Theological Education for a Church Moving South and a North Atlantic World in Transition

The following address was delivered at the Commencement Exercises of Christ School of Theology and Christ College on June 11, 2026. Although addressed to graduates, it reflects broader concerns regarding theological education, world Christianity, the Global South, and the future of Christian intellectual formation in the twenty-first century.

Distinguished faculty, honored guests, families who have prayed and waited and sacrificed, and, above all, the graduates of Christ School of Theology and Christ College: grace and peace to you.

I want to put a question to you today—not a question you will answer in this room or at this hour, but one you will spend the rest of your lives answering by the way you live, teach, preach, and serve. The question is this: What does it mean that you were here?

Not merely that you completed a curriculum, satisfied requirements, passed examinations, and earned the right to a new title. Those things matter. They are not nothing. But I mean something far larger. What does it mean, in the long arc of the church’s history and in the groaning and hoping of a world that does not yet know what it is waiting for, that you, in this decade and in this place, received the kind of theological formation you have received?

I want to spend these minutes trying to answer that question. To do so, I am going to ask you to think across two centuries.

I. The World You Are Entering

We are not given the luxury of imagining that history stands still. The world into which you graduate has been reshaped by what historian Philip Jenkins described as a seismic shift: a movement in the center of gravity of world Christianity without precedent in five hundred years.

The church of Jesus Christ, for five centuries dominated by its Northern and Western expressions, has moved south and east—to Africa, Asia, and Latin America. Today, roughly two-thirds of the world's Christians live in what we now call the Global South.

As the Kenyan theologian John Mbiti observed decades ago, the centers of Christian vitality are no longer found primarily in Geneva, Paris, London, or New York. Increasingly, they are found in places such as Kinshasa, Addis Ababa, Buenos Aires, Seoul, Manila, and Lagos.

What once sounded like a prediction has become a description.

At the same time, here in our own North Atlantic world, the long age of cultural Christianity is ending. Churches are aging. Inherited loyalties are thinning. The institutional forms that carried theological education through much of the twentieth century will not, by themselves, carry it through the twenty-first.

I know what that can feel like. It can feel like loss, retreat, and decline. But despair is precisely the wrong response—not because the losses are unreal, but because those losses have opened something.

Karl Barth repeatedly reminded the church that it neither masters nor judges the Word of God. The church stands beneath that Word as its servant. When cultural scaffolding comes down, what remains is the Word. And the Word, as Scripture says, “is not bound” (2 Tim. 2:9).

The reduction of cultural Christianity in the North is not the defeat of the gospel. It may, in the strange economy of God, be one of the conditions under which the gospel once again becomes legible—not as cultural background noise, but as the startling, specific, demanding, and beautiful claim that God became flesh, died, and rose again, and that this changes everything.

Into that opening, the church needs people who can speak credibly and rigorously, with their whole minds and their whole hearts: people who have not merely inherited the faith but wrestled with it; who know why they believe what they believe; who can give an account of the hope that is in them; who have read the tradition deeply enough to stand in it and speak from it, not merely about it. That is what you have been formed to do.

II. The Treasure You Carry

I want you to understand what a rare and precious thing you hold. Theological education—genuine theological education, education that takes Scripture with full seriousness and brings to it the full discipline of the human mind—is in short supply in the world.

Andrew Walls, the great historian of world Christianity, devoted much of his life to sounding an alarm about this reality. The southward movement of Christianity creates an urgent need for theological leadership, Christian scholarship, and institutions capable of forming pastors, teachers, and thinkers for the rapidly growing churches of Africa, Asia, and Latin America.

The church is growing faster than it can train leaders. The result, in too many places, is faith that is wide but not deep—enthusiastic but undiscerning, vulnerable to exploitation, distortion, and the thousand substitutes that offer spiritual experience without theological substance.

You have been given substance. You have been given the languages of the tradition—its Scripture, its confessions, its centuries of reflection, argument, and prayer. You have been taught to read carefully, think precisely, and speak clearly. You have been formed not merely in information but in a habit of mind, a theological imagination, that can be brought to bear on any question, in any culture, and in any century.

Beneath all of it—beneath the languages, disciplines, and centuries of argument—your formation here rested on a single conviction: that theological language can speak truthfully about reality. When the church says, “Christ is risen,” it is not merely expressing a feeling, preserving a tradition, or marking an identity. It is making a claim about what is.

This institution was founded on that conviction. It exists because of it. Theology, as you have learned it here, is not the management of religious meaning or the adaptation of inherited symbols to contemporary taste. It is disciplined speech about God—under Scripture, within the tradition, accountable to truth.

Your task, therefore, is not, in the first instance, to make the gospel credible. It is to ask under what conditions the gospel is true, and then to speak faithfully within a reality you do not control.

This is not a small thing. It is, in fact, an almost embarrassingly large thing to have been given. And with it comes a responsibility proportionally large.

III. The Two Directions

I want to speak to you about two directions in which your formation will be needed, two horizons toward which you must face simultaneously, like a watchman guarding both the city's gate and its walls.

In the North Atlantic world, the church will likely be smaller in the coming decades. It need not be weaker. A church no longer upheld by cultural assumption must be upheld by genuine conviction, and that is, in many ways, a more honest and more theologically serious church.

But it will need pastors who can think and teachers who can explain, without defensiveness or embarrassment, why the faith of the Creed is not a relic but a reality; why the Incarnation is not mythology but metaphysics; why the Resurrection is not comfort but claim.

Charles Taylor has mapped with remarkable precision how the secular age arrived at a condition in which belief in God appears to many as merely one option among many—one choice in a supermarket of meaning.

Into that condition, the church is not helped by becoming louder or more entertaining. It is helped by becoming more serious. It is helped by recovering the question Dietrich Bonhoeffer posed from prison: What does Christian faith look like when it can no longer depend upon inherited cultural supports? It stands on what it actually is—the gospel of the Crucified and Risen One.

For that church, you are indispensable.

The growing church of the Global South is doing what the North has nearly forgotten how to do: it is proclaiming the gospel, and people are responding. Yet it faces the same challenge faced by the early church as it spread across the Mediterranean world: how to go deep; how to move from first proclamation to mature formation; how to develop theology that is genuinely African, genuinely Asian, genuinely Latin American—not a carbon copy of Northern categories, but a living encounter between the gospel and particular cultures, carried out with rigor, love, and fidelity to the apostolic witness.

This is where institutions of the North—with their libraries, disciplines, and centuries of accumulated learning—can become genuine partners: not overlords, not exporters of cultural imperialism dressed in theological clothing, but partners and learners.

The church of the Global South has much to teach the church of the North about vitality, proclamation, and the lived expectation that God actually acts in history. The traffic must run both ways.

You are equipped to travel in both directions.

IV. The Long View

Now I want you to think across two centuries—not just back, but forward.

Two hundred years from now, someone will write the history of theological education in the early twenty-first century. They will describe a moment of crisis and transition: the waning of old institutional forms in the North; the urgent, unmet needs of the burgeoning church in the South; the rise of digital education that made formation across vast distances suddenly possible; and the theological questions generated by technological change at a speed and depth not seen since the Industrial Revolution.

And they will ask: Who rose to that moment?

Who understood that the moment called not for retreat but for rigor—not for the lowering of standards in the hope of survival, but for the deepening of formation in the conviction that the church deserves the very best of what its teachers can give?

Who understood that accessibility and seriousness are not enemies but allies, and that the gospel can be proclaimed clearly without being proclaimed shallowly?

Who understood that the Word of God is not the property of any single culture or century, but belongs to every tribe and language and people and nation, and that theological education is one of the chief instruments by which that Word is received, understood, and faithfully handed on?

I believe—I am convinced—that some of those who rose to that moment were formed here: in institutions like this one; by faculty who cared enough to teach with everything they had; by students who cared enough to learn with everything they had; by a community that believed, against the evidence of institutional decline all around it, that theology matters.

Theology is not a museum of antique ideas but a living, truth-bearing enterprise concerned with the reality of God, the proclamation of the gospel, and the formation of faithful servants for Christ's church.

