 presented the world with a new divisive, global reality; the financial crash of 2008 has led to a decline in living standards from one generation to the next in several advanced economies; the dashed hopes of the Arab Spring across North Africa has seen a changed context in the Muslim world; the Afghan war ended in a return of the Taliban; the global context presents more of a challenge to advanced western, capitalist democracy than has been the case since the 1930s; the COVID pandemic brought the world to a halt and showed the limits of medical advancements; globalism has given rise to a variety of protectionist nationalisms; global economies have been replaced by Glocal economies; life expectancy has not increased in several major Western countries; South Africa’s hopefulness of a rainbow nation has not been fulfilled; the internet has led to algorithmically controlled life which creates binarized divides; technology is at the point of AI surpassing human intelligence; so-called post-modern paradigms have led to fractures in culture as truth becomes a contested reality, especially around identity; the environmental crisis has captured society with a frightening apocalypticism; the internet has become a means of surveillance rather than the hoped for tool of liberation; the mainstream media has lost the trust of many people in Western Society.

The stark nature of recent changes in society is pronounced and experienced at different levels as well as in different cultural and social settings. Measuring hope or despair is, of course, complex, and measurement of these in populations is a relatively new area of inquiry. But there are multiple indicators which show a lack of hope. On the individual level, there are psychological and even biological markers which might be used to correlate self-reported accounts of hope or well-being.^[iii] Corporately, since the Millenium, there have been measurable increases in despair among particular socio-economic groups in society and among younger people.^[iv] Social scientists have shown that happiness and satisfaction often correlate with hope and are associated with it; but the distinguishing feature of hope is a belief in the capacity to improve one’s situation. This has come by many to be seen as lacking.^[v] Therefore, on a national or global level, it might be notable that a recent survey by Ipsos of major economies saw that 58% of people thought their country was in decline and 56% considered it broken; only Singapore was an exception. In the USA, only 17% of people did notthink their country was in decline. In Great Britain the number of people who believe the country to be in decline has increased from 48% in 2021 to 68% in 2023; this is a huge and rapid transformation. Of course, these measures are not quite the same as direct measurements of hope and despair, but they are an indicator that people do not believe things are getting better, and at a societal or political level are unable to improve the situation. On an interesting aside, the four most secular countries surveyed (Netherlands, Sweden, Great Britain, France) occupy four of the five top spots in terms of believing their country is in decline.^[vi] This may be connected to the fact that hopelessness expresses itself culturally as well. Ipsos’ survey also shows the lack of hope in the progress of countries is attributed by people across nations to globalism, political culture, rejection of classical political settlements, and rejection of expertise. Indeed, according to Google NGRAMS, “despair” features more highly in common parlance in all forms of literature now than at any point from the end of the 19th century.^[vii] The same is true for the term “powerless,” which is remarkable when one considers the limited franchise that existed at the end of the nineteenth century.^[viii]

This change and the societal implications associated with it has been captured in several academic discourses, perhaps most notably in the work associated with the Center of Theological Inquiry by Nobel Laureate in Economics, Angus Deaton, and Anne Case. As social scientists, they consider deaths which result from drugs, alcohol, and suicide.^[ix] Their book Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism offers detailed empirical examination of this. They show that, for example, among white non-Hispanics in the USA, mortality rates among those aged 45-54 decreased from the year 1900 to the year 2000 from c.1,350 to c.390 per 100,000 of the population.^[x] However, and surprisingly, since the new millennium, mortality rates in this category have increased. Indeed, deaths from the side-effects of alcohol or drugs or from suicide among the white non-Hispanic US population aged 45-54 rose from 31 per 100,000 in 1990 to 92 per 100,000 in 2017—an almost three-fold increase in only around a quarter of a century.^[xi]

