Book Review of Gerald Hiestand and Todd Wilson, The Pastor Theologian: Resurrecting an Ancient Vision
The Pastor Theologian: Resurrecting an Ancient Vision by Gerald Hiestand and Todd Wilson
(Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2015). $11.98/187 pages.
Pastors are theologians too. In fact, they are the church’s primary theologians; or at least, they should be. Evangelical pastor theologians Gerald Hiestand and Todd Wilson issue a call for pastors to live to their calling to be theological practitioners and have mutual conversations with theologians in the academy. Both are needed, but the specific ministry location of the congregational context lends itself to scholarship that should both shape the academy and edify the body of Christ. Their goal is to address the problem of churches becoming theologically anemic, and theology becoming ecclesially anemic. (14) The migration of theological scholarship from churches and monastic communities to universities accelerated the disjunction of theological work from that which was edifying for congregations. Hiestand and Wilson do a brief historical survey from the early centuries of the western Church through the Reformation to trace this trajectory, supported by an extensive appendix of careful research on key clerical, nonclerical, and monastic theologians.
A disclaimer of transparency is in order: Hiestand and Wilson are conservative evangelicals who do not use inclusive language and whose references to pastor theologians use the masculine pronouns “he/him.” Whether their intention is to use the masculine pronouns as the traditional terms for general inclusion (e.g. as like in Spanish when one uses the masculine case to indicate the inclusion of both male and female genders), a modern reader is left unsure whether they believe that this vision of being and becoming pastor theologians is reserved for men only.
Notwithstanding that, the vision they do lift up is an important one that ought not be elided. Their volume raises three kinds of pastor theologian, each with expanding and specific callings: the first order being ones who translate academic scholarship to the local church; the second order being ones who write theology and interpret theology for the local church and the wider church catholic; the third order, which they focus the latter part of the book is what they call pastor theologian as “ecclesial theologian.” The ecclesial theologian is the pastor theologian who is serving in a congregational context but who is shoulder-to-shoulder with academic theologians, and who writes to influence academic theology, as with the church catholic, while being faithful to pastoral ministry in the local congregational context.
Their closing chapters offer practical guides, almost a swot analysis of what it means to be an ecclesial theologian, how one goes about undertaking it successfully and faithfully in the midst of multiple demands of ministry, family, scholarship, and life. For pastors, professors, and students: this book is a handy, easily accessible work of historical, pastoral, practical theology worth considering and living into.
