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.

Why Congregations No Longer Make Sense: The Ontology of Christian Life after Christendom

This essay arises from the work of the Center for Congregational Revitalization (CCR) at ILT’s Christ School of Theology, which investigates the conditions under which congregations can hear, speak, and live the Christian faith intelligibly in a post-Christendom context.

The present inquiry concerns the conditions under which congregational life is intelligible at all in the early twenty-first century. What follows is not a programmatic proposal, nor a set of strategies for institutional renewal, but a more basic investigation. It asks what a congregation must be if it is to be recognized as a site of Christian life rather than as one more voluntary association among others.

The crisis now facing congregations is widely acknowledged, but it is rarely described with sufficient precision. It is said that attendance is down, that engagement is weak, that younger generations are absent, and that cultural conditions have shifted. All of this is true. Yet none of it reaches the heart of the matter. These phenomena are not the problem itself, but the surface manifestations of a deeper dislocation. The more fundamental issue is that congregational life increasingly takes place under conditions in which its central claims are no longer stably intelligible as referring to what is real.

To state the matter more directly: the difficulty is not simply that fewer people believe, but that what it would mean to believe is no longer clear. The language of God, grace, sin, redemption, and resurrection continues to be used, but its referential force has become unstable. It is heard, at times, as expressive, at times as symbolic, at times as ethically suggestive, but only intermittently as naming what is the case. Where this instability takes hold, congregational life becomes ontologically thin. It persists as form, but its substance is no longer secure.

It is at precisely this point that many contemporary responses go astray. Efforts at revitalization frequently assume that the underlying problem is one of execution: that congregations need better leadership, clearer vision, more compelling communication, or more effective programming. Such efforts are not without value, but they presuppose what is no longer given. They assume that the congregation already exists as a coherent site of meaning and that the task is to make that meaning more accessible or more attractive. But if the conditions under which that meaning is intelligible have themselves been eroded, then no amount of strategic refinement can restore what is absent. Strategy cannot generate ontology.

The question, therefore, must be pressed at a deeper level. What is a congregation? Not in sociological terms, nor in institutional terms, but in ontological and semantic terms. What must be the case for a gathering of persons to count as a congregation in the full theological sense?

A first approximation may be offered as follows. A congregation is a community constituted by practices in which the Word of God is not merely spoken, but is understood as referring to and effecting what is real. This definition is deliberately modest, yet it carries significant weight. It does not require uniformity of experience, nor does it deny the presence of doubt, struggle, or partial understanding. What it does require is that the practices of the community presuppose that the language they employ is truth-apt and world-disclosing. The Word is not merely meaningful; it is about something, and that something is the living God.

From this, several consequences follow. First, the reality of God cannot be treated as an optional background assumption. It must function as a constitutive presupposition of congregational life. Where God is tacitly bracketed, treated as a hypothesis, or reduced to a projection of communal meaning, the congregation ceases to be intelligible as a congregation in the theological sense. It becomes instead a community organized around shared values, narratives, or practices, but no longer a site of divine address and action.

Second, the language of the congregation must retain its referential integrity. The words of proclamation, prayer, and catechesis must be capable of referring beyond themselves. If they are heard only as expressions of human interiority or as symbolic gestures within a closed system of meaning, then their theological function collapses. Semantic realism is not an optional philosophical addendum to congregational life; it is one of its conditions of possibility.

Third, the practices of the congregation must be understood as participatory rather than merely expressive. In proclamation, something is said that is not reducible to the speaker’s intention. In the sacraments, something is given that is not exhausted by communal recognition. In catechesis, something is learned that is not constructed by the learner. These practices presuppose that reality exceeds the subject and that the congregation is addressed by, and drawn into, that excess.

It is here that a decisive distinction must be made between two kinds of congregational existence that are often outwardly indistinguishable. There are congregations that are formally Christian but ontologically thin. They retain the language, the structures, and even many of the practices of the tradition, yet these no longer function as disclosures of what is real. Alongside these are congregations that are ontologically thick, in which the same practices are inhabited as sites of divine presence and action. The difference between them is not primarily one of style, size, or even doctrinal precision. It is a difference in the mode of being.