What Deaton and Case show through detailed empirical evidence is that the cause which lies behind these ostensible causes is what they refer to as despair. They trace the locus of this to the impossibility of advancement in economic terms. But their focus is on the effect of this reality. Here, the reason for citing racial identity becomes evident. While African Americans are likely to be poorer, they are less likely to die the kinds of deaths listed above. Indeed, a steady decrease in these deaths took place from 1990 to 2015 among African Americans.^[xii] What might mark this difference? Case and Deaton point to the positivity of people in terms of whether their life is going well and will continue to improve. After centuries of slavery and then legalized racism and racial segregation, African Americans had become more positive and hopeful with a c.4% increase in this aspect of the General Social Survey between 1970 and 2020, moving in a sustained and constant direction.^[xiii] Building on the work of Case and Deaton, Carol Graham notes:

By several measures, the United States is experiencing a full-blown crisis of despair. Suicides, fatal drug overdoses, and deaths related to alcohol use are at unprecedented levels. For example, overdoses alone caused nearly 107,000 deaths in 2021, up from 52,400 in 2015. And, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, surveys of high school students across the United States indicate that the rate of mental health problems in adolescents, especially young women, has consistently risen since the surveys began in 2011, a pattern exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic. In 2021, three in five teenage girls reported feeling persistent sadness, and one in three said they had contemplated suicide. And the malaise extends more broadly. When asked in a recent Gallup poll whether they were satisfied with the way things were going in the United States, only 19% of Americans said that they were. This percentage starkly contrasts with the high of 65% in 1986.^[xiv]

Of course, satisfaction or happiness are not the same as hope, but they correlate with it. If satisfaction is the present condition in which we live, hope is the condition within the present in which we articulate our capacity to improve the level of satisfaction with which we live.

In popular culture and writing, there has been a tsunami of literature attempting to diagnose the problem, usually siding with one side or other of the “culture wars.” But despite the flood of materials on these issues in other academic and popular discourses, the situation is getting no better—dramatically worse, indeed, if the Ipsos figures for Great Britain (above) are anything to go by. This deluge of diagnosis and description is not hitting the mark: the need for some kind of meaning-making intervention is key.

Hope in Theology?

Where might we begin to identify the reasons for this failure of alternative discourses to get to the root of the problems of the multiple forms, causes, and locations of hope and despair? Those of us who are theologians must surely wish to argue that, without at least attending to the theological and spiritual dimensions of these issues, the chance to re-establish hope is always destined to some degree of failure. It is interesting to note, in these discussions, that what has not been sufficiently captured has been that all the while hope declined, so too did religious adherence in the West, especially in relation to the mainline Christian denominations. “Nones” are now the biggest category of people in the US while Western Europe is more secular still. In other words, the deficit in hope that social scientists are recording has coincided with rapid global secularization at least in the West.^[xv] This is certainly true in the USA, where deaths of despair have rapidly increased in recent decades. While secularization has already progressed for at least three quarters of a century in Western Europe and much of the Anglophone world, religious decline in the USA has only recently caught up: church or synagogue membership has fallen from 70% (a rate which had held steady since the 1980s) in 1999 to only 45% in 2023. Furthermore, psychologists have found that dispositional optimism—which is at least prima facie related to hope—is correlated with religiosity.^[xvi] Relatedly, in his follow-up to Cultural Pessimism, Oliver Bennett examined “cultures of optimism,” identifying religion as an important institution in the building and sustaining of hope.^[xvii] While causal relationships cannot be evidenced, it is at least plausible that religion is a source of hope, and that its decline concomitantly removes that source of hope from many.

