Graham Tomlin has a radical goal: to bring theology back to the heart of the church. You’d think it would already be there, but Tomlin, on the pastoral staff of Holy Trinity Brompton Anglican Church in London, believes the local church has neglected sound theological teaching for the past 200 years.
“It began when universities began to become secular in the 18th and 19th centuries,” says Tomlin, also the principal of Holy Trinity’s St. Paul’s Theological Centre and the dean of St. Mellitus College, an Anglican theological school. “Theology was being taught apart from Christian life and separate from the churches, to the impoverishment of both. Seminaries started in reaction to that, to provide Christian alternatives to the secular university. Yet those remain one step removed from real local churches.”
Here here for Graham Tomlin. Our blog host, also, has made compelling arguments in the past for the increase of Christian education as a key for discipleship. It’s needed now more than ever, as there are many in the church (in the long wake of Schleiermacher perhaps) who prize feeling over thinking, and push careful reflection to the edge as something unrelated to the work of a pastor. The results of that agenda are pretty obvious…
What can I say? Yes, yes, yes! If you don’t study theology as a part of “church”, Jesus gets relegated to being a “how to live life to the fullest” guru!
Amen