Compilation Theology in University

THEOLOGY IN
UNIVERSITY
* Connection without control: theology and
interconnectedness in university
* Why theology can and should be taught at secular
universities: Lonergan on intellectual conversion
* Religious Studies in Christian universities in
contemporary Asia: its relationship to Christian theology
* Newmans aesthetic vision: Theology and the education
of the whole person
* Practical theology and postmodern religious education
Q-
ROUTLEDGE
Christian Higher Education, 6:143159

C 2007 Taylor & Francis Group, LLC
Copyright
ISSN: 1536-3759 print / 1539-4107 online
DOI: 10.1080/15363750600932908
CONNECTION WITHOUT CONTROL: THEOLOGY AND

INTERCONNECTEDNESS IN THE UNIVERSITY
JOHN SULLIVAN
Liverpool Hope University, Liverpool, England
Three questions are addressed here. First, why should theologians promote interconnectedness in the Christian university? Interconnectedness is here understood
as the promotion of dialogue between subject areas. Second, why is the promotion
of interconnectedness problematical? Third, how might we conceive of this being
done, in particular with what kind of tone, style and intention? Theology cannot
dictate without damaging either the educational process or the cooperative culture
and community in the university. Thus I argue for theology to be a source of
connection in the university, but without control.
Introduction
A Christian university should be able to prompt its members to
see the connectedness of the many forms of knowing. Faith and
learning should be envisaged as allies rather than as opponents.
The critical thinking developed across the disciplines, and the
diverse perspectives on reality these disciplines offer, should be
seen as capable of being harmonized with the kind of commitments that flow from Christian faith. However, any integrated
view of human understanding faces complexities and challenges,
both in principle and in implementation, not least one that is
theocentric. In the university, disciplines become fragmented;
scholars become more and more specialized; modularization of
courses encourages a consumerist attitude toward knowledge
rather than a cumulative and long-term development by students,
inhibiting even a sense of the wholeness of the particular subject
they are studying, rendering it a loose collection of bits and
pieces. Surely the meaning to be gleaned from any segment of
knowledge is dependent on and enriched by a sense of a larger
Meaning that the segments draw upon and feed into. A Christian
Address correspondence to Professor John Sullivan, Liverpool Hope University,
Liverpool L16 9JD, United Kingdom. E-mail: sullivj@hope.ac.uk
143
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J. Sullivan
university should be able offer students the opportunity for a

holistic education.
How can we provide students with a coherent curriculum?
Should coherence be left to students to construct or should
faculty seek to build coherence into the curriculum? How can any
attempt to offer coherence avoid imposing controls that inhibit
freedom of thought, student choice or the autonomy of the
disciplines? What is the role of theology in fostering coherence
and connectedness in the university in the contemporary context?
I take it that any university should aim to develop in students some
combination of comprehensiveness of view, coherence between
the parts of their thinking, together with open-mindedness, which
entails recognition of our limitations, our partial vision, and
ambiguity in our experience of self and world, while avoiding
over-prescribed modes of thinking that are too tidy and too selfassured. A Christian university should seek to be a place that goes
beyond building community, providing care, promoting worship,
and serving those in need (Wood, 2003, pp. 9193, 107). It should
also draw on the Christian intellectual tradition to facilitate the
development of Christian thinking, about all aspects of reality.
In this paper, three questions are addressed. First, why should
theologians promote interconnectedness in the university? Second, why is this problematical? Third, how might we conceive
of this being done, in particular with what kind of tone, style,
and intention? Why do these questions matter? It is important,
if students are to reach any adequate level of understanding and
to have the possibility of developing an integrated worldview, that
bridges are built, not only within the ecology of concepts and
practices at work in any particular discipline, but also between
different areas of the curriculum. Some of the obstacles to such
integration and to the role of theology in fostering interconnectedness can be attributed to the wider culture, some to the
working practices and operating principles of modern universities
and some are brought about through the misguided strategies
of theologians themselves. Theology cannot dictate or dominate
without damaging either the educational process or the cooperative culture and community in the university. Interconnectedness
can be neither imposed nor guaranteed. Thus I argue for theology
to be a source of connection in the university, but without control.
I suggest that a variety of connections should be promoted,
Connection Without Control
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without advocating any particular model. It should be noted that

seeking connectedness is something much less systematic and
developed than attempts at a more full-blown integration.
I believe this more modest effort is more likely to be effective in facilitating dialogue in the contemporary context of
universities. One outcome we might hope for from such efforts
at interconnectedness is a more integral vision, a greater sense of
coherence and a heightened (and better informed) commitment
to the common good (Nichols, 2000, p. 242).
Need for Interconnectedness
One reason why theologians should press for interconnectedness
in the curriculum flows from a belief in the unity of all truth.
Ralph Wood (2003, p. 89) reminds us of the Protestant refrain
All truth is from God and the Catholic equivalent, that we
should seek to find God in all things. This suggests that Christians should expect to find an essential harmony and coherence
between the different kinds of truth they encounter, though, of
course, this may not be immediately apparent and may require
immense work before we can come to appreciate this unity.
Theology is about how all things relate to God. Thus, in
a sense, a Christian cannot rule out any area of knowledge as
irrelevant to our appreciation of God, even though, for practical
purposes, she may restrict her attention to a particular area, while
always being conscious that such an area is only ever a part of a
much larger whole and needs to be related to and incorporated
into a bigger picture. In Matthew 22:37, we read You shall love
the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul,
and with all your mind. This reminds Christians that they have
a duty, as disciples, to deploy all the capacities of their intellectual
endowment, alongside their other human capacities and gifts, in
service of the gospel. While the intellect is not everything, it is
part of who they are, what they have been given, equipment to be
appreciated, developed, and deployed. In 1 Corinthians 12:46 we
read, There are varieties of gifts, but the same Spirit. There are
varieties of service, but the same Lord. There are many forms of
work, but all of them, in all men, are the work of the same God.
And in James 1:17, we are told Every good thing bestowed and
every good gift is from above, coming down from the Father of
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J. Sullivan
lights. For the purposes of this paper, these quotations remind

