Off and on over the past several months, I’ve been listening to (and watching performances of) Wilco’s song “Theologians,” from their 2004 album A Ghost is Born. I come to the song more as someone presumably addressed by the title than as a Wilco devotee.

I cannot help but hear this song as a rebuke to the great mass of academic and churchy theologizing that fails not only to “reach” contemporary Christians and those curious about Christianities, but that fails to risk inhabiting the “lifeworlds” of such people, ostensibly a crucial source for theologians (insofar as faith is practiced by humans) and audience for theologians (insofar as theology is meant to be taken in by humans). “Theologians don’t know nothing about my soul.” And toward the end of the tune, we learn that maybe it’s Jesus who is singing this taunting song: “Where I’m going you cannot come”; “I lay it down”; “A ghost is born.” It’s rare that we get the image of Jesus singing to theologians, whether in “secular” or “sacred” music.

(more…)