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Welcome to the first podcast for Insights, the faculty journal of Austin Seminary. I am William Greenway, the editor of Insights and professor of philosophical theology here at Austin Seminary. The author of our lead essay for the Spring 2020 issue of Insights, which is focused on theology for abundance, is David Hadley Jensen. Professor Jensen is a distinguished scholar, the author of 10 books, most recently a theological commentary on 1st and 2nd Samuel, and a book on the history of Christian understandings of Christ.

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He has also written extensively on theology and childhood, parenting, and human sexuality. He is currently academic dean and professor in the Clarence N. and Betty B. Frierson Distinguished Chair of Reformed Theology here at Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary.

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The title of his essay, which we will be discussing today, is Theological Education for Life Abundant. An abbreviated written version of this discussion can be found in the Spring 2020 issue of Insights. Welcome, Professor Jensen. We are looking forward to learning about theological education and abundant life.

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Thanks, Bill. It's good to be here. Now, you see the Gospel of John stressing how Jesus came to bring us abundant life. I want to hear more about your vision of abundant life.

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Is there a difference between, say, the good life that so much of our society is aiming at and life abundant? Yeah, great question. Certainly, We hear a lot along our national conversations about abundance, about the good life, the quest for the good life, what makes for a life worth living.

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Often in our society, when we talk about abundance, we immediately drift toward the material. So it's our It has to do with things. It has to do with stuff.

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It has to do with accumulation of enough goods to ensure a good life. I think the way Jesus presents life in abundance in the Gospels, not just the Gospel of John, is quite different from that. Abundance in Jesus' vision centers on our relationships. not on things, our relationships, our relationships to God, our relationships to other people, to other creatures, our relationship to creation itself.

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And so I think we see in the pattern of Jesus' life is life flourishes when those relationships flourish. We see that in his relationship to God, who he turns to in prayer over and over again. Jesus teaches us to prayer. He models what a life in

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flourishing relationship to the divine looks like. Jesus also encourages us to turn toward others. The life in abundance calls us to love our enemies as well as those nearest and dearest to us. And so we see in the pattern of Jesus' life that the circle of our concern gets wider and wider and wider.

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It incorporates those who we are sometimes prone to dismiss. And then finally, I think even in the life of Jesus, you see a pattern of what life in relation to God's creation looks like in flourishing. Jesus, often when he's overwhelmed, he leaves the crowd and goes into what I see the natural world for renewal.

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Jesus encourages us to consider the lilies of the field in the life of prayer. And so I think the life of abundance portrayed in the gospels is all about relationships. The life of abundance that our society often trumpets has to do with things.

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And though the pattern of Jesus' life concerns things, it's not reduced to things. It incorporates all of our relationships. So that's how I see those spinning out. Okay.

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At the end of your essay, You end with a reference to Jesus' crucifixion at age 33. It seems like this would seriously qualify what people might understand by abundant life. How does that dynamic come into play?

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That's an amazing question that I'll try to answer. You know, I think part of how I see the crucifixion is this. Jesus offers a pattern of abundant life. And that's the very thing that many of the powers that be in his time see as a threat.

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Let me spell this out a little more. What do they see as a threat exactly? Well, this circle of wider and wider concern. You know, I do think the Roman Empire sees the pattern of human relationships as power over others.

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so that Rome extends its reach by exerting its power over other peoples and tribes in the ancient Near East. Jesus offers another model of widening the circle of concern, seeing power not as power over, but power with and power that empowers others to life in its fullness. It's clear to me that Jesus doesn't seek His own death. I mean, I take His prayer in Gethsemane quite seriously.

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Father, if it be possible, let this cup pass from me, but not my will, but yours. And so Jesus doesn't actively seek His own death, but the death-dealing powers that He confronts force that upon Him. And I think what we see in the death of Jesus is the clash between a vision of the abundant life and a vision of life that seeks the benefit of some at the expense of many.

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And that's how I would understand the death of Jesus. And what the death of Jesus shows us, I think, is that there are fates that are worse than death. A life that's cut off from others, a life that's cut off from the life-giving world that God has given.

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All the ways that we cut off relationship can lead to a, quote, life that is worse than death itself. And so Jesus offers this vision of life abundant and is willing to die for it. That's how I see it. Yeah.

