Dean's Message to Students Thinking of Making Their Way to the School of Theology
About a century and a half ago, not far from the Boston University campus, in Concord at Walden Pond, Henry David Thoreau asked, “Could a greater miracle take place than for us to look through each other’s eyes for an instant?” In addressing you as potential students at the School of Theology, I would be greatly helped by such a miracle. I do think the great 19th-century theologian, Schleiermacher (you’ll learn about him!), was wrong in his claim that “the age of miracles is closed.” But this particular miracle, that of seeing the world and your expectations of it through your very own eyes, is denied to me. One has difficulty enough gaining access to one’s own mind, soul, and heart. A like access to the interiorities of another, well, that’s a real piece of work.
You will see at once that in order to talk about how the School of Theology can address your own greatest aspirations, wants, and needs, I should have to know as you know, see as you see, hear as you hear. Still, we constantly welcome people without having such “information.” However individuated and determinate each person is (and each of us is), the human mind and heart are accessible in their recurring patterns, largely as qualified by time and cultural emphases. Each of us extrapolates from his or her own experience, so much so that St. Augustine thought that in telling the story of his life (in the Confessions) he could address human existence in the round. Upon reading that work, Petrarch exclaimed: “I account myself to have read not the story of another’s life but of my own.” We all have enough in common to illuminate each other’s particularities.
Institutions are the cultural repositories of the accumulated wisdom of what we hold in common. The church especially is the repository of what classically has been called the depositum fidei: the deposit of faith. The theological seminary is the mind of the church (without neglecting spiritual formation, thus the heart), seeking ever to understand the faith once and continuingly given us in the communion of saints. Until we get to know you as individuals, and you get to know us as individuals, we will be unable to address your individual wants and aspirations. In the interim, our curriculum is oriented not to individual wants but to what every leader of the Christian church needs to know. Wants and needs are dialectically related to each other, which is why we never reach a state of rest between our wants and needs. And this constitutes growth in a vigorous, informed faith.
I shall be misunderstood if thought to be thumping the tubs for a merely individual set of wants and needs. We are social and cultural beings through and through. We delude ourselves in thinking our individual wants and needs are solely our very own, for they are shaped in many ways by structures that exceed us in range and power. One of the things one learns in the study of religion is how intertwined one religion is with another, and that not merely historically, but even now when virtually everyone in the United States has friends—even a spouse, or other relative—who is religiously “other.” While ours is a Christian seminary, and thus we are committed to knowing and perpetuating our Christian identity, you will learn early on that those bearing the name of Christ across the world and across time are as different from each other as they are from those in other religious traditions. So we cannot discover, uncover, recover our own Christian identity without study of the many forms of Christian identity, and the intertwining of those forms of identity with other forms of human religious life. The same is to be said as well of the many cultural, social, and political forms of human life.
I welcome you, then, to an intensified time of informed quest. This time will be unlike any other in the life that lies before you. Here you will, if not begin then concentrate upon a learning process that will not end when you leave us. To revert to St. Augustine once more: he said that one needs a teacher only until the “inner monitor” (which he identified with the Logos, the Word) has been aroused and brought under discipline. One then no longer needs the outer teacher because the teacher is within and active under discipline. This is by no means the same as “finding one’s bliss,” raising one’s “self-esteem,” becoming “inner-directed” or finding one’s own big self-help book.
Boston University’s School of Theology was once known as “The School of the Prophets,” but probably Martin Luther King Jr. was our last alumnus to warrant that title. No real prophet wants to be a prophet (consult the Old Testament/Hebrew Bible randomly), but God’s world needs prophets (and sages, and holy dancers, and singers making a joyful noise, and . . . ). I, and my colleagues, welcome you to the life of juggling your wants and the world’s needs, the world God created and even now is redeeming from folly. Life here also has its follies, which is to say that we are a human community. So we have some fun, too.
Published by Trustees of Boston University
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30 November 2007
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