You are those students.

This is that institution.

And the moment you were formed for is the one you are now entering.

V. A Word About the Cost

I would be less than honest with you if I spoke only of the privilege and not of the cost.

Many of you have paid a great price to be here. You have given years of your lives, financial resources you could not easily afford, and midnight hours that others spent in leisure. Some of you have uprooted families, strained relationships, and carried doubt and weariness alongside your conviction. Some of you have wondered, in the darkest hours, whether any of it would amount to anything.

I want to speak to that doubt directly.

The Apostle Paul, writing from prison, said, "I have learned to be content with whatever I have." Learned—not always possessed, not simply received without struggle, but learned through suffering, failure, and the long disciplines of trust.

Formation is always costly. It is always slow. It often feels, in the middle of it, as though nothing is happening—as though you are simply enduring. And then one day you discover that the person on the other side of all that endurance is not who you were when you began.

You are not who you were when you began.

The tradition you have received is not simply academic content stored in your memory. It has shaped the way you see. It has given you eyes to look at the human situation—at suffering and joy, sin and grace, death and resurrection—and see it whole.

That is irreversible.

No one can take it from you.

You carry it into every room you enter, every conversation you have, every sermon you preach, and every life you touch.

Verbum Domini manet in aeternum.

The Word of the Lord endures forever.

And so, because it has been entrusted to you, you now bear the responsibility of carrying it faithfully into the places where God calls you.

VI. The Charge

And so I charge you.

Go and teach the church to think.

Go and help the church in the North to become the smaller, more serious, more genuinely evangelical community it is being called to become in this hour.

Go and stand beside the rising church of the Global South—not above it, not as experts condescending to pupils, but as partners and servants in the one holy catholic and apostolic mission.

Go and write the theology that this century needs: theology that does not evade the hard questions of artificial intelligence, ecological crisis, political fragmentation, and the slow hemorrhage of meaning in secular culture, but faces them with the full resources of the Christian tradition and the full confidence of the gospel.

Go and refuse the quiet bargain this age will offer you: to retain the vocabulary of the faith while relinquishing its claim. Where that bargain is accepted, theology does not immediately disappear. It continues—as institution, discourse, and activity—but it loses its object. Do not lose the object.

Go and remember that behind every theological question is a human being: a person made in the image of God, groping for light, hungry for truth, in need of the one thing that neither philosophy nor politics nor technology can provide—the Word that became flesh and dwelt among us.

Go and be ruthlessly faithful—not successful, faithful.

Faithfulness looks like failure more often than we admit, and it bears fruit more often than we see.

Athanasius was exiled five times. Luther was excommunicated. Bonhoeffer was hanged. The arc of the faithful life is not a smooth ascent. It bends, sometimes violently, and it is often in that bending that God does some of his deepest work.

Go and know that you do not go alone. You go as members of the body of Christ, which has been proclaiming this gospel for two thousand years and has not yet run out of breath.

You go carrying the prayers of the faculty who taught you, the love of the families who sustained you, and the witness of the saints who have gone before you.

You go, as the letter to the Hebrews puts it, "surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses" (Heb. 12:1): Augustine, Luther, Bonhoeffer, Barth, Mbiti, Walls, and ten thousand others whose names we do not know, but whose faithfulness made our faithfulness possible.

And you go carrying the promise that "the one who calls you is faithful" (1 Thess. 5:24) and that "the one who began a good work among you will bring it to completion" (Phil. 1:6).

Conclusion: The Word Is Not Bound

I want to close with a word about why institutions such as Christ School of Theology and Christ College matter in the history I have been describing.

History is not made only by the large and famous. More often, it is shaped by the faithful and the obscure: by the teacher in a small seminary who trains the bishop who later guides the church through a crisis; by the scholar in a modest institution whose ideas travel farther than she ever imagined; by the graduate who returns to a village, congregation, or city and builds a community of faith that, two generations later, sends its own graduates into the world to do the same.

We will not know, in our lifetimes, what God will do with the formation that has taken place here.

We do not need to know.

We need only to trust that the Word is not bound and that, when it is faithfully taught and faithfully received, it accomplishes what the Lord promises:

"So shall my word be that goes out from my mouth; it shall not return to me empty, but it shall accomplish that which I purpose and succeed in the thing for which I sent it." (Isa. 55:11)

That is not a sentimental hope. It is a theological claim.

The gospel does not become true because it is believed. Rather, it is believed because it is true, and the reality to which it bears witness does not depend upon our recognition of it.

And you, standing here today, are evidence that someone believed that truth deeply enough to stake an institution upon it—and that you believed it deeply enough to stake a portion of your lives upon it as well.

For that faith, and for what you will do with it, I am profoundly grateful. The church is grateful. And I believe—indeed, I dare to say—that the Lord of the church, before whom every knee shall bow and every tongue confess, is not indifferent to what has happened here.

Go, then.

The task before you is larger than you can presently see. The church needs what you have been given. The world needs the truth entrusted to your care. The hour is urgent, the opportunities are immense, and the future remains open before the providence of God.

The Word is not bound.

Therefore, neither should your courage be.

Soli Deo Gloria.

The Theology of the Cross as Right Naming

Most discussions of Luther's theology of the cross begin with suffering. They tell us that God works through weakness rather than strength, through suffering rather than triumph, through hiddenness rather than glory. While all of this is true, it may not be the most fundamental point Luther is making.

My contention is that the heart of Luther's theology of the cross is not suffering. It is truthful judgment. 

The decisive text comes from the Heidelberg Disputation of 1518, where Luther writes:

"The theologian of glory calls evil good and good evil. The theologian of the cross calls the thing what it actually is."

The contrast is striking because Luther does not say that the theologian of glory suffers too little or that the theologian of the cross suffers more. He says that one names reality falsely while the other names it truthfully. Simply put, the primary issue for the theologian of the cross is judging rightly. 

The theologian of glory lives within a distorted account of reality. He judges according to power, success, achievement, influence, and visible accomplishment. Strength appears self-evidently good. Weakness appears self-evidently bad. Success seems to indicate blessing. Failure seems to indicate judgment.

The problem is not that such judgments are irrational; it is that they are made according to a false model of the real, and it is the cross that reveals this.

At Calvary, divine power appears as weakness. Divine wisdom appears as foolishness. Divine victory appears as defeat. If one judges merely by appearances, then Good Friday can only be understood as catastrophe. Yet faith recognizes that precisely there, under the form of weakness and shame, God is accomplishing reconciliation with the world.

The theologian of the cross therefore learns a difficult discipline. Like Plato, she learns to say what is real apart from appearances to the contrary.  Accordingly, she claims:

• Sin is sin.
• Death is death.
• Judgment is judgment.
• The creature is creature.
• God is God.

The point sounds almost trivial until one recognizes how much energy human beings expend avoiding such naming. What do we humans do? 

• We rename sin as woundedness.
• We rename guilt as dysfunction.
• We rename death as transition.
• We rename rebellion as authenticity.                                                   
• We rename judgment as intolerance.

Our age is remarkably skilled at redescribing reality until the thing itself disappears beneath its preferred vocabulary.

This tendency is hardly limited to secular culture. The church is often tempted by the same impulse. We preserve theological grammar while quietly evacuating theological reference. We continue speaking of grace, resurrection, repentance, and Christ while becoming increasingly uncertain whether these words refer to realities outside our own religious practices.

The result is a culture of managed descriptions. Everything is interpreted, but nothing is named. The theology of the cross stands against this entire enterprise.

It insists that reality possesses a determinate contour independent of our descriptions of it. More importantly, it insists that this reality is disclosed most clearly in the crucified Christ. The cross becomes the criterion by which false naming is exposed and truthful naming becomes possible.

This is why the theology of the cross is not anti-rational. It is neither a celebration of paradox for its own sake, nor is it an invitation into theological obscurity. It is instead a discipline of intellectual honesty.

The theologian of the cross does not refuse to think, but refuses to allow thinking to be governed by false appearances. The theologian of the Cross refuses

• To call success faithfulness.
• To call power wisdom.
• To call self-justification righteousness.
• To call evil good and good evil.

