How to Know How? Theological Method and Karl Popper

This is a draft introduction to a few draft chapters on theological method.

A person of skill, who does not teach the skill, is like a treasure buried in a field. A proper goal of the academy is to reveal such treasures, to multiply bread, to turn scarcity into abundance.

I studied theology for several years at a reputable school, earning a master’s. What does it mean to be skilled in theology? I left the academy still wondering.

The Association of Theological Schools (ATS) accredits graduate theology programs. It believes it has a sense of what skills a theologian should cultivate. Its standard for a master’s of divinity (4.3) requires that every degree holder meet “learning outcomes” in: (a) religious heritage, (b) cultural context, (c) personal and spiritual formation, and (d) religious and public leadership.

As a master’s degree holder, I am prepared to opine a bit on this standard’s practical meaning. Religious heritage and cultural context are information inputs. Personal and spiritual formation contain practical ways of being. And religious and public leadership require information output – they require public storytelling.

Unnamed in this paradigm: how the information is to be converted into leadership. The goal of theological education is to produce people who can convert religious heritage and cultural context into faith leadership. But no one knows how they do it. They pursue personal and spiritual growth – inward tasks – and this inward pursuit equips them for faith leadership.

I exaggerate for effect. Naturally, in theological school, one is taught much practical wisdom about how to be a faith leader. Practically, one must have a strong presence as a preacher, one must serve communion with reverence, and so on.

But the problem remains: if the process of faith leadership is inward and personal pursuit, then it is extremely difficult to explain the process consciously. Personally, James Loder‘s work on the role of unconscious imagination in problem-solving has convinced me of this point. Ask Ezra Pound or Einstein how they arrive at their mind-bending results, and they can explain some points – the craft of wordsmithing, the process of theory choice and theory testing. But there is a limit. They cannot explain how the idea occurred to them. If faith leadership is like this – a work of inward imagination – then it is difficult, if not impossible, to teach.

The admission processes of most graduate theological schools reflect this difficulty. They require very little in specific pre-training, nor do they judge applicants too heavily on their past success or failure. But they do require one thing: a penetrating review of the applicant’s spiritual probity. Are the potential students the persons they claim to be? A great weight is thus placed on potential students – who, of course, are a morally conscious and eager-to-please bunch – to warrant that they can participate in the mysterion of faith leadership. And, of course, they have no idea.

At any rate, because it is difficult to explain the process, theological schools are generally poor places to learn theological methods, processes by which one should critically evaluate what theologians teach.

I do not say this lightly, because my alma mater devoted components of several courses to the discussion of theological method. They ingeniously transformed the dryness of ‘method’ into the life-giving waters of ‘practice’ and ‘wisdom.’ (Indeed, in my training one of the most helpful books on method was billed as Practical Theology.) But the alchemical miracle seems to have hinged on me drinking the waters and being strangely transformed along with them. It is the spiritually trained and masterful practitioner who converts heritage and context into leadership.

Enter Karl Popper. Popper, more of a philosopher of science and by no stretch a theologian, still managed to highlight academic theology’s precise problem. Popper sought to explain how scientists maintain objectivity and reduce bias, as a community. He refused to attribute their success to their inward life, with scientific ‘virtues,’ like personal detachment or openness to correction. Instead, the objectivity of science comes from “the friendly-hostile co-operation of many scientists.” (The Open Society, ch. 23, p. 424, emph. in orig.) Scientists try to prove each other wrong, to discover who is right. They co-operate by competing.

In other words, the magic happens, not within any individual scientist, but between them. As they try to prove each other wrong, they keep only the ideas that survive this process. The theories that survive many tests are accepted. Final knowledge is never produced, but today’s knowledge is typically better than yesterday’s.

Now theology is not a science, in the way that physics, chemistry, and biology are sciences. Theology has different goals. But as they are all human undertakings, they can suffer from the same weaknesses. And they do. So, Popper’s journeys into the methods of scientific thought can shed some backscattered light on theological thought.

Academic theology must come to revalue reason, if it is going to take the pressure off its recruits. Today, academic theology is not short of imagination. But no vision, no arc of justice, no image of redemption, is going to get much further than the person who saw it, if it cannot be tested. Reason provides a necessary framework for the community to communicate.

This principle goes for theological learning, and it goes double for faith leadership. It is absolutely possible to form a community that works together and does not reason together, at least in the short run. In that long run, this kind of reasonless community lacks moral balance and wisdom. It will not learn, it will not adapt, and it will fall apart.

All leaders who lead through any means other than reasoned persuasion are authoritarians. Perhaps unintentionally so, but it is so. Authoritarian leadership may not always be immoral – though it offers no check on its morality other than force – but it is always ineffective in the long term. Authoritarian leaders, who do not subject themselves to critical acceptance by others, cannot communicate the truth with others. They cannot hear things coming.

By contrast, in a group of people that reason together, people communicate better. They hear one another more clearly, and they can move themselves on behalf of others. They can each develop a stake, a role, a place (however open to change) in their group. Popper is fond of citing the great Athenian orator Pericles: “Although only a few may originate a policy, we are all able to judge it.”

Academic theology needs to learn the lesson that the job of a faith leader is impossible. No one can spin the story of just two hundred people without erasure. Today, the academy teaches an unhelpful impossibility: a faith leader must listen to context and heritage, and personally process them to a narrative. Perhaps the academy can learn to teach the helpful impossibility: a faith leader succeeds when the community leads itself through critical reflection. A faith leader succeeds when the leader is no longer necessary. I call this idea “helpfully impossible,” because, while reason cannot defend reason itself, a leader can at least teach critical discourse habits to others.

In Popper’s collected essays in Conjectures and Refutations, he explores his understanding of critical discourse in detail. The coming chapters will dive into Conjectures and Refutations, asking the question, “what could this mean for theology?” If you are a theologian of the academy who see today’s crisis of method, and want to address it, I salute you, and I offer you what follows.

I have the academy in mind. In today’s English-speaking world, there are many theological schools that operate outside the accredited academy. Church training organizations, blogs, podcasts, and denominational groups can each function as a kind of school of thought for the educated person of faith.

The crisis of method affects these schools differently than it affects the academy. Often, these schools grow up around a charismatic leader, a dedicated mission, or a strict adherence to specific tools of thought. This focused intention allows the group to achieve much within its domain. But it comes at a cost: the school becomes an insider group. One might class such groups as “conservative,” if insiders lack tools to engage with outsiders as equals, or “progressive,” if insiders engage with outsiders politely and free of reasoned discourse.

Either way, focused non-academic groups do much to ferment theology. They produce novel ideas (almost all novel ideas are wrong). They demonstrate that the academy itself is an insider group. They remind the academy that it has no privileged access to the truth, even as these groups often claim privileged access for themselves. Indeed – isn’t that what I’m doing here, on this blog?