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The Place of Theology in the Academy Today
Paul R. Hinlicky
Tise Professor of Lutheran Studies, Roanoke College
I wish I could give Prof. Benne a direct answer to his question. But I cannot allow the secular
fundamentalism of his agent provocateur (disguised as a respectable religious studies scholar) to frame
the question for me. That would entangle me in a false claim to timeless and universal knowledge in
matters more significant than analytical truisms. For both philosophical and theological reasons, I deny
such knowledge to creatures.1 Even at its best, our hard-earned knowledge of the world achieves but
fragments of meaning in a story of the universe that vastly surpasses us. These fragments are
meaningful to us, they may even be truthful anticipations of Truth, but for homo viator (St. Thomas,
humans as ‘on the way’) they cannot answer –at best they rather provoke—the kinds of questions
reasonable people deem religious and/or philosophical.
“Who are we? How did we get here? Where are we going?” That is one series of classical
questions from the ancient West. Another modern series runs: “What can I know? What must I do?
What may I hope?” These and others like them are great questions. A curriculum named “intellectual
inquiry” certainly wants to consider them. In our market-driven capitalist culture, pursuit of such
seeming imponderables may be considered idle. A liberal arts college stands out not only as a place
where such issues are posed, but as well as a place where significant answers that have arisen in the
course of the human journey are explored and debated and further elaborated. People of open mind
and good will should ally in keeping the liberal arts college liberal, that is, free to pose great questions
and to argue about significant answers.2 Such deliberation has the capacity to qualify and even to
challenge the short-sighted “perceived needs” which fuel (or manipulate) the market.
Christian theology, as I understand it, allies with other champions of the liberal arts in insisting
that the unexamined life is not worth living, that questions of origin and destiny, truth and value, justice
and mercy, beauty and purpose put concerns of immediate function and present utility into the wider
and better context of our common world and its destiny. For good or for evil that world remains
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That is to say, I deny Kant’s synthetic a priori, and regard perception, conception and interpretation as the varied
and irreducible elements of knowledge, itself a temporally and linguistically extended social enterprise.
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This is not to devalue the historian or the social scientist’s interest in the historically particular, but to require that
particulars be seen in the larger wholes to which they belong by means of the cognitive act of interpretation
regarding any particular’s significance for some real or implied audience.
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relentlessly religious, and hence it is arguably the case that critical inquiry is necessary for educated
people. The unexamined religion, we might say, is not worth believing (or otherwise practicing); further,
upon examination, some choices in religion will arguably merit greater trust than others (though such
choices, upon reasoned examination, may not map out along traditional fault-lines). Blind faith is no
virtue.
Assuming such an account of our contemporary context, I won’t make an abstract case for “the”
place of Christian theology in “the” academy, an “epistemological” justification, so to say, that assumes
that a timeless and universal knowledge of knowledge is available by which to make such a judgment.
Indeed, since the contemporary academic scene seems to me more a “pluriversity” than a university, I
will sketch an historical account (based on my recent book, Paths Not Taken) leading to “a” location of
this legacy of thought in today’s intellectual milieu. Other narratives will find other places for Christian
theology, ranging from the “dustbin” to restoration to the “throne” (theology as queen of the sciences).
Between these polar wings of contemporary culture wars, I urge a more classical interaction between
reason seeking its source and faith seeking understanding.
Christian theology takes its place at the academic table as an interested interlocutor, both
arguing for its own truths and dialoguing with others about theirs. The affirmation of pluralism here is
sincere, despite a spotty historical record. Scholarly and critical theology is not an ideological
rationalization of some self-absolutizing religious institution or tradition; rather it knows that its truths
can be verified finally only by their own Object, which is a matter of faith, not sight. That is to say,
theology knows how eminently disputable its own central claims are – that self-awareness is what
makes critical inquiry (not ‘fundamentalism’ or ‘dogmatism’) both possible and necessary. As the
deconstructionist literary critic Stanley Fish put the point a few years back in a great post-modernist
debate with Richard John Neuhaus: Virgin Birth? Resurrection from the dead? Yet these mysteries
framing the earthly life of Jesus of Narazeth who was crucified under Pontius Pilate provide the lenses
by which Christian faith perceives its object, the divine Word made flesh. The conception and
interpretation of this perception in ever new history is theology’s task.
To come to the heart of the matter, then, theology is about God, more precisely the God of the
gospel, who gives life to the dead and calls into being worlds that do not yet exist, who in the person of
the Son suckles at Mary’s breast and pants with mortal thirst on the Roman gibbet. That gospel
narration, as I just said, is both the problem and the possibility of theology’s place in the academy. For
some today invocation of the word ‘God’ is a conversation-stopper (Rorty). The word ‘God’ signifies an
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irrational appeal to an invisible authority that cannot be warranted but rather by its pretended
supremacy gives license to the most egregious academic and political abuses (obscurantism and
mystification, clericalism and theocracy). Yet for others today the word ‘God’ re-emerges from its
modern eclipse to indicate the possibility of a gift beyond the quid pro quo of the market (Derrida), that
is to say, to name a transrational (i.e. not irrational or subrational) hope in a future grace that is not yet
tangible except by the gift of, and in the form of, Christ-shaped faith active in love and persevering in
hope. In this latter mode, Christian theology today would speak with the prophets a word of criticism
on the abuse of the word ‘God’ for partial and partisan interests. But above all it would be concerned
with the apostles to speak the word ‘God’ to tell of a Giver of gifts at the origin, the turning-point and
the final destination of humanity.
