Are you sure you don't want to be a rabbi?

So I get this question from my classmates about twice a week, at least. And I understand why--I am at divinity school, after all! A fair amount of these folks will enter the ranks of professional clergy themselves, and there are some ways in which I clearly fit the role: I'm an active and committed Jew, and I enjoy talking about religious life beyond the boundaries of my academic discipline. I'm a damn good preacher (if I do say so myself), a good listener and leader, and I have an inexplicable talent for getting on the good side of notoriously cantankerous old people.

But my answer is simple - no.  This certainty does not come out of any disrespect for the profession, let me be absolutely clear. But they keep asking. And these are my favorite classmates: the inquisitive ones, the feisty ones, the feminists, the ones that pay attention to the text and each other, people I respect deeply, people who I think would make great academics if they weren't already committed to ministry. So what's up?

Is this just a reflection of our natural tendency to assume others want what we want? That folks who are awesome must really be like us? Is it like how I secretly hope all the smart ones are gay? Or, on the other hand, does it get at some of the underlying tensions in this field between "church" and "university"? Or is it just about stereotypes? If someone is kind and thoughtful, or has not-completely-arcane theological insights, she must be destined for the pulpit, rather than the classroom? Or on my side, am I assuming that all critical-minded people end up writing, rather than ministering? Are we saying that the academic is dry and the preacher dull? I readily admit that I wonder if this dichotomy is less noticeable to my colleagues in New Testament or Theology, departments that have (here, at least) more clergy among the professorial ranks. Or for that matter, any women, which probably makes it easier to see female students as future professors. (Have I just given away my institution? Tragically, I think not.)

When my mentors were my age, scholars and clergy alike got the MDiv--it was the only degree that offered the preparation in Hebrew, Greek, and modern languages needed for graduate work in Bible. Curriculums were pretty standardized, which is to say, clergy got a little more academics and academics got a little more God. Also, they walked uphill to Systematic Theology. Both ways. In the rain. In all seriousness, though, I wonder if the move to two-year MAs and MTSs might not be a bit of a regression. Are we not here, in part, because we believe in the spirit of a joint enterprise between lived religion and the academic study thereof? Aren't we here to learn from each other? Shouldn't out work be mutually informative? Finally, to deliberately mis-quote a deliberate mis-quotation (seriously, we can get into the backstory here another time), is not theology the theory and ministry, broadly defined, the practice?