Evan Rosa: For the Life of the World is a production of the Yale Center For Faith and Culture. Visit us online at faith.yale.edu.
Amy Brown Hughes: I feel like theology can be a really hospitable place for people to actually access Christianity, where there are some big ideas and some values there that we can talk about: well, how do you come to consensus on diverse topics? How do you bring in people from various ways and have them sort of work through some big idea, like how to think about who God is?
Like, that's a huge question: who's God? You can't start from a place-- you can't start from a narrow place on that. What I find so beautiful about early Christianity is there we have some resources for thinking about theology in sort of a more expansive way where for them, they talked about theology and philosophy in the same breath.
Evan Rosa: This is For the Life of the World, a podcast about seeking and living a life worthy of our humanity. I'm Evan Rosa, with the Yale Center For Faith and Culture. Miroslav Volf often introduces what we do at the Yale Center For Faith and Culture with reference to the green leaf in our logo. That leaf is inspired by the Book of Revelation's depiction of the Tree of Life, which grows for the healing of nations.
Now, this raises a question: does your approach to theology bring healing and reconciliation? Does it introduce Christianity as a way of life and peace, flourishing and shalom? Does your theology have space for diverse and difficult questions to exist together? Now that kind of hospitable theology would indeed make a difference in our world.
Today on the show, we're playing a conversation between Matt Croasmun and Amy Brown Hughes, associate professor of theology at Gordon College, and author of Christian Women in the Patristic World. Amy and Matt reflect on the promise and hope of a hospitable theology grounded in a way of life sensitive to the difference theology makes for the most pressing issues of our lives today. Thanks for listening.
Matt Croasmun: Amy, if I may, I'm so glad to have you here.
Amy Brown Hughes: I'm glad to be here. Thank you so much for inviting me.
Matt Croasmun: So let's start on the positive side.
Amy Brown Hughes: Okay.
Matt Croasmun: From your point of view and where you sit in your particular institutional location and disciplinary location, what's right in theology these days, what's going well?
Amy Brown Hughes: Oh, I think there's a lot going well, actually I think we live at a really amazing time and I'm really glad to be a theologian at this point, because I'm seeing, especially on the student side a lot more, you know, felt need for working through their faith, not just picking up Old Testament, New Testament classes and going, "okay, I'm done, you know, moving on," but really a felt need and, uh, to connect with God and with theology personally, but also connect--they're making the connection now much more than I've experienced in the past with, oh, this actually has to matter in something that I do, whether I'm an accountant or physical therapist or whatnot. And so they're starting to make that connection. And they're actually starting to ask that of theologians now. So in my classes, students are starting to say things like what does theology say about this, about the refugee crisis about this or that. That is really encouraging to me because it shows me that, that we're starting to have a different kind of conversation about what theology is.
It's started becoming unlatched from sort of an up here conversation and having more of a, oh, this is more of a Christian conversation broadly speaking. So on that level, it's very encouraging. I also see some churches that I've been involved in when I was back in Illinois had, was part of very under-resourced inner city church.
And I said, "hey, do you want me to teach 10 weeks on the Trinity?" And whereas several years ago, they, would've been a little bit sketchy about that. Like, Ooh, that sounds really out there, which is kind of funny, but now there's a real hunger for that. So I'm seeing it kind of across the board as far as, as a theologian, that the stuff that I do is not only mattering pedagogically in the academy for students, but also with the church as well, that it's starting to be something that they're starting to, like, want books and they want things recommended to them. "Hey, what do you recommend on this?" And I'm starting to see the academy starting to make some of those connections as well, even amongst each other. "Hey, let's have a conversation about Methodius of Olympus, one of my faves, you know, that, "Hey, let's look at how he connects all of these things together, and why would that matter? Why should we even talk about him." So, so--
Matt Croasmun: That is encouraging. So both the kind of heady, intellectual, big questions, and even maybe rather specific, very particular kind of historical questions, but then trying to connect there's an impulse then from students to connect that to real life global questions, political questions.
Amy Brown Hughes: Mm-hmm
Matt Croasmun: Boy that's--that is really encouraging!
