Ten Questions with Han-luen Kantzer Komline

When did you know you wanted to pursue theological education and an academic career? How did you come to that realization?

After entering Wheaton College as a history major, I decided to switch to philosophy to chase the big, deep questions.  Why are we here?  How should we live?  What is truth?  Then, in the spring semester of my freshman year in college I took a reduced load so that I could wrap up my courses early to start German studies in Schwäbisch Hall in the spring.

Sometimes less is more.  With so few classes on my plate, I spent hours poring over and pondering the scriptures.  I would hole myself up in a library carrel and write out page after page of reflections.  During that semester I realized that if I could choose one thing to spend the rest of my professional life doing, it would be exploring the mysteries of the Bible.  I wanted to keep thinking about the big bold questions, but I wanted to do so with God’s word as my light.

Yet I also wanted to think about the big picture.  How did varying insights across the testaments, genres, and books of the Bible fit together into a holistic understanding of life’s meaning?

Internally, these were some of the stations on the way toward a vocation in academic theology.  At some point in a required course on Christian thought a professor wrote a short line at the end of one of my papers “We should talk about your interest in theology.”  I no longer recall how he realized I had this interest.  I’m not sure if I had even become conscious of this interest until reading those words.  He became a long-term mentor.

You have described your calling as modeled on John the Baptist’s mother Elizabeth. Would you tell us more about how you see yourself fulfilling that calling?

Right now in my work at Western Theological Seminary, my more specialized calling is to do so in a way that nurtures, trains up, and prepares others who will be like John the Baptist too. Share on XJohn the Baptist prepared the way for Jesus by redirecting attention from himself to the coming Lord.  In this sense he represents the calling of all Christians.  Our purpose is to point to Jesus.  We direct people to seek life in him.

As a seminary professor, I also see John’s mother, Elizabeth, as a symbol of my calling.  Yes, I’m to point to Jesus.  But right now in my work at Western Theological Seminary, my more specialized calling is to do so in a way that nurtures, trains up, and prepares others who will be like John the Baptist too.

I love the story of Mary’s visit to Elizabeth.  John, in Elizabeth’s womb, leaps for joy.  I am so grateful for those moments when I get to witness the joy of my students in encountering Christ.  And my hope and prayer is that I can move myself to places in my teaching (as Elizabeth did in her life, by visiting Mary) where such encounters can happen.

What is one thing you wish you had known when you started your academic career?

This might sound strange, but I’m not sure I would change anything.  It has just been so amazing to watch things unfold beyond anything I ever dared to hope for.  Perhaps one thing I was not expecting was the source of some of the challenges that have come up in my academic life.  I was anticipating (and warned about!) problems like ending up hating my dissertation topic (never happened; I loved it the whole time), struggling to find a job in a brutal job market, or being defeated by the two-body problem (my husband is an academic as well).  I think what I did not fully expect was that some of the most challenging aspects of this calling would not be those standard roadblocks that can plague an individual scholar but rather struggles a level up.  In a time of massive shifts in American religious culture and challenges in higher ed, the entire landscape of theological education, not just one’s own place in it, is tremendously volatile.

When was your first encounter with the work of Augustine? Did you know immediately you wanted to spend time studying him deeply or did that come later?

When I was a teen my father bought me my first copy of Confessions.  Normally, I ate up his book recommendations.  But Confessions seemed so alien.  As I look back on it, it is difficult to say what feature of the book exactly put me off.  I had read many other old books, some older than Confessions.  And many of them featured male protagonists.  Books about pious Christians often held my interest too, from missionary biographies to the worn Elsie Dinsmore volumes on the top shelf in the back corner of my grandmother’s basement.  Ironically, I think it may have been the book’s theology that was one bridge too far.

It wasn’t until seminary that Augustine began to intrigue me.  In a course on his ethics and politics, I was introduced to the idea of dramatic developments in Augustine’s thought.  Working on my master’s thesis with Ellen Charry, I experienced the beauty of his most abstractly theological work: On the Trinity.  So I came around eventually!

You’ve written a significant work on Augustine’s view of the will. What did you discover about Augustine’s view that you wish more people knew?

People often fixate on certain controversial topics when they think of Augustine on the will.  Did his views on predestination allow for free will?  How did he use the idea of the will to approach the problem of evil?  Was he the inventor of our modern notions of will?  These individual trees are important, but my first book drew me through a wider forest.

I wish more people appreciated just how profoundly biblical Augustine’s thinking about human willing was. Share on XIn taking a broader view, we see that part of the reason so much confusion surrounds Augustine’s view is that he doesn’t have a single view of the will.  Rather, his views evolve over time.  He retains his earlier insights, but recontextualizes them.  So the will takes on added layers over time in what becomes an historical account of the will whereby Augustine accords to it different ways of functioning appropriate to different periods that are themselves determined by how people relate to God.  The will functions in one way as originally created, in another way given the fall, in another way given Christ’s work of redemption, and in another way in final glory.  This means that Augustine’s mature understanding of human willing is theological and biblical to the core.  You simply can’t make good sense of it without using biblical and theological categories.

