One of the leading insights for us at the Center for Pastor Theologians has been the influence of social location on theological reflection. In the high-tide of postmodernism, it's almost cliché to make this point about social location. But for pastor theologians, it's still a point worth emphasizing. Pastors inhabit a different sort of vocational space, or social location, than, say, academics; it's an ecclesial location, and this shapes our theological reflection. So, what is it about the pastoral calling, or pastoral social location, that influences theological reflection in unique and helpful ways?

The ecclesial location entails cruciform vocation

As I read the New Testament, not least the teaching of Jesus and the letters of Paul, as I read biographies of pastors of old, and as I reflect on my own experience, I find myself arriving at this conclusion: the pastor's ecclesial location entails a cruciform vocation.

Cruciformity, literally means conformity to the Cross of Christ. Or to put in a Pauline idiom, being crucified with Christ so that I no longer live but Christ lives in me. Don't slip into the bad habit of thinking of this abstractly; there was nothing abstract about it for Paul. Remember, he bore on his body the brand marks of Christ. So, cruciformity, as I'm using it, means very real, concrete suffering. It's different than garden-variety mishaps; it's not splinters, but self-sacrifice. Suffering, big and small, in Jesus' name for the good of others.

As best I can tell, this kind of suffering is simply part and parcel of the pastoral calling. You can't be a pastor without embracing a large helping of heartache and heartbreak—your own, and that of the people you serve. In fact, what God hardwired into the apostle Paul's calling he has hardwired into every pastor's calling: "I will show him how much he must suffer for the sake of my name" (Acts 9:16). While the divine necessity is perhaps not the same, the stubborn and uncomfortable fact of suffering certainly is.

Paul's suffering was dramatic, much more so than anything I'm likely to experience. Over the years, I have found one or two rubber chickens in my mailbox, and quite a few not-so-nice-emails in my inbox; I call them "Monday morning emails." Yet I've not—not yet, at least—been thrown into prison, beaten, suffered forty lashes minus one, been in danger from robbers, shipwrecked, nearly stoned to death, or gone without food or sleep for a single night.

These intense examples of suffering don't top Paul's list of painful experiences as a pastor. Instead, as he says at the conclusion and, I would argue, climax of his famous catalogue of suffering, "And, apart from other things, there is the daily pressure on me of my anxiety for all the churches. Who is weak, and I am not weak? Who is made to fall, and I am not indignant" (2 Cor. 11:28-29).

So Paul the pastor speaks for all pastors when he says this, "We are afflicted in every way, but not crushed; perplexed, but not driven to despair; persecuted, but not forsaken; struck down, but not destroyed; always carrying in the body the death of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus may also be manifested in our bodies. For we who live are always being given over to death for Jesus' sake, so that the life of Jesus also may be manifested in our mortal flesh. So death is at work in us, but life in you" (2 Cor. 4:8-12).

So, then, pastor, your ecclesial location with people means cruciform vocation for people: death at work in you, so that life might be at work in your people. Like the prophet Jeremiah, yoked to your people and thus yoked to suffering with and for people.

This is where theology is born

Here's the key point: This dual aspect to the pastor theologian's calling as a pastor—his ecclesial location and thus cruciform vocation—isn't a hindrance to theology, but a help—even the generative source of theology, the place where it's born, in the caldron of church, the crucible of suffering.

Nicholas Wolterstorff, one of America's leading Christian philosophers taught at Calvin, then at Yale. He was responsible, with Alvin Plantinga, for the movement known as reformed epistemology. But what you may not know about Wolterstorff is the profound suffering he has had to endure. A number of years ago, he lost his 25 year old son in a tragic climbing accident. He writes about it in Lament for a Son, a fresh version of C. S. Lewis' Greif Observed. As a result of this painful experience, he says that now when he meets people and they ask him, "Tell me a little bit about yourself," he feels compelled to answer this way, "I am one who lost a son." Because, he says, "That loss determines my identity; not all of my identity, but much of it. It belongs with my story."

