How to Teach Introductory Theology(?)
Kerygma and Curiosity
It is no secret that, over the past few decades, the student population of Catholic colleges and universities has changed in terms of their religious beliefs and practices. Fewer students identify as Catholic, and those who do often have less religious literacy than one could expect in previous decades. Many non-Catholic Christian students demonstrate a similar decline in religious literacy. On the other hand, a handful of students are refreshingly educated and articulate regarding their faith. Reflecting nationwide trends, an increasing number of students identify as “nones” or as “spiritual but not religious” and have a wide variety of beliefs about God, the human soul, the afterlife, and other spiritual realities. Many students also come from non-Christian backgrounds and identify as Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist, or other religions. Today’s classroom is a microcosm of the pluralism so ably analyzed by the theologian Lieven Boeve, as I discussed last week.
If you teach theology, how do you adapt your approach to today’s student population? Or thinking back to your student days, what was an effective strategy one of your professors used that you think might be helpful for other instructors? Share your thoughts in the comments.
The traditional approach to teaching college-level introductory theology was developed to serve a much different student population than we find today in most Catholic college campuses. Based on the classic understanding of theology as “faith seeking understanding,” this approach assumed that most students had been raised in Catholic households and that at least some, if not most, had received theological education in Catholic high schools. College-level theology courses, then, provided an opportunity for deepening students’ understanding of the faith and challenging simplistic pieties picked up as children that stand in the way of a more mature faith. They also opened the door to integrating theological knowledge with the other disciplines students were studying.
Of course, the description of this theological curriculum as “traditional” is anachronistic, since it only existed for a relatively short period of time. As Sandra Yocum explains in her Joining the Revolution in Theology: The College Theology Society, 1954-2004, theological education was almost exclusively the preserve of the clergy well into the twentieth century, and even into the 1950s, most students at Catholic colleges in the United States were educated in the field of “religion,” focused more on the practical living out of faith than in the more intellectual field of theology. As the Catholic Church increasingly recognized the distinct vocation of lay people, advocates (including the American Jesuit theologian John Courtney Murray) called for more thorough theological education for Catholic college graduates.
Although most theology professors probably realized that the student population was changing long ago, it is interesting that most undergraduate theology textbooks still follow a thematic structure developed in that earlier age, and indeed not all that different from the theology manuals used in seminaries in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
For example, for many years I used the revised edition of Theological Foundations, edited by J.J. Mueller, S.J., which opens with a chapter on God (divided into sections on the attributes of God and the Trinity), and continues with two chapters on the Bible, a chapter on Christology, and chapters on the Church, the sacraments, and morality.
Compare this with the volumes of the Dogmatic Theology manual by Joseph Pohle and Arthur Preuss in the 1910s: one volume on the attributes of God, one on the Trinity, one on creation and revelation, two on Christology, volumes on Mariology and grace, and then four volumes on the sacraments, concluding with a volume on eschatology. The content has been updated for today’s student population and to reflect more contemporary theology in the light of Vatican II—including a greater emphasis on the Church and chapters on ecumenism and world religions, for example—but the structure is basically the same.
And maybe that is okay. There is certainly a logical ordering to the structure. But I think it is worth exploring whether there are alternative ways to structure the theological curriculum that are better suited to today’s students and their spiritual and intellectual needs. I am sure many theological professors have experimented with different approaches that work for them and their students.
For my own part, when I teach introductory theology courses, I start the semester by taking a narrative approach. We begin the semester by taking brief looks at the biographies of relatively contemporary Catholics who demonstrate in their lives what it means to be Christian. Most recently, I used the examples of Chiara Badano, a young Italian woman who lived a life of service but died at an early age from cancer, which she faced with hope and faith, and Oscar Romero, the heroic Archbishop of San Salvador who advocated for the poor during El Salvador’s civil war. This gives the students an opportunity to identify what Christianity looks like in practice using examples they can relate to, but I also give them an opportunity to identify elements of these lives that seem strange or uncomfortable to them.
Then, continuing with the narrative approach, we read through the entire Gospel of Matthew over several class periods. The purpose at this point is not to take a critical scholarly approach to the Bible, but rather to identify how Jesus is portrayed in the narrative and how other characters interact with and respond to Jesus. I would say the goal is to present students with the kerygma, the proclamation or witness of what the first disciples experienced with Jesus, as an open question. “Does this experience make sense?” “What does this experience mean for me?” “Do I find this disturbing?” For the rest of the semester, we follow a more traditional sequence of topics, but now framed as exploring how Christians tried to make sense of that original experience of Jesus and what it means to be a follower of Jesus, and then passed on that faith to others. Along the way, I also introduce them to aspects of contemporary theological method, such as the dialogue between theology and science, liberation theology, feminist theology, etc.