At the end of the day, while I don’t dispute that Augustine’s views on willing were highly creative and even innovative, I think they were so precisely because of how he built his account of human willing on a biblical substructure.  I guess I could put it this way: I wish more people appreciated just how profoundly biblical Augustine’s thinking about human willing was.

What three books by Augustine should every Christian read?

My youthful reluctance notwithstanding, I do recommend Confessions.  In just one book you encounter Augustine’s distant world, eventful life, and ardent love for God.  My personal favorite in Augustine’s corpus just might be Instructing Beginners in the Faith.  This short handbook is brimful of wisdom relevant for anyone who teaches the Christian faith, which just about all of us do in some form.  Finally, I would recommend Augustine’s sermons.  New City Press publishes a curated selection in elegant modern translation under the title Essential Sermons.  In Augustine’s preaching we see him as a person amid other people: chastising, ribbing, comforting, convicting, even as he reacts to his listeners.  More than anything else he wrote, Augustine’s sermons make me feel like I’ve been in the same room with him.  And for Christians, they provide an opportunity to be exhorted and encouraged in the faith by one of the most popular preachers of all time.More than anything else he wrote, Augustine’s sermons make me feel like I’ve been in the same room with him. Share on X

How can Augustine improve our anthropology, especially in light of the challenges of secularism?

Augustine’s statement that “our heart is restless until it rests in you” resonates with universal longings of our age.  He acknowledges the human desire to flourish.  Who doesn’t want fulfillment, rest, and to be happy?  Wanting these things is not wrong.  But Augustine repeatedly emphasizes that the only ultimate path to finding our true selves and to realizing our potential is loving pursuit of God and God’s purposes, which entail love of neighbor.  When we make self-actualization an end in itself, we inhibit our ability to attain it.

Augustine’s view is a corrective both to secular attempts to understand and establish human value without reference to God, and to the idea that human happiness can be attained by making God subservient to our agendas for achieving our own best interests.  In both these ways, Augustine’s vision of humanity decenters the human self, instead focusing questions of human meaning, destiny, and potential squarely on God.  He helps by giving us an unrelentingly theocentric anthropology.

Next to Augustine, what other theologian in the Great Tradition is pivotal to the history of Christianity?

Looking across the whole of Christian history, figures such as the Cappadocians and Luther come readily to mind.  A pivotal figure who rarely gets the same level of press in popular Christianity, but who is arguably just as important, is Origen of Alexandria.  Working in the third century, he established ideas, trajectories, and practices that would come back into play at crucial turning points in ensuing centuries.  The council of Nicaea, for example, can be seen as a struggle between two streams of Origen’s Christology.  And Origen was instrumental in pioneering learned study of the Bible, from the allegorical style of interpretation he practiced to the precedent he set for producing lengthy commentaries on biblical texts.  In searching for God through intensive, passionate, scholarly grappling with scripture, people such as Augustine and Luther were following in Origen’s footsteps.A pivotal figure who rarely gets the same level of press in popular Christianity, but who is arguably just as important, is Origen of Alexandria. Share on X

You also have an interest in Marilynne Robinson. Why do you think her work has penetrated the imagination of Christians in our day?

In preparing for the 2019 Wheaton Theology Conference featuring Robinson and her writings, I read through her complete works at the time.  But I have a special appreciation for her novel Gilead.  I think Christians resonate with the hope articulated there that even amid the personal and structural realities of human sin and woundedness, divine realities can break into our world with stunning beauty: love, forgiveness, grace.  Gilead opens our eyes to be surprised and awed by these seemingly impossible, unearned gifts, which—for the Christian—point to God as their ultimate source.

As one of the editors for the International Journal of Systematic Theology, what are you noticing about systematics that gives you hope for its future?

Augustine’s statement that “our heart is restless until it rests in you” resonates with universal longings of our age. Share on XCurrently, I would say we are in a season of many small encouraging signs.  As an editor at IJST it has been wonderful to see good collaboration across the ecumenical aisle, both on the submission side and in leadership with Matthew Levering, a Catholic, serving as one of our co-editors.

An upside to the increasing fragmentation and decentralization of theological education has been diversity in the kinds of topics that receive coverage.  Since it is no longer the case that a few institutions in a few geographical centers are dominating the discussion, keeping theological conversation focused on the expertise of their faculty, the sources of creativity are more diffuse.  We are therefore seeing a broader range in the kinds of topics and dialogue partners—past and present—that authors take up.

Accompanying this broadening has been a moderation in vitriol.  When the theological conversation is concentrated on a small number of specialized debates, steam can build up quickly.  The more diffuse character of the conversation geographically, institutionally, and thematically, therefore goes along with a moderation in the intensity of some of the conflicts and debates.

Finally, I see an increasing interest in addressing the practical implications of theology, whether in moral terms (with a movement toward ethics), societal terms (with a movement toward politics), or ecclesial terms (with a movement toward the life of the church).

I think all three of these trends could promote theological creativity, collaboration, and relevance to everyday life in coming years.

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Image credit: Retro morning | Photo taken in Sozopol, Bulgaria. | Rumena Zlatkova | Flickr.