us that, though we might need to specialize in our research,
scholarship, and teaching, in order to achieve any penetration
in our personal learning and so that we can offer something
original, reliable, and credible to the stock of knowledge, we must
always be keenly aware that God is also operating outside our
own specialisms, in other people and through other disciplines.
Thus, it is fitting that we enter into dialogue with scholars working
outside our own niche in the academic marketplace, in order to
widen our appreciation of Gods ways, purposes, nature, and call.
Second, there is an essential open-endedness in each of
the disciplines and fields of inquiry. They are incomplete, unfinished, on the way, constantly developing, encountering new
questions and problems. We can acknowledge this even as we
feel committed to their key values, insights, concepts, methods,
and structure. Without a degree of open-endedness, they would
rapidly become fossilized, repetitive, inward-looking, closed, increasingly irrelevant and ultimately moribund. The categories and
concepts we deploy can be useful in demarcating part of the
world as a focus for our attention, but they can obscure as well
as clarify. This happens as they help us to attend to this aspect,
while neglecting another aspect, of what we study. One aspect
becomes so bathed in light for us that other aspects are hidden
in shadow. We can only see so much at a time. But these concepts
and categories can be reconfigured when put into another, wider
context, when we engage in interdisciplinary dialogue. Dialogue
between the disciplines can help to ensure a balance of continuity
and openness. There cannot be any real dialogue if people do not
bring to the table something definite that is theirs to share. Nor
can there be any real dialogue if people are not prepared to listen
and heed what they hear. There is a parallel here with ecumenism.
This too depends upon people bringing something definite to the
table, but also a willingness to be vulnerable to critique, to have
ones position enriched and modified through the reception it
receives from others.
Third, central to a Christians self-understanding is the belief
that we are finite and fallen. We are limited through endowment,
circumstances, opportunities and through choices that make
us one kind of person rather than another, choices that have
consequences for our future options, closing some down, even as
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others are opened up. This is one good reason for theologians to
wish to go beyond their own discipline and to encourage others
to do the sameas part of an effort to transcend our limitations.
Other disciplines help us to note the parameters of our finiteness
and fallenness. In addition, it may be claimed that theology
helps other disciplines by providing an explicit awareness of and
vocabulary for these features of our existence, features that can
be easily missed or misdescribed. Recognition of our limitations
should induce in us greater realism, humility, and openness to
other perspectives, nudging us to collaborate with others in our
explorations.
Fourth, there is our communal nature, as social beings. We
need a plausibility structure (Berger, 1980); that is, we need our
beliefs to be reinforced by the consciousness that others share
them. The strength of a university rests as much on its quality
as a community of scholars, fostering and developing a collective
wisdom, as on the quality of individual scholars. Interdisciplinary
endeavors can be an important element in countering excessive
individualism and also in undermining the tribalism of some
forms of intradisciplinary debates.
Fifth, our belief that all human beings are made in the image
and likeness of God is a powerful motive for taking very seriously
what other people think and value, how they perceive, evaluate,
and respond to the world. If there is something of God in them,
it behooves us to attend carefully to their investigations, findings,
and judgments.
In Cady and Browns (2002) book devoted to theology
and religious studies in the university there is only one reference in the index to interdisciplinary dialogue, directing us
to an essay by Kathryn Tanner. She unpacks some of the reasons for not remaining enclosed within the confines of single
disciplinary thinking and the abstractions from the bigger picture
this entails.
Global capitalism, the media reach, an ecological sensibility in biology,
systems analysis in the social sciences, the stress in the physical sciences on
the complex statistical interplay of multiple forces, interdependent processes, complex configurations of possible events, all suggest an expansive
cognitive model attentive to contextual relationality rather than abstract
analysis. . . . Disciplines that isolate attention on de-contextualized bits of
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the world of human experience cannot hold off for long consideration of
the concrete fullness of that experience, but are forced by the intellectual
climate of the times to put their own concerns back into the larger picture.
(Tanner, 2002, pp. 204205)
I take her argument to point towards the incompleteness

and inadequacy of working only within disciplinary boundaries,
even if for much of the time this is necessary. We must be ready
to place our limited inquiries within the wider setting of the
work of other disciplines, though there will be multiple ways of
so doing, with no particular one way being privileged. Tanner
here is stressing the essential complexity that will be missed if
we concentrate solely within a single discipline, however sophisticated its methods. Making connections with other disciplines will
help to enhance our appreciation of this complexity and interrelatedness of phenomena. At the moment, as Michael Lawler
comments, there is too little convergence, too little contact
among the various faculties, too little mutual challenge and response among them, leaving them all diminished (Lawler, 1998,
p. 1).
Connectedness is also stressed by Kim Phipps. She says,
Scholarship is rooted in connectednessin mutual assistance,
conversation, encouragement, support, and evaluation. Scholarship proceeds by building on what others have done, and
it makes sense only in the context of what others are doing
(Phipps, 2004, p. 172). Basically, we need others, not only within
our disciplines of inquiry, but also beyond them, in order to
appreciate fully the data we come across and to make sense of
our world. Scholarly life, even if often carried out in isolation
for long periods, is essentially one of interdependence. Such
interdependence is stressed by Alasdair MacIntyre in his 1999
book Dependent Rational Animals. MacIntyre draws our attention
to the goods that come our way through vulnerability and the
virtues of acknowledged dependence on others. However, when
Phipps emphasizes connectedness as essential for scholars, she
refers to more than merely a focus on findings and the concepts
used in analyzing these findings. She also alerts us to the need
to pay attention to the personal stories from which the findings
emerge, for scholarship is embedded in lives that have other
dimensions that impinge upon their academic work. Scholarship
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that precludes consideration of the autobiographical perspectives