If this is correct, then the task of revitalization must be reconceived. It is not first a matter of innovation, but of recovery. Not the recovery of past forms as such, but the recovery of the conditions under which those forms were intelligible as bearing truth. The question is not simply how to make congregations more effective, but how to restore them as places in which the Word of God can again be heard as referring to and effecting what is real.

This shifts the entire horizon of the discussion. Leadership, programming, and strategy remain important, but they must be subordinated to a more basic task: the cultivation of an ecclesial life in which the reality of God is presupposed, the language of faith is truth-apt, and the practices of the church are inhabited as participations in what exceeds them. Without this, revitalization will remain a matter of surface adjustment. With it, even small and fragile congregations may become again what they are called to be.

Subsequent reflections will seek to draw out the implications of this account for the concrete practices of congregational life, including proclamation, catechesis, and leadership. For the moment, it is enough to have clarified the point at which the problem must be engaged. The crisis of the congregation is, at its core, a crisis of intelligibility. And the renewal of congregational life will require nothing less than the recovery of its ontology.

Work of the Center for Congregational Revitalization (CCR), ILT’s Christ School of Theology.

Why the Emerging Church Cannot Restore Meaning: From Deconstruction to Intelligibility

This essay arises from the work of the Center for Congregational Revitalization (CCR) at ILT’s Christ School of Theology, which investigates the conditions under which congregations can hear, speak, and live the Christian faith intelligibly in a post-Christendom context.

I. The Misdiagnosis of Decline

Across the contemporary ecclesial landscape, a common narrative has taken hold. Congregations are declining. Participation is weakening. Institutional Christianity is losing its cultural and social centrality. In response, a wide range of proposals has emerged, many of which seek to reimagine the church in more flexible, adaptive, and contextually sensitive forms.

Among the most influential of these responses has been what is often called the “Emerging Church.” It presents itself not as a programmatic reform but as a reorientation of Christian existence. Its proponents speak of conversation rather than proclamation, community rather than institution, authenticity rather than authority. They seek to create spaces in which individuals may renegotiate inherited beliefs and practices in light of contemporary experience.

There is, at first glance, something compelling in this effort. It recognizes that the problem facing the church is not merely organizational. It acknowledges that the conditions under which Christian language is heard and understood have changed. It senses that what once could be assumed can no longer be presumed.

Yet for all this, the movement remains fundamentally misdirected, for it does not address the deepest level of the crisis.

The central issue is not that the church has failed to adapt its forms. It is that the conditions that once made theological language intelligible have been eroded. The problem is not first institutional. It is semantic and ontological.

Until this is seen, all attempts at revitalization—no matter how creative—remain superficial.

II. Deconstruction as Religious Orientation

The Emerging Church is best understood not as a coherent movement with defined doctrines, but as a shared orientation. Its unifying feature is not what it affirms, but what it resists. It resists institutional authority, doctrinal fixity, and the perceived rigidity of inherited forms of Christianity. In their place, it elevates openness, plurality, and ongoing reinterpretation.

At the heart of this orientation lies a continual practice of deconstruction. Beliefs are not received as given but treated as material for revision. Practices are not normative but experimental. Identity is not stable but negotiated. The church itself is not a fixed reality but an evolving network of relationships, conversations, and experiences.

This deconstructive posture is not accidental. It arises from a broader cultural situation in which claims to truth are met with suspicion, and where meaning is understood to be constructed rather than given. Within this horizon, the task of theology is no longer to articulate what is the case, but to facilitate processes by which individuals may find what is meaningful for them.

Thus faith becomes conversation. Doctrine becomes narrative. Proclamation becomes performance.

What is lost in this shift is not merely clarity, but reference.

III. The Loss of Theological Reference

The decisive weakness of the Emerging Church lies here: it cannot secure the referential status of its own language.

To speak theologically is to intend something. It is to say not merely what is meaningful, but what is the case. It is to speak of God, not as a projection of human discourse, but as that which stands over against and addresses the human subject. Without this referential orientation, theological language collapses into expressive activity.

