An interview with Philip Clayton

Fortress Press: Your recent work occasions us to ask these questions, some general and some tied more directly to the work you did on your new book with us—Transforming Christian Theology.

Given your background in philosophical theology, what got you interested in your current project on this more popular style of theologizing?

Philip Clayton: I studied under the German systematic theologian, Wolfhart Pannenberg. For the great theologians of the past, both German and American, there was more than a trickle-down effect—their theologies had massive influences on the church and the world. But things changed. In our day academic theologians—people who do systematic and theological theology—no longer have much of any influence on the church or on society. And I’m not convinced that academic theology is so “intrinsically valuable” that we should do it for the sheer fun of it.

So I underwent a major conversion. I decided to write books that non-specialists could understand and profit from—books that would help the church and works that would address the really hard questions that Christianity faces today. I am ready to deal with the protests from “professional” theologians; indeed, maybe I can win some of them over to this new style of writing.

I talk more about my recent conversion in the interview with Harvey Cox. You can find it (and listen or download) at our new site, TransformingTheology.org.

FP: What transformations are happening in theology today? Are any of them analogous to movements in the Enlightenment?

PC: But that’s the problem. Standard academic theology isn’t undergoing a major transition, although it should. The primary audience of academic theology has become the academy. It’s as if my colleagues don’t realize that what they do exists only because there are Christians and because Christians are grouped together in a public institution called the church. If the church dies, their field will die as well. (Or perhaps it will be reduced to academic religious studies. Indeed, perhaps that’s what some of my colleagues are hoping!)

Let me put the point differently. The Catholic theologian David Tracy became famous some years ago for saying that theology has three “publics”—the publics of Church, Society, and Academy. The church is in major crisis today. Will theologians throw their training, their brains, and their passion into the project of understanding the crisis and helping to address it?

Some will say: Who cares if there is no church? We still have society and the academy. But the truth is, society isn’t really listening to theologians any longer. The days of massive influence, the days of Paul Tillich and Reinhold Niebuhr, are gone. That leaves the academy. And what the academy is asking today is that theology give up its traditional role as faith-driven reflection. That’s the $64,000 question that theology faces today.

FP: What is theological reflection and how is it part of every Christian’s vocation?

PC: Theological reflection, at its core, only means thinking about what you believe. For many of us today, however, that means getting clear on what we believe in the first place. Many of us find that, even with all the doubts, we still belong in the Christian tradition. And we’d like to live in a way that somehow reflects Jesus’ life and values. But we’re no longer sure exactly how to formulate our beliefs. We need the freedom to think this Christianity thing through from the ground up. It’s not about being liberal or evangelical; it’s even deeper questions that than—core questions of Christian identity.

I wrote Transforming Christian Theology to help people find the freedom to ask these deeper questions and to work their way toward answers they could live with (and by!). I wrote it as a call to academic theologians and church leaders, so that they could become supporters and resource people of this process that so many Christians are going through today.

I was brought up thinking that theology existed to give “the answers” to Christians, that is, to tell them what they are supposed to believe. Now I’ve learned that theology’s function today is to help us formulate the questions of Christian identity today, and to remind us of what Christians have said about these questions through the ages. Every Christian is a theologian; everyone asks what it means to be a follower of Jesus in her own age and context. I want to return theology to the pews, instead of glorifying it in its safe haven in seminaries and university divinity schools.

FP: What is the most important thing that theologians need to hear today? What does your new book have to offer this topic?

PC: Theologians need to get what most pastors and many Christians already know: the church in America today–especially the mainline churches, but not only they—are in crisis. We have reached a tipping point where the very existence of the traditional Christian institutions is in question. The average age in mainline churches on a typical Sunday is now well over fifty, and there is no sign that the younger generations are coming back. It is not “business as usual.”

We need to rethink what “church” means from the ground up. The revolution is already under way, and exciting things are being done. But the message hasn’t gotten out through the denominational structures, and it’s not reaching the multitudes who no longer want to have anything at all to do with church or the public practice of religion. The Ford grant that we received here at Claremont—“rekindling theological imagination” (see TransformingTheology.org)—has allowed us to see the depth of the crisis, and Transforming Christian Theology is my first attempt to formulate it.

I think Christianity has powerful things to offer to our planet and its people in the twenty-first century. But it’s going to take some radical rethinking, some radical changes, and they’re going to have to happen fairly quickly here.

Philip Clayton is author of Transforming Christian Theology: For Church and Society, Fortress (2009), and Adventures in the Spirit: God, World, Divine Action, Fortress (2008). Find Philip on Fortress Forum here.