by Rob Goodale
Why study theology? I stood silently for a moment. I finally pieced together a woefully inadequate graduate student cliché of an answer about pondering the deep questions of life and encountering the transcendent. “Because it is,” which is usually an excellent way of making teenagers shut up and also hate you, didn’t seem right, but neither did my sophisticated theology grad student bluster.1 The question stuck with me, and as I am wont to do, I let it simmer in my mind for a long while, like a nice large pot of chili (nomz).
Eventually, I finally put my finger on the simpler version of the question that was sticking in my craw2: why study anything? Eight years removed from high school, it is decidedly unimportant for me to remember what iambic pentameter is, which assassination started World War I, or how many covalent electrons3 a carbon atom has. If, for some unfathomable reason, I needed to know any of these things, I would find the answer by Googling the question, which is probably what high school students (and honestly, high school teachers) are doing now, anyway. The Age of Google has made memorization into a neat parlor trick. If it was ever a necessary piece of pedagogy in a utilitarian sense, it isn’t anymore.4
So, an imaginary student says in that particular way that teenagers do when they think they’ve discovered something no one else has ever thought of before, if memorizing facts doesn’t matter because of Google, then we should just throw away all the textbooks and make every paper and test open-Internet, right?
Wrong, dummy.
The acquisition of information is not the point of education. If that’s all you’re learning, then you either have bad teachers or are a bad student. Don’t worry, though: it isn’t your fault.
Education exists to teach skills. When a high school student is forced to memorize lines of Shakespeare, or Archduke Franz Ferdinand’s name, or that a carbon atom has four valence electrons,5 the piece of information itself is important—but only because the information is essential to the development of a skill. Acquiring this information is not the telos of learning. The irony of the American system of secondary education, where the history, English, and science departments are all siloed from one another,6 is this: while we tend to think they have nothing to do with each other, each discipline is essentially teaching students different aspects of the same thing: how to think.
The precise way in which different disciplines facilitate this learning is, for the most part, pretty obvious. Math and science teach you how to use problem solving to take information and get new information from it. English and language arts teach you how to listen, think, and speak eloquently. The purpose of studying history, amidst all the names and dates, is to discover that human action is almost always connected to other previous or concurrent human action—in other words, what any given person does impacts other persons.7
But Mr. Goodale, the imaginary student says, you didn’t answer the question that was asked.8 Why study theology?
We study theology because it changes the way we think about the world itself. We study theology in order to learn how to see.
Here’s what I mean: without being challenged with an alternative, our worldview tends to turn decidedly inward. The notion of this inward turning has a rich theological history, from Saint Paul to Augustine to Martin Luther to C.S. Lewis, but one need not be a theologian or even a Christian to identify the tendency.
David Foster Wallace, in his excellent essay "This Is Water",9 observes what he calls the “natural, hard-wired default setting” of human beings, which is to be “deeply and literally self-centered.” "This Is Water" is essentially an exhortation to overcome this natural, hard-wired default setting, and see the world differently. Wallace suggests sheer force of will to achieve this end. I suggest studying theology.
It would be a mistake for me to overlook an important point here. Studying theology doesn’t necessarily mean sitting in a classroom listening to lectures. In fact, a better term than “studying” would perhaps be “doing” theology.
Doing the work of living a Christian life—developing a life of prayer, of participation in the sacraments, of service to the poor, of authentic communal life—is a form of primary theology. If theology is faith seeking understanding, then to live a normal life in relationship with Christ, starting from a place of faith and living in search of greater understanding, is to do theology.
Each of these facets of the Christian life is a way of nurturing a relationship with God. This relationship changes the way we see the world, because in the cosmos God designs, we cannot love God without also loving our neighbor. The one who does theology rejects the binary offered by the world—that my neighbor must either be an asset or an obstacle in my effort to fulfill my desires—and instead embraces not only the neighbor but all of creation as a sign of God’s love and a mediator of grace.
Irish scholar and priest Dermot Lane10 observes, “[T]he human is an always-already-graced being, and so, therefore, finding God is not about discovering something new. Instead, discovering God is about entering more fully into that with which we are already familiar.”11
The skills that are developed by doing theology don’t fulfill some kind of gnostic desire to see the otherwise unseeable or know the otherwise unknowable; doing theology is about learning to see the same old boring crap that is always around us in a new way. What might otherwise be a source of anger and frustration instead becomes a way of encountering God.
This is admittedly a bit of a dangerous tightrope to walk when speaking to students, but teenagers really don’t need to know the names of the patriarchs, prophets, or apostles. They don’t need to memorize the cardinal and theological virtues, or the beatitudes, or the prologue of John.12 All of these things are important, but as educators, it’s our job to illustrate to our students why they’re important—and the answer cannot be “because it’s on the test,” because then once the test is over, so is the importance of the content.
I don’t mean to have an overly-inflated sense of self, but there is so much at stake here. Good religious education, which encourages young people to do theology, changes the world because it changes the way young people see other human beings. This can solve problems. It changes the way people think about politics, sports, sex, immigration, religion, and race. Again, what is otherwise perceived as an asset or obstacle in my own self-interest is transformed into a sign of God’s love and a mediator of grace, regardless of how much product is in their hair or when they last showered.
That’s why we study theology, and why (if we want to be fully alive) we can never stop studying theology: it’s how we learn to see.
1 To be sure, none of my students gave a crap about such an answer because it was not immediately clear how it would help them get either a date or an A, and in my experience, that’s like 99% of the things they think about.↩
2 I’m not actually from the South, but out of all the things I’m not, it’s my favorite thing to pretend I am.↩
3 I’m not even 100% sure that a “covalent electron” is a thing. Which is kind of my point.↩
4 Whether or not this is a good thing is an important question, but not the one I’m addressing here.↩
5 Ha! See, I Googled it and found out that “covalent electron” is, in fact, NOT a thing. Dang, Google is cool.↩
6 And all of the really important things—like music, art, drama, shop, home ec, and the like—are exiled to the fringes of society.↩
7 Math, science, english, language arts, and history teacher friends: I’m all the way open to fraternal correction on these things. Until just now, they were largely observations that had never left my own head.↩
8 Shouts to Mr. Prindiville, and to AP teachers everywhere whose students refuse to answer the question that was asked.↩
9 Technically, "This Is Water" was a commencement address Wallace gave at Kenyon College in 2005 before it was an essay. You can find the audio from this on YouTube, and listening to it is even better than just reading the text.↩
10 Obligatory “I live in Ireland” comment.↩
11 This is from Catholic Education in Light of Vatican II and Laudato Si, a book I own because I picked it up in a bookstore in Knock, Ireland, simply because it had the words “Catholic Education” in the title and it wasn’t too long. It’s brilliant. I love bookstores.↩
12On second thought, everyone should probably memorize the prologue of John. It’s the most beautiful and scandalous thing ever. I think this footnote just became a sneak preview of another post.
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