The Emerging Church, however, systematically suspends this question.

It does not deny reference outright. Rather, it relocates it. Truth is no longer understood as correspondence to reality, but as the outcome of communal discourse. What is “true” is what can be sustained within the conversation. The criterion is no longer adequation to what is, but coherence within what is said.

This shift has profound consequences.

If theological claims do not refer beyond the practices that sustain them, then they cannot bind. If they cannot bind, they cannot command belief. If they cannot command belief, they cannot form a community ordered toward truth.

What remains is a space of negotiated meaning, in which individuals are affirmed but not adjudicated, included but not instructed, accompanied but not addressed.

Such a space may be psychologically appealing. It may even sustain a certain kind of communal life for a time. But it cannot sustain a congregation as congregation.

For a congregation is not merely a gathering of individuals in conversation. It is a community constituted by its relation to what is proclaimed as true.

IV. The Instability of Deconstructive Ecclesial Forms

The practical consequences of this failure are already visible.

Communities shaped by deconstructive orientations tend toward instability. Their structures remain informal, their commitments provisional, their practices continually subject to revision. Participation is often intense but transient. Leadership is diffuse. Institutional continuity is difficult to maintain.

This is not simply the result of poor organization. It is the natural outcome of the underlying orientation.

Where no claim is permitted to stand with normative authority, no structure can endure. Where all forms are subject to continual renegotiation, no form can stabilize. Where the individual is the final arbiter of meaning, communal coherence becomes fragile.

It is therefore not surprising that many such communities function as transitional spaces. They provide a context for those disillusioned with more traditional forms of Christianity, offering a place in which inherited beliefs may be questioned and reconfigured. But they rarely provide a durable framework for sustained ecclesial life.

They are, in this sense, parasitic upon the very traditions they critique. They draw their energy from the deconstruction of inherited forms, yet lack the resources to generate new forms capable of enduring beyond that deconstruction.

V. The Category Error: Adaptation Without Ground

The fundamental error of the Emerging Church lies in its attempt to solve a problem of intelligibility through adaptation of form.

It assumes that if the church becomes more conversational, more inclusive, more flexible, it will once again become meaningful. But meaning does not arise from form alone. It arises from the relation between language and reality.

One may alter the setting of proclamation, soften its tone, or multiply its modes of expression. But if what is said is no longer heard as referring to what is real, these changes do not restore intelligibility. They merely obscure its absence.

The result is a subtle but decisive displacement. The focus shifts from what is said to the conditions under which it is said. The success of theological language is measured not by its truth, but by its capacity to generate engagement.

This is not revitalization. It is accommodation to the loss of intelligibility.

VI. Toward a Different Diagnosis

If the analysis offered here is correct, then the path forward cannot consist in further experimentation with ecclesial forms. Nor can it rest content with the multiplication of conversational spaces.

What is required is a recovery of the conditions under which theological language can once again function as language that refers.

This requires, at minimum, the reassertion of three claims.

• First, that God is not a function of discourse but the ground of it. Theological language does not create its object but responds to it.
• Second, that theological statements are truth-apt. They are not merely expressive or performative, but capable of being true or false.
• Third, that the congregation is constituted by its relation to this truth. It exists not simply as a community of shared experience, but as a community addressed by what it confesses.

These claims do not solve the problem. But without them, the problem cannot even be properly posed.

VII. Conclusion: Beyond Deconstruction

The Emerging Church has performed a valuable service. It has exposed the inadequacy of merely institutional solutions to the contemporary crisis of the church. It has shown that inherited forms can no longer be assumed to carry their own intelligibility. It has made visible the depth of dislocation experienced by many within contemporary Christianity.

But it has mistaken the nature of the problem. By treating the crisis as one of form rather than of intelligibility, it has directed its energies toward continual deconstruction and reconstruction of ecclesial practices. In doing so, it has produced spaces that are open but unstable, creative but indeterminate, hospitable but unable to bind.

What it cannot do is restore the conditions under which theological language is heard as referring to what is real.

Until that task is undertaken, the revitalization of the congregation will remain beyond reach.