Pastors are specialists in loss. Recently, the angel of death visited our congregation, and we lost three of our own. Two senior saints, but one was a young woman in her late twenties, who died the day after her son's third birthday. Pastors specialize in loss, hurt, pain, trauma, suffering, and soul-anguish of one kind or another. And the loss determines our identity; not all of our identity, but much of it. It belongs to our story. It shapes our entire outlook on life, ministry, the church, God, and, yes, even our theology. Cruciformity is a help, not a hindrance. A place where theology is born.

Jürgen Moltmann, one of the twentieth century's leading German theologians, describes the trauma he experienced living through the horrific events of the Second World War. In his Experiences in Theology, he describes how traumatizing it was in July of 1943 to watch the destruction of his hometown of Hamburg, in a military raid the RAF called "Operation Gomorrah." Some 40,000 people died, were literally burnt to death. Moltmann himself nearly lost his own life, and watched his friend be, as he says, "blown to pieces" while he was standing right next to him.

Now, you might think this kind of horrific experience would destroy any prospect of doing theology. But listen to Moltmann, who sounds remarkably Pauline at this point, "My experiences of death at the end of the war, the depression into which the guilt of my people plunged me, and the inner perils of utter resignation behind barbed wire: these were the places where my theology was born."

So, too, for the pastor theologian as pastor, in their ecclesial location and thus cruciform vocation. This is where their theology is born. This is where it is nursed and nurtured and, by the grace of God, reaches its full maturity, in the cauldron of the church, the crucible of suffering.

Cruciformity's influence on the pastor's theology

But, perhaps you're wondering, in what specific ways does cruciformity—or the crucible of suffering—shape a pastor's theology? Let me distill it down to four essentials.

See
Cruciformity helps you see, theologically. It corrects for epistemic nearsightedness, or blindness. There is proven hermeneutical value in suffering for the sake of others, not least in one's reading of the Bible. If you don't embrace cruciformity, you won't be able to see. I wouldn't, for example, have known who this "person of division" was from the Pastoral Epistles, if I'd not collided with some of these prickly characters in my own church. I would've never caught the force of Paul's charge to Timothy not to let them despise you for your "youth," if I had not received a 32 page hostile missive in my inbox that referred to me as "Young Todd" no less than fourteen times. I would've never grasp the beauty of Scriptures' declaration that "male and female he created them," if I'd not walked alongside a man in our church who wakes up most mornings wishing he was a woman. Perhaps this is what Job meant when he confessed at the end of his journey with suffering, "I had heard of you by the hearing of the ear, but now my eye sees you" (42:5-6). Suffering has salutary hermeneutical effect; it helps you see.

Sift
Cruciformity helps you sift your theological priorities. Cruciformity turns pastor theologians into hedgehogs, not foxes. I'm referring to Isaiah Berlin's classification of intellectuals into two types. On the one hand, you have foxes who Berlin says "pursue many ends, often unrelated and even contradictory, connected, if at all, only in some de facto way, for some psychological or physiological cause, related to no moral or aesthetic principle." If they were a bullet, they'd be bird or buck-shot, not a slug. Hedgehogs, on the other hand, "relate everything to a single central vision, one system, less or more coherent or articulate, in terms of which they understand, think and feel—a single, universal, organizing principle in terms of which alone all that they are and say has significance." They're the opposite of intellectual ADHD; they have a singularity of theological vision that imitates the Apostle Paul's. It's cruciformity that got them there. Because there's nothing like suffering for others to help focus the mind. It helps you see, and then it helps you sift, so you learn to reckon with what really counts. Perhaps this explains the elegance and profundity of Calvin's Institutes. For, as his biographer T. H. L. Parker puts it, "He was not unfamiliar with the sound of the mob outside his house threatening to throw him in the river and firing their muskets." To which he adds, "The Institutes was not written in an ivory tower, but against the background of teething troubles."

