Friday Theology: John Webster on Cultivating The Theologian's Soul

 

The last of his six Burns Lectures given in 1998  (U of Otago, NZ) and published as The Culture of Theology (Baker Academic 2019) by the late Anglican theologian, John Webster, is entitled “Habits: Cultivating the Theologian’s Soul”.   Here, Webster concludes one of the main themes of these lectures, that there is no dispassionate place for the theologian to stand and rationally consider his or her subject within the mode of criticism.   To attempt such a stance would be an imitation of academic practices that has little or nothing to do with the gospel and the Christian tradition that, for Webster, the theologian must be grounded within.

 

Theology for Webster is “Thinking and speaking well of the God of the Christian gospel” and to do this, the theologian must undertake “the rather bruising business of acquiring and practicing certain habits of mind, heart, and will”.   He uses the adjective “bruising” to point to another grand theme of the lectures, that the business of theology involves “mortification”, a willingness to be changed, “to have our hearts subdued by piety”.  As Webster writes, the goal is not to “existentialize” theology, to make it about an authenticity of the self, but rather to pursue an “authenticity to Christ and the gospel which is to define Christian theological existence”.  

 

Webster:

“So my claim is not merely that theologians ought to cultivate certain modulations of their inner lives (though I think they should), but more that Christian theological existence is nothing other than a form of Christian existence, standing under exactly the same total claim of the gospel.   Part of what is required as a response to that claim is readiness for the kinds of personal growth and change which inevitably afflict us in engagement with God.  Engagement with God means being sufficiently grasped, disturbed, or troubled by the gospel and its dispute with us, that we are provoked (however unwillingly) to learn how to think differently.  But part of the difference that we are to learn is the dawning of the realization that “learning how to think and live differently” is not just a matter of adding on new attitudes or adopting new patterns of action; it involves abandoning my mastery of myself and receiving myself anew from God.  Good theologians are those whose life and thought are caught up in the process of being slain and made alive by the gospel and of acquiring and exercising habits of mind and heart which take very seriously the gospel’s provocation.”