of individual scholars will be severely limited, lacking creative
imagination and insights into human nature (Phipps, 2004,
p. 177). Of course in paying attention to the personal stories told
by scholars we need to beware unilateral forms of testimony that
engage insufficiently with critical questioning and that seek to
impose their authority on listeners, seeking surrender, rather than
those which invite free responses in a spirit of humility, seeking
correction and completion.
Failure to tap into the faith dimension latent in students
and subject matter can be countered by attention to curriculum
connectedness. Often there is a tendency to ignore what many
students bring to the classroom across the disciplines in terms of
their faith affiliationor allergies to faith. Yet to advert to the religious implications of what is being learned might be an additional
way for teachers to create inclusive and hospitable spaces for
learning, by tapping into where students are coming from. I am
thinking here as much of student resentments and rejections of
religion as of their positive convictions and affiliations. Teachers
should acknowledge this aspect of student identity, allow it to
enter into the classroom and into educational assignments. Of
course, not only is faith (in something) part of the being of the
students; it is also integral to some aspects of the realities being
investigated in many disciplines. Referring to psychology, sociology, history, anthropology and literature, Jacobsen and Jacobsen
(2004, p. 161) says, Since faith is part of the reality that those
disciplines seek to study, matters of faith ought not to be banned
from the academic dimensions of these subjects. One might add
that, even though faith might be less evidently part of some other
disciplines, in terms of what they are studying, it will certainly be
part of the life of students and scholars in, for example, science,
medicine, business, engineering, and education, and therefore
an element in the operating factors that affect their perception,
thinking, and evaluating.
I believe that universities should be places where faculty and
students raise key questions about the disciplines. What are the
philosophical assumptions that underpin them? How is power
exercised within them? Who sets the agenda and on what basis?
Whose voices are heard, suppressed, or ignored? What are the
boundaries that separate out one discipline from others? What
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ethical issues arise out of deploying the key concepts and central
methods of that discipline? It is difficult to see how these questions
can be adequately addressed without looking over the garden
fence, giving at least some consideration to neighboring disciplines. Theology has always had to do this, for, as Kathryn Tanner
says specifically Christian sources and norms have never been sufficient for theological instruction (Tanner, 2002, p. 209). There
has always been engagement with concepts and cultures external
to the faith. The very meaning of even the most fundamental
theological claims is determined by what theologians do with
the notions and affirmations of other intellectual and cultural
areas (Tanner, 2002, p. 210). One draws upon the intellectual
terminology or currency available at the time even if one buys
something different with it. Tanner claims that One cannot be
a constructive theologian for the present day without familiarity
with the currency of the other intellectual or cultural fields of the
day, and it is through the assessment of how other theologians of
the past and present have dealt with comparable material of their
own times and places that one develops a sense for what needs to
be done now (p. 210).
John E. Hull provides two additional reasons for theologians
to engage in interdisciplinary dialogue. First, they cannot be
countercultural in the university context if they remain within
their own field of study and accept the reigning rules of the
academic environment. If they submit to the wisdom of the
incumbent paradigm they relinquish [the] right to pose the central questions, redefine limits, set priorities, or offer alternative
answers to societys questions of ultimate concern (Hull, 2002, p.
216). Second, if they abdicate responsibility for engaging others
in dialogue about scholarly questions, methods, findings, and
their practical implications, they run the risk that the Christian
perspective will function simply like bookendsGod talk will
appear [at the best] at the beginning and end of lessons, units,
courses and years, but what lies in between will remain largely
unaffected (Hull, 2002, pp. 222223).
Obstacles
There are many different kinds of obstacles to the establishment
of connection between the disciplines. Among some Christians
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there has been a marked anti-intellectualism, as if a faith separated from scholarly and academic concerns was somehow more
pure, more trusting, less reliant on human achievement, more
open to Gods revelation. Faith alone or Scripture alone is required by the disciple. Academic learning clouds the vision, relies
too heavily on anti-Christian assumptions, invites pride, and leaves
less room for God in ones life. Fideism, however, undermines the
credibility of Christian faith in the long run and refuses to use one
of Gods great gifts, rationality.
Among other Christians who seek connections between theology and other disciplines, sometimes the kind of relationship
sought invites suspicion. This might be because the relationship
being pursued seems too unilateral, with theology influencing
the other discipline but not in turn allowing itself to be influenced, as if theology is already complete while the other partner
is deficient. Nicholas Wolterstorff refers to Abraham Kuypers
one-directional, non-interactionist view of the relation between
religion and the practice of scholarship (Hull, 2002, p. 213). Or,
suspicion might be aroused by fears that the academic agenda of a
discipline, and following from this, the distribution of power and
opportunities, might be altered by a dominant religious group,
thereby rendering second-class academic citizens those scholars
who are not members of the faith or denomination in question.
This fear certainly prevails in some Catholic universities (Langan,
1998, p. 96).
Jacobsen and Jacobsen (2004, pp. 1531) bring out two
important limitations of earlier integration models. They claim,
with some justice, that those models often depend rather closely
on a Reformed, Calvinist view of Christian scholarship and fit
much less easily with other Christian emphases, among which he
mentions Catholic, Wesleyan, Lutheran, Pentecostal, Baptist, and
Orthodox approaches. Some of these give less emphasis to the
intellectual dimension and more to other dimensions of Christian
life, for example, the liturgical, sacramental, communal, practical,
political, and aesthetic. Jacobsen and Jacobsen also point out that
typical models of integrating faith and learning fit better areas
of study that by their nature are more philosophical or theorybased, for example sociology, rather than chemistry, or literary
criticism rather than engineering. Partly because of the cogency
of these points, I am advocating in this paper, not a full-blooded
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integration, but a much looser and less systematic exercise in

