What Theology School Didn’t Teach Me

Who had the power to name one practice “religion” and another “superstition”? And who got to decide?

I went to theology school expecting to study theology.

Not just one stream of theology. Not simply the traditions that had already been declared respectable enough to enter the classroom. I expected an education that would help me wrestle with the complicated history of how human beings have understood God, Spirit, Scripture, ritual, suffering, liberation, and sacred power.

I attended Oral Roberts University, and I learned a great deal there. But some of the most important parts of my theological education were not taught to me in the classroom.

The library taught me.

That distinction has stayed with me.

The books were there. The histories were there. The sources were there. But much of what I eventually discovered about African American religious history, African-derived religious traditions, Hoodoo, Conjure, Vodou and Voodoo, folk Christianity, and the complicated spiritual worlds created by Black people in the Americas was not occupying the same educational space as the theology I was formally being taught.

And that eventually forced me to ask an uncomfortable question:

One of the problems begins with the word theology itself.

Students can easily leave theological institutions with the impression that theology primarily means studying recognized Christian doctrines, denominational histories, famous theologians, biblical interpretation, church history, and the arguments that institutions have decided belong within the theological canon.

But human beings have never encountered the Divine only through systematic theology textbooks.

They have carried sacred words on their bodies, prayed Psalms over danger, worked with plants, understood dreams, maintained relationships with ancestors, developed healing traditions, confronted spiritual threats, and constructed religious worlds under conditions that the dominant theological institutions often did not understand — or did not respect.

Where was all of that in my theological education?

Those questions matter because absence teaches too.

When certain traditions are repeatedly presented as theology while others appear only as superstition, magic, folklore, heresy, or not at all, students learn an intellectual hierarchy even when nobody explicitly teaches one.

The library complicated the world I had been given.

I encountered historical and scholarly sources dealing with African American folk belief, Conjure, Hoodoo, Black Christianity, African religious continuities, healing, spiritual specialists, biblical practices, and the lived religion of Black communities.

And suddenly the categories were not nearly as clean as I had been taught to imagine them.

Actual Black religious history is more complicated. People lived at the intersections.

The spiritual needs of a community did not always fit neatly inside the categories scholars and religious institutions later constructed for them.

That realization changed the way I approached theology.

The deeper I studied, the more I also had to reconsider what I had been taught to do with Scripture.

A theological institution can teach you how it interprets the Bible. That is not necessarily the same thing as teaching you the entire history of how communities have encountered and used biblical texts.

Black people in America did not merely inherit somebody else’s Christianity and repeat it unchanged.

And within some African American spiritual traditions, Scripture could also become operative sacred language.

That raises questions I wish theological education had encouraged me to ask much earlier:

Those are theological questions too.

Eventually even the language we casually use for God deserves examination.

Exodus 3:14 in the King James Bible reads:

That passage opens an enormous theological door.

Those questions take us somewhere much deeper than the simplistic image of an old man somewhere above the clouds.

And this is precisely why theological education should expose students to more sources, not fewer. The point is not to replace one dogma with another.

The point is to give students enough history to recognize when somebody else’s interpretation has been handed to them as though it were the only interpretation that ever existed.

That distinction has become central to my own work. I am not interested in leaving one institution that tells people what they must believe only to construct another institution that does exactly the same thing.

Education should give people tools.

Then teach me how to ask:

That is education.

That may be the greatest lesson theology school gave me, although not necessarily in the way it intended.

The curriculum showed me what an institution considered important enough to teach. The library showed me how much existed beyond those boundaries.

And once I discovered that larger world, I could not unknow it.

I began to understand that recovering African American religious history is not about inserting a few Black names into an otherwise unchanged theological curriculum. It requires asking harder questions about how the curriculum itself was constructed.

Those questions are now part of my theology too.

This experience eventually helped shape what I mean by Education for Elevation.

Education should not make students dependent upon the teacher for permission to think. It should make them better investigators.

I need enough education to understand their histories, intersections, tensions, differences, and possibilities.

That is what I wish theology school had given me more of.

But fortunately, there was a library.

And sometimes the books sitting quietly on the shelves will introduce you to the questions the classroom never thought to ask.