Book Review: A Little Exercise For Young Theologians, by Helmut Thielicke
The unfair and typical challenges of being a young church leader
I purchase books from footnotes. If I’m reading a book, I really, really like, I usually end up buying four or five additional books based upon those cited in the author’s footnotes.
I figure, if the person I’m reading has good things to say, then the people he quotes probably have even better things to say. Or they’re of equal value.
This reasoning led me to Helmut Thielicke’s book, A Little Exercise For Young Theologians. I learned of it while reading Michael Reeves’s book, Rejoice and Tremble. Reeves wrote, “Thus Helmut Thielicke warned his theological students of the vain stage of ‘theological puberty’ many go through after a year or two of study. In that stage, infatuated with new theological concepts, the young theologian is filled with gnostic pride. His love dies in the devilish thrill of acquiring a knowledge that means power. Then this skewed knowledge proves its own perversity in his character as he becomes a graceless theological thug, ever itching for a chance to show off his prowess. And it is hardly as if older theologians are immune to this disease. We who love theology need to remember that there is no true knowledge of God where there is no right fear of him.”1
The concept of theological puberty sold me. I had to buy Thielicke’s, A Little Exercise For Young Theologians. And I read it. It is short, 74 pages. It can be read in two short sittings. It’s cheap too, $10. Audible has it for less than $4 if you’d rather to listen to it.2
Thielicke was a conservative, Lutheran theologian. He wrestled plenty with the thinking of his day, which was often swimming in the pool of existentialism (engaging the work of Søren Kierkegaard and Friedrich Nietzsche). He lived at the same as another Lutheran pastor, Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Both men wrote on the challenges of living out the Christian faith in a secular world.
The neo-orthodox3 theologian, Karl Barth, influenced Thielicke’s thinking quite a bit. While Thielicke respected Barth's emphasis on the sovereignty of God and the primacy of revelation in Jesus Christ, he also offered critiques of Barth's dialectical method4 and his tendency to downplay the importance of human reason and natural theology.
So I read the book. It is was written for seminarians and graduates as they embarked into the Church to take up the responsibilities of shepherding the flock. Throughout it, Thielicke warns against pride and encourages the need to be circumspect. He uses some great metaphors.
For instance, in a chapter called, The Theological Change of Voice, which continues on the theme of puberty, Thielicke writes of the need for the young theologian to grow spiritually in order to catch up with his intellectual growth. In other words, he might know some things and take them for granted, yet men of the past had to suffer to learn them and to hammer them out onto paper.
He writes, “There is a hiatus between the arena of the young theologian’s actual spiritual growth and what he already knows intellectually about this arena. So to speak, he has been fitted, like a country boy, with breeches that are too big, into which he must still grow up in the same way that one who is to be confirmed must also grow into the long trousers of the Catechism. Meanwhile, they hang loosely around his body, and this ludicrous sight of course is not beautiful.”5
It is easy to picture the young graduate who still lives in a body somewhere between boyhood and mature man. It is indeed a dilemma. Most older pastors will concur, that as a younger man he desired to learn the truth, and God’s Word and theologians helped open his mind to many things, but that he needed a couple extra decades of life’s experiences and challenges to confirm and correct his convictions. Is that something a 23-year old has acquired? Probably not. (Although, 61-year olds haven’t completely arrived either.)
Yet, the thought I had as I read Thielicke’s words was, Wouldn’t it be better for a side-by-side growth of the man with his theology before he was expected to become a pastor? Is this not one of the advantages that elders6 were meant to be older men in the faith, having governed their households well?
The challenge of the office is that it requires godliness coupled with longer life experience. It takes time. Throughout a man’s life God embosses His Word into the metal of the man. It is unfair to expect a younger man to have been impressed this way. He needs time. Thielicke is correct when he writes about the need for “passing through” your own primary experiences and not simply conceptual ones.
He also reasons that someone could write a lecture about Luther and expound upon his theological significance, but hardly know anything about what God taught Luther. So, it is NOT enough to receive the “literary or intellectual deposit of what another’s primary experience, say Luther’s, has discovered.” If this is the stockyard from which your faith is drawn, it is living “second hand.”7
It is a good caution that Christians do not imagine themselves vibrant, courageous, and faithful based upon the books they read or the podcasts to which they listen. Build your faith with God and His Word by primary experience. Live!
