Do theologians need to man up?

I TA Theology II, and in today's lecture our professor delivered a mild-mannered rant about universalism, or more exactly, how we debate universalism. He shared an anecdote about a Presbytery meeting he attended in which a couple of candidates being examined for ordination were grilled about the concept.

If I get the anecdote right, neither candidate affirmed universalism; they affirmed a kind of middle-of-the-road, "We must hope well of all and not rashly judge anyone to be reprobate" point of view, but that wasn't good enough for a few. A few, in the presence of the candidates and especially out of their presence, mocked the candidates for an equivocating, mealy-mouthed faith in a saccharin-sweet God who's too darned nice to judge anybody.

Questioning the manhood of universalists, or even suspected universalists, is nothing new. In the fifth century Augustine wrote:

It is quite in vain, then, that some--indeed very many--yield to merely human feelings and deplore the notion of the eternal punishment of the damned and their interminable and perpetual misery. They do not believe that such things will be. Not that they would go counter to divine Scripture--but, yielding to their own human feelings, they soften what seems harsh and give a milder emphasis to statements they believe are meant more to terrify than to express the literal truth.

The sentimental might hope that all dogs go to heaven, but the tough-minded know better.

Or do they?

Which requires more toughness, more courage, more fortitude:

1. Consigning Gandhi to hell, or
2. Being willing to go to heaven with your ex?

Isn't universalism the sunny side of a tough-as-nails doctrine of reconciliation? When Jesus glossed his own prayer, saying, "Unless you forgive others their trespasses, your Heavenly Father will not forgive you your trespasses?" wasn't he effectively saying that either we're all saved or none of us are?

I think it applies far beyond those who do us wrong. Isn't the Other, every Other, even your soul mate, at some level a kind of reproach and rebuke to you? Here is this other human being who does not live and believe in this world as you do--either not quite or not by a long shot, either glibly or earnestly. Doesn't that implicitly call your raison d'etre into question? If so, then doesn't the logic of the prayer insist that you have to get past that if you want to get past Saint Peter? Isn't the only way into heaven arm-and-arm with the Other? The heretic? The secularist? The fill-in-the-blank?

Samuel Hopkins famously declared that one should be willing to go to hell for the glory of God. That's tough. That's glass-chomping Calvinism, if I may quote a classmate. But I think an equally tough affirmation would be that one should be willing to hold open the door to heaven for the whole human race for the glory of God.

So I'm questioning what it means to be a tough-minded theologian. But I'd also like to question whether being tough-minded is all that desirable in theology. Certainly one must be willing to think long and hard about these matters.

But I don't think that theology ought to be an expression of machismo, and all too often it is. You read some of the big theology blogs, and it's like you walked into a second grade pissing contest. Sarcasm and put-downs abound. What joy there is seems to be in demolishing someone else's opinion, not in discovering something true and good and beautiful.

This too is nothing new. Philipp Jakob Spener disliked the "disputatious" nature of theology in the 17th century so much that he did something about it. He founded Pietism. So there are alternatives.

And to return to the anecdote that prompted this post, I think this is what drives a lot of the nastiness we see on the floor of Presbytery--not theology per se but machismo. I don't know what the gender was of the candidates in question, but in my own experience I can't tell you how many times I've seen a female candidate for ministry, standing there looking as innocent as Bambi, whose faith statement testifies to a sincere love for Christ, and an earnest desire to serve him in ministry, get grilled by That Guy. He goes over her Christology, soteriology, ecclesiology and eschatology with a fine-toothed comb, because she's a woman, I suspect. Because the unconscious assumption is that since testosterone is fuel for theology, her theology must be deficient. If you can't even enter a pissing contest, what kind of a theologian will you be?

Either that, or they remind That Guy of his ex.

Of course there are exceptions to every rule. The irenic Spener was male. And there are "disputatious" females in ordained as well as lay ministry. And to be sure, there are substantive issues debated on the floor of presbytery (on occasion). Not every issue is a proxy for race, gender and class. Although it must be said that if Sessions and CPMs and denominational seminaries did their jobs, truly problematic candidates would never reach the floor to begin with.

But the bottom line is that theology is not trench warfare, and it would be a mistake to make grimness a criterion for truth, or adopt a take-no-prisoners attitude to perceived falsehoods.

Comments

[Camassia]

I've known a few universalists whose verbal style was as incendiary as anyone's. For instance, the history section at christianuniversalist.org talks about how the "perverse, unbiblical Augustinian theological system" helped make the Catholic church a "barbarous, evil enterprise." I suspect that the real division here isn't between universalists and exclusivists but between people who think this is a crucially important moral issue (whichever side they're on) and those who don't. To the former, the latter probably look like they're just afraid to take a stand. (And there are certainly reasons to fear taking a public universalist stance, in some environments.)