Instead the theologian of the cross says what the thing is.

This is not merely an academic exercise, but the precondition for hearing the gospel. Accordingly, 

• Forgiveness can only be proclaimed where sin has been named.
• Resurrection can only be proclaimed where death has been acknowledged.
• Grace can only be proclaimed where judgment has been spoken.

The cross names in order to promise; it kills in order to make alive; it unmasks in order to redeem.

Luther's theology of the cross therefore remains profoundly relevant to our contemporary horizon. We inhabit an age of therapeutic management, technological control, institutional ambiguity, and semantic evasion. Everywhere we find pressure to rename reality into forms that are easier to bear. It is against all of this that the theologian of the cross stands. 

While such a theologian is not specialist in suffering, not a lover of paradox, and certainly not an enemy of reason, she is one who has been judged by the crucified and risen Christ and thereby set free to call a thing what it is.

Why Most Theological Education No Longer Knows What Theology Is

This essay arises from the work of the Christ School of Theology. For a broader account of its mission and theological rationale, see the Christ School of Theology.

The Crisis Beneath the Crisis

The deepest crisis in contemporary theological education is not financial, demographic, institutional, or ecclesiastical. It is theological. Beneath the visible anxieties of declining enrollment, budgetary strain, denominational fragmentation, and cultural marginalization lies a more fundamental disorder. Many theological institutions no longer know, with clarity and conviction, what theology itself is.

That judgment may sound severe, but it names a reality that presses upon anyone willing to look steadily at the present situation. The problem does not usually announce itself as confusion. Institutions speak readily and often eloquently of mission, ministry, leadership formation, spiritual growth, justice, service, and ecclesial renewal. They describe what they do, whom they serve, and why their work matters. Yet beneath this confident speech there remains a prior question that is too seldom asked and even more seldom answered: What kind of discourse is theology? Does theology make claims about reality? Does it say what is the case? Are its judgments true or false in any serious sense? And if they are, what would have to obtain for them to be true?

Where those questions are not faced, theology begins quietly to lose its object. It may continue to function institutionally. It may continue to produce courses, degrees, conferences, and graduates. It may continue to serve the church in a variety of recognizable ways. Yet the inner center has begun to give way. A school may remain busy, earnest, and religiously useful while no longer being fully certain what it means to educate theologically. Once that occurs, every other institutional uncertainty is intensified, because the school no longer possesses settled clarity concerning the very thing it claims to teach.

The Modern Reduction of Theology

This situation did not arise by accident. It is the result of a long and cumulative modern redescription of theological discourse. Over the course of generations, theology has been pressed to speak more modestly, more cautiously, and finally more evasively about its own object.

Sometimes theology has been reduced to the language of value. On this view, theological claims do not describe what is the case, but rather articulate what has significance for human life. To confess that Christ is Lord is not chiefly to state something about reality, but to declare the incomparable value of Christ for the community of faith. Theology thus becomes the ordering of religious significance rather than the disciplined articulation of truth.

Sometimes theology has been reduced to the analysis of experience. It becomes the reflective description of dependence, commitment, transformation, or communal consciousness. Theological language then functions as a way of rendering intelligible what persons or communities undergo in relation to the divine, or what they take themselves to undergo.

Sometimes theology has been reduced to the grammar of an ecclesial practice. In this construal, theological statements do not refer to objective reality so much as they operate within the rule governed speech of a believing community. Their validity lies less in truth than in coherence, less in reference than in authorized use, less in ontological seriousness than in communal intelligibility.

These approaches differ in important respects, but they share a common direction. Each weakens the bond between theology and reality. Each loosens the relation between theological language and what theology purports to name. Each moves theology away from truth bearing discourse and toward a more sheltered and less demanding mode of speech.

What is lost in this movement is not merely a theory of meaning. What is lost is theology itself.

What Happens to Schools When Theology Loses Its Object

Once theology no longer understands itself as discourse ordered toward reality, theological education is transformed from the inside out. The school may still teach doctrine, Scripture, history, and ministry. It may still cultivate piety, discipline, and pastoral skill. Yet the purpose of these activities has subtly shifted. Students are no longer being formed principally to speak truthfully about God, creation, sin, redemption, and the world. They are being formed to use a religious language competently, to inhabit a tradition intelligibly, and to function within a community of practice.

This work is not worthless. The church indeed requires formation, discipline, inheritance, and faithful practice. But when these become detached from theology’s primary obligation to truth, something decisive has been surrendered. Theological language becomes increasingly expressive, therapeutic, adaptive, and intraecclesial. It continues to function, but at a lower register. It can sustain discourse within a believing community while becoming progressively unable to say what is the case.

That inability is disastrous. The world beyond the church does not finally ask whether theology is moving, edifying, or coherent within its own circle. It asks what theology is about. It asks whether theological language refers, whether it makes claims, and whether it can account for itself as more than disciplined religious self description. When theology can no longer answer such questions, it loses public intelligibility. It may continue speaking, but it no longer knows the precise character of its own utterance.

The consequences return upon the church itself. A theological discourse that cannot in principle withstand the question of truth cannot indefinitely preserve its force even among believers. The church too lives within a world in which truth claims are tested, challenged, and compared. If theology cannot say what sort of claim it is making, it cannot long sustain confidence in those whom it teaches.

The First Question

For this reason, the first question confronting theological education is not practical but conceptual. Before strategy, before enrollment, before budgets, before institutional design, there stands a more fundamental inquiry: What kind of language is theology? When theology speaks, what kind of claim does it make? And what would have to be true of God, world, and language for theological speech to bear truth?

These questions must come first because everything else depends upon them. If they are not answered explicitly, they will be answered implicitly, and usually badly. Institutions will continue to speak as though theology were one thing while structuring their teaching as though it were another. They will retain the vocabulary of truth while quietly educating for something less than truth. They will invoke doctrine while hollowing out its ontological seriousness. In that way theology is not denied outright. It is thinned, displaced, and rendered increasingly weightless.

Renewal therefore cannot begin merely with better programs, more efficient administration, stronger branding, or more energetic recruitment. Theology cannot be rescued by management. It cannot be restored by institutional optimism alone. It must first recover its object. It must once again understand itself as discourse concerning God, God’s acts, and the relation of creation to its Creator. It must dare again to make claims that are not reducible to private spirituality, communal performance, or moral aspiration. It must recover the nerve to speak of reality.

That recovery will not remove difficulty. It will intensify it. The moment theology again claims to be truth bearing speech, it must face anew the hard questions of meaning, causation, reference, revelation, and interpretation. But those are precisely the questions theology ought never to have ceased asking. Better the difficulty of truth than the comfort of conceptual surrender.

Two Different Callings for a School

At this point every theological institution faces a decision. Is it chiefly teaching students to use theological language well within the life of the church? Or is it teaching them to make truthful judgments about reality through theological discourse? The difference is not small. It is determinative.

If the former is the true task, then the school will properly concentrate on formation, fluency, tradition, and ecclesial competence. It will teach students how to speak fittingly and faithfully within an inherited community of belief. It will cultivate the practices and habits that render such speech possible. There is dignity in this work. But it is not yet the full work of theology.

If the latter is the true task, then a more rigorous and demanding vocation emerges. Students must be taught not only what Christians have said, but what sort of reality Christian claims intend. They must learn to ask what it means for theological language to refer, what kind of causation divine action implies, what truth in theology can mean, and under what conditions theological assertions may be judged more than expressive, useful, or socially authorized. In this case the school is not merely training religious speakers. It is forming theologians.

Only the latter preserves theology as theology in the strong sense.

The Public Responsibility of Theology

This issue has become acute because theology no longer inhabits a culture willing to grant it authority in advance. It cannot presume its own seriousness. It must show that its claims are intelligible, that they are about something, and that they cannot be reduced to the religious interiority of the speaker or the cultural habits of a community.