Work of the Center for Congregational Revitalization (CCR), ILT’s Christ School of Theology.

Catechesis after Christendom: Reclaiming the Intelligibility of the Faith

This essay arises from the work of the Center for Congregational Revitalization (CCR) at ILT’s Christ School of Theology, which investigates the conditions under which congregations can hear, speak, and live the Christian faith intelligibly in a post-Christendom context. under which the claims of the Christian faith may be received as referring to what is real.

I. The Catechetical Situation

Catechesis has always been a quiet but decisive work of the church. It does not carry the immediacy of preaching, nor the visibility of public worship, yet it is the means by which the language of the faith is actually learned, retained, and inhabited. In the Lutheran tradition, this task achieved a remarkable clarity in Luther's Small Catechism. Its structure is not merely pedagogical but theological. It orders the Christian life: existence under God’s command, trust in God’s promise, address to God in prayer, and reception of God’s gifts.

For a long time, catechesis could proceed with a certain confidence. The language it employed, though requiring explanation, was heard within a horizon that rendered it broadly intelligible. One might struggle with particular claims, but the claims themselves were not heard as unintelligible or referentially void. The catechetical task was thus largely one of instruction within an already functioning world of meaning.

That situation has changed.

II. The Loss of Intelligibility

The present difficulty is not first a matter of declining knowledge, though that is real enough. It is a matter of intelligibility. The language of the catechism is no longer reliably heard as referring to what is real. Its words remain, but their ontological weight has thinned.

This shift is often obscured because the vocabulary persists. One can still speak of “God,” “sin,” “grace,” and “forgiveness.” Yet these terms are now frequently received in ways that alter their function. They are heard as expressions of human experience, as symbolic articulations of value, or as markers of communal identity. What is no longer assumed is that they name realities that exist independently of such expression.

The result is a subtle but decisive transformation. Catechesis continues, but it increasingly operates within a framework in which its own claims are not taken to be straightforwardly about what is the case. It teaches a language whose referential status is uncertain.

III. From Instruction to Reestablishment

Under these conditions, catechesis cannot remain merely instructional. It must take on a more fundamental role: the reestablishment of intelligibility.

In an earlier setting, catechesis could presuppose that its claims were, in principle, understandable as true or false. Today, that presupposition must itself be addressed. The task is no longer only to teach what the catechism says, but to make possible an understanding of how what it says can be heard as referring to reality.

This does not entail a turn to abstraction for its own sake. It entails a renewed attentiveness to the conditions under which theological language functions as more than expression. Without such attentiveness, catechesis risks becoming either rote repetition or symbolic formation. In neither case does it form believers in the classical sense.

IV. The Catechism as Grammar of Reality

A helpful way to recover the depth of the catechetical task is to understand the catechism as a grammar rather than merely a summary.

• The Commandments articulate the structure of creaturely life before the Creator.
• The Creed names the reality of God’s action—past, present, and ongoing.
• The Lord’s Prayer presupposes that God hears and responds.
• The Sacraments enact the presence and promise of God in concrete form.

Each of these does more than convey information. Each presupposes a world in which God is an acting subject and in which human life is constituted in relation to that action. To teach the catechism is therefore to induct persons into a way of speaking that is ordered toward reality.

Yet such induction now requires more than repetition. The grammar must be shown to be responsive to what is. Without this, it may be learned formally while remaining uninhabited existentially.

V. The Question of Reference

At the center of the catechetical crisis lies the question of reference.

Traditional catechesis assumed that theological language refers. When one speaks of God, one speaks of God. When one speaks of forgiveness, one speaks of an act that occurs. This assumption did not require constant defense because it was supported by a broader cultural and conceptual framework.

That framework has weakened. Theological language is now often interpreted within models that do not support reference in this sense. It becomes expressive, performative, or communal, but not truth-apt in relation to an independent reality.

Catechesis must therefore proceed with an awareness of this shift. It must not only use theological language but help restore the conditions under which that language can be heard as referring. This is not an optional supplement. It is now intrinsic to the task.

