On Academic Theology

What exactly should the role of theology be in academia? In the modern world, the two disciplines almost seem to be at odds with one another. Even if we recognize that the most proper form of theology is doxology, that loving, prayerful response to one’s encounters with God, the practice of theology as a scientific discipline (as St Thomas Aquinas calls it) requires the theologian to study and investigate not just their own experiences of God, but what has been experienced and taught by others, especially the movement of the Holy Spirit working in the Church throughout history. They need to know what it is the Church proclaims; they need to know not just the words, but the intent and meaning behind her dogmas. They must understand that the way we define words changes from age to age. Thus, they must be made capable of properly reading creedal statements and interpreting them so that they make sense to the people who live in their own day and age. To do this, they must look into the sources of Christian doctrine. They must discern how and why different doctrinal positions developed, because this will reveal what a specific doctrine was meant to teach, and what it did not teach.. But there should be a purpose in all of this. Theologians are not meant to be curiosity seekers, looking for interesting facts to display; they are looking to understand their own relationship with God, and finding a way to bring that understanding to the community, for the good of the community and not for any individual glory. Their investigation should be to build up the faith, not to destroy it. They should seek to overcome confusion, not to add to it.

Academia, however, has a different intent. While once it was a pursuit of truth, now it is a pursuit of glory. Academia desires new ideas, new thoughts, and new traditions to argue over, to contend with, so that its practitioners can easily find an outlet for their writings. Academics are expected to publish, and their publications are expected to be new, improved analyses, overturning the way people used to understand their respective academic disciplines. It seeks to investigate, just as a theologian does, but for a different reason than a theologian would. It seeks to deconstruct the past as a means of overcoming its influence, so that the academic’s position can be accepted as the new norm to be followed. That is, if they have a position – many times, there is no reconstruction, there is merely a deconstruction; it is easier to cause doubt, to bring fire to the ideas of the past, than it is to rise out of the ashes, a phoenix.

When one combines the art of theology with modern academia, it is quite understandable why this new discipline, academic theology, is often a nihilistic wreck destroying the faith of its practitioners and its readers. There are many bright lights in the field, showing that the field itself is not without merit. Indeed, when it is done properly, it is a rather important endeavor and those who do it properly should be thanked for the contributions they have given to the world. But there are far more dim lights, far more black holes trying to snuff out whatever light that still exists, than there are these bright lights, and as time goes by, fewer and fewer bright lights seem to be born in the field. This could change in the future, and let us pray toGod this happens. But currently, as one who engages the discipline, I find the field to be in utter shambles, and there are many reasons for this.

First, the field follows the academic discipline in trying to deconstruct the past. Let me state that I agree with this, as far as it goes. We need to understand the past, and with it, we need to understand where our theological teachings come from, including the presumptions which helped shape their proclamation. But academics often feel, once you deconstruct the past, and show that a given teaching developed only as a result of a specific historical situation, you then remove all value of the teaching itself. This kind of historical criticism has led many theologians to doubt their faith, and when this study is not brought back to some sort of positive affirmation of the faith (as, sadly, is most often the case), it is not surprising that these studies end up destroying the faith of those who read them and those who make them. Of course, the academic, though they should know better, has fallen for a rather peculiar form of ad hominem. While it might be true that a given teaching arose out of certain circumstances, and those circumstances might not have been ideal, those circumstances alone do not determine the truth or falsehood of that teaching. The moral character of a teacher does not entirely determine the accuracy of their teachings; nor does the fact that a teacher gave inaccurate justification for a teaching mean that teaching is necessarily wrong.

Secondly, the field follows academic discipline in trying to offer new, innovative insights to justify its existence. This is not necessarily a bad thing in itself, because we would expect development of Christian doctrine as history moves closer to the eschaton. But the problem is that academic theology engages deconstruction of the past in order to justify new, and often farfetched, views. One needs to only look to the Jesus Seminar to see this at work. Its participants first seek to destroy the past, to destroy the way Christianity views Jesus, then it seeks to offer new, sensationalistic declarations on Jesus as a way to justify its existence. They realize (unlike some) it is not just a deconstruction of the past that is necessary. They realize that people need to come out feeling they gained something after reading the studies of the Seminar, and in this respect, they are right. But, for them, the pursuit they hold is that of the glorification of their own ego, and their right to that glory comes from the fact that they have published the newest, most absurd views on Jesus yet. Probably the only reason why they did not ask Dan Brown to be a member is that they at least hold some intellectual integrity, and require their participants to at least have a working knowledge of Biblical languages.