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Are there especially significant theological confusions things theological education might want to address that might obstruct people's ability to live abundantly. Yes, I mean, certainly if there is one great theological confusion that's landed on the scene in North America and frankly worldwide in the Christian community, it's the vision of the prosperity gospel, which is a vision of abundance, but it is inherently tied to material goods. that if, and the prosperity gospel says something like this in its many different forms, that if you live a faithful life, you will be blessed with things.

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That is a radical oversimplification, reduction of the abundant life that I think we are shown in the gospels. I don't mean to minimize our relationship to material things. Certainly our relationship to material things is part of the abundant life that Jesus promotes. Jesus is concerned about the plight of the poor in his context.

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I mean, a basic minimum of things that support our daily life is a non-negotiable. The dynamic, of course, of the pattern of the prosperity gospels, when is it ever enough? If the abundant life concerns our relationships to things, we will never have enough things. There is always someone who's going to have more.

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We're always going to look toward that. I mean, it's insatiable. This is how I think, you know, I think Calvin was right about the dynamic of sin and the dynamics of greed. It is fundamentally an insatiable appetite.

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And so that's certainly the prosperity gospel is one of the primary threats, even if you will, to a vision of abundant life that the gospel seems to promote. You speak of people spending Sunday mornings at coffee shops, staring at iPhones, or watching their kids play club soccer. Me too. Me too.

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This morning, my newspaper had a headline that read, how fitness app Astraia became a religion. And it said the app provides community, training data, and motivation to millions of athletes. Now, I love going to coffee shops. I love that my kids play soccer, and I enjoy camaraderie with the other parents.

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I have nothing against Instagram and phones. I'm all for exercise and running clubs. So what's the problem? No, I'm for all those.

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things too. Amen to everything that you have said. I think what I was trying to address in that comment that I make in the essay is that there does seem to be a general pattern in American life of shunning some of the forms of community that have shown to promote and sustain our relationships with each other and with the living God and God's creation. in favor of doing it all myself.

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Okay, so I mean, I depend on the iPhone every day. Does the iPhone in the end and how it is used, does it enhance our relationships with others or does it cut ourselves off? Does reading the Sunday paper enhance our relationships with others or does it cut it off? My problem is not with any one of these things that I list in that litany of things.

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I do think something is lost when the gathered people of God either seek communities that are so homogenous that they simply reinforce their own worldviews and their own stereotypes and their own biases, and gathering with a community large enough where you break bread together with people who will occasionally annoy you. The vision of the reign of God that Jesus promotes is not a community of the like-minded. It's a gathering of peoples from east and west, north and south, different experiences in life.

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And so I do think the patterns of our affiliation in North America tend to isolate us more and more from one another, and the vision of church that Jesus promotes draws people from all corners of the world. And so I think what I was really trying to diagnose is what are the patterns of modern American life that tend to insulate ourselves from one another and the beautiful differences of the human community. That being said, there is no such thing as an ideal church.

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There is no such thing as an ideal, you know, every community that gathers around Wharton Sacrament fall short of a vision God calls us to embrace. But it seems like these other communities, as great as they are, don't necessarily meet in their fullness the abundance you're talking about. And we see people desperately striving for community.

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Maybe, is there too much to say even there's a way in which, and I think the way you speak generally, this would apply not to just to churches, but to synagogues and temples and mosques, but communities of faith that share in some way the sense of abundance. There's a way in which many people are moving away from these communities at precisely the time they most desperately need them. Yeah, I mean, look, exactly. I mean, I do think, I mean, look at how fragmented our society has become politically.

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Instead of believing something when you see it, people see it when they believe it. How do the communities that we are drawn to, whether they're online or whether they're in the flesh, how do they challenge me? How do they open me up to new perspectives and the beauty of other people who live and act and think differently from my own way of living and acting? I mean, I think this is part of what was so scandalous about the life of Jesus, is that he crossed boundaries that were taboo.

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And that's, Jesus, in the end, doesn't ask us to found a denomination. He asks us to follow him. I know there will probably be questions that he asks about patterns of religious affiliation in the US, and that's, I try to address some of that. But also you don't interpret follow him individualistically.

