The Social Context of Academic Theology

Have you ever known a seminary professor who has witnessed a physical healing or miracle, or had a vision of Jesus, or been delivered of demons, or received what Pentecostals call the "baptism in the Holy Spirit?" Or, to put the question another way, have you ever known a professional theologian who has directly experienced the supernatural events that can be found on every page of the New Testament? Or, have you known an academic who was socially at ease among the Bible-believing, miracle-seeking, hand-clapping, faith-preaching "lower" classes? Or any who have lived among the Third World's poor and directly participated in their "primitive" and "superstitious" world?

With only a few exceptions, I would have to answer No to the foregoing questions. Most theologians in the Episcopal Church are products of what liberation theologian Juan Luis Segundo describes as the "great urban centers in the Anglo-Saxon industrial empire; an urbane pragmatic man molded by scientific and technological thought and bound up with the notions of progress and affluence. And as we have seen, what he cannot accept is a transcendence pictured as intervening within the boundaries of this world that he knows, uses, manipulates, and dominates." Our Idea of God, p. 124.

Why does Segundo make this assertion? He is a Third World theologian. He speaks for and from the marginated, the poor, the wretched of the weaker nations and classes. But he is also an academic. He has read the First World theologians. He knows that Anglican theologian John Macquarrie is typical when he claims that "supernatural interventions belong to the mythological outlook and cannot commend itself in a post- mythological climate of thought." Principles of Theology, p. 248.

This "non-intervention," however, is not due to God's impotence. To paraphrase the Magnificat, the Lord pulls down the mighty from their seats and He ever lifts up the humble. He feeds the hungry and sends the rich away empty. But First World theologians, and this is Segundo's point, are privileged. They inhabit the upper regions of a world system that rests upon a lower strata of poverty, oppression, and grief. They and their constituency would find it difficult to meet a God who topples the prominent and honors the humble. Consequently, they avoid situations such as charismatic worship where they might suddenly "meet the Lord" or "get baptized in the Holy Spirit," and thereby lose their academic respectability and status. Then, once isolated from religion in its "cruder" forms, it is only logical to demythologize the New Testament, or define God's act in such a way as to eliminate an objective divine intervention. The result is a terrible theological impoverishment.

Sociologist Peter Berger puts it quite nicely: "It would require a good satirical pen indeed to describe the embarrassment that would be caused in one of our Protestant seminaries or church gatherings by the appearance of anyone claiming to have had a genuine encounter with the supernatural. Such an emergency, however, has become quite unlikely with the psychiatric screening and counseling procedures that have become commonly accepted in our ecclesiastical institutions." The Noise of Solemn Assemblies, p. 45.

I write as one who has spent years in academia (thirteen years of graduate study with three advanced degrees including a Ph.D. in theology), as one who entered the Episcopal church through the charismatic movement and saw the God of the New Testament in action, and as one who has lived among the Third World poor. (Plenteous Harvest, July, 1997)

The Rev. Robert J. Sanders, Ph.D.
July, 1997