by Gary Buchholz
Gary Buchholz was a graduate student at the University of Chicago in 1985, and one of the most intellectually formidable voices on net.religion.christian. Where most of the newsgroup traded personal testimonies and biblical commentary, Buchholz brought academic theology to the net — Schleiermacher, Altizer, the death-of-God movement, A/theology — and used it to provoke the believing majority.
This post is his sharpest statement of a thesis he had developed over several weeks: that professional theology has always regarded the institutional church with contempt, and that this contempt is intellectually justified. Schleiermacher said it in 1806. Altizer said it in 1985. Nothing has changed. The church, Buchholz argues, is like a room full of people who have given themselves the title "doctor" without going to medical school — and professional theology, like the AMA, wants nothing to do with them.
Whether one agrees with the argument or not, it is a genuine document of early internet intellectual culture: a University of Chicago student using a global computer network to deliver, to the widest possible audience, an argument that most academics would only make in faculty lounges. The Thomas Merton line in Michael Ellis's "Dance of Death" (also in this collection) is a direct response to Buchholz's posts from this same week.
I would want to treat theology as any other academic discipline and as such, the discipline does not allow "just anyone" to "walk in off the street" and participate as a full member. The price of admission is much higher than that.
How many years does one attend medical school before one is qualified to be a doctor? How many years of study does it take to pass the bar and become a lawyer? Is theology any different? Christian theology has a 2000 year history — is this any less a body of knowledge and tradition than either medicine or law?
What is the church? An association of "doctors" that never went to medical school, or "lawyers" that never attended law school? How can they claim for themselves these titles having never devoted any serious study to those disciplines that would allow them to rightfully claim these titles?
The church is a paradox. It is an association of people calling themselves doctors and lawyers selling snake oil and rhetoric. Is it any wonder why professional theological societies want nothing to do with the church?
Is this anything new? Not at all. In 1806 Friedrich Schleiermacher (called the father of modern theology) in his book On Religion: Speeches to Its Cultured Despisers, in defense of the Christian religion against the church, writes this (pp. 157–58):
"...This at least is certain, that all truly religious men, as many as there ever have been, ... have all known how to estimate the church, commonly so-called, at about its true value, which is to say, not particularly high.
The church ... is very far from being a society of religious men. It is only an association of persons who are but seeking religion, and it seems to me natural that, in almost every respect, it should be the counterpart of the true church.
...They cannot be spoken of as wishing to complete their religion ... for if they had any religion of their own, it would, by necessity of its nature, show itself in some way ... They exercise no reaction because they are capable of none; and they can only be incapable because they have no religion ... I would say that they are negatively religious, and press in great crowds to the few points where they suspect the positive principle of religion ... In entire passivity they simply suffer the impressions on their organs.
...In few words this is the history of their religious life and the character of the social inclination that runs through it. Not religion, but a little sense for it, and a painful, lamentably fruitless endeavor to reach it, are all that can be ascribed even to the best of them, even those who show both spirit and zeal."
What Schleiermacher writes here in 1806 as regards the relation of theology and theologians to the church is reflected throughout the theological tradition to the present day. My quote of Altizer as regards a church theology being impossible and the impossibility of returning to the Bible is simply the latest instantiation of Schleiermacher's remarks, articulated by the theological tradition again in 1985.
It's simply a matter of paying dues. People in church don't pay the "dues" that professional theologians think they ought to pay, and therefore professional theology wants nothing to do with the church and those people therein that call themselves "Christians."
Do you blame them?
[In response to the claim that "the sick are being healed, the hungry are being fed, the naked clothed, the prisoners visited ... and the Good News is being preached":] But having no effect in getting people out of church into theology schools, divinity schools, or seminary. You all still sit there and "suffer impressions on your organs." What's the problem?
Don't make total ignorance of the historic Christian theological tradition a Christian virtue. One can be proud and have a haughty spirit if one is in possession of the tradition and can move the Christian symbols with ease.
The successor discipline to traditional theology does have a name. The name is written thus: A/theology. It is a triple-play on words and situates the problem precisely. The question of post-modern theological thought is the status of the boundary signified by the "/".
In all honesty I must say that the church looks as silly to professional theology as it would look to the AMA if a group of people having no medical education whatsoever were to meet on a weekly basis to chart the future course of "medicine."
What these "doctors" perceive as "medicine" is, by the standards of the profession, no more medicine than witchcraft and voodoo magic practiced by witch-doctors. The extrapolation of the analogy to Christianity and the church is exact.
If you have no theological talent — then don't bother. As in the case of medicine, the profession is best served by eliminating those people who show no promise. To paraphrase Schleiermacher, the church is the site of those who "wanting to be" have utterly failed.
Gary
Colophon
Written by Gary Buchholz, University of Chicago Computation Center. Posted to net.religion.christian, August 18, 1985. Message-ID: [email protected].
A reply in a thread that began with Buchholz's original essay on contemporary theology; this post responds to criticism by R. J. Brown and defends the thesis that professional theology has maintained principled distance from the institutional church since at least Schleiermacher. The Schleiermacher quotation is from On Religion: Speeches to Its Cultured Despisers (1799, second edition 1806), as published in the 19th-century English translation. "A/theology" refers to the post-modern theological project associated with Thomas J. J. Altizer, Mark C. Taylor, and the death-of-God movement — using the typographical slash to signify a position that is simultaneously theological and anti-theological.
The argument provoked Michael Ellis of Schlumberger Palo Alto Research to write "Dance of Death" (also in this collection) — a response from thermodynamics and comparative religion that ends with Thomas Merton.
Preserved from the Usenet archive for the Good Work Library by the New Tianmu Anglican Church, 2026.
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