To say this is not to deny the interpretive character of theology. Theology certainly interprets. It receives an inheritance, reflects upon it, and speaks it anew within changing historical and intellectual horizons. But interpretation must not become a solvent. Theology interprets only on the condition that what it interprets is not dissolved into the act of interpretation itself. Christian confession cannot be reduced to its use, its effect, or its communal resonance without ceasing to be confession in the strong sense.

Theology therefore has a public responsibility. It must be able to say, with conceptual seriousness, what sort of claim it makes when it speaks of God. It must not hide behind pious language when pressed on the question of truth. It must not substitute fluency for reference, sincerity for ontology, or usefulness for reality. If it does, then it may continue to function religiously, but it will no longer know itself theologically.

The Decision Before Us

We therefore stand before a stark and unavoidable choice. Shall theology become primarily a language of identity, practice, and communal self understanding? Or shall it recover itself as disciplined discourse concerning God, revelation, world, and truth? Shall it rest content with being meaningful inside a protected circle, or shall it once again risk speaking about what is the case?

No school can evade this decision indefinitely. If it does not know what theology is, it cannot know what kind of students it is forming, what kind of faculty it requires, what sort of curriculum it ought to build, or what future it should seek. The question is not peripheral. It is architectonic. Everything else depends upon it.

For that reason, the crisis of theological education is not first a crisis of money, scale, or structure. It is a crisis of self understanding. It is a crisis concerning the very nature of theology. Until that is addressed, every practical reform remains unstable, because the institution has not yet decided what work it exists to do.

Conclusion

Theological education will not be renewed by technique alone. It will not be saved by administrative efficiency, by therapeutic ministerial language, or by institutional ingenuity severed from theological clarity. It can endure only if it knows again what theology is: a disciplined discourse ordered toward truth, speaking of God, God’s works, and the world before God.

Where that conviction is restored, much else may yet be rebuilt. Intellectual confidence may return. Curricula may recover coherence. Faculty and students may again know what kind of labor they share. The school may once more stand before church, academy, and public with a seriousness proportionate to its calling.

Where that conviction is not restored, institutions may continue for a time to speak in theological accents while no longer knowing what theology is.

What Can You Study at the Christ School of Theology?

This essay arises from the work of the Christ School of Theology. For a broader account of the School’s mission and theological rationale, see the earlier posts in this series.

There are theological schools that can describe their purpose in noble and elevated language, yet leave unanswered the most practical of questions: What, precisely, can one study there? A school may speak of formation, tradition, mission, service, and excellence, and still never make sufficiently clear what kind of intellectual and theological labor it actually offers. That clarity matters. If the Christ School of Theology is to be understood rightly, then it must be known not only why it exists, but also what sort of study it makes possible.

The answer is that the Christ School of Theology offers a coherent range of theological and academic pathways ordered to the formation of pastors, scholars, teachers, leaders, and serious lay Christians. Its graduate offerings include the Master of Ministry, Master of Chaplain Ministry, Master of Divinity, Master of Arts, Master of Sacred Theology, Doctor of Ministry, and Doctor of Philosophy. Alongside these stand undergraduate and certificate pathways through Christ College, including the Associate of Arts, Bachelor of Arts, and certificate programs. Taken together, these offerings make clear that CST is not simply a seminary in the narrow sense, nor merely a graduate division detached from broader Christian formation. It is a theological school with multiple levels of entry and multiple forms of vocation in view.

That breadth is not accidental. It reflects a judgment about the needs of the Church and the age. The Church does not require only one kind of laborer. It requires pastors who can preach and teach, scholars who can think deeply and write carefully, chaplains who can carry the Gospel into institutions of suffering and service, teachers who can hand on the tradition, and lay Christians whose intellectual and theological formation equips them for faithfulness in family, society, and congregation. Nor does every vocation begin from the same point. Some students arrive seeking ordination. Some come in search of advanced academic work. Some are second-career students discerning a call. Some begin with undergraduate study. Some seek focused certificates rather than full degrees. A theological school that takes the Church seriously must make room for this variety without surrendering seriousness of purpose.

Yet it would be a mistake to think of these offerings as a mere catalog of options. The deeper unity of the School lies elsewhere. What the Christ School of Theology seeks to do better than most theological schools is to hold together two tasks that are too often torn apart. On the one hand, theology must know the Christian tradition deeply. It must know Scripture, doctrine, history, confession, and proclamation. On the other hand, theology must understand with equal seriousness the intellectual and cultural horizon into which that tradition must now be spoken. Some schools preserve the tradition by retreating from careful study of the present age. Others immerse themselves in the contemporary horizon and thereby lose the depth, grammar, and claims of the tradition itself. The Christ School of Theology refuses both temptations. It proceeds from the conviction that theology is irreducibly hermeneutical: the disciplined effort to interpret the horizon of the Christian tradition into the contemporary horizon without surrendering the integrity of either.

That judgment explains why students here study not only biblical and doctrinal materials, but also philosophy, ethics, church history, pastoral theology, and the cultural and intellectual conditions under which Christian claims must now be heard. Theology cannot be content merely to preserve a body of inherited statements, as though the task were only archival. Nor may it content itself with adapting Christian language to the sensibilities of the age, as though theology were chiefly a matter of cultural translation. Its labor is more demanding. It must understand the classical Christian tradition deeply enough to speak it faithfully, and it must understand the aporias of the present deeply enough to know how that tradition must now be proclaimed, defended, and taught.

This is why the graduate programs have the shape they do. The Master of Divinity, for example, serves those preparing for pastoral ministry, where biblical knowledge, theological judgment, historical awareness, and practical wisdom must be held together. The Master of Arts serves those seeking concentrated theological study that may lead toward teaching, service in the church, or further academic work. The Master of Sacred Theology, Doctor of Ministry, and Doctor of Philosophy each represent more advanced forms of theological labor, whether in scholarly research, ministerial reflection, or the disciplined pursuit of theology at the highest academic levels. These are not interchangeable degrees. Each belongs to a different vocational and intellectual contour, yet all presuppose that theology is something to be studied rigorously, not merely admired from a distance.

The same is true, in a different register, for the undergraduate and certificate offerings. The undergraduate side exists because Christian intellectual formation should not begin only once a student has already reached seminary or graduate work. A classical Christian education at the undergraduate level can prepare students for ministry, for further theological study, or for service to neighbor in a range of settings. The certificates likewise serve students whose callings, circumstances, or immediate aims require serious study in a form more focused than a full degree program. Here again the School’s breadth is not dilution. It is an attempt to serve distinct vocational needs without abandoning theological substance.

How, then, does such study actually occur? The Christ School of Theology teaches through a live, online, synchronous model rather than through a merely self-paced or content-delivery approach. Students and faculty meet in real time. They can question, clarify, respond, and press claims in the presence of one another. The point is not convenience for its own sake, but accountability, encounter, and seriousness. Theology is not learned merely by absorbing information. It is learned where one must answer for what one says, where distinctions are demanded, where confusion is exposed, and where the mind is pushed beyond repetition into judgment. The School’s educational form is therefore ordered toward rigor rather than dilution, and toward presence rather than educational solitude.

This point deserves emphasis because it bears directly on the School’s larger vocation. The Christ School of Theology does not understand itself as existing only for one ecclesial constituency, however important that constituency may be. It stands within the classical Christian tradition from a Lutheran perspective, but it does so with a view toward theology’s three publics: the church, the academy, and the general public. For that reason, study at CST is never merely internal or tribal. Students are not being formed simply to repeat acceptable formulas within a protected ecclesial setting. They are being formed to speak Christian truth as truth—to the Church, certainly, but also in the academy and before the world.

This is why the School’s deeper theological accents matter even in describing what can be studied here. Theological realism, semantic realism, theophysical causation, a theology of nature, and the perspicuity of Scripture are not decorative themes. They are operating convictions that orient the School’s work. They express a refusal to reduce theology to private value, communal self-description, or churchly performance cut off from the common world. A theological language that functions only on religious occasions while spinning idly before the academy and the public cannot finally mediate the external Word of God. The Word addresses human beings in the world they actually inhabit. It comes from without. It is not owned by the Church, but creates the Church. To study theology well, then, is to learn how Christian claims may again be spoken with ontological seriousness, semantic clarity, and evangelical force.