So, we might wish to say that if we are to re-gain hope in a world of despair, the need for religious engagement with these matters is important—imperative even. For those of us with faith, this point might seem obvious. However, in a society which is more educated than ever before, some cheap optimism offered through an escapist focus on another world is far from satisfactory and will never capture and transform the imaginations of a culture of despair. Hope is not mindless, Ostrich-like head burying in the world while imagining another reality either in this world or in a dimension beyond it after death. Hope involves recognizing and acknowledging the circumstances in which we currently find ourselves and, in that, understanding and lamenting the fact we are not where we could be as individuals, societies, cultures, and the world. Hope is, in one sense, born of realism and dis-satisfaction combined with a sense that we have not arrived, nor perhaps will we ever fully arrive. This sense of non-arrival is important: hope transcends and is something more than the assertion of one or another current worldview. It longs for and cries for something more. Theologically, we might say that hope as a category realizes the Kingdom of God might just be at hand, close enough that it is at our fingertips; but hope simultaneously acknowledges that that Kingdom will always avoid our grasp and hold. And, as such, simply repeating the same tired mantras of thought will not work. There needs to be a genuine sense of the situation in which we find ourselves and a meaningful vision for where the world is and might be able to go to fulfil its best potential and flourish. While the same themes and issues we as humans have needed since we first came into being will inevitably offer a cantus firmus, we will need to play new melodies on these and improvise on those melodies in each context.

It is this living understanding of the thought related to faith which the best of Theology can offer. My own teacher at Oxford and later my colleague at Aberdeen, John Webster, FBA, described the most illuminating Theology as involving three things:

(1) conceptual ingenuity, resourcefulness, and suppleness, which enable a projection of Christian claims suitable to draw attention to their richness and complexity; (2) conceptual transparency, which enables a more penetrating understanding of primary modes of Christian articulation of the gospel; and (3) broad knowledge and sensitive and creative deployment of concepts inherited from the Christian theological tradition.^[xviii]

And, of course, there may be parallels in Jewish Philosophy or Islamic Law. The need for “ingenuity,” for “subtleness” and for “attention to … complexity” is of vital importance to our current contexts of despair. One cause of our hopelessness, indeed, might well be that whatever side of our binarized cultural divisions we might find ourselves on, we face the realization of the worldview we hold not being fulfilled. Instead, our own binarized worldview is greeted by an equally-fiercely-held one on the opposing side, and the confrontation between the two leads to a mode of entrenched warfare that moves little with small victories for one side or the other all the while the opposition attempts to outflank our sides. Winning hearts and minds, improving our disagreement, enabling iron to sharpen iron is hard in such a mode of war. And while battles may be won or lost, the total victory in the “war” never seems to be possible. This situation demands fresh and insightful thinking which is culturally and intellectually engaged, speaking to our complex contexts and issues. This is no different with regard to our theological thinking. Indeed, Theology might offer something of very particular importance here. Theology reminds us that hope is not a category which involves realization of the concrete form of our present presuppositions. The transformatory work of God in creation is always on the way to its completion, beyond our imaginings and cannot be confused with any one worldview or another. We might say, indeed, that in our social, cultural, and political divides what we have done is replace hope for a better world with the certainty that whichever version of the current world we assent to is the perfect realization in the here and now of God’s purposes: we confuse liberalism or conservativism all too often with the Kingdom of God rather than understanding them both to be provisional understandings we have in which we are to hope for a better tomorrow. As such it is all too easy to despair that others are not subjugated to our kingdom in which our ideology takes the place of God’s complex ways with the world. This identification of the confusion of any political or ecclesial settlement with God’s redemption is an easy win for Theology in the current world—though all too often Theology itself becomes a thermometer reflecting those issues rather than a thermostat setting them.

But there is a rigor involved in Theology which is powerfully appropriate for articulating the rationality of faith in and to an age of despair which is also one of increased advanced learning. In society at large, the percentage of adults in the US between the ages of 25 to 64 with college degrees, certificates, or industry-recognized certifications has increased from 38.1% in 2009 to 54.3% in 2021. Theology is crucial in society if faith is to speak in this context. Indeed, the place of Theology within the academy is deeply related to that need. Theology involves the scientific (wissenschaftlich in German) study of God, God’s ways with the world, and all things in relation to God. Theology is the attempt at the intellectual understanding which follows from faith. In this way, Theology is subject to the same kinds of intellectual and academic rigour as any other academic discipline, even as it maintains its basis as thinking from faith. The father of Theology in the modern university, Friedrich Schleiermacher, argued that if Theology were to exist in the university, it must engage in the work of the university to teach people to

regard everything from the point of view of Wissenschaft [science or reason], to see everything particular not for itself but in its nearest scientific relations and insert it into a wide common frame, in steady relation to the unity and totality of knowledge, so that they may learn in all thinking to become conscious of the basic laws ofWissenschaft.^[xix]