If the difficulty lies not merely in usage but in the very possibility of reference itself, then the question of the ontological ground of intelligibility cannot be avoided. For a fuller account of the conditions under which theological language can be heard as referring to what is real, see my Nota Trinitaria on Teleo-Spaces: Intelligibility, Normativity, and the Limits of Subjectivity. 

VI. The Pastor as Interpreter of Intelligibility

This altered situation places a new weight upon the pastoral office.

The pastor remains a teacher, but not only a teacher of content. The pastor must also function as an interpreter of intelligibility. He or she must be able to discern how the language of the faith is being heard and where its referential force is being diminished or lost.

At times this will require explicit clarification. At other times it will require a more patient form of guidance, in which assumptions are brought into view and gently corrected. In either case, the aim is not to win arguments, but to make it possible for the language of the faith to be heard as meaningful in the fullest sense.

Without such work, catechesis risks speaking past its hearers. With it, catechesis can again form persons who understand what they confess.

VII. Practice and Understanding

Catechesis is not exhausted by explanation. It is sustained and deepened through practice.

Prayer, confession, and participation in the sacramental life are not adjuncts to catechesis but integral to it. They provide the lived context in which the language of the faith is enacted. In them, what is taught is also performed.

Yet practice alone cannot secure intelligibility. Where the conceptual conditions of understanding have eroded, practice can persist without clarity. It may be maintained as habit, even as its meaning becomes uncertain.

The task, therefore, is not to choose between practice and understanding, but to hold them together. Catechesis must teach and form, clarify and enact. Only in this integration can the language of the faith be both learned and inhabited.

VIII. Toward Catechetical Renewal

The renewal of catechesis will not be achieved through novelty alone. It will come through a reorientation of the task.

Catechesis must again proceed with patience, allowing its claims to unfold over time. It must be attentive to the conceptual situation of its hearers, neither assuming too much nor conceding too quickly. Above all, it must retain confidence in its own subject matter—that it speaks not merely of human possibility, but of divine reality.

Such catechesis may appear slower than what contemporary expectations demand. Yet it is precisely this slowness that allows depth to emerge. It forms not only familiarity with the language of the faith, but understanding of what that language intends.

IX. Conclusion

The catechetical challenge of the present moment is not merely pedagogical. It is ontological and semantic. It concerns the relation between language and reality, between what is said and what is.

If the church is to remain the church, it must form persons who can confess the faith with the understanding that such confession is about what is real. This cannot be assumed. It must be cultivated.

Catechesis is the place where this cultivation occurs.

In a time when the intelligibility of the faith is no longer given, catechesis becomes again what it has always, at its best, been: the patient formation of persons into a way of speaking and living in which God is not an idea, but the living One who addresses, judges, forgives, and gives life.

Congregational Life after Christendom: A Diagnostic Framework for Revitalization

This essay arises from the work of the Center for Congregational Revitalization (CCR) at ILT’s Christ School of Theology, which investigates the conditions under which congregations can hear, speak, and live the Christian faith intelligibly in a post-Christendom context.

The difficulty facing congregations today is not adequately described by decline.

Decline is real. Attendance has diminished, participation has weakened, and many congregations face uncertain futures. Yet these phenomena are better understood as symptoms than as causes. They are visible expressions of a deeper transformation, one that concerns the conditions under which congregational life can be understood at all.

The problem, more precisely, is one of intelligibility.

Congregations do not persist simply because they are well organized or effectively led. They persist when participation in their life can be recognized as fitting within the broader horizon in which individuals live. Where that horizon supports the claims of the congregation, participation appears natural, even necessary. Where it does not, participation becomes unstable, optional, and eventually difficult to sustain in any enduring way.

The present moment is marked by precisely this kind of shift. What has changed is not only how many people attend, but how congregational life is understood. The question is no longer simply whether individuals will participate. It is whether participation itself makes sense.

To address this, we must move from symptoms to structures, from observable decline to the underlying framework within which congregational life is interpreted. What follows is a brief account of five interrelated developments that, taken together, help to define that framework.