establishing connections, without seeking to specify the expected
outcomes or nature of these connections.
Such lack of clarity, however, about what is being aimed for
in interdisciplinary dialogue, can itself be an obstacle. This might
be related to lack of realism about what can be expected, how
open people are prepared to be, how much time they can devote
to dialogue beyond their discipline, and how many resources can
be allocated for this kind of activity. It might also be linked to an
attempt to seek too tidy an approach to interdisicplinary dialogue
and projects, perhaps importing a monistic attitude, envisaging a
strategy that is insufficiently pluralistic or flexible. Too systematic
an approach can be both threatening and narrowing. Disciplinary
affiliations among faculty can lead to connections with their
international colleagues in the same field being prioritized over
those with their colleagues from other disciplines in their own
institution. Then there are defensive mechanisms and territorial
sensitivities that operate, for example, in protecting budgets, in
preserving a curriculum into which one has invested much time
and effort, in the drive towards empire-building, combined with a
mixture of both excessive confidence in a discipline and a fear of
the unknown. In the collaborative project management of people
drawn from different disciplines attention has to be paid to the
identity, security, and motivation of those involved. Ways have to
be found to balance the risk-taking required for interdisciplinary
endeavors with the familiarity and stability provided by the homebase discipline.
Lyon and Beaty succinctly indicate three considerations
that can inhibit interconnectedness between theology and other
disciplines in a university setting. First, some claim that, with
regard to their particular discipline, religious perspectives are
either nonexistent or simply irrelevant. Second, which version
and whose definition of Christian is to be used, since there
simply does not exist one unified version which can be labeled
the Christian one? Third, some take the view that teaching a
Christian perspective presents a biased view that is unfair to other
religious (and nonreligious) perspectives (Lyon & Beaty, 1999,
p. 85).
With regard to the first of these points, judgment as to
whether theology has anything to offer should be withheld until
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after some interdisciplinary discussion has taken place. My guess

is that it is a combination of three factors that leads to a premature judgment of irrelevance. Many theologians have simply not
considered the implications of their work for other disciplines.
Similarly, many theologians have failed to listen carefully to what
scholars in other disciplines are up to and are thus unaware
of how theology and other studies might be linked. Likewise,
scholars in other disciplines rarely consider the potential relevance of theology, remaining largely in ignorance of its potential
contribution to their work.
As for the second consideration, the sheer multiplicity of
Christian voices, I do not think this should be especially problematical, (given the multiplicity of voices often clamoring for
attention in other disciplines) so long as the particularities of the
tradition being represented by a theologian are specified, with
a humble acknowledgement of the limited degree of authority
these hold for other Christians and so long as the theologian
displays a willingness to learn from Christians of a different
persuasion, as well as an openness to other disciplines. As for
the third possible objection to theology being brought to bear
in interdisciplinary dialogue, that inviting the Christian voice
into the academy is unjust to nonreligious and non-Christian
views, this is specious reasoning. It presupposes that the Christian speaks without respect for others, without knowledge that
there are other points of view and that others are not allowed
to speak for themselves. None of these conditions need apply when Christian theologians contribute to interdisciplinary
dialogue.
It might be thought counterintuitive to assume that the
academy is ready for theology to make a constructive contribution
to cross-disciplinary dialogue. There are intellectual trends that
seem to count against such an undertaking. These include:
1. The hermeneutics of suspicion (all is power-play and the
expression of vested interests)
2. A strong sense of the situation-specific nature of all claims
(relativism)
3. Resistance to metanarratives
4. The discrediting of authority
5. Individualism
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6. Autonomy (rather than interdependence) as a major value

7. The privatization of religion and its relegation to a marginal
and merely optional activity
8. The tendency to believe that we can develop the software of
skills and competencies without the hardware of character;
in other words the assumption that what we learn in class is
something quite disconnected from (and thus uninfluenced
by) the company we keep, what else we are learning, the kind
of life we live and the persons we are becoming.
Marcia Bunge identifies both a negative and a positive feature
in the modern academy. On the one hand, many students and
faculty seem to hold onto the very modern assumption that faith
and learning are separate realms and that religion is personal
and private and therefore irrelevant to academic life. On the
other hand, there appears to be a growing openness to religious
perspectives among scholars in several fields that some attribute to
the postmodern critique of objectivity and emphasis on pluralism
(Bunge, 2002, p. 249).
Such openness to the religious voice as one among many
contending for our attention in the marketplace of ideas is very
different from the position of religion in a religiously affiliated
university. It is plausible to argue that theologians in Christian
universities are in some way sponsored by their institution, perhaps considered as spokespersons for it, guardians of orthodoxy,
in a privileged position vis-`a-vis other disciplines. When they
speak, they can be heard by faculty from other disciplines as
if they are speaking with more than just their own voice, with
an institutional mandate. Of course, this is often not the case
at all, for many Christian universities in practice give far too
little support to the position and healthy functioning of theology,
thereby undercutting the capacity of the institution to articulate
its identity and to communicate intelligently its raison detre.
Secularization has frequently deeply permeated even religiously
affiliated universities, influencing their operating assumptions
and practices. Secularization occurs for many reasons. We want
to widen the field and improve the quality of our staff; reducing
the focus on religious affiliation and commitment allows us to
widen the net in recruiting the best staff. We want to avoid heavyhandedness and compulsion in imposing a religious ethos and so
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step back from many of the kinds of requirementin curriculum

and in student lifethat once might have been normal. We need
to maximize our recruitment of students, of all kinds, including
the brightest, in order to compete and to remain viable; thus
we minimize the religious character of our institution in our
promotion of it, lest this should put them off coming to us. It
is not surprising that cumulatively the obstacles indicated in this
section lead some colleagues to see the religious and the academic
mission of Christian universities as existing in tension. While
acknowledging this, I believe the tension can be a creative one.
Prompting Connections
Theology should not be considered as a competitor against other
disciplines, but their partner. Although there is, in my view, a
place for both apologetics, a defense of the faith we hold, and for
critique, exposing the false assumptions, misguided priorities, and
distorted values of some worldviews and ideological contenders
in the university, the primary role of theology, in the context of
interdisciplinary inquiry, is as humble contributor to the debates
and investigations. All knowledge involves interpretation. And this
emerges from our worldview fed by prior inclinations, judgments,
commitments, and aversions. Neutrality might be often claimed
but is rarely displayed in practice in the academy (Clouser, 1991).
Theologians should ask their colleagues what view of persons,
society, knowledge, and learning underlies their current practices
and proposalsbe ready to be questioned in turn on these
points. They should open up for their colleagues the possibility
of seeing all of reality as the theater of Gods work. As Harry
Lee Poe puts it, faith intersects an academic discipline at the
point where it asks its fundamental questions . . . appropriates
its most fundamental assumptions . . . [and] establishes its core
values (Poe, 2004, p.138). Poe provides a useful set of questions
that can facilitate interdisciplinary dialogue:
With what is your discipline concerned?
What characterizes the methodology of your discipline?
On what other disciplines does your discipline build? To what
other disciplines does your discipline contribute?
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What are the values on which your discipline is based? At what