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To follow is to be part of a community in this way. I mean, it's a vital part that follows from being about and for others, which addresses kind of the loneliness that also exists so much about in contemporary society where people never been surrounded by more people, never been more connected and never felt more alone. That's almost a cliche now that you're going right after.

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You've written books on parenting and childhood. When you think in particular of youth, because a lot of things on that list have to do with our kids and church or a youth group and what concretely we would want to provide ourselves or have our churches provide what can distinctively be provided by theological understanding and education that would be helpful for children in living abundantly. So yeah, so are you asking a question of what makes youth group, for example, different from a soccer team?

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Yeah, but that would be one way of phrasing it. As much as I love the soccer team in that community, are there distinctive elements and characteristics that, the gym or the soccer club or these other communities, they're part of a rich life, perhaps. But is there something distinctive that theological understanding and reflection and the community of a faith community would bring or other ways to think about that as we think about parenting?

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Yeah, let me try to address this. It's an amazingly simple question that is actually quite rich. And I'm not sure I can capture all the richness of the question itself, but here are some thoughts.

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Of course, there are many things that, for example, a youth group or a adult Sunday school group and a soccer team or a bowling league share in common. It's the ways that the gathering together week after week for a common purpose nourishes the bonds between us that make for a good life. Over and over again, we see this happening.

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I would say, however, that what distinguishes the gathered people of God on Sunday or the youth group on Wednesday night or Sunday afternoon, at the end of the day, it's not centering around so much a common thing, such as a love for soccer or a love for exercise or healthy habits. But it's an orientation to the beauty of God and God's world. So there's something that, there's a de-centering that happens in the church where it's not all about me and my needs. It centers us, if you will, in the majesty and mystery of God's grace and in the story

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that is so much larger than any of the other narratives that sustain us. So there's a comprehensiveness, I would even say, if you will, of what faith communities and what youth group seeks to do over and against all the good things that soccer teams. And these are the things that, I mean, I think about where have I made friends in my community? It's often through youth sports.

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It's through, that's that happens and that's to be celebrated. So I'm not seeing that as a, I don't see, there's sometimes I hear people talk about youth sports happening on Sunday as a threat to Christian community. I'm like you. I have been to games on Sunday morning that have conflicted with church.

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I felt ambivalent about that, but at the end of the day, I'll pick going to the game that my child is in. So it's not an either-or, it's a both-and. The problem happens when these things arise perhaps to the degree that the other piece, the church piece, the youth group piece, the formation of that community is somehow there's no space for it. That's maybe a danger.

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Yeah, and I think parents and children have to negotiate all of these things. I mean, you know, what does it mean to live a faithful life at this moment in time when the demands on time are arguably much, much more. I mean, one of the, I will say this about parenting and childhood, it does seem like you quote, have to specialize in something earlier and earlier and earlier, otherwise you lose.

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I remember when our daughter expressed an interest in gymnastics at about, in about the 5th or 6th grade. And she wanted to take a gymnastics class and There really weren't any options. It was too late.

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It was way too late. Way too late. And that's, there's something that saddens me about that. So.

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All right, the words theological education can invoke visions of seminaries and professors. But for most people, theological education comes from the pastors and youth pastors, Christian educators, and Sunday school teachers, and the more than 380,000 Christian congregations, and that's just the name, Christian congregations, in the US. So how do you conceive of the relation among seminaries and professors and such, and all those others engaged in Christian education?

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Yeah, I think you've hit the nail on the head. I mean, the phrase theological education sometimes gets reduced to seminary education. Education for the training of leaders in the Christian community.

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I see theological education happening whenever there's intentional reflection in community with others on our growth in the Christian life. Congregations are very well equipped to do that because congregations are the place where that life gets lived out, where it's modeled. Of course, that assumes that congregations have competent and faithful leadership, both clergy and laity.

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I think, how do I want to put this? Seminaries flourish when their relationship with congregations are flourishing. We are not, we at seminaries are the training ground for the leaders of the church, but our students, as they do degree programs here, do field placements in congregations. And I think each student is challenged by the circumstances of those congregations.

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And so There's this delicate dance and interconnection between the life of the seminary and the life of congregations. I sometimes hear the critique that seminaries are bubbles. I don't buy that at all.