From this perspective, the question What can you study at the Christ School of Theology? has a twofold answer. One may answer first in institutional terms: one may study undergraduate programs, certificates, pastoral ministry, chaplaincy, theological arts, advanced ministerial practice, and doctoral scholarship. That answer is necessary and true. But one may also answer more deeply: one may study here how to think theologically in a time when theology can no longer assume its own intelligibility. One may study Scripture and tradition, but also the conditions under which Scripture and tradition are to be proclaimed now. One may study the Church’s inheritance, but also how that inheritance addresses a world in which transcendence has grown dim, causation has been severed from meaning, and theological language is too often treated as expressive residue rather than truth-bearing speech.

The Christ School of Theology offers this work because the age requires it. It requires more than the preservation of churchly vocabulary. It requires more than managerial training or spiritual uplift. It requires the disciplined formation of men and women who can read carefully, think clearly, judge soundly, and speak faithfully. It requires pastors, scholars, teachers, and lay Christians who understand both the greatness of the Christian tradition and the strangeness of the world into which that tradition must now be spoken.

That is what one may study at the Christ School of Theology.

And anything less would be unworthy both of the tradition it serves and of the age to which it must speak.

Christ School of Theology: Why Online Theological Education Need Not Be Thin

This essay arises from the work of the Christ School of Theology. For the broader theological framework within which it stands, see the Christ School of Theology.

There remains a common assumption, both inside and outside the church, that online theological education must finally be thin theological education. One may perhaps deliver information online. One may perhaps distribute content, post lectures, assign readings, and grade papers. But can one really teach theology there? Can one form pastors there? Can one cultivate the habits of mind, judgment, attentiveness, and fidelity that serious theological education requires?

Many assume the answer must be no.

That assumption is understandable. Much online education has in fact deserved suspicion. Where education becomes the mere transfer of digitized content, where students work largely alone, where instruction becomes impersonal and asynchronous, and where intellectual accountability gives way to administrative convenience, thinness is exactly what follows. There is then little reason to be surprised when the result is educational malnourishment. One may have information, but not formation. One may have access, but not depth. One may have credentials, but not judgment.

Yet it does not follow that online theological education as such must be thin. What follows is only that a bad form of it will be thin, just as a bad residential model will be thin. The question is not whether education occurs through a screen or in a building. The question is whether the conditions necessary for serious theological study are actually present.

Theology is not learned by proximity to brick. It is not learned simply because one has moved to a campus, walked through old hallways, or sat in a classroom with stained glass nearby. Theology is learned where students are drawn into disciplined attention to Scripture, doctrine, history, language, argument, and proclamation. It is learned where teachers and students meet one another in real time, where claims are tested, where confusions are exposed, where distinctions are demanded, and where the mind is forced beyond slogans into judgment. If these things are absent, one may still have an institution, but one does not yet have serious theological education.

The question, then, is whether an online model can sustain such conditions. The answer is that it can, provided that the model is built not around convenience, but around presence, accountability, and rigor.

At the Christ School of Theology, the point of online instruction is not to reduce theology to downloadable content. It is rather to extend serious theological education beyond the narrow limits imposed by relocation. There are many students who cannot simply leave home, uproot families, abandon vocations, or detach from congregational settings in order to study theology. Some are already serving churches. Some are engaged in chaplaincy or other ministries. Some are second career students. Some live in places where relocation would itself sever the very ties through which theological vocation is being tested and deepened. To say that such persons may undertake rigorous theological study without abandoning those responsibilities is not to cheapen theological education. On the contrary, it may strengthen it.

For theological education should not occur in abstraction from the actual life of the church. One of the weaknesses of some residential models has been the temptation to separate the student too sharply from the ecclesial, pastoral, and vocational contexts in which theological judgment must finally operate. A student may then become skilled at seminary performance while remaining oddly distant from the real congregational life into which he or she will later be sent. By contrast, a properly ordered online model allows students to remain embedded in local communities of faith even while undergoing rigorous theological instruction. The congregation does not replace the school, nor does the school replace the congregation. Each can serve the other.

This is why the distinction between asynchronous and live teaching matters so much. Thinness enters most quickly where education becomes solitary, self paced, and largely unanswerable. Real time teaching changes the matter. When faculty and students meet live, one can question, respond, challenge, clarify, and redirect. One can see whether a student understands or is merely repeating. One can press a claim until its ambiguity is exposed. One can hold a discussion to its proper object rather than allow it to drift into impressionism. In short, one can teach.

Good theological education has always required more than the possession of data. It requires habits of seriousness. Students must learn to read carefully, to distinguish the central from the peripheral, to follow an argument, to weigh a theological judgment, and to state clearly what is and is not being claimed. They must learn not only to affirm Christian truths, but to understand their logic, their grammar, their ecclesial use, and their relation to the world in which they are confessed. None of this requires geographic co presence as such. It requires disciplined intellectual encounter. Where that encounter exists, theological education may be real and substantial. Where it does not, no campus architecture can save it.

Nor should one ignore the opportunities that a serious online model affords. It allows theological schools to gather students and faculty from a wider geographical range. It allows people rooted in very different ecclesial and regional contexts to study together while remaining in those contexts. It makes possible forms of theological conversation that are not easily available within a single residential setting. It can also keep before students a truth sometimes obscured in more insulated academic environments: theology is not an escape from the world, but preparation for thought and proclamation within it.

Of course, none of this means that every online theological school is strong, or that every live digital classroom automatically becomes rigorous. Educational seriousness never comes cheaply. It depends upon faculty who know what they are doing, curricula shaped by theological judgment, students willing to submit themselves to discipline, and institutions clear about the difference between education and content delivery. The medium does not eliminate these demands. It intensifies them. One must work harder, not less, to prevent dilution.

But when these demands are met, there is no reason in principle why online theological education must be thin. Indeed, in an age such as ours, it may in many cases be the wiser form. It can join rigor to accessibility, community to flexibility, and deep study to ongoing ecclesial life. It can bring serious theological education to those who would otherwise be shut out of it. And it can do so without surrendering the live exchange, accountability, and intellectual pressure through which theological education becomes real.

The Church does not need more educational romanticism. It does not need nostalgia for old forms simply because they are old. It needs pastors, scholars, teachers, and leaders who have actually learned to think theologically, speak clearly, and confess faithfully. Where those things happen, theological education has substance. Where they do not, it is thin, whatever the setting.

The question is therefore not whether theology can be taught online. The question is whether it is being taught well.

The Christ School of Theology answers that question by insisting that accessibility need not entail dilution, and that online theological education, when live, rigorous, and ordered toward formation, need not be thin at all.

For readers wishing to pursue the broader theological and philosophical framework within which this work stands, the following essays may serve as points of entry:

• Toward a Formal Theology of Teleo-Spaces I: Why Intelligibility Needs a Formal Grammar
• When Theology Cannot Mean: Realism, Irrealism, and the Crisis of Theological Language
• What Does Resurrection Mean? On What Christians Are Claiming When They Say, “He Is Risen”
• On Differentiated Possibility and the Ground of Intelligibility

Christ School of Theology: Why this School Exists

The Christ School of Theology is the graduate theological school within the Institute of Lutheran Theology, dedicated to theological education, formation, and research in service to the classical Christian tradition from a Lutheran perspective.

The Christ School of Theology exists because theology in our time can no longer assume the world in which it speaks. There was an age in which the Church’s language still lived within a shared moral, metaphysical, and cultural grammar. Even when men and women resisted the Gospel, they often still understood what was being claimed by it. That age has largely passed. The present difficulty is therefore not merely that churches are weaker, denominations more fragmented, or religious habits more attenuated. The difficulty is deeper. It concerns the conditions under which Christian proclamation may again be heard as bearing truth, as referring to reality, and as making an indispensable claim upon those who hear it.

