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.