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Our faculty at Austin Seminary is constantly in conversation with congregations in the Austin area and beyond, in fact, all across the country. Whenever I have spoken in congregations, I have been impressed by the hunger that is in congregations for substantive questions and dialogue about matters of faith, about matters of public life, about things that matter. people don't want a dumbed down set of answers to basic questions. They want to engage and live the questions that sustain life.

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And I encounter, my work at the seminary is renewed whenever I teach in congregational settings. So that's, those are some thoughts on the question. And my next question, I'll go ahead and ask it, but you kind of went ahead and answered it.

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So I take that as a very good side, was that you mentioned actually a growing hunger for theological education among adults. And I was going to ask, you know, what's the cause of this and what do you think they're yearning for? I mean, maybe you've already answered that question, but it's something also I've witnessed. I think, I mean, I don't know, I contrast so much of contemporary American political discourse with what I see happening in the seminary, what I see happening in congregations.

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A lot of easy answers are offered by would-be leaders these days. Ways of lumping some people into some categories who you're supposed to listen to and others in other categories that you dismiss, whole hog. Visions of life that see some as threats to, quote, our way of life. Visions of life that assume that God is on your side.

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What I see in congregations, what I see in the conversations that I have with our students and colleagues in classrooms is struggle, is a refusal to settle for pat answers. I just got back from a remarkable retreat, and I know you've been on this retreat before, that gathers Christian, Muslim, and Jewish seminarians for a better part of three days on conversations about things that matter. And our topic this time was prayer.

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And what we saw in that gathering was We got some exposure to the practices of prayer across these traditions in ways that deepened our appreciation of each other's traditions and strengthened our own prayer life. And those kind of opportunities are exceedingly rarer in our society where we are sometimes encouraged to write others off. And so I just

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maybe there's more hunger for authentic theological reflection and spirituality because there's so much in our political and economic discourse that refuses to cultivate those very things. Now, you say the trends have reversed recently. But you reference a familiar decline story about seminaries and churches. I want to just throw out some statistics.

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According to a 2017 study in the Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, in 1998, there were roughly 220,000 Christian congregations in the US. In 2006, that number jumped to 401,000. There's no explanation of why.

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They're just going to read the data. Maybe 911 is, I mean, it'd be interesting to know these dynamics, what the relation is. But this is just, but anyway, from 220,000 in 1998, 200, or rather, to 401,000 in 2006. And then by 2012, it had decreased to 358,000 congregations.

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Now, one could refer to 2006 to 2012 and report that more than 7,000 Christian congregations a year are shutting their doors. Ignoring this radical up and down shift, and we just saw that in a graph, you never draw a conclusion about a trajectory from it. And the net increase of more than 100,000 congregations from 1998 to 2012. So let's take one other example, and this is noted in your article.

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Between 1998 and 2018, church membership in the U.S. declined from 70% to 50% of the U.S. population. Now, that sounds like a big drop in church membership, but in absolute numbers, that means that in 2018, there were 163 million church members in the U.S.

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which is 10 million people more than the entire US population in 1950. Now, on the other hand, there's been a slow but steady decline in mainline churches. So what do you make of all of this data and the different ways that you use it? How do you respond to that?

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Let me respond by saying what I don't make of it and then what I do make of it. Okay. I think what I don't make of it is a sky is falling mentality. I have been in gatherings where statistics get cited about the Protestant mainline that essentially boil down to this.

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We're shrinking beyond anybody's imagination, and if we don't blow things up the way they are, we're doomed. I don't buy that one bit. I am enough of a reformed Christian to be convinced of a thing called the perseverance of the saints, that the church is God's beloved, and the church will endure come whatever.

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Now the shapes of church life are changing. What I do make of these statistics is that the fabric and the makeup and the patterns of religious affiliation are changing. As American society becomes more diverse, as our suspicion, often rightly so, of certain authorities, gets lived out.

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I mean, you look at the sexual abuse scandals that have not just cut across the Roman Catholic Church, but Protestant denominations as well. There are often good reasons to be suspicious of structures that are more concerned with preserving a particular form of church than protecting the most vulnerable. So there are all kinds of, and we are awakening to some of those things, thanks be to God. So what I make of the statistics is our patterns of religious affiliation are changing, the forms of church are changing, and yet the church endures and will endure on into the future.