A theological school worthy of the name must begin there. It must ask not only what the tradition has said, but under what conditions that tradition can now be spoken faithfully and intelligibly. It must ask not only how pastors are trained, but how the Gospel is to be proclaimed into a horizon that no longer easily knows what sin is, why grace is needed, or what it could mean for God to act. It must ask, in short, how the Church’s inherited kerygma is to encounter a world in which transcendence has grown dim, metaphysical confidence has collapsed, and theological language is routinely redescribed as expression, projection, or communal performance. The Christ School of Theology exists because these questions can no longer be postponed.

Legally established as the Institute of Lutheran Theology, the Christ School of Theology seeks to preserve, promote, and propagate the classical Christian tradition from a Lutheran perspective. But those words should be heard with their full weight. To preserve the tradition is not to embalm it. To promote it is not to market a brand. To propagate it is not merely to repeat formulas inherited from the past. The tradition lives only where it is understood, thought through, confessed, and proclaimed anew. A theological school therefore fails in its work when it contents itself either with pious repetition or with cultural adaptation. If it merely repeats, it becomes antiquarian. If it merely adapts, it dissolves. Its task is more difficult and more noble: to bring the historic proclamation of Christ into disciplined engagement with the intellectual and cultural horizon of the present without surrendering either the substance of that proclamation or the seriousness of the horizon into which it must speak.

This is why the school’s educational model matters. The Christ School of Theology offers rigorous theological education in a fully online, live, synchronous form. This is not an accidental delivery mechanism, but a considered judgment about the nature of theological formation in our time. Serious theology does not require geographical relocation, but it does require presence, exchange, accountability, correction, and community. One does not become a theologian, pastor, teacher, or church leader merely by consuming information. One must be drawn into disciplined conversation, made to answer for claims, forced to distinguish the clear from the vague, and habituated to the labor of thought. Theological education worthy of the Church requires not only content, but encounter. The live and synchronous character of the school’s work witnesses to this conviction.

Nor does the Christ School of Theology understand itself as existing simply to service one ecclesiastical constituency, however important that service remains. It exists because the theological problem confronting the Church is larger than denominational machinery. The age itself has changed. The modern and late-modern self inhabits a world differently than did its predecessors. God no longer appears obvious; the world no longer seems charged with givenness; and the self, turned inward upon its own authenticity, increasingly mistakes immediacy for truth. In such a world, the Church requires more than managerial competence, therapeutic speech, or vaguely spiritual uplift. It requires pastors, scholars, and teachers who can think dogmatically within the conditions of the present, who can speak of God without embarrassment, and who can recover the possibility that theological language may actually say what is the case.

This, finally, is why the name Christ School of Theology must be used. There was a time in which denominational descriptors could carry strong positive content in the public imagination. That time, too, has largely passed. In an increasingly post-denominational and religiously disoriented setting, the words Christ, School, and Theology state directly what should stand first. They clarify the proper public face of the School’s graduate theological mission. What should first be heard is not tribal location, but the School’s fundamental task: theology ordered to Christ for the sake of the Church and the world.

The Christ School of Theology therefore exists neither as an administrative convenience nor as a modest educational enterprise among many others. It exists because theology must again become equal to its age. It exists because the Church still needs places where Scripture, tradition, proclamation, and thought are held together under discipline. It exists because the Gospel still must be preached into a world that no longer understands itself. And it exists because there remains no faithful future for the Church where theology is not once again treated as a matter of truth, reality, judgment, and life.

If this sounds ambitious, it is. But anything less would be unworthy of the hour. The Christ School of Theology exists because the hour demands more than maintenance. It demands seriousness. It demands courage. It demands that theology again learn how to speak.

What Does Resurrection Mean? On What Christians Are Claiming When They Say, “He Is Risen”

Christians say each Easter, and many say each week, “He is risen.” Yet it is no longer clear that all who utter these words mean the same thing by them. Is this a cognitive claim? If so, what kind of claim is it, and what could make it true? Everything depends upon whether Easter names an objective act of God or merely the significance later attached to Jesus.

The Question We Must Ask

What does resurrection mean? Christians say each year, and many say each week, He is risen. Yet it is no longer clear that all who utter these words mean the same thing by them, or even that they take them to be the kind of claim the Church has historically taken them to be. For some, resurrection names a miracle in the strongest sense: God raised the crucified Jesus from the dead. For others, it is a symbol of hope, a poetic way of saying that love is stronger than hate, or that the memory of Jesus still animates the community of faith. For still others, it names the disciples’ transformed consciousness after the catastrophe of the cross, an existential recovery of courage after despair. These are not small differences. They concern what Christians are actually claiming when they say, He is risen.

The first task, then, is conceptual. What sort of assertion is He is risen? Is it a claim about reality, or a way of interpreting reality? Does it refer to something God has done, or to the significance believers have found in Jesus after his death? Does it name an event, however mysterious, or does it function as symbol, confession, or communal orientation? These questions arise because in modern theology and modern culture the meaning of resurrection has become unstable. The language remains; the content often shifts beneath it.

This instability matters because Christianity has always understood Easter as proclamation. The earliest Christians did not merely say that the cause of Jesus lived on, nor that his ideals remained inspiring, nor that his followers had recovered courage after his execution. They proclaimed that God had raised him. Whatever difficulties attend that proclamation, its grammar is plain enough. Something is being said to have happened, something that cannot be reduced to the inner life of the disciples or to the continuing vitality of Jesus’ teaching. Easter, in its classical Christian sense, is not first the announcement that the disciples came to see things differently. It is the announcement that God acted.

The Logical Type of the Easter Claim

Before asking whether He is risen is true, one must ask what kind of utterance it is. Is it cognitive or noncognitive? Does it purport to say what is the case, or does it instead express an attitude, commitment, hope, or stance?

This distinction is decisive. Expressivism is noncognitive. On such a view, He is risen does not fundamentally report a state of affairs. It expresses commitment, hope, endorsement, or ecclesial posture. The sentence retains declarative grammar, but its deepest function is not descriptive. One still says He is risen, but what is displayed is not what God has done to Jesus so much as the community’s orientation toward Jesus, death, and the future.

Subjectivism is different. It is cognitive. It does treat He is risen as truth-apt. But it locates the truthmaker within the sphere of consciousness: the experience of the disciples, the continuing consciousness of the Church, the transformation of existential self-understanding, or the occurrence of certain moral or religious states. Subjectivism does not say that the sentence merely expresses a stance. It says something. But what it says is made true by what obtains within human mindedness.

A further clarification is needed. The psychological states of others are objective for me. They may obtain apart from my awareness, perception, conception, and language, and they may therefore be investigated from a third-person standpoint. That is why psychology and historiography are possible. Yet epistemic objectivity is not the same thing as ontological realism. If the truth of He is risen were exhausted by the disciples’ psychological states, then the claim would still depend upon human awareness, conception, and experience as such, even if not upon mine.

That is why one must distinguish a weaker and a stronger sense of realism. If one says, x is real if and only if x obtains apart from my awareness, perception, conception, and language, then the psychological states of others may count as real. But if one says, x is real if and only if x obtains apart from human awareness, perception, conception, and language, then those same states no longer count as real in the stronger sense. They may be objective for inquiry without being mind-independent. The stronger sense is the one at issue in theological realism.

An objective cognitive reading of Easter in the strongest sense therefore requires more than the existence of Easter-faith, Easter-experience, or Easter-interpretation. It requires that something obtain apart from human mindedness as such. The decisive question then becomes: what must obtain if He is risen is to be true in that stronger realist sense?

What Could Make “He Is Risen” True?

Once the issue is framed in this way, the truthmaker question can no longer remain vague. It is not enough to say that resurrection is “real” or that “God acted.” One must ask more exactly: what in particular could make the sentence true?

The disciples’ renewed courage cannot be the truthmaker. Nor can the Church’s enduring hope, its liturgical confidence, or its Easter-shaped life. These may all be effects of resurrection-faith, or even effects of the risen Christ if Christ is risen, but they are not what makes the sentence true. They concern reception and appropriation, not the state of affairs to which the sentence answers.

