The Poverty of Academic Theology
Theology has always been a precarious discipline. This is in part because of its breathtaking audacity—to speak about God, no less! It is also because of its unavoidable dependence on cultural milieus, social institutions, and intellectual tools that it does not completely control. It arose out of the crucible of Christianity’s first centuries, as that relatively obscure movement within Judaism became the dominant religion of late antiquity. Located first in the monastery and cathedral, theology entered a new phase with the birth and ascendancy of the medieval university. From the outset, many critics found theology in this iteration to be abstract and too far removed from the joys and fears of everyday believers. Some reformers, such as Jean Gerson, sought to make the university more conducive to a set of concerns that we now often group under the rubric of “spirituality.”
A century or so later, the critique was continued by the Modern Devotion, most well known for The Imitation of Christ. That book has a low opinion indeed of university theology, placing these words in the mouth of Christ: “I am God, who enable the humble-minded to understand more of the ways of the everlasting Truth in a single moment than ten years of study in the Schools. I teach in silence, without the clamor of controversy, without ambition for honors, without confusion of argument.”
Reformers, Protestant and Catholic alike, were aware of this problem. They strove in different ways to counter it, be it by repristinating monastic genres or by reinvigorating university theology with an infusion of the rhetorical arts, retrieved and refashioned by Renaissance humanism. These attempts notwithstanding, the following century was the century of orthodoxies and polemical theology, the century of scholasticisms, Catholic and Protestant. The problem of relating university theology (or seminary theology, for that matter) to the lives and needs of the majority of believers loomed over the theological landscape like a slumbering volcano, erupting periodically through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries: thus, Pietism in Germany, Pascal and the Jansenists in France, or the Wesleyan reform in England.
Subsequent centuries brought new challenges. Theological subdisciplines developed, and once helpful distinctions became divisions and even oppositions. Moreover, from the Enlightenment on it was not only theology’s ecclesial utility and contributions to individual holiness that was contested, but its very legitimacy as an academic discipline. Its defense on both scores headed the agenda of nineteenth-century Protestant “liberal theology.” This worthy albeit often maligned movement endeavored to show both that the integrity and relevance of Christian faith could be speculatively defended and elaborated on modern grounds and that such a defense was vital not only as an apologetic strategy against its cultured despisers but also ad intra for the well-being of the faith itself. There were important developments along the same lines in Roman Catholic theology, but Pius IX and Leo XIII rejected that approach, embracing instead the neoscholastic revival of Libertore and Kleutgen as the proper response to the challenges the Church faced, both ad intra and ad extra.
In Catholicism, a way of understanding theology’s role solidified during this time that has been described by Johann Baptist Metz: “The bishops teach; the priests care for; the (professional) theologians explain and defend doctrine and train the caretakers. And the rest? The people? They are chiefly the objects of this instructing and caretaking church.” Yet this solution, if solution it be, left unsolved the two problems that I have highlighted in this admittedly too brief history. First, a very real question subsists on whether and how theology has a future in increasingly secularized universities (even those still nominally affiliated with one or another Christian tradition). These universities are increasingly orienting themselves toward training the experts needed to keep late modernity’s political, economic, and technological structures running smoothly. Thus, it is not just theology’s avowed service to a particular cultural and historical tradition that makes it appear insufficiently “objective” for universities so conceived, but its insistence that its subject matter cannot be instrumentalized to the benefit of the smooth functioning of any set of human institutions and concepts, modern ones included. Will theology be dispersed into various component disciplines, which are “objective” enough to gain admission into these secular academies? Or will it withdraw from the university, restricting itself to the seminary? Or find new institutional settings, such as retreat houses or study centers, or root itself once again in the cloister and cathedral? Or in the ethereal landscape of websites and blogs?
Second, and more germane to the concerns of Renewing Theology, will academic theology become more and more isolated from the joys, sorrows, needs, and gifts of believers outside the university gates? Here theology shares the dilemma of its sister discipline, philosophy. Pierre Hadot identified this dilemma in Philosophy as a Way of Life. He draws our attention to the difference between philosophy as it existed in the ancient schools and philosophy as it is often taught in the modern university: “Ancient philosophy proposed to mankind an art of living. By contrast, modern philosophy appears above all as the construction of a technical jargon reserved for specialists.” Has theology too become “the construction of a technical jargon reserved for specialists”? It certainly has become divided into subfields, each of which—rightly enough—holds itself accountable to the most exacting technical standards of its cognate discipline: scripture study to the various disciplines of textual analysis, literary critique, cultural anthropology, and so on; historical theology to a similar array of historical methodologies; moral and systematic theology to a spectrum of disciplines, including philosophy, psychology, anthropology, sociology, and even the natural sciences. This rigor is important, and theology is the better for the precision that comes with it. Yet, as a perhaps unintended result, is it any surprise that many Christians experience theology as an increasingly arcane and esoteric conversation carried on above their heads? Need we wonder that they find it difficult to experience theology anymore as a guide into an “art of living,” an invitation to explore and deepen the response they have made, however tentatively, to the call to follow Christ?