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And so one of the questions of theological education, of course, then is How are we responding to the vision of church that is being lived out, that looks different in many ways from a denomination headquartered in a particular place and then with an apparatus? I mean, that's, you know, I think I said earlier, Jesus invites us to follow him, to live it out in the company of others. And some of the patterns of denominational affiliation are comparatively recent and necessary acquisitions in the ongoing quest to follow Jesus faithfully.

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And so I'm not worried. I really am not. I'm more hopeful about the church now than I was 20 years ago when some of this, quote, supposed decline wasn't as much on our consciousness. I don't, I choose not to see it as decline.

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I choose to see it as changes. Does that make sense? That makes sense. And the reason you saw me pausing there for a second is because what you just said took me to a question I actually eliminated before I sent you my list of questions to think about, which was in the article, you used the terms mainline and establishment in a sort of an interchangeable way.

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But historically, if you think of the Deuteronomic history or post-Constantinian Rome or the Holy Roman Empire or Kierkegaard's Denmark or virtually any other period where the church has been establishment, it turns out establishment is not the healthiest thing for the church to be. That's precisely when abundance and the good life tend to be confused. And that kind of correlates to what you said, where you were more worried 20 years ago when we were so confident and maybe overconfident, maybe then in a place of temptation.

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And now, does that maybe fit in. And that is not to equate that mainline with establishment, but to be concerned about worries over being established. I couldn't have said it better than you just said.

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I mean, I mean, easy alliances between the church and whatever powers that be have always been a mixed blessing in the Christian community. I mean, there is, you know, so you've said it. Let me go to a related question, and you can expand on this. So A notable trend in Protestant churches is the steady growth of non-denominational congregations, from 54,000 congregations in the U.S.

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in 1998 to 84,000 in 2012. And that's without a dip. That's just a continual growth of 30,000 congregations, which by 10s of thousands outpaces the the sure but relatively small loss of congregations in the mainline churches.

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So maybe is this related to the signs of vitality and spirituality? life bubbling up all over the place you refer to? And might this relate to the growth of non-denominational students here at Austin Seminary and other denominational schools? And finally, if I can do all three of these at once, because you also talk about the value of denominations.

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So this is not something to be simply lost, but so how might we who value the denominations and the value of denominations, how do we react? How do we put all this together? Right, Wow, that's a lot.

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Yes, I see the spontaneous emergence of non-denominational traditions, and that's an interesting phrase, a non-denominational tradition, or non-denominational communities, as a sign of the Spirit moving and blowing where it will. We cannot contain all of the movements of God's Spirit let loose in the world. And so yes, there is, we see more non-denominational students at Austin Seminary. I think that is a sign of something that God is doing in the world and a sign that we need to pay attention to.

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And what are the patterns and signs of flourishing in those non-denominational communities? My perennial question, having just celebrated those spontaneous movements, however, is what happens to patterns of accountability in a non-denominational community? Part of, I think, the genius and witness of denominations is that the church is always more than a gathered congregation. And patterns of relationship between congregations are essential if we are to grow in our faithfulness in following Jesus Christ.

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Because as you and I know, people turn away from the living God. Communities turn away from the living God. And sometimes communities can get quite dangerous in their departure and in their turn to what I would call idolatry rather than...

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And so what my question of a non-denominational tradition is what are the patterns of accountability that make sure that congregation is not simply led astray by either A, one charismatic individual, or B, a group of powerful people within that congregation who leads it on a certain path. So within denominations, there are structures of accountability that I don't always see in non-denominational communities. And then what was the third question?

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How do we react? In mainline denominations, how should we react? Which you've sort of answered. Yeah.

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We pay attention seriously to what's happening and try to ask ourselves, what do we have to learn from this? Are there I mean, I think the Protestant tradition from the get-go has been unbelievably eclectic. Calvin had a perspective that this is God's world.

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We're open to goodness wherever it may be found. There is not a rigid sacredness that is cut off from the rest of the world. God is moving throughout the world and we are open to that wisdom wherever it might be found.

