Review Essay, Keeping the Balance
Theology as a university discipline Trueman goes on to consider a major issue he perceives “at the very core of academic theology” that obstructs the effort to integrate our faith and our studies. “This is the issue of theology as a university discipline”. Offering a sobering historical analysis of how it has got itself into its present state, Trueman stresses that “the problem is not just the liberal theology that you learn at university but the whole university culture and ethos”. In other words, there is a problem with both the content and the context of theology as a university discipline, and in Trueman’s opinion, the later, “with its tendency to neutralize all the imperatives of Christian theology”, is “far more subtle and far more serious”. Historically, Christian theology “was integral to the church’s life and testimony, and thus intensely practical”, but the modern university “has divorced theology from it proper place in the life of the church” and “is ultimately not interested in those claims that make Christian theology so important”, except as “artefacts to be examined and discussed”. It is also under pressure to justify itself to the world on commercial and economic grounds.
To help us understand the issue of context, Trueman offers an analogy: Suppose the discipline of medicine became reformed in a most absurd way so that gradually all compounds come to be seen as having equal power to cure and it eventually became unacceptable to speak of one person being more or less ill than any other! The result, of course, would be that the discipline of medicine, whose very purpose was to think about and cure human diseases, would fragment, because there would be “no central concern or conviction” to keep it together. Trueman goes on to imagine a group of students who become disillusioned with the consensus orthodoxy of modern medicine and come to believe that people do suffer sickness, that medicine is good for you and that poison is bad. The trouble with this imaginary group of “radicals”, however, is that they just talk about it. They may have rejected the content of consensus orthodoxy, Trueman observes, “but they have done so in the same context and culture as their opponents: not that of curing people, but that of juggling with clever and interesting ideas”.
Category: In Depth, Spring 2006
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