Being a professor at a theological institution is complicated. Especially when you work out a lot of your theology in public, as I do on this blog.
When you blog you are never your own person. You are a voice speaking from somewhere. That somewhere stands in the background, and you are its voice.
Last week I tried to sign something as “Blogger at Storied Theology,” and when it appeared in public I had become, “New Testament Professor at Fuller Seminary.”
So it’s time to set some things straight about Fuller and me.
Bible, Theology, Integrity
When I came to Fuller seven years ago, not one (ok, maybe one) of my Biblical Division colleagues believed in inerrancy. Fuller had given up that shibboleth years ago.
When I did my “theology exam,” I had a debate with a senior NT professor about the interrelationships between faith, baptism, and salvation in Paul’s letters. We were not exactly on the same page. But when the final vote was taken, I passed unanimously. Even in disagreement, there could be acceptance.
These two signals pointed to the possibility of an evangelical institution with unique promise. Here we could do our historical critical work with integrity. Here we could disagree and still be a unified faculty.
Fresh air!
The air began to be let out of those tires after my first year.
I had started researching Theological Interpretation of Scripture. I was frustrated by the literature, because it seemed to be largely coming up with fancy ways to ignore historical and critical scholarship in order to give primacy of place to the church’s theological traditions as guides to reading the Bible.
I read scripture theologically. But as a New Testament scholar, I see my job as always listening first and foremost to the text in its historical context, and allowing its theology to be the first voice to which we respond. In the end, I will affirm creeds or confessions, if I do, because I believe they contain the right things to say at a given moment in time in which they were written, in light of what scriptures says.
In this, I thought I was just being a normal biblical scholar. And Protestant. And Evangelical.
However, a couple of my senior Bible colleagues found this disturbing. It was not enough to affirm that some confessions were correct. One had to start with the confessions and use them as hermeneutical guides in the strong sense. One had to like the idea that we define Christianity by what we believe. (All this despite the fact that we have Baptists and Anabaptists on faculty.)
Integrity is crucial for both of us. I define integrity as being true to the historical critical scholarship and bringing that into theological dialogue with the church. They define integrity as being true to the “Grand Tradition of the Church” and allowing that to guide what we see in and say about history.
So when I say, “The Synoptic Gospels show Jesus as an idealized human figure,” I have not said enough. If I cannot say, “And it also shows the divine Jesus, as we learn in the creeds,” I have articulated a theology that “is on a trajectory” away from our shared statement of faith.
My senior colleagues and I give different answers to the question, How do we relate the Bible to the theology of the church?
And this is one major reason why next year will be my last at Fuller.
Homosexuality, History, Integrity
When I wrote, Jesus Have I Loved, but Paul?, I knew that it was something of a risk to write on homosexuality. It’s basically the only chapter anyone ever reads. (For the love, people, 1-3 are the best chapters of the whole book! *ahem*)
But it was well received among my colleagues. It has been used in Fuller classrooms. One colleague overstepped reality by calling it “brilliant.” But I appreciated the encouragement. Another read it and then opened up an opportunity for me to speak to friends of the seminary on how to wrestle with questions of sexuality.
Now-president Mark Labberton mentioned the chapter on homosexuality in his endorsement on the back. He invited me to do a webinar on pastoral responses to homosexuality in society. And when one of his first acts as president was to host a panel in the wake of the Supreme Court’s rulings on Prop 8 and DOMA, he invited me to serve as a panelist.
Fuller had shown itself to be a place where we could ask questions, where we could confess that our traditional readings of the Bible might be wrong, or that the implications of those readings might need to be revisited.
You can imagine my disappointment, then, when I left that panel on how to respond to SCOTUS and walked across campus to a meeting with a couple of senior colleagues who indicated that my writing on homosexuality was going to be a profound hindrance to their ability to support me should I apply for tenure.
You may or may not be surprised to learn that neither had attended the panel I had just been a part of.
The more I study the question of homosexuality in scripture and the ancient world, the more complex I realize the issue is. I have worked some of those questions out here, publicly, expressly to help uncover that things are a lot more complicated than simply delineating what sexual practices are ok and which are not. Historical critical scholarship has made me question, and realize the need to question, what we say theologically and ethically.
For a number of my colleagues, it is not ok to ask these questions unless the answer we already have decided upon follows close on their heels.
Anyone at Fuller can tell you that over the past year to eighteen months clear signals have been sent that sexuality is not something that is open for any sort of conversation, much less debate.
For everyone, living with integrity is important.
For a small window of time, I caught sight of a Fuller in which integrity on the sexuality issue meant having conversations whose faithfulness was measured by standards of academic investigation and conversation.
For now, Fuller has chosen a different route. Integrity means ensuring that the stated position of the school is upheld and affirmed and not called into question.
These are different ways of measuring integrity. Neither is right or wrong. But I am disappointed that Fuller has chosen its way, as indeed a number of colleagues are disappointed with the route I chose. Most of all, I am disappointed that we cannot hold these differences in creative tension.
This difference is a major reason why I will not be at Fuller after next year.
Fit, Farewell, Integrity
To further the integrity conversation, I think it is important for both me and Fuller that you know our differences on these matters.
For Fuller’s part, I am sure that many do not want you thinking that the kinds of questions I am asking or answers I am suggesting are ok to ask or offer as answers at Fuller.
You know that now.
I will continue to speak about homosexuality, and to advocate for a better way forward. And you need to know that this is a place where Fuller would like to distance itself from me.
I will continue to celebrate the amazing picture of the human Jesus of the Synoptic Gospels and hope you will be filled with as much wonder as I have been. And you need to know that this is a place where Fuller would like to distance itself from me.
For my part, I do not want you to see what I do and think that Fuller is a place where you should come to study if what I’m doing here on the blog and in my writing is helpful, challenging, life-giving.
Fuller and I have chosen different paths in our pursuit of integrity as we stand in relationship to Christ, scripture, and the church.
Fuller has this phrase, “Fuller fit,” that we use to evaluate potential colleagues. It’s an amorphous way of saying that we know “us” when we see it. My senior colleagues have decided that I do not qualify under this rubric. I will therefore be leaving at the end of the 2015-16 academic year.
I am disappointed that someone like me was not able to take deep root in a place that seemed to hold so much potential at its early moments. And I hope that in the future Fuller’s vision of integrity will look more like mine.
But for now, that is not to be.
Fuller will continue to move forward by asking how its beliefs find articulation in the work of its faculty.
I will continue to move forward by asking how the work I do impacts my beliefs.
So we will both find integrity along the different paths that we have chosen. And those paths will be separate.
Update: Fuller has posted as much as they can say publicly, and I’ve reproduced that with an additional thought in another post.
Featured Image courtesy of Stuart Miles at FreeDigitalPhotos.net