First, congregations have lost much of their social gravity. They no longer function as central gathering places within the lives of most people. Where congregational life once intersected naturally with patterns of work, family, and community, it now competes with a wide range of alternative structures. The result is not simply that people are less committed, but that fewer come into contact with congregational life in any sustained way.

Second, congregations have lost their normative status. Participation is no longer assumed as a basic feature of life. It has become one option among many and must now be justified. This shift is subtle but far reaching. Where participation was once taken for granted, it must now be explained, defended, and chosen. What is optional is always fragile.

Third, individuals increasingly inhabit what may be described as a condition of cross pressure. They live within multiple and often competing frameworks of meaning. They may affirm the language of the Christian tradition while simultaneously operating within accounts of reality that sit uneasily alongside it. The result is not straightforward unbelief, but fragmentation. The same individual may speak of God in one context and interpret the world in entirely different terms in another.

Fourth, a moral reversal has taken place in the way God is understood. In earlier contexts, the goodness of God was generally presupposed. Today, God is often evaluated according to moral intuitions formed independently of the tradition. Questions of suffering, justice, and fairness are no longer addressed within a framework that assumes divine goodness. They are brought to bear upon that assumption itself. The result is a growing instability in how central theological claims are received.

Fifth, a broadly naturalistic understanding of reality has become pervasive. The success of the natural sciences has contributed to a default framework in which events are explained in terms of natural causes and processes. This does not always take the form of an explicit denial of divine action. More often, it results in a situation in which such action no longer appears necessary for explaining what occurs. God is not so much rejected as displaced.

Each of these developments is significant in its own right. Their full force, however, lies in their convergence. Together, they alter the horizon within which congregational life is lived.

The most important consequence of this convergence is not simply decline, but the fragmentation of meaning within congregational life itself. The language of the church persists, but it no longer functions within a shared framework. Terms such as God, grace, and salvation are used, but they are heard in different and sometimes incompatible ways. The same practices are enacted, yet their significance is less stable. The same sermon is preached, yet it may be received as a claim about reality, as a symbolic narrative, or as a form of moral reflection, depending upon the framework within which it is heard.

This fragmentation is often not immediately visible. Congregations can continue to function with a considerable degree of outward continuity. Yet beneath this continuity lies a growing divergence in how what is said and done is understood.

It is at this point that the limitations of many contemporary approaches to congregational renewal become apparent. Much of the existing literature assumes that the basic intelligibility of congregational life remains intact and that the task is to increase participation through improved strategy. Better leadership, clearer communication, and more effective programming are all taken to be central.

Such efforts are not without value. But they presuppose precisely what is now in question.

If the framework within which congregational life once made sense has shifted, then strategy alone cannot resolve the problem. It can refine what is already understood. It cannot restore understanding where it has weakened. One cannot optimize what no longer makes sense.

If this diagnosis is correct, then the work before us must be reoriented. The task is not simply to improve congregational performance. It is to clarify and, where necessary, rearticulate the framework within which congregational life is understood.

This line of argument has been developed in greater detail across the essays mentioned above, all of which are available on Academia.edu. Readers may consult Congregations after Christendom, The Decline of the Church Is Not the Problem, Cross-Pressure and the Fragmentation of Belief, The Problem of God, and What Are We to Make of Science? for fuller treatments of each dimension. A more extended and integrated account is also available in the longer paper Congregational Life after Christendom: A Diagnostic Framework for Revitalization, which gathers these threads into a single argument.

What is now required is a second phase of work.

If the difficulty lies at the level of intelligibility, then the question of its ontological ground cannot be avoided. For a fuller account of the conditions under which intelligibility itself is possible, see my “Nota Trinitaria on Teleo-Spaces: Intelligibility, Normativity, and the Limits of Subjectivity.”

If the difficulty lies at the level of intelligibility, then the task is not only diagnostic but constructive. We must ask how proclamation, teaching, pastoral care, and congregational form can function under these altered conditions. This includes, in particular, a renewed attention to theological language, the reconstruction of plausibility, and the formation of persons capable of inhabiting the life of the church with understanding.

The next set of essays will take up these questions directly. The first of these, Proclamation under Conditions of Fragmented Meaning, examines the situation of preaching when the language of the church no longer carries a stable reference across hearers. Subsequent essays will address catechesis, pastoral care, and forms of congregational life in similar fashion.