Amy Brown Hughes: Well, and what's beautiful about it is that actually they don't want just their questions answered. They actually do want to know some of the details. They want to have things to hang their hats on. Which is encouraging. So my research, you always want as a scholar to have your research actually matter in what you teach and not teaching and research being so divorced, but I'm starting to see those things come together a lot, which helps me as a scholar, that when I write things, um, to have sort of a broader audience, sort of subconsciously in my mind now than maybe I used to.
Matt Croasmun: All right, so that's some of what's encouraging, what's going well. What are the challenges, what's hard in theologies these days? Or what are the, what threatens it?
Amy Brown Hughes: I think, I mean, Mark Noll talked about the "scandal of the evangelical mind," you know, from my perspective being in an evangelical institution, I, we're still having that conversation a little bit, sort of some of the anti-intellectualism thing and associating theology, sort of gets shunted into that category, sort of automatically as being sort of esoteric and kind of out there and not really making those connections or not connecting specifically with Scripture, that theology is something other than the Scripture, it's something kind of dangerous and risky that we do over here.
So there's still some of that, that kind of, it's not as overt as it used to be, which is nice, but there's still some of that untangling that is happening. And so there's that. And I also, I also see some issues with going off into our specific corners and sort of holding like white knuckling these particular perspectives, because for certain values that we hold, whether it's politically or socially and starting to make, seeing theology as a way to put ourselves against someone else, "I have more theology on my side" or "more on this side. And so therefore I'm more right."
And it's, there's some agonistic aspects of that I find troubling to say the least.
Matt Croasmun: You talked a lot about kind of the interaction with the church and for Christian students. What about in the broader culture? Does, what does Christian theology have to say these days in our, in our pluralistic world?
Or maybe I can make that more particular for you. When you meet someone--
Amy Brown Hughes: Yeah.
Matt Croasmun: --On an airplane, right?
Amy Brown Hughes: Yeah.
Matt Croasmun: And they ask you what you do, how do you answer and what kind of conversations do you end up in?
Amy Brown Hughes: Oh my goodness. That's, that's so funny because I'm an extrovert and no, I don't make people talk on planes, but if they do want to--
Matt Croasmun: I appreciate that because I never want to talk on planes, but that's good.
Amy Brown Hughes: Then I'll be reading something or grading papers and I, probably about 75% of the time, somebody--"what are you doing?" And I tell them that I'm a theologian and I often get questions about, "what do you think of this really weird scripture that popped in my head?"
And so that's always interesting, but oftentimes it allows them to actually ask somebody that they sort of have something that strikes a nerve. And so I feel like theology can be a really hospitable place for people to actually access Christianity, where there are some big ideas and some values there that we can talk about--well, how do you come to consensus on diverse topics? How do you bring in people from various ways and have them sort of work through some big idea like how to think about who God is? Like, that's a huge question: who's God? You can't start from a place, you can't start from a narrow place on that. So I think methodologically, theology actually has a lot to offer there.
I'm thinking like maybe more specific, like something the, like theological anthropology at, uh, a place where it is really interesting work on, from a theological perspective, on the image of God, how humans relate to--how humans relate to God, how humans relate within themselves, psychologically, how humans relate to each other, how humans relate to the earth, that anthropological perspective from a theological framework. And then thinking, okay, for instance, like with the United Nation's global goals, for instance like gender equality, no poverty, these different goals, they're worldwide conversations about how humans can flourish, largely speaking. So how can theology with how we think about humanity--how can we participate in those conversations? And I think that sort of requiring ourselves to think, "can we actually participate in that conversation" and say, "yes, I think we can." So how can we do that? Like what can we bring to bear on the conversation of eradicating poverty in the world?
How can we participate? And I think challenging ourselves to have that reflex to, as part of our theological exercise or theologizing in general, I think can allow for areas of common ground that we might not have, might have disagreements on other places, can come around specific issues that are very human.
Matt Croasmun: Mm-hmm. Yeah. So you're in particular, an historical theologian, what you just described, the interest from your students, and even what you're just talking about now, this kind of engagement with contemporary cultural issues, but you study things that are centuries old, right? More than a millennium old. How do you-- what would, what would your field look like--patristics or ancient Christianity or historical theology, however you want to, how you term it, what would that look like, if it were oriented around these big questions of human flourishing or what the, what the questions of kind of the vision of a good life?
