Digging Deeper on Theology and Life Abundant

Insights Editor William Greenway Interviews David Jensen

I want to hear more about your vision of abundant life. Is there a difference between the so-called “good life” and “life abundant”? Often when we talk about abundance we immediately drift toward the material and accumulation. Abundance in Jesus’s vision centers on our relationships: with God, other people, other creatures, and with creation itself. For Jesus, life flourishes when those relationships flourish. And Jesus urges us to make the circle of our concern wider and wider, incorporating even those whom we are prone to dismiss.

You reference Jesus’s crucifixion. Surely this qualifies the understanding of “abundant life”? The Roman Empire thinks of flourishing as exerting power over other peoples. Jesus sees flourishing when we widen our circle of concern; he sees power not as power over, but power with and for others. Jesus doesn’t seek his own death. The death-dealing powers he confronts force death upon him. The death of Jesus is a result of the clash between a gospel vision of abundant life and a vision that seeks its own benefit at the expense of others. The death of Jesus actually reveals a fate worse than death: life cut off from others and the life-giving world God has given.

Are there theological confusions that obstruct people’s ability to live abundantly? One great theological confusion is the prosperity gospel. It says, “If you live a faithful life, you will be blessed with things.” Certainly our relationship to material things is part of abundant life—Jesus is concerned about the material needs of the poor. But if abundant life concerns relationship to things, we will never have enough. Things do not satisfy. Someone’s always going to have more. Calvin was right about the dynamic of sin and greed: it cultivates an insatiable appetite, cutting us off from life abundant.

You speak of people spending Sunday mornings at coffee shops, staring at iPhones, watching their kids play club soccer. This morning The Guardian newspaper called the fitness app Strava a religion, saying it provides community, training data, and motivation to millions. Now, I love coffee shops and my

In so much public discourse I see easy answers, caricatures, presumption that God is on our side. What I see in seminaries and congregations is struggle, a refusal to settle for pat answers … I think that is what people desire, and maybe today there’s even more hunger for authentic theological and spiritual reflection and education because there’s so little in public discourse.

kids playing soccer. I have nothing against Instagram. I’m all for exercise clubs. What’s the problem? Today, many shun communities proven to promote and sustain our relationships with each other and God. My problem is not with anything I list. But does the iPhone ultimately enhance our relationships or cut us off? Moreover, something is lost when we seek communities that reinforce our own world views instead of breaking bread with people who occasionally annoy us. I am trying to identify patterns in modern American life that tend to insulate us from ourselves and from one another.

Today it is cliché that people have never been more connected yet never felt more alone, and in relation to that, you see people moving away from communities of faith precisely when they most desperately need them. Right.

The exercise or soccer club may be part of an abundant life, but is there something distinctive and significant about faith communities? Yes. The youth group or adult Sunday school class and a soccer team or a bowling league share many commonalities. Gathering together regularly for a common purpose nourishes bonds that make for abundance. What distinguishes the gathered people of God is that the gathering is not centered around a shared interest, like

love for soccer or exercise. It is orientated to God. In faith communities there’s a decentering and re-centering in God’s grace.

So, it’s not an either/or. But problems could arise if engagement in faith communities is cut off by other commitments? Yes. Parents and youth have to negotiate all these things. What does it mean to live a faithful life this moment, when demands on time are so intense?

The words “theological education” can invoke visions of seminaries and professors. But for most people theological education comes from pastors, youth pastors, Christian educators, and Sunday school teachers in more than 380,000 Christian congregations across the United States. How do you conceive the relation among professors and others engaged in Christian education? Theological education happens whenever there’s intentional reflection in community on Christian life. There’s a delicate dance between seminaries and congregations. I sometimes hear that seminaries are bubbles. Not so. Our faculty is in constant conversation with congregations. And I am impressed by the hunger in congregations for substantive dialogue about faith. People don’t want a dumbed down set of answers to basic questions. They want to engage and live the questions that sustain life, and my work at the seminary is renewed whenever I teach in congregational settings. So, a delicate and invaluable dance.

You mention a growing hunger for theological education among adults. What are they yearning for? In so much public discourse I see easy answers, caricatures, presumption that God is on our side. What I see in seminaries and congregations is struggle, a refusal to settle for pat answers. I just attended a remarkable annual retreat, Sharing Our Faith Traditions (SOFT) that gathers Christian, Muslim, and Jewish seminarians for three days of conversation. Our topic this year was prayer. We were all exposed to practices across traditions that deepened our appreciation of one another’s traditions and strengthened our own prayer lives. I think that is what people desire, and maybe today there’s even more hunger for authentic theological and spiritual reflection and education because there’s so little in public discourse.