The aim is not simply to reverse decline. It is to render congregational life intelligible again.

Where that occurs, renewal becomes possible. Where it does not, no strategy will suffice.

Readers who wish to explore the argument in greater detail may consult the individual essays available on Academia.edu: 

• Congregations after Christendom: Why the Focus Must Return to the Local Church , 
• The Decline of the Church Is Not the Problem 
• Cross-Pressure and the Fragmentation of Belief 
• The Problem of God: Moral Reversal and Theological Instability 
• What Are We to Make of Science? 

A more extended and integrated presentation of the full argument is given in Congregational Life after Christendom: A Diagnostic Framework for Revitalization, which gathers these analyses into a single framework and situates them within the work of the Center for Congregational Revitalization.

Preaching When Meaning Has Fragmented: The Crisis of Proclamation Today

This essay arises from the work of the Center for Congregational Revitalization (CCR) at ILT’s Christ School of Theology, which investigates the conditions under which congregations can hear, speak, and live the Christian faith intelligibly in a post-Christendom context.

Introduction: The Question of Preaching Today

Preaching has always stood at the center of congregational life. It is the primary means through which the Word is proclaimed, the place where the promises of God are spoken into the concrete circumstances of human existence. For much of the church’s history, the task of preaching, while never simple, was sustained by a relatively stable horizon of understanding. The preacher could assume that the language of the sermon, though requiring explanation and application, was heard within a framework that rendered it broadly intelligible. Lamentably, that assumption can no longer be maintained.

The difficulty facing preaching today is not only that fewer people are present, nor that attention is more difficult to sustain, nor even that cultural expectations have shifted. These factors are real, but they do not reach the heart of the matter. The more fundamental issue is that preaching now takes place within a context in which the meaning of its central claims is no longer stable.

The problem is not simply that the sermon must be made more engaging. It is that what the sermon says is not consistently heard as referring to what is real.

I. The Fragmentation of Hearing

Under contemporary conditions, the same sermon can be heard in multiple and divergent ways. The preacher may speak of God’s action, of sin and forgiveness, of judgment and grace, yet these terms do not arrive in the hearer as they once did. They are received within a plurality of interpretive frameworks that shape their meaning in advance.

For one hearer, to say that God acts may still be heard as a claim about divine agency in the world. For another, it may be understood as a way of expressing personal meaning or communal identity. For a third, it may be received with hesitation, as language that gestures toward something no longer clearly affirmed. These differences are not always explicit. They often remain unspoken, yet they structure the act of hearing.

The result is that the apparent unity of proclamation conceals a divergence in understanding. The same words are spoken, but they do not always say the same thing.

This condition is intensified by the fact that many hearers inhabit more than one framework at once. Within the liturgical setting, theological language may be affirmed in its traditional sense. Outside that setting, the same individual may interpret events in terms that leave little room for divine agency. The sermon is thus received not within a single, coherent horizon, but within a field of competing possibilities.

Preaching, in this context, does not address a unified act of hearing. It addresses a fragmented one.

II. The Weakening of Referential Force

The central consequence of this fragmentation is a weakening of the referential force of theological language. Statements that once functioned as claims about what is the case are now frequently received as expressions of meaning, orientation, or value.

To say that God forgives may be heard as describing an act of divine mercy, but it may also be heard as encouraging a posture of acceptance. To proclaim that Christ is risen may be received as a claim about an event in reality, or as a symbolic affirmation of hope. To speak of sin may be understood as naming a condition before God, or as referring to patterns of human brokenness. In each case, the linguistic form remains intact, but the mode of reference shifts.

This does not necessarily produce immediate resistance. The hearer may continue to participate, to assent, and even to be moved by what is said. Yet the relation between language and reality becomes less determinate. The sermon risks being heard not as proclamation, but as interpretation.

Where this occurs, the preacher faces a difficulty that cannot be resolved by rhetorical skill alone. One cannot simply make the language more vivid or more accessible. The issue lies not primarily in expression, but in reception.

