Ivy and Ivory Towers

Driving from Linwood, NJ to Princeton, NJ was like driving from the sprawling utilitarianism of suburban American wastelands into some transplanted European town in the midst of shedding its green and revealing its glory. Narrow streets intended for horses were paved over and forced to accommodate cars, but tall white columns in front of colonial homes still guard olde money. If it weren’t for the college students in Uggs, I would swear the campus ivy screamed London.

As I marveled at massive theological tomes housed in old European architecture, I joked with my friend who attends Princeton Theological Seminary that it felt far removed from the rest of the America, and his response was simply, “Just like the oasis of Wheaton.” It’s isolated quaintness, streets lined with gnarled trees in gold and red, and Asian families with cameras vicariously dreaming for their children belied the fact that it was a mere 10 miles from one of the most dangerous cities in the country (Trenton). Meandering its streets, I did not feel the dirty grit of reality.

I have no doubt about the importance of theological studies. If I were made of sterner stuff, I would have contemplated it as possible steppingstone in life. I pondered at certain moments what my Chinese grandmother would think walking through these streets, a women who has lived her entire life in the tumultuous country of her birth, from one historical desolation to another. She would have found it incomprehensible that such a beautiful and entirely different place existed on the same earth she knew. And yet, here it stands, buildings and streets that were built to facilitate theological and academic pursuits, intended from its foundation to be a place where those who knew God intimately would be sent out to shepherd flocks and lead the country.

Is theology, or the pursuit thereof grounded in reality? Perhaps I shouldn’t draw such a line. Some would undoubtedly say that pursuing theology *is* pursuing reality. I would like to hope that such a notion is true, that theology is indeed the attempt at understanding the workings of God in a world of brokenness. However, I can’t help but to think of the books housed in one of the greatest theological libraries outside of Oxford and wonder how this entire town, swarming at every coffee shop, bar and corner with intelligentsia, an antithesis of what the rest of the world experiences, can possibly say to suffering, hungry and struggling people in the midst of wars, disease, and death.

I wonder, though not in a condemnatory way, why the study of God and reality seems, by most appearances, so insulated from it.

In no way am I disparaging academic pursuits of God through theological studies. However, I am wary of the simple pursuit of theology. The former (as I understand it), is an attempt to better love the Lord. The countless hours and late nights of classes, readings and writings will multiply into true bread for the hungry. It seeks to better understand the heart of the Lord, and how to love what He loves. It is a means to His ends. He is the end. But the pursuit of theology for the sake of itself seems to be as useful to the world as an unread thesis gathering dust underneath the basement shelves of a converted anachronistic cathedral in a beautiful isolated town of New Jersey. I wonder how many brilliant minds throughout history have settled for the fiddling of words.

For my friends in various seminaries and ivory tower institutions around the country, I pray that all those days behind Greek and Hebrew books, systematic, philosophical and historical theology classes, all the homiletics and exegesis practices will indeed bring you to love the Lord more, and draw you to the ghettos of this earth like Trenton, 10 miles away from the insulated comforts of Princeton. And if I ever get there to join y’all, call me down to earth once in a while.