You note trends have reversed, but you reference a familiar tale of decline. According to Simon Brauer, in 1998 there were 220,000 Christian congregations in the U.S. That jumps to 401,000 by 2006, and then declines to 358,000 in 2012. Between 2006 and 2012 a lot of congregations shut their doors, but in the longer term there was dramatic movement up and down and a net gain of 130,000 congregations. Or, consider that between 1998 and 2018 church membership declined from 70 to 50 percent of the U.S. population. That sounds like a big drop in numbers of church members, but in absolute numbers that amounts to 163 million church members in 2018—10 million people more than

the entire U.S. population in 1950. At the same time, there is a steady decline in mainline churches. What do you make of all of this data?

Well, what I don’t make of it is “The a sky is falling!” I have seen statistics get people excited: “We’re shrinking beyond imagination, and if we don’t blow things up we’re doomed.” I don’t buy that one bit. I am enough of a Reformed Christian to believe in the perseverance of the saints, to believe the church will endure come whatever. What I do make of these statistics is that the makeup and patterns of religious affiliation are changing as society becomes more diverse. There is also suspicion of traditional authorities stemming from sexual and financial scandals. There are suspicions some are more concerned to preserve particular forms of church than to protect the most vulnerable. Theological education continually asks, How are we to respond to the diverse new visions of and possibilities for church? Our patterns of religious affiliation are changing, the forms of church are changing, and yet the church endures and will endure. I’m not worried. I’m more hopeful about the church now than I was twenty years ago, when all this change wasn’t as much on our consciousness. I see it not as decline, but as constructive adaptation and re-formation.

You used the terms “mainline” and “establishment” interchangeably. But if we think of the Deuteronomic History, post-Constantinian Rome, the Holy Roman Empire, Kierkegaard’s Denmark, or many like periods … it turns out “establishment” is not the healthiest thing for the church. It’s precisely when “abundant life” and “the good life” become confused. That correlates to you being more worried twenty years ago, when we were more solidly part of the establishment? Precisely. Easy alliances between the church and whatever powers may be have always been a mixed blessing in the Christian community.

According to Brauer, there has been steady growth of nondenominational Protestant congregations in the U.S., from 54,000 congregations in 1998 to 84,000 congregations in 2012. That continual growth outpaces losses in the mainline churches by tens of thousands. Does this relate to spiritual vitality bubbling up everywhere that you refer to? And might this relate to the increase in nondenominational students here at Austin Seminary? I see this spontaneous emergence of nondenominational traditions (an interesting phrase!) as a sign of the Spirit blowing where it will. We do see more nondenominational students here at Austin. That is a sign God is doing something and we need to pay attention. I do worry about narrowing of vision and about accountability in nondenominational communities. Part of the genius of denominations has to do with formal patterns of relationship among congregations, which widens our areas of focus, concern, and accountability beyond our own congregation.

How should we who value denominations react?

We pay attention and ask, What do we have to learn from this? The Protestant tradition has always been unbelievably eclectic. Calvin said this is all God’s world, so we should be open to goodness and truth wherever we see it. God is moving throughout the world and we should remain open to divine wisdom wherever it might be found. At the same time, while we are open to what is new and different, we should name what in our churches and in our world is not from God.

The drop in percentage of Christians in the U.S. is partly related to growth in people from other faiths. You encourage us to celebrate this shift. What and why are we celebrating? How do you envision relations among those from different faith traditions? My honest answer is I don’t know what is happening, but I trust God’s purposes will be accomplished. At a minimum, my Christian commitments call me to be a good neighbor with whoever I’m thrown into community with. That means being open to hearing outsiders, and perhaps even changing because of what they say. It is also our responsibility as Christians to tell the good news as we know it in Jesus Christ—but then we let God do the work that God will do.

You just experienced this at the Sharing Our Faith Traditions retreat … Definitely. There we honestly grappled with very different perspectives. For instance, the Muslim students asked us, “How can you be trinitarian?”