III. The Limits of Adaptation

Faced with these challenges, it is understandable that preachers might seek to adapt their language. Terms that appear difficult or unfamiliar are replaced with more accessible ones. Doctrinal formulations are translated into contemporary idioms. The aim is to bridge the gap between the language of the tradition and the experience of the hearer.

Such adaptation has a legitimate place. Preaching has always involved the careful ordering of language so that it may be heard. Yet adaptation alone cannot resolve the present difficulty.

If the underlying issue is that theological language is no longer heard as referring to what is real, then the substitution of more familiar terms does not address the problem. It may reduce resistance, but it may also reinforce the tendency to hear the sermon within a non-referential framework. The language becomes more accessible, but its claim upon reality may be further attenuated.

The difficulty is therefore not that the tradition’s language is too complex. It is that the framework within which that language once functioned has been altered.

To adapt language without attending to this framework is to risk speaking more clearly while saying less.

IV. The Task of Rearticulation

If preaching is to retain its character as proclamation, then the task before the preacher is not merely one of translation or adaptation. It is one of rearticulation.

By rearticulation we do not mean the invention of new content, nor the abandonment of the language of the tradition. We mean the careful speaking of that language in such a way that its referential claim can once again be recognized. The aim is not simply that the hearer understand the words, but that the hearer grasp what those words are about.

This requires a heightened level of theological attention. The preacher must be aware not only of what is being said, but of how it is likely to be heard. This does not entail tailoring the sermon to each possible interpretation. It entails speaking with sufficient clarity that the claim being made is not easily reduced to something else.

In practice, this means that proclamation must resist the drift toward purely expressive or symbolic hearing. It must continue to speak of God as acting, of Christ as present, of forgiveness as given, in a manner that signals that these are not merely ways of speaking, but claims about reality.

Such speech will not always be immediately received. It may encounter resistance or confusion. Yet without it, preaching risks losing its distinctive character.

V. Preaching as the Formation of Hearing

Under these conditions, preaching must also be understood as participating in the formation of the hearer’s capacity to hear.

The sermon does not simply communicate content to an already stable act of understanding. It addresses and, over time, reshapes the frameworks within which understanding occurs. This has always been the case, but it takes on renewed significance where those frameworks are contested. To preach is therefore to engage not only in proclamation, but in formation.

This formation is not accomplished in a single sermon. It is the cumulative effect of sustained proclamation over time. Through repetition, clarification, and patient instruction, the hearer may come to recognize the coherence of the language of faith and the reality to which it refers. The aim is not to eliminate all tension or difficulty, but to render the act of hearing more stable.

This requires patience on the part of both preacher and congregation. It also requires a willingness to acknowledge that misunderstanding is not an occasional obstacle, but a persistent feature of the present context.

VI. The Responsibility of the Preacher

The responsibility of the preacher, under these conditions, is both more complex and more demanding than in earlier periods. It is no longer sufficient to assume that the language of the sermon will be heard within a shared framework. That framework must, in part, be reestablished through the act of preaching itself.

This does not mean that the preacher bears this responsibility alone. The work of teaching, catechesis, and congregational life more broadly all contribute to the formation of understanding. Yet preaching remains central, because it is the place where the Word is publicly spoken and where the congregation is gathered to hear.

To preach, then, is to speak within a fractured horizon without conceding that fracture as final. It is to proclaim in such a way that what is said may once again be heard as true in a robust sense, even where that hearing is not immediate or complete.

Conclusion: Proclamation and Reality

The challenge facing preaching today is not merely one of communication. It is a question of reality.

If the language of the sermon is no longer heard as referring to what is the case, then preaching risks becoming one voice among others, offering interpretation without making a claim upon the world. If, however, the preacher continues to speak in a way that holds together clarity of expression and referential intent, then preaching may still function as proclamation, even under altered conditions.

The task is therefore not to abandon the language of the tradition, nor to rely upon it uncritically. It is to speak it with a clarity that takes seriously the context in which it is heard.

Only in this way can preaching continue to be what it is called to be: the public speaking of the Word through which God addresses the world.