Schleiermacher asserted a “covenant” which seeks to maintain the freedom of scientific critical method within a context in which faith has its place as well.^[xx] This may seem a strange relationship, but of course all subject areas have their belief systems and metaphysics. In this sense, the place of Theology in the academic community has always been one which has had two horizons: the pure science and inquiry of the university and the living and thinking community of faith which considers its origins and ends to be God. Theology is, we might say, a subject which examines all of reality from the perspective of faith in God—asking everything from whether God exists to what we might learn from ancient wisdom to what belief in God might mean for the world in the questions we currently face.

But is Theology as it is currently exercised equipped to continue to do this work so desperately needed in order to shift an age of despair into an age of hope? The problem is, after all, that we no longer live in a society where the givenness of Theology in a university can be taken for granted. If the subject of Theology is rational reflection on the Christian faith, as soon as that faith is seen as irrational, unscientific, or irrelevant, then its place in an academic context is deeply contested. As secularization has happened and the traditional institutions of faith have declined in their number, status, power, and influence (in complex ways), so too has the overt sense of Theology as a meaningful intellectual enterprise. There are many who would ask: What have the pulpit in the church and the lectern in the lecture theatre have to do with each other? What place does faith have in the corridors of advanced critical learning? Fewer vocations in a more secular society have made even the utilitarian case for retaining Theology in the university ever more difficult to justify and this has been compounded by the establishment of specialist seminaries, entirely divorced from university or research settings, which provide ministers with training aside from the critical cut and thrust of academic departments. Separation of church and state might well have originally meant a minimal secular settlement in which confessional identity could not be required in secular contexts. But that did not demand a complete disassociation of Theology from the powerhouses of learning, as the continued existence of Divinity Schools and Seminaries in the most prestigious university towns indicate. Nevertheless, it is increasingly the case that that minimal settlement is being replaced by a maximal one where secular society is imagined as the telos and endpoint of history. In such a situation, a metaphysically naturalistic or even atheistic starting point is presumed in university learning, seeking a modernist neutrality which suggests that matters of belief are shackles to be broken and have no place in prejudicing not only the thoughts of academics but also the hallowed environs of the university. Such an understanding of Theology as a basis of its exclusion from universities is, of course, deeply arbitrary and does not reflect the norms required of other disciplines. Can we ever really imagine a situation in which those who teach History or Economics or Politics are not formed and shaped by historiography, belief in economic theory, or commitment to given political perspectives respectively? We would never challenge these beliefs as a (to quote Kant) “self-incurred tutelage” from which we need to be freed. Let alone could we think of the most famous intellectual of the twentieth century, Albert Einstein (who lived around the corner from CTI) without recalling his statements about inspiration, intuition and even miracles in relation to scientific inquiry! Stanley Hauerwas puts it starkly:

If, for example, most academics think there is no problem for departments of economics and schools of business to presume the normative status of the capitalist order, that is, capitalism can be advocated between consenting adults, why is there such a problem with theology?^[xxi]