Thirdly, it seems that many people who engage in the field of academic theology at one time were people of faith, but after having their faith battered by the assault of modern academic deconstruction of the faith, they have lost whatever faith they once held, while remaining active in the discipline. They have nowhere else to go. So they just become historians looking at the past, with no belief, no hope to share with others. This creates a continuous, downward cycle in the field itself; all that is taught leads to the same faith-destroying conclusion one generation after the next. There is no understanding of how to take these new facts and interpret them in more fulfilling manners, because there is no faith left by the professor to impart to their students. Those few who continue to hold onto their faith do so with great difficulty, limping through their studies. It comes to no surprise that this has affected Patristic studies the most. Where once there was a lively theological contribution from the discipline, we find now it has become a discipline which seeks to destroy the ideas and reputations of the Fathers.

Fourth, because those who hold positions of power in the discipline no longer hold to any faith themselves, they discourage students from making the leap from historical analysis to any positive theological proclamation. They do this many ways. First, they will tell their students that their opinions do not matter; they are just students, after all. They must prove themselves in the discipline, in the activity that the professors find relevant (which, of course, is not theology proper). “Only when you have shown yourself capable of understanding all that we can teach you, after showing you accept all our deconstruction for a lifetime, you are permitted, when you are on top, to make your own theological declarations for us to hear.” Dissertations are to be done in this pattern – they are to be academic, not theological. This is the attitude of many (thankfully not all!) in the field. Imagine how different the history of theology would have been if this practice had been enforced in times past: how many theologians who died at a young age, such as Blessed Duns Scotus, would never have written any significant theological treatises? Imagine if St Pavel Florensky had been told not to write his theological masterpiece, The Pillar and Ground of The Truth because it was a proclamation of theological faith more than it was a study of the past?

Fifth, for those who still hold some faith, they do go to the other extreme – their problem is not a problem of deconstruction, but how they reconstruct the faith. Since academic theology follows the academic pursuit of newness, those who hold faith seek to justify their credentials by creating new, and often perverse, interpretations of the faith. At least they have faith, but what they have faith in – is hard to tell, and difficult to know if it is still Christian. But they are to be complimented, because in their struggles, they hold on, and have not found their faith to be entirely destroyed. There are many new areas of theological discipline where this is taking place, for example, in political theology, in ecumenical theology, and in my personal favorite, comparative (interfaith) theology. Yet, because what they create is usually a pure innovation, their idea holds very little weight, and is easily forgotten; the glory of an innovator is short and sweet, before a bitter fall from grace. In the end, their students will either have their faith shattered when their teacher and guide falls from grace, or they will seek to replace their teacher in a rather evolutionary fashion, waiting for their own short moment of glory.

It comes to no surprise that some of the greatest theologians of the twentieth century, for example C.S. Lewis and Hans Urs von Balthasar, were not academic theologians, but people who held such a great faith, they had to proclaim it. C.S. Lewis, for example, might not have wanted himself viewed as a theologian because he was not capable of offering all the deconstructive analysis of the past, nor because he did not show all the intellectual sleight of hand that makes one seem to be a great theologian, yet he is, far more than most, a theologian in the truest sense. His writings are popular because they offer honest, yet insightful, declarations of his faith. He was willing, even, to accept his role as being a non-theologian, and to learn from the analysis of so-called theologians, but he did so in the true form: he analyzed the results, and used them to form some positive assessment of the faith. Hans Urs von Balthasar is an odd case. He could have been an academic theologian. He engaged all of its disciplines, but he never wanted to be a part of it. Even when he acted as a member of the International Theological Commission, he never called himself a theologian. He wrote out of faith, and wrote to promote it; he moved beyond the academic pursuit and turned his writings into a pursuit for truth, even if that truth is as old as the Church herself.

Those who actively seek to be academic theologians must look to the example, not of their peers, but of the theologians of the past; they must look to them as the proper example of what it means to be a theologian. We must not think our field is about debate on subtle points of history. If we are called to be a theologian, we must remember that as an academic theologian we are called to be a theologian first. We should be a theologian even more than being an academic. The training and discipline of academia is good, useful, and even needed, but it should be the form in which the practice of theology is engaged, instead of the means by which theology as a discipline self-destructs.