point do these values come into conflict with other disciplines?
Over what values within your discipline do members of your
discipline disagree?
What is the philosophical basis for your disciplines values? (Poe,
2004, pp. 138139).
He also provides examples of questions for particular disciplines,

from which I select just five as examples:
For Biology: To what extent, if any, should genetic engineering
be used to enhance human beings?
For English: What are the similarities and differences in interpreting biblical texts and other literature?
For Political Science: What is the role of forgiveness in international relations?
For Fine Arts: What are the limits, if any, on the freedom for
human creative expression?
For Economics: What is the relationship of the quest for profitability and the Christian call for compassion and justice? (Poe,
2004, p.159).
These kinds of questions facilitate the development of a

wisdom that transcends mere knowledge (Maxwell, 1987). At
the same time theologians must show that they are open to the
possibility that faith can be illuminated, engaged, interrogated,
and challenged by the findings of other disciplines, so that it is
tested, purified, clarified, and kept humble. The tone of engagement between the disciplines fostered, facilitated, and supported
by theologians should be dialogical rather than conflictual. My
assumption here is that a Christian university will function more
like an umbrella than something more systemic, to use the
terminology of Duane Litfin. An umbrella organization seeks to
house a variety of perspectives without sacrificing its sponsoring
perspective . . . to create an environment congenial to Christian
thinking, but without expecting it of everyone (Litfin, 2004, pp.
1718). Such an idea has implications for the kind of hospitality
Christians display, the tone of voice they adopt and the quality of
listening they exhibit.
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There are various ways that theology can contribute to interconnectedness in the university. Tanner (2002, p. 206) argues that
theology can help to focus the universitys attention on the most
pressing problems and challenges of contemporary life. This view
is echoed by Wood, who believes that a Christian university should
help faculty and students to discern how the Gospel impinges
upon all humanistic and scientific questions, such as: What
constitutes the human person, the quality of the good life, the
purpose of social existence, the nature of the physical universe,
the structure of political and social order (Wood, 2003, p. 120).
In this way theology can influence the way other subjects are
taught, ensuring that they address the big questions about life and
the world. Joseph Komonchak powerfully brings out the potential
relevance of theology for the wider curriculum in the following
way:
Whether or not the human person is reducible to the dumb play of
material forces, whether or not he has a destiny beyond the grave, whether
or not he can attain truth, whether or not there is a God, whether or not
this God has a redemptive care for us, surely have consequences for the
way in which we conceive not only our private lives but our social lives as
well, for the fashion in which we deal with one another, for the criteria by
which we measure success or failure, for the means we consider whereby to
render human life, not just our own, not just our nations, but the whole
worlds life, less unworthy even of the human, never mind the divine.
(Komonchak, 1998, p. 82)
Attention to their apophatic tradition should make Christians ready to acknowledge the limitations of their language and
its reachits match with and adequacy to reality. This should
prompt them to take pains to avoid being overdogmatic in
dialogue. However, the openness and flexibility suggested by such
awareness of the limitations of language does not imply that
Christian theologians should be unprepared to bring to the table
something stable and substantial. Being open-minded does not
mean being empty-headed. For, as Tanner says, Theologians on
the basis in great part of distinctively Christian sources and norms
purport to say something important about the nature of human
flourishing (Tanner, 2002, p. 207).
What will be needed if the kind of interconnectedness I have
advocated is to occur? Among a number of recommendations,
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J. Sullivan
Gasper includes the following three: there should be research

