What metaphor does one use to describe the way the work of scholars is passed on to everyday Christians? “Trickle down” is not good, for it implies that the academy is an endless pure font, with only some tainted refreshment making it to the plebs. “Mediation” and “bridge building” are better, both for their christological echoes and their suggestion that traffic goes both ways. “Translation” makes sense if one acknowledges that a good translation is a work of art in itself. I prefer “preaching,” since whatever is true, good, and beautiful serves in the classroom as well as the pulpit.
These musings were prompted by the death earlier this year of Rachel Held Evans, who was one of the great theological translators, bridge builders, and preachers of our time. If you don’t know her work, check out the Twitter hashtag #becauseofRHE and behold the vast, digital church she planted, with moving testimonies from those who, through her work, were wooed into following Christ, called into ministry, and summoned from despair into an affirmation of life. She is the most influential mainline theologian of her generation, the C. S. Lewis of her time. Ask any seminary admissions officer who their applicants—especially women applicants—have been reading, and you’ll see that the claim is not overstated.
She was armed only with “a library card and a blog,” as she once put it. She never pursued a graduate degree or sought credentials from a denomination. Without past seminary training or ecclesial position, she found a voice online. She was more than a companionable, winsome, self-effacing memoirist of the journey out of fundamentalism. Hers was an intellectual project, and she took on the most daunting of subjects: how does the church read scripture and live it out well. Yet she never drew attention to her studiousness, showed no evidence of anxiety about a lack of academic accreditation, and seemed comfortable operating as a journalist.