However, an imagined horizon of secularization has meant that even when Theology has been able to continue in university settings (as in Europe), all too often Theology departments have in effect become religious studies departments. The content of faith and speech about faith is studied as an object apart from the living community of those who profess faith. It is this which so often shapes the imagination of many people of faith that Theology is seen by members of the church as “a cold, rationalistic, arid discipline that denudes theory of praxis, Christianity of vitality, and worship of the very heart that yearns for God and salvation.”^[xxii] Theology becomes a meaningless discussion of unknowable realities (the number of angels on a pinhead) or a practice of museum-like study of the past instincts of human beings in relation to that which we (in the university) now perceive to be irrational and unevolved spirituality. Theology becomes something which is observed rather than a living discourse which is participated in as if religious people could all be essentialized, all thought alike in a robotic way, and never had to think or reflect upon their faith in light of the challenges of today. Too often, Theology (if it continues to exist) is studied in the same way we might study a tomb in ancient Egypt instead of as a living, breathing discourse which involves normative reflection on how faith relates to matters in the world around us. This dusty and chilly mode of theological study has led to people questioning its value as a discipline at every level. In the UK, enrollments in Theology and Religious Studies degrees were 31% lower in 2017 compared to 2011 (amounting to 6,500 fewer students studying the subject in 2017 than 2011). In the USA, a Lilly supported research program has shown that in 2018-19 lead pastors with a graduate degree comprised only: 41% of Evangelical Protestant lead pastors; 43% of Black Protestant lead pastors; 89% of Mainline Protestant lead pastors; and 91% of Roman Catholic lead pastors. We might note that worryingly, the denominational areas of Christianity which are growing the most have the least educated pastorate. Even to them, the relevance of Theology is questioned; but at the same time the general population has higher academic qualifications.

And alongside this failing on the university side, it is also the case that seminaries have increasingly separated themselves from the university and its broader intellectual pursuits. Seminaries have engaged in one or other (traditional or postmodern) confessional exposition without attending to the broader world of academic learning. Indeed, sadly it is the case that all that some seminaries have in common with the university town in which they are located (if that is even the case) is a zip code. Of course, there are exceptions to this: both Princeton and Aberdeen where I have worked are examples of this exception. And there are others we can list; but that we can probably list them is significant. This separation of university and seminary becomes more pronounced when people come to see seminaries as places which “train” people in practice (trade schools) rather than locations of intellectual challenge and critical inquiry. The problem with training and “skill” based models of learning is that they teach us how to perform in a certain context, but don’t give us the depth to know what to do when the context changes and the rules shift. It is painting by numbers, not art class. Just as the greatest jazz musicians need to have inhabited deeply the rules of music and melody to perform, so Theological learning needs to offer a deep foundation of intellectual and practical wisdom in preparation for a lifetime of innovation on the themes learned which will need performing in all kinds of jazz-like arrangements. Moreover, seminaries are having to fight in order to retain their “share” of a dwindling “market.” Seminary enrollments decreased as follows between 2000-2020: 31% among Black Protestants; 8% among Evangelical Protestants (from an already very low basis); 44% among mainline Protestants; 13% among Roman Catholics. This fight involves in many instances “targeting” a particular market share by becoming the most concentrated version of that share. As such, in many instances individual seminary markets can echo the culture wars we see in society at large, perpetuating despair rather than creating hope; they also tend to be confessional and not critical, failing to prepare the pastorate for the intellectual defense of faith in a complexly secular and pluralist world in which they are to serve and preach; and they tend to be focused on practice and relevance rather than preparing people to be life-long learners with something meaningful to say.

Of course, this account in terms of both the university and the seminary is a caricature which the best of universities and the best of seminaries challenge. But the broad brushstrokes are worth painting. Theology (an academic and scientific examination of faith) in both settings finds itself at the margins. And yet, if society is to regain its hope (and if spirituality has a major role here), and if we live in an educated world of debate and contestation (which demands grown up thinking and not bumper sticker religion), then Theology needs to recover its place in the intellectual arena. If faith, religion, spirituality all have an important place in the recovery of hope for individuals, societies, cultures, and the world, then for faith to speak in and to this context, we need a theological renaissance. We need locations where Theology is at the center in both its commitment to faith and its commitment to the highest standards of intellectual science and inquiry.