Nor are the disciples’ experiences, taken simply as psychological events, sufficient truthmakers. One may say truly that certain disciples had visions, convictions, affective transformations, or powerful experiences of presence. Such claims may be psychologically and historically objective in the weaker sense just described. But if He is risen is made true only by such states, then its truth remains enclosed within human consciousness. The claim may still be about something more than my own mind, but it is not yet about something that obtains apart from human mindedness as such.

Neither are the empty tomb and the appearances, taken simply as evidential data, themselves the truthmakers. They are signs, testimonies, and evidentially relevant features within the Easter witness. But evidence for a claim is not identical with the state of affairs that makes the claim true.

The bare survival of Jesus’ soul is likewise insufficient. If that were all, then Easter would collapse into a doctrine of postmortem continuation. Yet the Church has always meant more than this. The scandal of Easter lies not in the persistence of consciousness after death, but in the victory of God over death itself.

Simple revivification is insufficient as well. If the truthmaker were merely that a corpse was biologically reanimated into ordinary mortal life, then Easter would amount to a remarkable reversal within the old order. But the Church has not meant Lazarus repeated. Resurrection, in the Christian sense, is not temporary return to perishability.

The strongest candidate truthmaker is therefore something like this: that the numerically same Jesus who was crucified, died, and was buried now lives by the act of God in a transformed, death-transcending mode of embodied existence. The truthmaker is thus neither bare psychology nor bare symbolism, neither sheer soul-survival nor mere biological reversal, but a divine act upon this Jesus yielding a transformed continuity between the crucified one and the risen one.

This is realism, but it is not crude resuscitationism. It does not say that a corpse simply resumed ordinary biological life. It says something far stranger and more difficult: that God acted objectively upon Jesus Christ so that the crucified one now lives beyond the ordinary conditions of mortality. Easter is therefore realist without being naively physicalist, and objective without being reducible to ordinary empirical occurrence.

The Post-Kantian Drift

Once these distinctions are in hand, much of modern theology becomes easier to read. The decisive question is always the same: what sort of claim is being made by the sentence, and what sort of thing could make it true? The theological tradition since the Enlightenment can often be read as a series of increasingly subtle relocations of the truthmaker for Christian discourse.

Kant is the great watershed. His critical philosophy does not simply reject religion; it restricts theoretical knowledge and presses religion toward practical reason. In that setting, claims such as He is risen become difficult to handle as straightforward judgments concerning divine action in reality. They are pressured toward moral significance, practical necessity, or regulative function.

Fichte radicalizes the movement. Religious language tends increasingly to function as language about vocation, ethical direction, or the self’s relation to the moral world-order. Easter is then no longer securely anchored in a singular divine act upon Jesus, but is tempted toward the sphere of moral or spiritual consciousness.

Schelling reopens the question of revelation and ontological depth, but the issue remains whether Easter is preserved as the singular act of God in history or absorbed into a larger speculative grammar of revelation.

Hegel transforms the matter still further. If spirit comes to actuality through the historical unfolding of consciousness and reconciliation, then resurrection is readily redescribed as a moment in the self-manifestation of spirit rather than as a singular divine act standing over against the Church’s appropriation of it.

Lotze then gives later theology one of its most important tools. Once one distinguishes sharply between the world of causal explanation and the world of worth and significance, resurrection can be preserved as a value-judgment even where confidence in its objective truthmaker has weakened. He is risen may then mean that Jesus is of abiding worth, that his significance was vindicated, or that the community stands under his incomparable value. The language remains cognitive, but its truthmaker has been relocated into the sphere of value rather than event.

Seen in this light, the post-Enlightenment trajectories become more intelligible. Some are frankly noncognitive and expressivist. Some are cognitive but subjectivist. Some are intersubjectively objective without being strongly realist. Some move from event-language to value-language. Once one asks of each trajectory, what kind of claim is this? and what could make it true?, a great deal of fog lifts.

Another Decisive Distinction: Does Soteriology Precede Christology?

A further distinction clarifies modern theology even more. One must ask whether, in the order of theological construction, soteriology precedes Christology or Christology precedes soteriology. Do we begin with the human need for salvation and then interpret Christ as the answer to that need? Or do we begin with the person and history of Jesus Christ and only then derive from that who he is for us and what he accomplishes?

The point here is methodological rather than ontological. No orthodox Christian theologian means to say that salvation exists prior to Christ in reality. The question is what has explanatory priority in the theologian’s account.

Tillich exemplifies one path. One begins with the human predicament and then presents the Christian message as the answer. Estrangement is first analyzed; Christ appears as the bearer of the New Being who overcomes estrangement. Christology is thus organized by the prior soteriological question. Jesus matters because he answers the problem already disclosed in the analysis of existence.

Pannenberg moves in the opposite direction. One asks first: Who is Jesus? What happened to him? What does the resurrection disclose about his identity? Only then does one ask what this means for us. Salvation follows from Christ’s identity and history; it is not the prior lens through which Christ is first construed.

This distinction matters deeply for the resurrection question. If soteriology precedes Christology, then Easter will be handled primarily as the answer to a human need already specified in advance. Resurrection then readily becomes a function of its salvific meaning. If, however, Christology precedes soteriology, then one asks first what God has done in Jesus, and only after that what this means for humanity, judgment, forgiveness, and hope.

That is why Pannenberg remains so important. He saw clearly that the resurrection of Jesus must be treated as an objective claim and not merely as existential transformation, ecclesial value, or post-Easter interpretation. He refused the easy modern bargain whereby one preserves Easter’s significance at the cost of surrendering its objectivity.

Some Major Ways “Resurrection” Has Been Understood

At this point, the conceptual field comes more fully into view. The word resurrection has not functioned univocally. It has carried several distinct possibilities, some ancient, some modern, some half-orthodox, some plainly reductive. To say merely that there are “different interpretations” is too weak. One must see the differing structures of thought at work.

1. Resurrection as Revivification

On the crudest construal, resurrection means that a dead organism once again became biologically alive. The corpse resumes ordinary bodily functioning and returns to the same order of mortal existence it inhabited before death. This is the easiest conception to imagine, because it requires the least conceptual revision. It treats resurrection as an extraordinary instance within an otherwise familiar biological frame.

Yet this is not the Christian meaning of Easter. It is closer to revivification than resurrection. It amounts to saying that Jesus came back, as one might come back from a coma or a near-fatal injury. But the risen Christ of the Church’s confession is not simply returned to ordinary life. If this were all Easter meant, then resurrection would be only a temporary reversal, not the decisive victory over death. Revivification leaves mortality structurally untouched.

2. Resurrection as Miraculous Resuscitation

A slightly more refined version speaks not of ordinary revivification, but of miraculous resuscitation. Here one does not imagine a natural process, but a supernatural interruption. God miraculously restores the dead Jesus to life. Still, the conceptual difficulty remains. For if the result is simply the restoration of ordinary mortal life, then the miracle changes only the cause of the return, not the kind of life returned to. The question is not merely how Jesus lives again, but what kind of life he now lives. A miraculous return to perishability is still not yet what the Church has meant by resurrection.

3. Resurrection as the Survival of the Soul

Another possibility is that resurrection language is really a way of speaking about postmortem spiritual continuation. On this account, what matters is that Jesus was not annihilated by death. His soul, spirit, or consciousness survived and continued in a mode no longer bound to the body. This view is often more intellectually refined than resuscitation language, and it can seem more plausible to those who find bodily resurrection difficult.

But it too falls short of the Christian claim. The Church has never proclaimed merely that Jesus’ spirit survived. If that were all, Easter would tell us little more than many religious and philosophical traditions have already maintained. The scandal of Easter lies not in disembodied persistence, but in God’s victory over death in relation to the crucified Jesus himself. A doctrine of soul-survival weakens the creaturely and bodily density of the Christian proclamation.

4. Resurrection as Symbolic Vindication

A modern symbolic construal takes resurrection as a way of saying that Jesus was, in the end, “right,” that his cause was vindicated, or that the meaning of his life survived the attempt to destroy him. Here resurrection names not a new state of affairs obtaining in relation to Jesus himself, but the enduring force of his significance. The world tried to silence him, yet his meaning lives on.