Cultivates
Cruciformity cultivates the virtues, not just moral, but intellectual. Serious theological reflection depends upon what philosophers refer to as "excellent epistemic functioning"; that is, well-cultivated habits of mind that are conducive to this kind of reflection, what are known as the intellectual virtues. Here I'm tapping into that school of thought known as virtue epistemology, that philosophical tradition which claims we achieve excellence in the intellectual life as we embody not only the moral, but the intellectual virtues. No one will deny that cruciformity has a way of cultivating moral virtues in our lives. But so too, cruciformity cultivates intellectual virtues, like wisdom, prudence, discernment, the love of truth, firmness, and generosity. At the same time, cruciformity has a way of purging from us things like folly, gullibility, dishonesty, obtuseness, and naiveté—various intellectual vices. Listen to virtue epistemologist Jay Wood, "Sometimes knowledge gives way to dogmatism, understanding grows clouded, and intellectual agility and acuity become calcified and unyielding." Perhaps countering this very thing is what Paul has in mind when he urges us "not to be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind" (Rom. 12:2).

Drives us back to prayer
Cruciformity drives us back, again and again, to that first of theological acts: prayer. In 1963, the famed Swiss theologian Karl Barth arrived for the first time on the shores of America to give a series of lectures at Princeton and then in Chicago. Those talks are now gathered under the title Evangelical Theology: An Introduction. In that volume, Barth takes up the theme of theological work as his fourth and final theme, and identifies the work of prayer as chief among all that the theologian does. His reasoning is simple: "all theological work can be undertaken and accomplished only amid great distress, which assails it on all sides." Thus, he insists, "The first and basic act of theological work is prayer."

Of course, prayer isn't the pastor theologian's only task, but it is their most basic. As Barth continues, "Undoubtedly, from the very beginning and without intermission, theological work is also study; in every respect it is also service; and finally it would certainly be in vain were it not also an act of love. But theological work does not merely being with prayer and is not merely accompanied by it; in its totality it is peculiar and characteristic of theology that it can be performed only in the act of prayer."

Theological reflection, if it is to be fruitful, must have not only windows to the outside world, but skylights to the heavens above. There must be a vertical dimension, so the theologian doesn't fall prey to the conceit that he operates independently from God, a kind of intellectual Pelagianism. Besides, as Barth says, all theological work is but an act of listening, adoration, and discovery, since the object of theological reflection isn't some thing—but some One. It is cruciformity that leads the pastor theologian into the wilderness of affliction, where we learn not only how to suffer but how to theologize. No wonder one of our best-known American pastor theologians, Eugene Peterson, distills the pastor theologian's role down to this: to teach his congregation to pray.

Culture making for pastor theologians

Perhaps, then, Luther was right after all, when he said this about what actually makes a theologian. "Living, even dying and being damned, make a theologian, not understanding, reading or speculating." Not a PhD, or a big church, or the vanity of being called "Doctor," but cruciformity in the service of Christ.

Cruciformity is essential to your calling as a pastor. Because of this, though, recognize that it is not a hindrance to your ministry, but rather a help. If you will lay hold of it by faith, indeed, as a gift, you will find it does not only amazing things to your character, but to your theologizing and your preaching. You'll find your preaching will look like the kind of preaching Marilyn Robinson defines as, "parsing the broken heart of humankind and praise the loving heart of Christ."

What greater soul-satisfying endeavor can there be than to embrace cruciformity in the cause of Christ for the good of others. Every parent knows this to be true. "What man and woman," asks the Christian novelist Frederick Buechner in his book Listening to Your Life, "if they gave serious thought to what children inevitably involve, would ever have them? Yet what man and woman, once having had them and loved them, would ever want it otherwise?" (Sept. 7 mediation). And so, as Buechner rightly says of parents in their suffering love, I want to say of pastor theologians as pastors, "To suffer in love for another's suffering is to live life not only at its fullest but at its holiest" (Sept. 7 mediation).

Todd Wilson (PhD, Cambridge University) is Senior Pastor of Calvary Memorial Church in Oak Park, IL, cofounder of the Center for Pastor Theologians, and author most recently of The Pastor Theologian and Real Christian.