groups that deliberately include faculty from different disciplines;
(at least some) professors should serve two departments; research
students should follow a minor subject, in addition to and from a
different discipline than their major area of investigation (Gasper,
2001, p. 17). The encouragement of collegialitywhich implies
joint collaboration in service of a cause that is bigger than any
single individual or disciplinefor the Christian community,
subscribing to the kingdom of God, can be a great incentive to
greater academic interconnectedness. Theology, through its clear
distinguishing of what is ultimate and what is penultimate, has a
role in questioning modes of university management and aspects
of academic culture that can slide into forms of totalitarianism
and idolatry that colonize our life-world.
Interestingly, Gasper suggests that, Interdisciplinarity will
work more readily when people act not as representatives of
disciplines but represent themselves, their experiences, values
and insights (Gasper, 2001, p. 15). When his insight is applied to
theologians in the Christian university, I would add that they have
an opportunity to help colleagues in other disciplines to see that
their work could be interpreted as a vocation, a cooperation with
Gods grace in a particular, positive if limited way, in preparing
for the kingdom. Thus understood, when speaking for themselves
they would do so with an enhanced sense of responsibility, not
only for the subject area they represent, not only with their fellow
academics, but also with a deep sense of who they are (a child of
God with a particular calling) and responsive to the source and
goal of all knowledge, God our Creator, Redeemer, and Sustainer.
This kind of thinking will require ongoing staff development for
mission, gradually building up confidence in the relevance and
applicability of Christian language and lifestyle to the academic
world.
The kind of role in promoting connections across the curriculum that I have described for theology avoids the extremes of
either abdication or domination, of silence or shouting. It links
with the Christian universitys raison detre. It accepts theologys
role in showing how all things relate to God. It draws upon
and displays the relevance for academic inquiry of the Christian
intellectual tradition. It questions the fundamental assumptions at
work in the academy. It invites others into dialogue and it listens
159
respectfully and humbly to what they have to add and shows itself
willing to learn from them. Thus it makes possible connection
without control.
References
Berger, Peter. (1980). The heretical imperative. London: Collins.
Bunge, Marcia. (2002). Religion and the curriculum at church-related colleges
and universities. In S. Haynes (Ed.), Professing in the postmodern academy. Waco,
TX: Baylor University Press.
Cady, L. E., and Brown, D. (Eds.) (2002). Religious studies, theology, and the
university. New York: State University of New York Press.
Clouser, R. (1991). The myth of religious neutrality. Notre Dame, IN: University of
Notre Dame Press.
Gasper, D. (2001). Interdisciplinarity. The Hague: Institute of Social Studies.
Hull, J. E. (2002). Aiming for Christian education, settling for Christians
educating: The Christian schools replication of a public school paradigm.
Christian Scholars Review, 13, 203223.
Jacobsen, D., and Jacobsen, R. (2004). Scholarship & Christian faith. New York:
Oxford University Press.
Komonchak, J. (1998). Redemptive identity and mission of a Catholic university.
In V. Shaddy (Ed.), Catholic Theology in the University: Source of Wholeness.
Milwaukee, WI: Marquette University Press (pp. 7389).
Langan, J. (1998). Catholic presence in the disciplines. In Shaddy (Ed.),
Catholic Theology in the University: Source of Wholeness. Milwaukee, WI: Marquette
University Press (pp. 91101).
Lawler, M. (1998). Introduction. In V. Shaddy (Ed.), Catholic theology in the
University: Source of Wholeness. Milwaukee, WI: Marquette University Press.
Litfin, D. (2004). Conceiving the Christian college. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans.
Lyon, L., and Beaty, M. (1999). Integration, secularization, and the two-spheres
view at religious colleges. Christian Scholars Review, 23(1), 73112.
MacIntyre, A. (1999). Dependent rational animals. London: Duckworth.
Maxwell, N. (1987). From knowledge to wisdom. Oxford: Blackwell.
Nichols, T. (2000). Theology and the integration of knowledge. In J. Wilcox
and I. King (Eds.), Enhancing Religious Identity.. Washington, DC: Georgetown
University Press (pp. 241249).
Phipps, K. (2004). Epilogue: Campus climate and Christian scholarship. In
Jacobsen and Jacobsen (Eds.), Scholarship & Christian faith. New York: Oxford
University Press, 171183.
Poe, H. L. (2004). Christianity in the academy. Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic.
Shaddy, V. (Ed.) (1998) Catholic theology in the university: Source of wholeness.
Marquette, WI: Marquette University Press.
Tanner, K. (2002). Theology and cultural contest in the university. In L. E. Cady
and D. Brown (Eds.), Religious studies, theology, and the university.. New York:
State University of New York Press.
Wood, R. (2003). Contending for the faith. Waco, TX: Baylor University Press.
Journal of Philosophy of Education, Vol. 45, No. 3, 2011
Why Theology Can and Should be Taught

at Secular Universities: Lonergan on
Intellectual Conversion
PATRICK GIDDY
Drawing on Bernard Lonergans Method in Theology (1972)
I argue that theology can be taught because personal
knowledge, of which it is an instance, is at the heart of
academic inquiry; and it should be taught because critical
engagement with basic ways of taking ones life as a whole
(religion in a broad sense) furnishes a critique of the typical
oversights of contemporary culture. The appropriation of
ones subjectivity entails an awareness of an existential
dialectic that pushes towards a decisive option for affirming
the possibility and worth of growth in ones powers of selfdetermination and self-transcendence. Thus conversion
precisely defined in terms of this dialectichas moral and
intellectual dimensions whose promotion goes to the heart of
the academic enterprise. By separating out those disciplines
(systematics, for example) which are mediated by the
existential stance taken by the scholar, Lonergan allows
theology to be seen as one world view among others.
The ghost of the apartheid-aligned Christian National Education