Here is one more analogy. Thielicke talks about the study of the theologian being like the study of a geologist. His work consists of the mineralogical analyses of stone, geographical formations, maps, graphs, a set of tables, etc. However, if the geologist does not comprehend the significance and beauty of a mountain for himself, then for what purpose is he studying?
Yet, the young theologian drilling down on historical arguments and traversing meandering theological details and taking sides in historical debates can become like the geologist who is only dealing in the parts and pieces but missing the reason. Such a man is going to be at a disadvantage and “hardly in a position to comprehend at all what the Alps are.”
Thielicke recommends, “We are working here as if we were in a mineralogical laboratory. But so far as the classification of knowledge is concerned, it is all wrong unless you yourself climb the mountains and breathe the air up there.”8
In a chapter called, Pathology of the Young Theologian’s Conceit, he warns that theology can make the young man vain. He says, “Truth seduces us very easily into a kind of joy of possession: I have comprehended this and that, learned it, understood it. Knowledge is power. I am therefore more than the other man who does not know this and that. I have greater possibilities and also greater temptations. Anyone who deals with truth - as we theologians do - succumbs all too easily to the psychology of the possessor. But love is the opposite of the will to possess. It is self-giving. It boasteth not itself, but humbleth itself.”
Thielicke goes on, “Now it is almost a devilish thing that even in the case of the theologian the joy of possession can kill love. It is devilish because the truth of theology is concerned with the very love of God, with his coming down, his search, his care for souls.”9
Finally, on page 67, he writes, “Whoever ceases to be a man of the spirit automatically furthers a false theology, even if in thought it is pure, orthodox, and basically Lutheran. But in that case death lurks in the kettle…Theology is a very human business, a craft, and sometimes an art…that depends upon the hands and hearts which further it.”10
I recommend the book as a help for self-sobriety. Pull it off the shelf when you think you might be getting a little ahead yourself.
Reeves, Michael, Rejoice and Tremble, p. 135.
https://www.amazon.com/Little-Exercise-Young-Theologians/dp/0802874150/ref=sr_1_1?crid=2QGL0VG3E4B5B&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.-_Njo34B8A10_G_ZJL1md2sCOGs8p30VQ9khGC88mDfLh9VUeJn3CGIBRniP675GtZHaPCezONy3hdpxY_fi0t5dWUD7yhQAGFPFTLrOss7Qy2pwVUS-gfB-3PJn_21o3rc7Trmah4_PPKHvEkJANg.E_uMMnKwuYG2LXBkROxhfFYsWkvMyuNtyqhaVIu6CEw&dib_tag=se&keywords=A+Little+Exercise+For+Young+Theologians.&qid=1712421143&sprefix=a+little+exercise+for+young+theologians.%2Caps%2C137&sr=8-1
Neo-orthodoxy emphasized the dynamic encounter with God through the biblical text rather than a static, systematic approach to doctrine found in some forms of traditional orthodoxy. Traditional orthodoxy emphasizes the authority of Scripture as the primary source of divine revelation and theological truth. Neo-orthodoxy, while affirming the authority of Scripture, sometimes emphasized the encounter with God in Christ as a more immediate or direct form of revelation, which traditional orthodoxy would view as undermining the unique authority of the biblical text.
The dialectical method refers to an approach in theology that emphasizes the tension and dialogue between opposing or contrasting theological concepts or perspectives in order to arrive at a deeper understanding of truth. For eg. there is biblical tension that exists between the idea of God’s sovereignty and human responsibility; perhaps another would be the tension that exists in the process of salvation between the concept of grace and that of human effort.
Thielicke, Helmut, A Little Exercise For Young Theologians, p. 28.
I’ve said somewhere else that the term “elders” is not meant to be a title (titular) with no significance to the meaning of the word itself.
A Little Exercise For Young Theologians, p. 30.
A Little Exercise For Young Theologians, p. 71-73
A Little Exercise For Young Theologians, p. 38.
A Little Exercise For Young Theologians, p. 67-68.