They thought that made you a polytheist, right? Right. And those kinds of basic questions help me to think about, own, and live my faith in ways that are not always possible if I’m always in the company of people who take the Trinity as a given. So, I don’t know what all God is doing, but when I am thrown together with these other amazing people I know I have reason to celebrate.

While talking about technical study of ancient texts in a rabbinical school, you have a line that I just loved, which is: “The relevance is in the ancient traditions themselves.” Can you expand upon that? Sure. When I visited one rabbinical school I observed the ancient practice of paired reading of Talmud, the reading of ancient commentaries on Jewish Law, together with the Torah. They’re reading the same texts that they were reading thousands of years ago. Watching them, it struck me that texts of our traditions already contain deep questions and reflections upon life lived in relationship to God, others, and God’s creation.

I began my sabbatical thinking I would find fresh and new ways of making traditions relevant, and what I found instead were ancient texts and ancient reflections about life-sustaining practices that were already wholly relevant. That said, we should remain open to new forms and resources. At the SOFT retreat there was a Jewish worship service. The liturgy was ancient. Yet in the middle the can-

tor chanted lines from a Destiny’s Child song. The leader of that worship service talked about how this gospel song expressed the ancient tradition of our reliance on God, and it worked. So, ancient traditions sometimes get expressed in new, modern forms, but the faith does not need updating to be relevant.

You say theological education should prioritize attention to climate change. Obviously, science is essential for understanding and addressing climate change. What distinctive contributions can theology make? It boils down to this: Christian theology, together with Jewish and Muslim theology, stresses that the world belongs to God. So in theology there is a decentering of the self and an affirmation of all the rest of the world, and that is not an inherent part of science. One of my favorite lines in Cynthia Rigby’s Holding Faith is, “Theology should not be afraid to say something about everything.” Not everything about everything, but something about the fullness of life in relation to God vis-à-vis everything—that includes health and economic policy and how we treat the natural world (so, climate change).

So, I want science to do good science. I expect theology to have enough familiarity with science to talk responsibly about our relations to others and God’s creation.

Finally, you also urge us to attend to place. For us, that means Texas, and in our context you also name migration as a prime issue for theologians. What distinctive contribution might theological education make to our understanding of migration? Migration is at the core of some of Christianity’s most basic narratives: Abram migrates from Ur, later the children of Israel end up in Egypt, then they migrate out of Egypt and slavery and to freedom in a new land, after that, again, there is exile. So, there’s a story of place and of being displaced over and over again. We also see migration in the life of Jesus—who says he has no place to lay his head. It’s complicated. It’s not simply a story of migration where one is never finding a home, and it’s never simply a story of “this is my place and I’m here forever.” It’s, “we live in this tension between having a home and not having a home”—and perhaps that’s reality for most people. So, I don’t want to romanticize migration because it’s often a forced hardship. I don’t want to romanticize home because home can be a hostile place. Maybe what I’m getting at is a restlessness with regards to place until we rest in the living God. Augustine says at the beginning of his Confessions that we are restless until we rest in God.

At the same time, education should not occur in “no place,” for then education becomes disembodied. So it’s important to reflect on the places where we are called to be, the places we end up calling home. I never thought I’d end up in Texas, but now I say that I’m a Texan in ways that would have surprised the self I was twentyfive years ago.

Your response is complex! Definitely not quick and caricatured. So, this is the

sort of complicated reflection people hunger for, the sort of reflection which begs for more. At the same time, the biblical theme of welcome for the stranger, and your openness to the other, these would say something quite clear about how we react to immigrants in crisis. Yet isn’t this is a reaction we could understand in terms of what you name as Jesus’s exhortation to widen our circle of concern, to think in terms not of power over but of power for, to think in terms of life abundant flowing from the fullness of our relation to all others, including those we might otherwise be prone to dismiss?

Oh, I think so. Part of what God is calling us to in the witness of Jesus Christ is to understand how all long for a home, even as many are called or forced away from home. We will find ourselves enjoying and sharing abundant life when we widen our concern to include all these others. Theological education at its best helps us to remember that, and it helps us determine how best to act so as to share abundant life with others as we journey through this life. v

Editor’s Note: The statistics cited in the questions come from Simon G. Brauer, “How Many Congregations Are There? Updating a Survey-Based Estimate,” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion (2017) 56(2): 438–448.

To listen to the full interview with David Jensen on theology for life abundant, tune into our new Insights podcast at AustinSeminary.edu/Insightspodcast or wherever you get your podcasts.