The Method of my Madness

As a college freshman (1978-1979), I recorded a statement that Martin Luther made (in Table Talk 352) on a 3 x 5 index card and taped it to the wall beside my dorm-room bed. Here is what Luther said: "A theologian is born by living, nay dying and being damned, not by thinking, reading, or speculating."

At 18, I was in earnest.

Luther's remark struck a chord with me insofar as I was tempted to pursue a seminary education or divinity degree after obtaining my baccalaureate; indeed, it helped me to resist that temptation. I knew then--or was beginning to recognize--that thinking, reading, and speculation were three things I had an aptitude for; consequently, I was not on the road to being "born" a theologian. I understood, as well, that, at 18, I had had very little experience of living, even less of dying and, of being damned, none at all (or none that I was aware of). I also appreciated the deep irony that Luther's dictum held for what is familiarly termed "theological education" in the United States and Europe: a curriculum of "thinking, reading, and speculating." In other words, an education that promised only to abort the birth of a would-be theologian. Martin Luther's table talk showed me the fork in the road.

After a few years of post-baccalaureate wandering in the wilderness of Wondering What Comes Next, I managed to avoid seminary by entering law school (albeit a school run by the Holy Ghost fathers of the Roman Catholic church). It was there that I began to acquire the requisite experience of living, dying, and being damned, an experience that would only intensify during the decade of legal practice to follow.

In 1995, enjoying some of the fruits of my professional labors, I found myself in Paris with a copy of Abu Hamid Muhammad al-Ghazali's Munqidh min al-Dallal (translated by W. M. Watt as The Faith and Practice of al-Ghazali). To my astonishment, I discovered in the autobiography of that late 11th/early 12th century Muslim theologian a life trajectory that anticipated Luther's later insight. Half a millennium before the German reformer, Ghazali had pursued a life of thinking, reading, and speculating in the mistaken belief that such a path would make him an "authentic" theologian--only to discover, to his sorrow, that "authentic" theology is not the product of thinking, reading, and speculating but, as Luther put it, of living, nay dying and being damned.

Now I found myself standing, once again, at a very familiar fork in the road. After several more years in the law, I returned to school: not for a theological education (I was acquiring that by more honest means), but to become an historian of religions. Such was the method of my madness.