I am comfortable calling my approach a kerygmatic approach, although I recognize that the term kerygma is today more associated with catechesis than theological education. For example, early in the twentieth century the Austrian Jesuit Josef Jungmann proposed a kerygmatic catechesis modeled after that of the early Church and emphasizing the life of grace, and more recently the catechist Sherry Waddell has proposed an approach to adult faith formation based on the kerygma, most notably in her book Forming Intentional Disciples. The term has become a bit of a buzzword in ministry circles, as I noted in my comments on the Los Angeles Religious Education Congress a few months ago. Theological education is different from catechesis, although I think there are ways to understand how they can be related while respecting their distinct purposes and the diverse student populations who may be participating in a theology course, but that is a conversation for another time.
There are certainly weaknesses in this approach. For example, it takes considerable class time to cover the biographical narratives and the Gospel of Matthew, which means other topics that might be covered in a traditional theology course, and that ideally ought to be part of the religious literacy of a college-educated Catholic, get short shrift. Also, basing the study of theology on witness can be risky. A few years ago, one of the contemporary figures we covered at the beginning of the semester was Jean Vanier; it was only the following year that horrible reports about his sexual and spiritual abuse of women became public! There may be other weaknesses, as well, but those are two of which I am aware.
For me, the primary advantage, however, of this kerygmatic approach is that it reinforces that theology is not about an esoteric set of religious beliefs, but is an attempt to make sense of a profound religious experience that transformed, and continues to transform, people’s lives. It provides students with a way to connect with the material, regardless of how they ultimately respond to the questions raised by the Christian kerygma.
I find two passages from recent popes helpful in summarizing my approach. The first comes from Pope Benedict XVI, in his 2005 encyclical Deus Caritas Est: “Being Christian is not the result of an ethical choice or a lofty idea, but the encounter with an event, a person, which gives life a new horizon and a decisive direction” (no. 1). The second comes from an address by Pope Paul VI, cited in his 1975 apostolic exhortation Evangelii Nuntiandi: “Modern man listens more willingly to witnesses than to teachers, and if he does listen to teachers, it is because they are witnesses” (no. 41). The latter quotation by Pope Paul, while suggesting that theological understanding must first arise from the witness of the disciples and of contemporary Christian lives, also makes clear that today, theology instructors ought to embody the curiosity, engagement, and critical thinking we hope to see in students.
Share your own strategies and methods for teaching introductory theology in the comments, or share your thoughts on effective strategies you have experienced or observed!
Of Interest…
Returning to the theme of the previous newsletter post, war and peace, Pope Francis offered an address to the United Nations Security Council, read on his behalf by Archbishop Paul Gallagher, the Vatican foreign minister, in which he insisted, “The time has come to say an emphatic no to war, to state that wars are not just, but only peace is just: a stable and lasting peace, built not on the precarious balance of deterrence, but on the fraternity that unites us.” The pope’s remarks, of course, come amidst the ongoing war in Ukraine, about which Pope Francis has said that the Ukrainian people have the right to defend themselves by taking up arms, so his comments ought to be interpreted as an integrated whole. Nevertheless, Pope Francis’s remarks suggest an ongoing dissatisfaction with the traditional moral categories for thinking about war, an issue that theologians have been wrestling with for several years now. Reporting by Cindy Wooden of Catholic News Service.
Again on the topic of war, in an update to a story I mentioned in a previous post, the Air Force has denied that it ran an artificial intelligence simulation in which an armed drone guided by artificial intelligence “killed” its operator after the latter told it not to “kill” a target it had identified, claiming that the officer who first reported this simulation “misspoke.” This is a pretty bizarre situation, and it is hard to imagine how the officer could have “misspoken” about something so specific. I talked to an expert who agreed that it was bizarre and suggested that it sounds like the Air Force actually did conduct the simulation but doesn’t want the public to know. But who knows?
On Thursday, the US Catholic bishops opened their spring meeting, and the conversation centered around the Eucharistic Revival, culminating in a National Eucharistic Congress in July of next year. See Lauretta Brown’s reporting for more details on the conversation. The papal nuncio Archbishop Christophe Pierre opened the meeting by raising the theme of synodality. Prior to the meeting, some had noted that synodality was conspicuously absent from the agenda for the meeting; we will see if the bishops follow Archbishop Pierre’s lead and make it part of the discussion.
There has been a lot of contention in recent days regarding Catholic participation in Pride Month. For example, earlier this week, Pope Francis sent a letter of support to the Outreach conference, hosted by Fordham University in New York City and organized by Fr. James Martin, S.J., among others, focusing on ministry to LGBTQ persons. The conference is also supported by Cardinal Timothy Dolan, the Archbishop of New York, despite an online petition calling for Fordham to cancel the event. In Washington, DC, Holy Trinity Catholic Church hosted a Pride Mass without comment from the Archdiocese. In Pittsburgh, however, a Pride Mass that was to take place at Duquesne University was cancelled at the request of Bishop David Zubik. The mixed messages signaled by these events demonstrate quite clearly that the Catholic Church is struggling to discern how to minister to LGBTQ persons.
This is a good summary of how things are changing. I’d like to learn what you think about the relationship between theology and religious studies as academic disciplines.