governmental policy continues to haunt debates on religion in education
in South Africa today. There is a residual fear of any one cultural group
imposing their ideas and beliefs on other groups. At universitiesfor
many years zones of liberation from nationalist religious ideologyit is
easy, for reasons I want to make apparent, to ignore the huge role in the
Struggle played by religious bodies, very often themselves apartheidresistant zones, and to view with academic suspicion the religion,
Christianity, associated with the past regime.1 In line with the constitution,
the 2003 government policy on Religion in Education speaks of parity of
esteem towards religions and world-views. This could very easily be
assumed to rule out the kind of reflection which in the classic definition of
theology presupposes faith. It could be thought that it entails an implicit
methodological atheism. And indeed at my own university campus this
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might at first glance seem to go without saying. Take a walk along the
Durban beaches on any Sunday morning and a smorgasbord of cultures
and religious traditions will unfold before your eyeswhile the sun-baked
surfers out on the backline would be hard put to give you the day of the
week, and the fully clothed Moslem ladies keep to the shallow breakers,
the presence of either group is ignored by the semi-circle of white-robed
Zionists (African Initiated Church) further along accompanying with
chants and drumming a full immersion baptism; and nearby alongside a
pier a Hindu family might be offering a sacrifice for their sons graduation
with candles and saffron streamers.
At the university, its tower visible from the beachfront, the presumption
of methodological atheism in the School of Religion and Theology would
seem an unquestionable, academic integrity requiring lectures be delivered
in a context that does not favour any one group of students by sharing their
prejudgments.2 The argument would be that one cannot presuppose any
particular religious claim to be true. While this seems rather to imply
methodological agnosticism, unless one is going to privilege atheist
beliefs, the upshot is the same. Either way, it seems difficult to see how
theology properly speaking could be taught at university, since the proper
understanding of the meaning of the doctrines would seem to presuppose a
large measure of prior openness to considering those beliefs in some way
true, revealing a real dimension of the universe. A constant theme in
religious traditions (in particular one can think of Islam and Christianity)
is that of conversionwhereas an atheist or agnostic is seen as arriving at
his or her position without any such change of heart. After all, how would
you test conversion, in an exam? From this point of view, if you subtract
from religious beliefs, what you arrive at is the general set of normal
beliefs, which themselves need little or no particular or special or personal
justificationthey are what is obvious, the domain of public reason. They
can be objectively tested in an exam.
It is the omission of the personal dimension of knowledge and
understanding that I want to challenge and therefore also the presumed
difficulty in offering theology modules at a secular, or multicultural
university. In this paper I draw attention to the cognitional theory of
Bernard Lonergan in addressing the philosophical difficulties with the
personal dimension of knowledge and the import of this for theology as a
discipline. In particular I will unpack his grounding notions of dialectic,
self-appropriation, and decisive reorientation or conversion.3 This
amounts to a critique of the idea that knowledge properly speaking is
limited to what can be verified in the sciences (scientism). There are of
course many such critiques but I am not concerned with those nor am I
really competent to place Lonergans approach within these others and
their consequent view of how the specifically theological domain is
conceptualized.4 I surmise and hope that the debate can benefit from
Lonergans way of dealing with a cultural situation where belief is one
possible option among others, by pointing to everyones implicit or
explicit options in confronting the need for engagement at the strictly
personal level (the existential dialectic at the heart of the knowing
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Why Theology Can and Should be Taught at Secular Universities
529
process), thus putting the focus on each individuals creative way through
this. One can note here the probability that a similar difficulty is to some
extent faced by other disciplines in the Humanities; an intelligent study of
English literature, for example, entailing the uncovering of meaning that is
at the same time an exploration of the students understanding of the
significance of his or her own lives and relationships.
Let us take the religious dimension of life to refer to ways in which one
comes to terms with ones life as a whole, the capacity of our human
nature Feuerbach referred to as ones species-being.5 Theology then is
the study of one such articulation of this capacity which involves faith in
God, which we can for our purposes leave further unspecified, except to
point out it would be misunderstood if the volitional and emotional aspects
of the faith were omitted.
II
Support for my suggestion comes from Charles Taylor (2004, p. 18). He

argues that it is a mistaken although widespread opinion that modernity
is a world-view which is arrived at simply by subtracting from the
premodern view an invented layer of mattering things (things to do with
religion, for example) so as to get to the natural residue underneath. On the
contrary, he argues, we can see the change from premodern to modern as a
shift in what matters at a personal level. A more adequate account would
run something like this: In the premodern world order persons were, in
Taylors terms, ontically and hierarchically embedded (in other words
both in terms of what they believed about their placeabove the beasts,
below Godand in terms of how, practically, social order ranked them).
And once we get rid of those old ways of placing individuals within the
prior community what remains is the residue: disembedded individuals
concerned primarily with mutual benefit. Or the same idea in reverse:
modernity as the breakdown of community and thus the problem is seen as
how to force individuals to conform (the prisoners dilemma6). Those old
traditions stressed the linking of moral virtue with hierarchy, while the
modern stress the capacity of individuals to be agents, and links moral
virtue with this. In both cases there is a certain way of developing (a
direction) and a certain way of being-together. So in each case there is in
point of fact a personal dimension; in other words modern culture cannot
be properly understood without appreciating its shared ideals of living and
seeing these (not uncritically) as of value, involving desirable virtues.
If Taylor is correct than the dominant understanding of standards of
academic integrity (involving the subtraction idea) is less than fully
coherent. I want to argue that a more plausible account would see
academic standards as part and parcel of an appropriation of human
subjectivity that has deep roots in religious traditions. Taylor points to
the paradigm shift (the so-called axial age7 of religions) in the way the
self-understanding of the major religious traditions, towards greater
emphasis on individual, subjectively authentic appropriation of the faith.
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Contemporary philosophy however struggles to find any way through to

