Teaching Theology

Useless reading

This is the time of year for many when we are preparing or revising our courses for teaching in the new academic year. It is therefore a good time to ask the question “Do we read because we teach or teach because we read?”. I had better explain that.

To read because we teach is our default mode. We have the course contents in front of us, we need to produce notes for ourselves and the students, we need to be contemporary in our content and that means reading the books and articles. We read because we teach.

To teach because we read is a way of talking about a different attitude. Our intellectual life is not circumscribed by the content of our teaching. It is, in part, separate from it, wider and richer. It roams free across genres and subjects, follows our curiosity and expands our interests. From that rich, unconfined intellectual activity, we become excited about new ideas and applications and these, along with their excitement, are fed into our teaching.

OK, sometimes this means that, when we are in the classroom, we stray a bit off message but students have to get used to the idea that it is you, not a subject that is front of them. In fact, that is precisely what they want (provided you give them what they also need in order to do well in the assessments, of course).

Our natural reaction to such advice is one related to available time. We are very busy people, especially this time of year; we can hardly find time to keep up in our subject and do the narrow research required to re-validate ourselves as lecturers, so how will we be able to carve out time to read wider? This is an honest problem and one that needs to be addressed by the seminaries and colleges which employ us as much as by ourselves.

Yet I maintain that this concept is not just a desire for those who can spare the time to enrich themselves, but an integral part of our calling and God’s mission.

Ranging widely and probing with interest in all sorts of places in society’s intellectual continent is a pre-requisite for building that bridge between the Word and the World which is the task of the theological educator today. The bridge has to be anchored by our interest and understanding at both ends. The fun, ideas, sufferings and riches of our eclectic reading provide the ability to let the Word speak into them all. And ranging more widely in the broad continent of the historical and geographical Church’s intellectual heritage allows us to understand the breadth of God’s work, God’s people and God’s love, much of which will come to us as new riches.

We can easily get old in the task. Many of us started off with a ferocious appetite for all sorts of ideas, thoughts, understandings, books and authors but sometimes gradually our intellectual house gets smaller, with more walls than windows.

It is not impossible for any of us to open up a little more to new “non-essential for teaching” reading. Just take one interesting book at a time.

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