Amy Brown Hughes: What I find so beautiful about early Christianity is there we have some resources for thinking about theology in sort of a more expansive way where for them, they talked about theology and philosophy in the same breath and really had, they didn't have the discipline's specificity that we have now.
And there was a real sense of, "this is our life. This--everything is at stake on this," and to preserve the martyr tradition and go, "okay, these people gave their lives for this. You know, why does that matter?" And I think thinking about theology as being sort of discourse among the church, largely speaking that discourse can have conversation points worldwide.
I think in early Christianity, I've found the, some beautiful resources for us to figure out sort of how to do that in a lot of ways to pull up a chair for them, metaphorically speaking, and sort of understand their context and think about that and then go, oh, you have some very interesting ways that get around some of our more modern hangups.
To give an example: I, I really spend a lot of time on Gregory of Nyssa, fourth century Trinitarian. And he's also very interesting. He writes on all sorts of different topics. He's a lot, he's kind of hard to pin down on a lot of things, exactly what he thought about things, which makes him a lot of fun, but he has some, the ways that he thinks about who God is, have some really great relevance, especially for modern Trinitarian discussions on gender and God and how, how we think through some of the specifically the feminist critique of how, how traditional theology has worked through that. And Gregory has some really interesting ways of thinking through some of those issues about how he understands the Trinity that allows us to access maybe from the tradition, some ways to answer some of those critiques in a constructive way. That we might not have had before, if we'd not ever encountered Gregory of Nyssa. I've run into that on several occasions, and allowing us to engage scripture in maybe a way that, it is different than we're used to. I think it actually allows us to practice some of that expansive theology that can allow us to be hospitable to different perspectives within Christianity and without.
Matt Croasmun: Hmm. So that's beautiful. And as, as you've been talking about the whole time, engage with questions for today and the kind of the life of faith and, and it is an inspiring kind of picture that we get from the ancient world, even philosophy right in the ancient world. Hadot and, and Foucault insisted, and Martha Nissbaum all insisted--this was a way of life that this is the way we ought to think about this. So, talked a bit about the kind of broader pluralistic culture that we're in, the number of, uh, folks that would check the box of Christian in America. It's going down. It's already quite low in Europe. In that kind of cultural context, why should a young person study theology? What do you say to young people who are thinking about that as a possible step forward? Are they resigning themselves to, you know, obscurity?
Amy Brown Hughes: --and poverty--
Matt Croasmun: --Well, that's granted.
Amy Brown Hughes: I think it kind of depends on what they think theology is for. Because, working in a liberal arts undergraduate institution when they wanna pick up a theology minor for instance, I really encourage students of any particular major to do that because I think that the study of theology is a tool kit that they're going to have throughout their lives as Christians. And I want them to feel like, that they can actually participate in their church conversations and not just automatically freak out when somebody disagrees with them.
So on that kind of level students who would study just theology in general, kind of in that sort of environment now, like a, a, a larger sort of graduate school or beyond that kind of perspective. I actually think that there's a great future for especially, uh, where Christianity is growing in majority of the world and, you know, coming from a charismatic background, um, like this is maybe this is a little bit more present for me just in how and understanding the value of, you know, my background. You know, my tradition is Azusa Street, is the sort of real diverse, like the Holy Spirit is a great equalizer sort of, and very non-elitist perspective. And I think seeing theology as sort beautiful opportunities to see the church in areas, growing in different kinds of contexts and seeing what they come up with, I think is a really beautiful opportunity to enliven us in the, in Europe and US, and et cetera, to, we see Christianity again for the first time.
And I think that theology often allows for access uh, to discussions that they might not be able to, if don't have as much of perhaps a historical or a language situation with working very directly with the biblical texts and such. So theology's a little bit wilder, a little bit messier, but I think that's actually an opportunity for the future.
So as long as students or people who are interested in that, understands sort of where theology is fitting and moving, and how it's fitting in a global context, I think that it's good thing.
Matt Croasmun: For the Life of the World is a production of the Yale Center For Faith and Culture at Yale Divinity school. This episode featured historical theologian, Amy Brown Hughes, and biblical scholar, Matt Croasmun. I'm Evan Rosa, and I edit and produce the show. For more information visit us online at faith.yale.edu.
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