To be sure, there are exceptions to this general story, and there are always theologians who rise to the challenge, combining both academic rigor and an empathic reach to include those outside the academy. Nonetheless, it seems fair to say that there is a growing sense, even among its supporters, that academic theology needs renewal and reformulation if it is to respond to the needs of the Church and society today. This must encompass its specific institutional structures and pedagogical techniques, including the division of labor between different theological subdisciplines. However, it also includes the ways academic theology (both speculative and practical) identifies problems, marshals evidence, constructs arguments, defends and emends them in conversation with others, and communicates results and recommends action. But how to proceed? If it is to remain in the university, it is certainly important that theology continue to be scholarship of the highest caliber. If it cannot deal with its proximate subject matter—the material of scripture and tradition, the social and political configurations of religious faith today, the world in and for which faith necessarily lives—with the same rigor that the other disciplines deal with their Sache, then it deserves the reproaches often leveled at it (or, as is more often the case, the benign neglect). Moreover, theology can and should attend to the work of other disciplines in the university as they strive to improve the quality of teaching and to discussions within the university as a whole concerning its role in society. After all, theology is not the only discipline that feels vulnerable in the university today; the kairos that faces academic theology confronts the university as a whole as it grapples with the question of whether or not a tradition that is now at least nine centuries old has a future.
It is, however, equally important to respond to the second issue: How do we reestablish a living relationship between academic theology and the lives of Christians in the world outside the university gates? How do we reopen that vital circulation between the three elements that Friedrich von Hügel listed as integral to any living religion: the intellectual element, the historical-institutional element, and the “mystical-volitional” element, in which “religion is rather felt than seen or reasoned about, is loved and lived rather than analyzed, is action and power, rather than external fact or external verification.” Since the Enlightenment, theologians have tended to focus their energy on bringing the first two elements (intellectual and historical-institutional) into contact. Their worthy aim was to counter the growing suspicion that religion, particularly as communicated through historical traditions and lived out in concrete social institutions, simply cannot have an “intellectual element,” that at the end of the day irrationality or mere opinion rules the minds of believers. Without denying the importance of that challenge, the conviction that guides this book is that it must be met along with the second, and that means by tapping the “mystical-volitional” element of religion. The two tasks are not opposed, or even unconnected. Far from threatening to render faith even more “subjective” and “irrational,” an appeal to the experience of the divine, as articulated in spiritual and/or mystical traditions, delineates an important locus from which to defend the cognitive integrity and relevance of religious faith.
In modernity, it is the genre of spirituality that has largely taken over the task of proposing “an art of living.” Its separation from theology has been bemoaned for at least seventy years, and many contemporary theologians have continued to insist on the need to reintegrate spirituality into the practice and results of theology. Yet, it is not easy to see how this reintegration will happen, since the division is not just a terminological one that can be overcome at the whim of the academic wordsmith. Rather, the division between spirituality and theology flows from, reflects, and reinforces the social and cultural conditions of modernity. It cannot be overcome by theory alone but by a new praxis, both of doing theology and of practicing spirituality, an ecclesial praxis that is at the same time individual and social-political. As a propaedeutic to this more sweeping and challenging task, we must undertake an analysis of how spiritual traditions can have, and indeed have had, an influence on the work of academic theology.
This task is more manageable. For one thing, we have at our disposal the fruits of more than a century of sustained historical scholarship focused on Christianity’s spiritual traditions. We have critical editions and excellent secondary works that introduce those past masters who strove to lure men and women into theology as a radically transformative and deeply satisfying way of life. We can and should learn from them, for the works of the Spirit are at once life-givingly new and yet also best perceived from the vantage of the long history of that Spirit’s presence in and to history.
It is in part this critical retrieval of spiritual traditions, along with the great interest in spirituality in both academy and surrounding culture today, that has made us so aware over the past several decades of the need to reestablish a living circulation between spirituality and academic theology. Yet the need both to reconfigure the practice and contents of academic theology and to reintegrate spirituality and academic theology have been felt for much longer, even if it was not named in these precise terms. Indeed, confining ourselves to Roman Catholic theology, if we survey the names of some of the theologians of the past century who militated for a richer use of Christianity’s spiritual traditions, we find some of the most important figures in the reinvigoration of academic theology: Jean Leclercq, Yves Congar, Marie-Dominique Chenu, Hans Urs von Balthasar, and Karl Rahner, to name a few. This suggests the hypothesis that those theologians who were most successful at reconfiguring academic theology to meet the challenges of late modernity were also most successful at reintegrating spirituality.
EDITORIAL NOTE: This article is excerpted from Renewing Theology: Ignatian Spirituality and Karl Rahner, Ignacio Ellacuria, and Pope Francis (University of Notre Dame Press, 2022). It is part of an ongoing collaboration with the University of Notre Dame Press. You can read other excerpts from this collaboration here. All rights reserved.