There is rhetorical power in such a construal. One can see why it appeals to modern hearers. It allows one to retain Easter language without bearing the full ontological weight of the classical claim. Yet the sentence He is risen is thereby transformed. It no longer says that God has acted upon Jesus; it says that Jesus continues to matter. It is not about a new state of affairs regarding Christ, but about the permanence of his significance.

5. Resurrection as Existential Awakening

A further construal, especially influential in modern theology, understands resurrection in terms of the disciples’ transformation. After the devastation of the cross, the disciples were reconstituted in courage, mission, and faith. Resurrection then names not primarily what happened to Jesus, but what happened in the disciples through their post-crucifixion encounter with his significance. The Easter proclamation becomes, in effect, a report on the emergence of a new existential possibility.

This is stronger than pure symbolism because it does describe a real occurrence. It is cognitive. It speaks of something that happened. But what happened is still located within human consciousness and communal life. The truthmaker lies in the disciples’ transformation. Resurrection has here become an account of Easter-faith rather than a proclamation of an objective divine act upon Jesus.

6. Resurrection as Value-Judgment

Lotze and much later theology make possible a different shift. Resurrection may be understood as a judgment of worth. To say He is risen is to say that Jesus possesses unsurpassable value, that his life has final significance, that the world cannot nullify the worth manifest in him, or that the community rightly stands under his claim. Here the statement remains cognitive, but its truthmaker lies not in event but in value. What is “risen” is not first a person in transformed life, but the incomparable worth of Jesus in relation to faith, history, and human self-understanding.

This construal is especially important because it preserves seriousness while quietly altering ontology. It is not noncognitive expressivism. It does assert something. But what it asserts is no longer a divine act in relation to Jesus so much as an evaluative truth about Jesus’ place in human and religious life.

7. Resurrection as the Self-Manifestation of Spirit

In more idealist construals, resurrection may function as a moment in the manifestation of spirit, reconciliation, or absolute life in history. The focus shifts from what happened to this Jesus to the larger movement in which death, negation, and estrangement are aufgehoben within the life of spirit. The language becomes grand, even majestic, but once again the center of gravity shifts. Easter becomes intelligible chiefly within a speculative account of totality rather than as the singular proclamation that God raised Jesus from the dead.

This construal can preserve theological richness, but it carries an obvious danger. The singularity of Jesus may become an exemplary moment within a larger metaphysical drama rather than the unique object of Easter proclamation.

8. Resurrection as Objective Divine Act

The classical Christian claim is different from all of these, though it may share elements with some of them. It is not mere revivification, not mere soul-survival, not symbolic endurance, not simply the transformation of the disciples, not a pure value-judgment, and not merely a speculative moment in the life of spirit. It is the claim that God acted upon Jesus Christ. The one crucified, dead, and buried now lives by the act of God in a transformed, death-transcending mode of embodied existence.

This is why the classical claim is so difficult. It will not allow itself to be reduced either to ordinary biological categories or to inward religious categories. It is realist, but not crudely physicalist. It is objective, but not reducible to simple empirical occurrence. It is bodily, but not merely biological. It is historical in reference, but not merely one item among others within the ordinary causal nexus. It is precisely the kind of claim modern thought has found hardest to sustain.

9. Why These Distinctions Matter

These are not idle conceptual possibilities. They govern preaching, apologetics, liturgy, and faith itself. If resurrection means revivification, then Easter is a miracle-story. If it means soul-survival, then Easter is a doctrine of personal continuity. If it means existential awakening, then Easter is a report on the disciples. If it means value-judgment, then Easter is a claim about significance. If it means objective divine act, then Easter is the proclamation that God has done something upon which all Christian hope rests.

The word resurrection thus conceals a great mass of philosophical and theological decisions. That is why the question cannot be left vague. To say He is risen is already to have decided, whether clearly or obscurely, what sort of claim Christian proclamation is.

Why the Modern Reductions Are Not Enough

The pressure of the modern world has made weaker accounts tempting. They allow one to retain Easter language while softening Easter’s metaphysical claims. One may still speak of resurrection while meaning by it memory, courage, value, or transformed self-understanding.

But this lowering of scandal also lowers the Gospel. If resurrection is reduced to symbol, then Christianity becomes a language for coping with death rather than the proclamation of God’s victory over it. If it is reduced to existential transformation, then the decisive Easter event is no longer what happened to Jesus, but what happened to the disciples. If it is reduced to spiritual survival, then the body becomes finally irrelevant and death remains substantially unconquered. If it is reduced to value-judgment, then Jesus’ significance is preserved at the cost of the objective divine act.

The problem is not that these weaker accounts contain no insight. Of course Easter does transform existence. Of course it does generate hope. Of course it does sustain a community and invest history with meaning. But none of these effects is the resurrection itself. They are, at best, consequences of it. When they are substituted for it, theology loses its object.

What the Church Has Traditionally Meant

What, then, has the Church meant when it says that Jesus Christ is risen from the dead? It has meant, first, that the crucified Jesus truly lives by the act of God. The subject of Easter is not a timeless ideal, nor the memory of a noble martyr, but this Jesus, the one who suffered, was crucified, died, and was buried.

It has meant, second, that resurrection is neither mere resuscitation nor mere spiritual continuation. The risen Christ is continuous with the crucified Jesus, yet he is not simply returned to the old order of perishability. His life is transformed and no longer subject to death. Easter is thus the beginning, in one man, of the new creation.

It has meant, third, that the resurrection is the Father’s vindication of the Son. The cross is not canceled by Easter, but confirmed in its deepest truth. The one rejected and condemned is the very one whom God vindicates.

It has meant, fourth, that resurrection concerns the creaturely life of the one raised. God does not redeem by abandoning creaturely reality, but by bringing His life to bear upon it.

A Theological Judgment

My own judgment is that He is risen must be taken as a cognitive and truth-apt claim about divine action and reality. It is not well understood as expressivist utterance, nor is it adequately grounded in the psychological states of the disciples or the Church. Its truthmaker cannot finally lie within human consciousness, however objectively such consciousness may be studied. Nor can it be reduced to the simple revivification of a corpse.

The claim is stronger and stranger than all of these. God raised Jesus from the dead. The crucified one now lives by the act of God in a transformed, death-transcending mode of embodied existence. That is not the resuscitation of ordinary mortal life. It is the Church’s proclamation that God has acted objectively upon Jesus Christ in such a way that death no longer has authority over him.

This means that Easter is not secured by liturgical repetition alone, communal intensity alone, or the persistence of Christian memory. The decisive matter is whether the words He is risen refer to what God has in fact done. If they do not, then Christian faith remains enclosed within the sphere of human projection and religious practice. If they do, then Easter names a reality that exceeds us, judges us, comforts us, and gives us hope.

Why This Matters Now

All of this matters because ours is an age tempted to make peace with death in subtle ways. Even where people deny transcendence, they continue to long for consolation. Hence the great temptation of modern theology: to preserve the consoling effects of Easter while relinquishing its claim about reality. One may still speak of hope, courage, renewal, and life emerging from darkness. But if God has not raised Jesus Christ from the dead, these become, at last, noble fictions.

The Christian proclamation is more difficult and more daring than that. It does not say merely that spring follows winter, that communities survive tragedy, or that ideals outlive their founders. It says that the God who gives life to the dead has acted in Jesus Christ, and that because of this act the deepest truth about the world is not death but life, not negation but promise, not despair but mercy.

That is why Easter matters. That is why Christians say, He is risen. And that is why the meaning of resurrection cannot finally be left vague. For if Christ is not raised, then the Church has mistaken its own need for God’s act. But if he is raised, then death is not sovereign, hope is not delusion, and the final truth of reality is disclosed not in the tomb, but in the God who raised Jesus from the dead.

Easter is therefore not the celebration of a religious symbol. It is the proclamation of an ontological victory. The Church dares to say that the crucified Jesus lives, that God has acted, and that because He has acted, death no longer has the authority to define what is finally real.

This essay arises from the work of the Department of Philosophical Theology at the Christ School of Theology.