Gerald Hiestand and Todd Wilson.  Zondervan, 2015. 129 pages + appendix.

The Pastor Theologian promotes a vision for pastoral ministry which emphasizes the theological leadership that pastors carry. Exercised well, it has strengthened the church through much of Christian history. However, this kind of pastoral leadership has been rare in modern Christianity. This book argues that whether they like it or not, pastors are the theological leaders of churches. To that end, this book sets out to endorse the role of pastors as theologians.

Hiestand and Wilson do not expect that every pastor should be a pastor theologian. They value the other roles pastors can have. But they argue that the relative absence of pastor theologians has been to the detriment of the church and needs to be revived in the present day.

The role of a “pastor theologian” they in fact parse into three different kinds. There is:

• The “local theologian,” who is a theologically astute pastor serving as their church’s theologian.
• There are also “popular theologians,” who produce and share their theologizing as speakers and writers, and do so for a wider audience than their church, at a level accessible to most Christians.
• Lastly, there is what they call the “ecclesial theologian.” This is, they write, “a pastor who is engaged in a kind of theological scholarship that is as intellectually robust as academic theology yet distinct from academic theology. We call it ecclesial theology; that is, theology that is germinated within the congregation, that presses towards distinctively ecclesial concerns, and that is cultivated by practicing clergy” (p. 18, emphasis original. “Ecclesial” means “to do with the church”, from the Greek word for a church or congregation).

The first two kinds of pastoral theologians the authors see as making a comeback in contemporary evangelicalism; the third becomes the focus of chapters seven and eight (see below). Ecclesial theologians are ideally thinkers, writers, preachers and teachers of the highest quality, but who do their work very obviously as a service to Christ and his church. One might consider as historic examples people like Calvin, Owen, and Edwards—all of these were fully engaged with the scholarship current in their world, but wrote mainly for the sake of the church rather than for other academics.

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An historical survey in chapter 2 reveals how theological leadership had been at the forefront of church leadership from the Apostolic Fathers in the second century up until the age of the Enlightenment in the eighteenth century. An appendix at the end of the book catalogues this. This theological leadership was normally centred on the concerns of the church, seeking to speak to its needs and questions.

Chapter three traces “The Demise of the Pastor Theologian in Europe and North America since the 1750s.” A large part of this story was due to the rise of the modern research university, which expected all study—including the study of Scripture, theology, and Christian history—to be performed with a posture of critical detachment. The posture this replaced had seen these disciplines as oriented around churchly concerns and performed more obviously as a service to God and his people. As the training of pastors was gradually taken up by universities, seminaries, and colleges, the apprenticeship model of training pastors, which included theological formation, slowly dwindled.

The forth and fifth chapters explore “The Theological Anemia of the Church” and the “Ecclesial Anemia of Theology.” On the first, the authors aver that the lack of pastorally-oriented theology in the church has contributed to a discernible decline or degradation in Christian ethics: without an undergirding Christian worldview, our distinctive way of life must fall back on the ways of the culture around us. On the second the authors contend that academic theology, although having an important role, does little to help answer the needs of churches, such as premarital boundaries, parenting, discipleship, idolatry, marriage, and so on.

Chapter seven highlights characteristics of the “ecclesial theologian’s scholarship and identity.” Remember – the “ecclesial theologian” is only one of the three kinds of pastor theologians the authors see. The list below is primarily to do with these, although the other two would hardly be excluded. The characteristics are as follows:

• The ecclesial theologian inhabits the ecclesial social location. Their primary place of vocation is the church, not the academy. This “sensitises and positions the ecclesial theologian to make unique pastoral contributions to theology” in a way that theologians in an academic setting are less often forced to grapple with.
• The ecclesial theologian foregrounds ecclesial questions. The concerns that shape this kind of theologian’s writing are those that arise from their role as a pastor, rather than those arising from current trends in academic discourse. Academic discourse is still engaged, but in order to serve ecclesial ends.
• The ecclesial theologian aims for clarity over subtlety. In their writing, such theologians have a goal clearly discernible by readers. Statements that defend or qualify may be omitted in order to keep clear the point that they want to drive home.
• The ecclesial theologian theologizes with a preaching voice. Such writing is not theoretical or ‘neutral’ in tone, but urgent, pressing the reader toward praise and right practice.
• The ecclesial theologian is a student of the church. The resources of past voices from the church are drawn upon to shape and inform the ecclesial theologian – not just the latest scholarship.
• The ecclesial theologian works across the guilds. Because the ecclesial theologian is a pastor, he cannot focus on one area of specialization. While he might (and should) have a specialization, as a pastor he needs to be familiar with more than one discipline of theology.
• The ecclesial theologian works in partnership with the academic theologian. Relationships with academic theologians will be valuable to help keep ecclesial theologians “honest,” preventing them from playing fast and loose with the subject matter in order to arrive at desired conclusions.
• The ecclesial theologian traffics in introspection. By this the authors mean that attention is paid to the inner workings of the human heart in theological matters.

In a final chapter, a series of strategies are offered that would help would-be pastor theologians become practising pastor theologians of hight quality. I will leave it to the interested reader to explore these, but the list is as follows:

• Get a PhD
• Staff the vision
• Get networked
• Guard your study time with a blowtorch
• Read ecclesial theology (and other stuff)
• Refer to your place of work as your ‘study’
• Build study-and-writing leave into your schedule
• Recruit a pastor-theologian intern
• Earn buy-in from your church leadership
• Let the necessity of love trump your love of truth.

This final point is particularly important to press home for eager theology students looking towards such a vocation. On it, the authors write:

“remember that your primary responsibility as an ecclesial theologian is to be a theologian to your own church. No one wants to be used, especially not your church. That precious blood-bought gift of God’s grace is not a platform for you to indulge your fancy for scholarship, nor a venue for you to cloister yourself off from the nitty-gritty of your calling… theology serves the church, not the other way around; she’s a handmaiden, not a god. Fast as Christ Church universal he neglects the church local, those to whom he has a very concrete commitment, then one ought to wonder if he is really serving the church at all”

(pages 121–22).

This book is valuable for the vision of pastoral ministry that it (re)introduces. Given the kind of challenges that Christianity faces today, church leadership needs to have more heft for the sake of the more intellectual elements of discipleship. Driving deeper roots into our theological heritage will help resource the church today if its relevance is made clear and its sharing is done palatably. Certainly, there are times I remember when my intellectual and theological bent served my young people well while I was our church’s youth pastor.

The authors make it clear that not all pastors are called to be pastor theologians, and that this is a good thing—the church needs a range of pastoral types. But insofar as this is a neglected pastoral sub-vocation, it is one that needs to be revived for the present day.

So, for readers of this post who have no aspiration to be this kind of pastor or any kind of pastor, you might ask what is to be your takeaway from this. If you think that there is value in raising up pastor-theologians into the ranks of church leadership, then I would ask you to encourage this from your pastor, to encourage this in young aspiring pastors, and to encourage it when your church might be seeking a new pastor! The church of the decades ahead will be all the better for it.

The Pastor Theologian is available from Fishpond.co.nz and was priced at NZ$38 in October 2024