Hoping in Our Theological Future

The Center of Theological Inquiry was founded precisely to speak into the space in which we find ourselves in the world today. Dr. James McCord’s founding vision was for an institute modelled (in a humbler way) on the Institute for Advanced Study here in Princeton in order that Theology’s capacity to work at the same intellectual levels as other academic disciplines and to speak to their discourses might be possible. This would involve for McCord nothing short of a theological renaissance. His words are more prescient now than at the foundation of CTI. What McCord realized in the 1960s and 1970s was, as he put it in brochures on CTI in our archive:

Research in the physical and natural sciences, as well as the humanities, is growing at an astounding rate. On the industrial front, the business sector recognizes that it must invest a substantial portion of its income in technological research and experimentation. To meet their particular needs, these groups have established centers for research, at the most advanced levels, where scholars have special resources to conduct investigations that they would be unable otherwise to undertake. Theology also requires research, especially if it is to grow in the right direction, to reach new and expanding communities, and to meet the challenges of rapidly changing world events. Unfortunately, theology has not kept pace with its research requirements. … Existent universities and seminaries are not equipped to undertake the type of advanced theological research that is now needed.

What prophetic words these were. The need is even truer today—exponentially so. But the truth of McCord’s words comes not only because of the context in which we find ourselves today. The truth of his claims runs much deeper. It rests for people of faith in their very faith in God. McCord continues:

The Center recognizes the need for the most rigorous exploration of all dimensions of faith and reason and is committed to generating integrative ideas in the service of God for the benefit of church, culture and all creation.We believe this kind of integration is not only possible, but, in fact, already exists in the very nature of truth. Because every truth, regardless of its source and purpose, proceeds from God, who is the God of all light and truth. …

Our hope is that the ideas generated [at the Center] will have a broad influence, setting off chain reactions of creative responses and developments elsewhere ….

McCord’s themes were developed by our first Director, and one of my great mentors, Daniel W. Hardy. In the archive paper we have here, written for CTI on the need for interdisciplinarity in Theology, Hardy expands on the vision for CTI that McCord had in this way:

The motivation for such a strategy is profound confidence in the unity of all of these [areas of inquiry] in truth and truthful practice as grounded in God and God’s purposes for the world.

In such a strategy, theological inquiry through interdisciplinary study would attempt to rediscover the distinctness and relation of the spheres of understanding and life, religious and “non-religious,” theological and interdisciplinary for the good of humankind, and in that to recover their intrinsic connection to the truth of God and God’s purposes. The result will be the enhancement of what is for the good of humanity, and the recovery of theological truth therein.

This vision for CTI, this vision for Theology, is a high and lofty one—an intensely hopeful one, indeed. But it is one which is needed desperately for the university, the church, and the world. If it is possible for Theology to recover its lively wisdom afresh through new thinking on the issues of the age, then perhaps we have a situation in which we begin as society to change the barometer on hope. This will be a hope which involves lament and a hope which understands it will always be looking ahead—a deep and complex hope and not a cheap optimism. It is clear that the complex forms of our current secular and pluralist age have at least some connection to the indices of despair we have charted. But it is the very need to enter into that complexity which is a possibility for Theology and which is required of Theology—speaking in, with, and to the changed environments in culture and society with relevance. After all, what could be more relevant to the world (for those of us with faith) than God and God’s ways with the world?

As the incoming director, I hope that CTI can be a place in which the relevance of Theology for the big issues and questions facing the world can be explored. We will need to do this at the highest of academic standards if we are to have credibility in a world of scepticism in which, for so many, the end of religion is seen as the inevitable end point of modernity. This will involve engaging the very best Theologians with the very best research from other fields, and it will involve supporting the research of those working on major questions facing society. But it will also involve “going public” with our ideas and work—ensuring our deep groundwork counts on the ground and engaging with the world beyond our walls. Our new building is perfectly set up for that. In his article in Time Magazine (August 22^nd, 2016) Albert Mohler, Jr. asks the question “Where have the Christian intellectuals gone?”. That this piece was published in Time is particularly meaningful for CTI as our former building was largely paid for by and named after Henry Luce, and we still have a bust and a portrait of him from the Luce family. Mohler writes this:

Where have the Christian intellectuals gone? There can be no question that the public square is increasingly devoid of any serious Christian thought and depopulated of Christian thinkers. Alan Jacobs perceives that a full generation ago, “American intellectuals as a group lost the ability to hear the music of religious thought and practice.” Surely, he added, “that happened at least in part because we Christian intellectuals ceased to play it for them.”