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And that is, I think that's our task today. That also calls us to name and reject what we believe is not from God that's going on in the world. And we owe that to diagnosing our own tradition and others' traditions as well, to the best of our abilities. The drop in the percentage of people in Christian congregations,

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is partly related to an increase in the number of people from other faiths in the US, which you encourage us not to mourn, but to celebrate. So what and why exactly are we celebrating? And how do you envision relations among those from different faith traditions? Wow, huge question.

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My most honest answer, I think, is I don't know what is happening. But I trust that God and God's purposes will be accomplished in God's own good time. And at minimum, my Christian commitments require me to be a good neighbor with whoever I'm thrown into community at this place and this time with.

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And that being a good neighbor means being open to hearing what he or she has to say and how that might even change me. I think our responsibility as Christians is to tell the good news as we know it in Jesus Christ and let God do the work that God will do. It sounds like you just had a concrete experience of this too.

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Yeah, concrete experience. Yes. At the soft. Yeah, at the sharing of faith traditions, yeah.

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And at that place, there was an honest grappling with some of our different perspectives. I mean, the Muslim students in particular were asking us, what on, How can you be Trinitarian? And those kinds of basic questions make me own my faith and live it in ways that are not always possible if I'm just always in the company of

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people who assume the Trinity is a given. I mean, what do we mean by it? Because they think you sound like a polytheist, right? And we don't feel like we're polytheists because we're monotheists.

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Right. So that's, you know, I found that a, not a watering down kind of experience, but a strengthening experience for my own faith. So I think, you know, I don't know what God is doing, but I know that I am thrown together with these other amazing people.

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Now, part of your essay is about traveling to Austria and observing the training of Catholic seminarians. And you say that in Austria, Catholic seminarians trained for seven years. And here in the States, Reform and conservative rabbinical training, which you also observed, takes five years. And you talk in this about the sort of technical study of ancient texts.

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Yes. And you have a line that I just loved, which is, the relevance is in the ancient traditions themselves. Could you expand upon that? Sure, Yeah, I.

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A couple of things behind you, but I'll first talk about the relevance in the ancient texts themselves. I saw when I visited 1 rabbinical school this ancient practice of paired reading of Talmud. So these ancient commentaries on Jewish law and on the Torah. That is a practice that they have been doing.

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longer than we've had what we call Christian seminaries. And they're reading the same things that they were thousands of years ago. The texts of our traditions, I am convinced, contain the deepest and most relevant questions of a good life lived in relationship to God, others, and God's creation. We don't have to make our tradition relevant.

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It already is if we attend to the basic tenets of our faith and our sacred texts and the traditions themselves. I think I began my sabbatical thinking that I would find fresh and new ways of, quote, making traditions relevant. outside of the communities other than my own. And what I found instead were life-sustaining practices that have been done over a long, time that saw relevance and lived relevance in those texts and traditions themselves.

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That being said, I mean, I do think one of the practices that has sustained Jews over time is study of Torah and worship. One of the things that happened in the Sharing Our Faith Traditions retreat that I attended last week was there was a Jewish worship service. And the liturgy was ancient.

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And yet in the middle of it, there was a Destiny's Child song that was chanted akin to It was a little bit of a, not quite a shock, but a, how do I want to put it, but the leader of that worship service talked about how this gospel song expressed the ancient tradition of our reliance on God, the sovereign God, creator of heaven and earth. And it worked. And so what I, mean, so the ancient traditions sometimes get expressed in fresh idioms.

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be it a Destiny's Child song. But we don't have to think that the faith constantly needs updating to be relevant. We pay attention to what God is doing in the world. We pay attention

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to the foundational classes of our tradition. And there is where the faith is lived. You mentioned climate change is one of a few issues we think we should be especially careful to address. Now, obviously, science is essential for understanding and addressing climate change.

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What distinctive contributions can theological education make? For me, it boils down to this. Theology and Christian theology in particular, but I think this also includes Jewish and Muslim theology as well, stresses that the world does not belong to us. It belongs to God.

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And there's a de-centering of the self that happens in a theological perspective that doesn't always occur, in my opinion, in a scientific perspective. I'm not saying that science needs theology to do good science. Instead, I'm actually saying the reverse.

