This article was written by Dr. Anthony Baker,
theologian-in-residence at Saint Julian’s Episcopal Church in north Austin
During my first year of teaching Christian Theology at seminary, I noticed a deficit of good argument skills among the students. I decided to assign disputations, medieval style debates (alas, the medieval of the academies, not of the jousting grounds) in which I posed a yes or no question and asked them to argue a side.
On the whole, students responded well, though I recall one particular class that seemed baffled by the entire idea. Stake a position on whether or not God can suffer? Or if Jesus is the only route to the Father? Or whether or not there is salvation outside the church? Why would we do that? “No ad hominems,” I coached. “You are not attacking persons, you are attacking ideas. But attack! Tear those ideas up! See what’s left after you’ve done your worst!” After one disputation I asked the students to respond to the exercise. “That was the most unchristian thing I’ve been asked to do in seminary,” one senior remarked. Ah, I thought. I’ve got my work cut out for me.
There are personal aversions to the kind of thing I was asking, but I think the pushback I experienced was largely a vocational assumption. Politics, punditry, and, let’s face it, most workplaces are full of arguments: anxiety-ridden exchanges—or non-exchanges—that leave us flushed and muttering for the rest of the day. Surely clergy should rise above this? Pastors are listeners, compassionate companions. Their art is hospitality, not argument.
In fact, I think this is a very dangerous assumption. Yes, faith leaders should rise above the poisons of public discourse; but such poisons are not yet arguments in the philosophical sense. (How often do pundits or politicians or regional managers connect major and minor premises to conclusion, or allow an interlocutor to challenge the aptness of an analogy?) But if we react to a contrarian culture with passive conversation, we create a cult of listening that refuses to move toward any shared conclusion. The exchange ends and everyone goes on thinking what she thought before. Or, worse, if something needs to be decided then those with power over language make a decision based on their own convictions rather than on critical and communal thinking.
Lacking the skill to turn conviction into argument, we wind up with a pretense of hospitable listening. We are like neighbors with tall privacy fences, who meet from time to time on the sidewalk and describe their houses to one another before going back inside and locking their doors.
In order to practice the truly pastoral art of linguistic hospitality, of turning private conviction into public communication, we need the tools of argument. We need to learn to discard—not permanently, but occasionally—the phrases “I just think,” or “I agree” or “I disagree,” and try phrases like, “If that is true, then doesn’t it follow that . . .?” Or “Your conclusion assumes . . .”
How might this change the relationship people of faith have with their convictions? How might it change a congregation’s discussions about belief? Beyond a single community, imagine—as the medieval disputers imagined—Muslims and Jews and Christians learning not only to listen peacefully but to go a step further and argue well with one another. Now imagine inviting Wiccans and Agnostics. A true interfaith dispute is a rarity, and one that might increase the trust between communities. God, after all, does not seem interested in showing up and silencing our questions with final answers, at least short of the end of the age. In the meantime, our very human skills of posing and answering questions are all we have to work with. Lacking a divine whetstone, “iron sharpens iron,” as the Proverb puts it. “And one person sharpens the wits of another.”
Listening is a pastoral art. But argument is as well, and we neglect this art to the detriment of our faith. If the ideas are worth holding, surely they are worth trying, testing, even tearing up from time to time?