His recent essay, “The Watchmen: What Became of the Christian Intellectuals?,” is more elegy than jeremiad, mournful of a day when consequential Christian intellectuals were taken seriously by the larger secular culture, serving as mediators between the worlds of belief and unbelief and making a difference in both worlds.

At CTI we are asking: Who will be the new Luce to sponsor this work and endow and name a building orientated towards work which will speak with academic power and the highest intellectual credibility to the worlds of belief and unbelief?

Key to the success of our public engagement will not just be presenting findings in multiple ways to multiple publics. Key to our success will also be dealing with the most captivating issues that grab the world’s attention and imagination. It is for that reason that my first intensive research project as Director of CTI will focus on the very thing with which we began this essay—the desperate need for hope. The John Templeton Foundation has awarded CTI $4.5mil. to pursue a program entitled From Despair to Hope: Interdisciplinary Theology in the Service of Building Spiritual Capital. Over the next three years we will bring together leading thinkers to try to understand and speak into the changed spiritual, societal, and cultural realities in which we live, seeking to develop increased spiritual capital in a world where hope has turned into despair simultaneous to a decline in organized religion in the West. When we are talking about spiritual capital, what we mean is ways in which faith might help to develop models of human authenticity that enrich society and the organizations and communities of that society. Another way to speak about this is to speak about how we act out and embody our virtues (in this case, hope) in public life. We plan to examine the theme of hope in relation to five areas in which transforming despair to hope is needed: (1) Technology and AI; (2) Civic Life; (3) Youth and Education; (4) Health and Medicine; (5) Entrepreneurship and Economics.

Key to our considerations is a critical question for Theology: Why has religion failed to be able to respond to a context of despair such that it has captivated the imagination of contemporary publics? To answer this question, we plan to offer constructive reflections on the theological thinking and the discourse which surround these issues. We will do so through new theologies of hope which are simultaneously transformed by and transforming of other academic arenas. And we will seek to consider how theological speech around issues of hope might need to be analyzed for the current context in which we find ourselves, and to capture what it is that a new set of theological speech around hope might have to offer to this context positively. Indeed, if some of what I have argued above is remotely convincing, we might want to say that part of the problem of hopelessness in society might well relate to the failure of or changes in religious speech about hope, especially in an age in which Robert Wuthnow identifies a shift from a “spirituality of dwelling” to one of “seeking” in which people seek to satisfy their spirituality on their own terms.^[xxiii] Has Theology responded in ways which have enhanced the fragmentariness of our “seeking” and self-satisfaction in religions, and what might this mean for theologies of hope and how they need to be transformed to create spiritual capital in our age?

We believe CTI is, for all the reasons above, uniquely poised to ask these questions and offer meaningful and wise answers for church, academy, and the world. Indeed, we even dare to hope that we might be able to bring about the very theological renaissance McCord envisioned, so needed if there are to be ripples of hope throughout the world. In an age of divided despair, what might it mean to lift our eyes from the hermetically sealed chambers of our partisan positioning to a future as yet unknown where something greater than we can imagine or picture lies beyond us? Too often the depths of our despair envelop us, but the heights of hope to which we look may as yet be higher. At CTI, we wish to raise our theological imaginations to those mountain tops. After all, this is an age in which we need hope.

^[i] See Doug Henwood, After the New Economy: The Binge... and the Hangover That Won’t Go Away (New York: The New Press, 2005).

