Unraveled

“I’m unraveled”—that might be an apt description of a well-known singer’s personal life, but it’s also fitting for the rest of us. More like “we’re unraveling,” the phrase captures the anxiety of our present moment better than most. Upheaval, disruption, or, more euphemistically, transition—these are just a few alternatives that have been invoked. But unlike unraveling, those terms fail to fully capture what makes the present feel so unsettling. Change itself is not alarming, but it’s when change is accompanied by the sense that the things we took for granted—i.e., the things holding life together as we’ve known it—are coming apart at the seams. Civil liberties, political norms, and democratic institutions: while we may have assumed their givenness, we now find them suddenly torn; in some cases, they’re slowly being undone through a thousand little snips here and there. 

So we are indeed unraveling. But this great unraveling may be exactly what we deserve. By “we,” I mean the political community we call the United States, but I also mean the church and its institutions of theological education. What we have assumed the church and theological education to be—that is, the elements that make the church and its seminaries, divinity schools, or even universities what they are (or have been for decades)—are also falling apart, some more rapidly than others. In this wake, many, if not all, of our theological schools are working hard to mend the tears as creatively as possible. I need not recall such efforts here. But we do need to reckon with the inconvenient truth that our inability to slow this unraveling is, in part, due to our stubborn denial of the conditions that made this process of dissolution possible in the first place. Dare I say that another famed singer had it right all along when she sang, “It’s me, hi, I’m the problem, it’s me….” 

If we’d only listen to the truth of that refrain, we might begin to acknowledge that our credibility as theological educators has been in question for some time now. We talk a good game about social justice and about a God who is of and for the poor. Yet the kind of community we have chosen to weave together relies on the very powers, logics, and socio-economic systems that helped make our politics the problematic it is today. Part of this reliance is, of course, understandable. Salaries need to be paid, scholarships need funding, and buildings require maintenance--institutional life is not cheap. But the structures and ideologies that keep institutions running have made institutional survival the prize. In the process, we’ve become beholden to corporate, tech, and financial actors (and the politicians who enable their outsized influence) as much as any other non-academic institution is today. Beggers can’t be choosers, as the saying goes. So it’s hardly a surprise that we’ve become accustomed to the “world’s” metrics for growth and long-term viability, and we’ve come to think of such metrics as obvious, reasonable, and necessary; our success depends on them. But along the way, we’ve become complicit in the wider unraveling of our political life: if not by directly contributing to the growing divides between rich and poor, or the connected and the unlucky, then as bystanders who lament and criticize these divides while yearning for a piece (any piece) of the very largess that such exploitative divisiveness yields.  

This has not gone unnoticed. The church’s (and its attendant educational institutions’) moral authority has been called into question, assuming it had authority to begin with. What we might be able to offer a society in crisis is hardly taken seriously. While we proclaim that the world as it is is not the world as it is meant to be, our proclamations fall flat as we continue business as usual. Are we not just as much a part of the socio-economic status quo as the rest of the world? Thus, the unraveling continues. 

We might be able to stitch things back together, however, if we’re willing to try on some new threads, as one might say. We’re accustomed to thinking of our institutions as communities of thought, where we can imagine life together anew (we’re in the ideas business, after all). But the lack of a theological imagination is less the problem than our failure to practice what we know (and preach). Dare I say that preaching is the easy part? There’s plenty to preach about, and we’re certainly not shy about preaching the good, the right, and the prophetic. But living what we preach, in our own schools (and churches), is more challenging than I think we’re willing to admit, or perhaps brave enough to do. Too much is at stake if we do what we believe the Gospel calls us to—the institutional costs are potentially frightening, of the insomnia-inducing kind. And yet what if we took the command to go and do likewise (Lk. 10:37) “literally,” with a fundamentalist-like simplicity and an evangelical-like zeal, and thus lived it comprehensively, unapologetically, unqualifiedly, from the bottom to the top? What if, in other words, we were courageous enough to risk the consequences of practicing a consistent ethic, the kind the Gospel enjoins? Surely, it is easier to raise the question than to affirm it and do it. But how else will we regain the credibility that has been lost unless we let go of our anxieties and attempt to do what we believe, assuming that we indeed believe (Matt. 6:30)? Only then might we be able to offer a different way forward for our churches and for our politics, and stitch things back together in a way that would make us hopeful and inspire others to pay attention to our schools of theology.