Historically, Israel’s prophetic criticism of religion had its counterpart in Greek philosophy. One
might even argue that theology as a discipline had its origin, as do so many other arts and sciences, in
the Greeks. Those ancient lovers of wisdom were the first to employ reason to criticize the popular
religions, with their sacrifices and myths, in the name of the divine. This rational criticism of religion
dovetailed with early Christianity’s great thinkers, like Augustine; ironically it re-emerged (so I would
argue) after the post-Reformation wars of religion to form the modern period. We can see this in the
criticism of religion (also, if not especially the Christian religion) that we find in Hobbes and Hume,
Spinoza and Kant, Feuerbach and Marx, Nietzsche and Freud (but also in Luther and Barth and
Bonhoeffer). When we think of the seminal significance of such thinkers for the disciplines of the
contemporary academy in sociology, psychology and political and literary theory (not to mention
philosophy), it is no leap to suggest that the theological (that is, not merely secular) critique of religion
has only gone underground in them. Under post-modern conditions, I venture, such criticism might yet
again blossom as explicit theology. Witness the “theological turn” in contemporary French philosophy.
In its own proper concern to speak with the apostles the word ‘God’ to indicate an
encompassing gift beyond all human striving, bargaining and strife Christian theology today is not alone.
The ecumenical and interfaith dialogues of the past century have opened up new vistas here for
Christian thought to see that the indication of gift appears in religions and cultures quite other than its
own. Among those dialogues is the virtual growth industry today discussing the religious implications of
the new cosmology. The natural sciences witness a return of wonder at the mystery of a universe that
apparently had a beginning, one that could have been otherwise, one that permitted the evolution of
life and intelligence, one that has you and me entertaining the word ‘God. ‘
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One vital area that eludes such renewed dialogue, as it seems to me, is the arts, more broadly,
the aesthetic realm of culture on both popular and elite levels. Just like theology, the arts have
struggled to understand their place in an academy dominated by positivist accounts of knowledge and
utilitarian conceptions of scholarship. In a world in which an axiological act like interpretation is
devalued (note the value judgment!) as the cognitive process of explicating phenomena to other minds,
art, like theology, seems like decoration, far from hard, cold reality. But the mutual estrangement of
these modern academic orphans has deeper roots. Many who flee reactionary forms of traditional
religion find refuge in art, which, as John Dewey influentially argued, becomes the replacement for
religion in scientific culture. The cult of art replaces the cult of worship; or better perhaps, as Dewey
actually thought, the object of worship becomes self-creating humanity, at once producer and
consumer. This correlates on a popular level with a consumptive ‘entertainment’ culture, which also
functions as a substitute religiosity for ‘fans’ (= fanatics, a term once applied to zealous believers). While
there is no other realm of inquiry that as readily entertains the great questions as do the arts, for
historically understandable reasons the relation today lamentably remains, as it seems to me, one more
mired in rivalry than groping towards dialogue.
Dialogue is possible for Christian theology because the term, “God,” has a peculiar property
corresponding to its putatively unique referent to the Creator of all that is not God, namely, that only
God properly knows God. The qualification applies especially to Christian theology as an academic
discipline. It is not merely a transgression of the limits of reason, but blasphemous for creatures to claim
to know God like they know the causes of a chemical process or a nuclear chain reaction. Then they
could control, manipulate and predict God just as with physical reactions. The alternative to this is
learning to trust the true God, ‘true’ indicating the very One whom we can neither bribe nor conjure. If
creatures somehow come also to know this real God in the state of trust, it will be by virtue of God’s
faith-imparting self-donation, thus under such conditions that “God” never properly becomes the object
of human abuse rather than of prayer, praise and thanksgiving, always instead the subject of Christformed loving service. Boldly or perhaps insanely Christian theology claims this privileged (i.e. “graced”)
position, when it holds that “no one has ever seen God,” but the “only Son who is in the bosom of the
Father has made Him known” (John 1:18), precisely as the One who so loved that world that He gave…
(John 3:16). In Christianity God is known in the moral risk of offering oneself to the invisible referent of
the historically ambiguous event of Jesus Christ. Academic theology which is Christian also involves this
personal risk. Christian theology cannot be undertaken by disinterested, neutral spectators.
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Yet what a hopeful theological claim that faith in the self-donating God yields: faith refers to the
Giver who is determined by His Son and Spirit to create, redeem and fulfill the world. That summary
narrative tells what we mean by the word, “God.” What we mean by “the world” all the other sciences
will have to tell us; what the fulfillment of the promise of creation (and what the alternative[s] to this
fulfillment) is (are), the arts will have to explore. But Christian theology as an academic discipline
ventures such an interpretation of these facts and values, whose ultimate verification ever depends on
the God of the gospel achieving His purposes.