^[ii] There is also statistical evidence of this from aggregate feelings of individuals. The Pew Research Center, for example, showed in 1999: “An overwhelming 81% of adults are steadfast in their optimism about what the 21st century holds for them and their families, and 70% believe the country as a whole will do well. Eight-in-ten Americans describe themselves as hopeful about the year 2000, and they anticipate the new millennium will usher in the triumph of science and technology. Majorities predict cancer most likely will be cured, AIDS will be eradicated and ordinary people will travel in space.” (Report of October 24^th 1999, “Optimism Reigns”: https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/1999/10/24/optimism-reigns-technology-plays-key-role/)

^[iii] See, for example, D. Campos, et al., “Emotion,” in C. Spielberger, ed., Encyclopedia of Applied Psychology (Cambridge, MA: Elsevier, 2004).

^[iv] See also C. Graham and S. Pinto, “Unequal hopes and lives in the USA: Optimism, race, place, and premature mortality,” Journal of Population Economics, 32.2 (2019): 665–733.

^[v] Graham, “Hope and Despair,” Behavioral Science & Policy, 9.2 (2024): https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/23794607231222529

^[vi] Ipsos Populism Poll, Populism, Anti-Elitism and Nativism (2024): https://www.ipsos.com/sites/default/files/ct/news/documents/2024-02/Ipsos-Populism-Survey-2024.pdf

^[vii] See: https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=despair&year_start=1800&year_end=2019&corpus=en-2019&smoothing=3

^[viii] See: https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=powerless&year_start=1800&year_end=2019&corpus=en-2019&smoothing=3

^[ix] Anne Case & Angus Deaton, Deaths of Despair and The Future of Capitalism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2020).

^[x] Case and Deaton, Deaths of Despair , 30.

^[xi] Case and Deaton, Deaths of Despair , 40.

^[xii] Case and Deaton, Deaths of Despair , 30.

^[xiii] Carol Graham enhances this analysis: “Sergio Pinto and I found remarkable gaps in hope and optimism between African American and White people, which were widest for those at low levels of income. We found that low-income African Americans are 3 times as likely as Whites to score high in hope on an 11-point optimism scale. This advantage aligns with trends in mortality, in which low-income Whites, who have traditionally had lower mortality rates, are losing ground compared with low-income African Americans, who are making gradual progress. In a more recent analysis published in a Brookings Global Working Paper in 2022, we showed that depression (a sign of despair and lack of hope) preceded deaths of despair among individuals and communities by 2 to 4 years, suggesting that well-being metrics could have served as a warning indicator had they been collected regularly,” (“Hope and Despair”).

^[xiv] Graham, “Hope and Despair.”

^[xv] See, for example, Ronald Inglehart, Religion’s Sudden Decline: What’s Causing it, and What Comes Next? (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020).

^[xvi] See, for example, Harold G. Koenig, et al., “Religious involvement is associated with greater purpose, optimism, generosity and gratitude in persons with major depression and chronic medical illness,” Journal of Psychosomatic Research 77.2 (August 2014): 135-43; Hayward, R. D., & Krause, N., “Religion, mental health, and well-being: Social aspects,” in V. Saroglou, ed., Religion, personality, and social behavior (pp. 255–280).

^[xvii] Oliver Bennet, Cultures of Optimism: The Institutional Promotion of Hope (London: MacMillan Palgrave, 2015).

^[xviii] Webster, “Introduction: Systematic Theology,” 10.

^[xix] Friedrich Schleiermacher, Occasional Thoughts on Universities in the German Sense: With an Appendix Regarding a University Soon to Be Established (1808) (San Francisco: EM Text, 1991).

^[xx] Claude Welch, Protestant Thought in the Nineteenth Century (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1972), 63.

^[xxi] Hauerwas, The State of the University: Academic Knowledges and the Knowledge of God (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2007), 13.

^[xxii] Hans W. Frei, Types of Christian Theology (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), 95.

^[xxiii] Robert Wuthnow, After Heaven: Spirituality in America since the 1950s (San Francisco: University of California Press, 1998).