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Theology needs science to do good theology. There is something, I would even use the word comprehensive about what theology tries to address. One of the things, One of my favorite lines of Cindy Rigby's book, Holding Faith, is that theology should not be afraid to say something about everything.

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Not everything about everything, but what theology tries to do at the end of the day is to express the fullness of life in relation to God, and that includes economics, that includes politics, that includes science, that includes... And so I would say that what theology offers is a de-centering of the self and human inquiry, and a comprehensiveness that seeks to seek out truth wherever it might be found. So I want science to do good science.

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I don't expect the scientist to be a good theologian, but I expect theology to have some passing familiarity with climate science and with meteorology. I mean, in order to talk responsibly, what do we mean by God's creation? So I think this is a different vision of how theology is comprehensive than, for example, the medieval depiction of theology as the queen of the sciences, as if it were kind of the culmination of all human inquiry.

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What I see instead is a mode of thinking that stresses actually theology's dependence on other forms of information. And this is going to be my last question, unless you want to make a parting comment about your hopes for theological education. But you stress also the need to attend place.

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And for us in particular here in Texas, but of course this would be true for almost everyone at this point, no matter where they live, given our global realities and connectedness, you named migration as an issue that we in the borderlands should also be careful to attend to. Here again, what distinctive contributions might theological reflection and education make to our understanding of migration? Yeah.

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A couple of thoughts. Your question actually reminds me that there might be a tension between these two things. On the one hand, Christian faith sees migration at the core of some of its most basic convictions.

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The people, Israel is a people on a journey. There's the story of migration out of Egypt and slavery into freedom in a new land. Then there's exile of that people. And so there's a searching for a place and it being displaced over and over again.

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And we see that reenacted in the life of Jesus. who is the one who says he has no place to lay his hand. So there's certainly not a romanticization of place in our tradition. And yet everybody is yearning for a place.

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I mean, part of the pattern of migration is that people sometimes out of choice or out of compulsion are sent away from home to find a new home. And maybe what I'm getting at is there's almost a restlessness with regards to place until we rest in the living God. That's something, Augustine says something akin to that in the Confessions. We are restless until we rest in the O God.

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And so I think what I was trying to address and what I'm stressing place is there's sometimes education can occur in, quote, no place, where there is no attention to, where education becomes a disembodied thing. And I think it's important to reflect on the places where we are called to be, the places that we end up calling home. I mean, I never thought I'd end up in Texas.

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But it's a place that I now call home. And it's grown on me. And I now say that I'm A Texan in ways that would have surprised the self I was 25 years ago. And so sometimes the places we are called to be are surprising and cause dislocation.

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And this is a sort of reflection that doesn't, it's not simplistic about migration and place. And this referred to earlier in terms of the complexities, not just kind of quick knee-jerk responses. At the same time, you would, you know, the theme of welcome of the stranger, you know, your openness to the other, would say in terms of how we react to immigrants and the plight we see, that also comes to the fore as a sort of an emphasis in reaction to a contrast between what you did earlier with material, focus on material security and abundant life, how that would cast our reaction to people caught in a flight in a different way.

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Is that also, I mean, yeah, and the other thing that this triggers for you is maybe One of the things that Protestantism continues to offer the world at large is this tension between place and migration. It's not simply purely 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.

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We live in this tension between having a home and not having a home. And that's the reality of most of the world, perhaps. So I don't want to romanticize migration because it's often forced upon people.

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I also don't want to romanticize home because home is often a hostile place for people. So maybe part of what God is calling us to embrace in the witness of Jesus Christ is seeing how all long for a home, and yet all are called away from home. And we meet God along the way and others within the journey.

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Very good. Well, thank you. Is there any last words you wanted to say? This is good.

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This is, I've enjoyed the conversation. Thanks. It's been wonderful. And so thank you for being a part of this.

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And thanks to anyone listening, all of you that, I hope this was stimulating and provocative and actually led to some of the complexity and affirmations that good theological education leads to. You can find the article this conversation was based upon in the spring 2020 issue of Insights, A Theology for Life Abundance. And also there will be a shorter version of this interview available there.

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But thank you again, Professor Jensen, and thank you for all. Thank you.