knowledge properly speaking of matters to do with subjectivity, and I
will situate the problem of theology at a secular university as a subset of a
more general problem in contemporary philosophy of thinking of
knowledge simply as what the sciences produce, scientism.8
To describe our society as secular can, as Taylor points out (2007, p.
3) be taken simply to indicate the falling off of religious beliefs and
practices. Equally frequently, and often for the purposes of political ethics,
and pertinent for our topic, it is taken to refer to the separation of church
and state. Public institutions are set up to operate autonomously of
religion, which is taken as a private matter. I want however to focus on
Taylors third meaning of secular, namely a change in the conditions of
belief which accompanies changes in social and cultural factors, such that
in contrast to past situations where belief was obvious, it is now one
human possibility among others.
The reason for concentrating on the third sense lies in the contested
nature of in what ways the public space is autonomous of religious beliefs,
i.e. secular in the second sense. We are interested here in the public
university. In the modern period academic disciplines, beginning with the
natural sciences, freed themselves from theological oversight. However
the autonomy of these sciences, it must be noted, is not an absolute one.
There are in each case certain procedures and methods which are not
justified experimentally within the science. The exact formulation of these
procedures is a matter of tradition but debated properly in philosophy, in
particular epistemology. The point we are putting forward about theology
is a point about this debate. The model for academic inquiry has by and
large been influenced by the natural sciences and by an accompanying
metaphysical view of reality which methodologically excludes subjective
or phenomenological factors (what its like to me, in Nagels words9). The
(in some places) hegemony of cognitive science in the philosophy of mind
is simply the most recent evidence of this trend. Of course there are
counter-examples, the appreciation of the verstehen approach in social
anthropology for example, but the onus seems to be on those who want to
show why the dominant model is not appropriate. This throws suspicion
on all personal and interpersonal knowledge of the kind we have in
theology (and also, traditional or pre-scientific world-views).10
III
For Lonergan, the low status of theology in the academy, which in his
judgment obtains at present, is a result of its failure to clarify its method in
response to the situation we have pointed to above.11 The personal aspect
is indeed part and parcel of theology: openness to take on board beliefs
which are life-changing and not at all simply out there to be noted. Our
own social situation (illustrated above with a local example) seems to
make this a difficultywhich was not appreciated when culture was
monolithic or normative (as the pre-modern European culture was,
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inheriting the Greek view of their own normative culture, other cultures
being pejoratively barbarian) and beliefs could be thought of as out
there, objectively true in a sense which did not challenge the individuals
sense of their selfin spite of the prophets, biblical and Protestant, who
sought to internalize peoples beliefs.
In the view we are challenging, a university module will address the
intellect of the student; whereas religious faith would seem to be founded
on an act of will and embedded in social groupings with distinct and
opposing basic tenets. These are not in any obvious way accessible to
public reason.
To tackle this problem we can begin by questioning the way in which
this dichotomy between reason and will is characterized. Modern thought
has moved away from a metaphysical psychology which isolates the
faculty of reason from that of will. Rather the focus is on the subjects
original presence to self, whether in knowing or choosing, and making this
thematic, as we have done. This means nothing more than in understanding the person we start from the individuals self-awareness, and
point out that knowing what knowing is, is not like studying some distant
planet of which we have had no direct experience. Rather, it is a matter of
the fuller appropriation (through growing understanding) of a capacity we
already have but do not exercise to its full extent. This approach, discussed
earlier by thinkers such as Kierkegaard in terms of self-appropriation,
Lonergan calls in general that of intentionality analysis. However
contemporary culture, oriented toward and valuing technological control,
has, as we will try to show, ironically a blind spot towards this
foundational subjectivity and agency. This in turn pushes out religion and
the expressivist dimension of human living to the detriment both of the
religious traditions, which are open to fundamentalist anti-intellectualism,
and the sciences which fail to connect with the larger world of values.
In this way I hope to show (a) how the conversion aspect of religious
faith is to be understood so as not to threaten the academic integrity of the
disciplines and the norms for any community of scholars. And (b) how the
suggested way of conceptualizing theological understanding does not
betray the tenets of any authentic religious tradition.
In general conversion has to do with the fact that apart from the creative
dimension of human living, our capacity for self-determination, there is
also, because of the fact of a kind of impasse, a moral impotence, the need
for a healing, restoring, dimension. This therapeutic dimension could
perhaps be illustrated through the reorientation marking different kinds of
being in love, and through a phenomenology of romantic love, as Doran
(1990, pp. 3033) suggests. The structure we are trying to indicate here is
pointed to in the classic text about the love of God: that it concerns not
how we love him but that he loved us first. The restorative element in
other words highlights a response rather than a creative and constructive
project as such of human persons (although a constructive element in
religion is always present, as Karen Armstrong (1994) sympathetically
argues in her A History of God). From this the distinctively religious
nature of this integral dimension of human history should be clear.12
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With this background we can get a first idea of what Lonergans

intention is in introducing the unusual idea of an intellectual conversion. I
want in this paper to focus in particular on this, abstracting from the
broader background. Basically, and anticipating a proper explanation of
the terms used here, Lonergans starting point is our awareness of sense
experience and also our experiences of insight and inquiry and reflection
on our insights and conceptualisations. How we react to this awareness
throws up a dialectic. And a dialectic calls for a response; it suggests a
resolution which we want to describe as conversion, a moment of growth,
a personal narrative. Theology in its phase of mediating the religious
tradition (before its more constructive and future-oriented task) can be
based on methodological agnosticism and on the consequent struggle of
the learner confronting the dialectic.
I now need to explain these terms, dialectic and conversion. We can
point here, as Lonergan does (2001, p. 298), to Heideggers phenomenological category of subject and his horizon. Heidegger argues that the
fundamental horizon of the existential subject, framing his or her field of
intentionality, is properly characterized as care or concern. There
would be a different horizon framing the intentionality of the natural
sciences and this horizon can change and develop as the disciplines
develop without having any effect on the subjects concrete living. In
contrast, a change in the subject is called for in the case of a change in
philosophical or existential horizon. We are talking about how we see
ourselves. And this is a question of personal growth. As Ogilvie (2001, p.
125) comments, conversion is an ongoing movement from one viewpoint
to a new conscious decision about new horizons within which a subject
will view, judge, evaluate and relate with his or her world. More
forcefully, Lonergan describes conversion as not merely a change or even
a development; rather it is a radical transformation . . . What hitherto was
unnoticed becomes vivid and present. What had been of no concern
becomes a matter of high import . . . [The convert] apprehends differently,
values differently, relates differently because he has become different (in
Doran, 1993, p. 218).
We can see a similar point about a growth moment in intellectual
inquiry being made by Plato in his justly celebrated cave metaphor. So the
idea is not new. Our approach is to unpack this moment of growth via
Lonergans framing dialectic and his precisely defined notion of
conversion. Dialectic names two opposing but linked principles whose
interaction issues in a dynamic process. Lonergan identifies on the
intellectual level opposing principles on the questions of what is knowing,
what is reality, and what is objectivity. All three questions are bound to
arise, because of the duality of human knowing, which is a given.
Lonergans own description of this duality (1957/1992, p. 276) is useful.
He takes the instance of a kitten, and notes the role of the kittens
consciousness as a technique for attaining biological ends. What does he
mean by this? The consciousness is extroverted. The kittens consciousness is directed outwards towards possible opportunities to satisfy
appetites. This extroversion is spatial: as it is by the spatial manoeuvres
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of moving its head and limbs that the kitten deals with means to its end, so
the means also must be spatial, for otherwise spatial manoeuvres would be
inept and useless. The extroversion is also temporal . . . Finally, the
extroversion is concerned with the real. A realistic painting of a saucer
of milk might attract the kittens attention but it cannot lead to the cat
lapping, in other words to the successful achievement of its biological
needs. The painting is not real.
This is the world of immediacy that is the whole of the new-born
infants world. With the acquisition of language we, however, also live in
a world mediated by meaning. We can live not simply by being oriented
by the pressing demands of our biological needs for their satisfaction but
also by our responses to values. We can think, because we can, unlike the
pre-linguistic toddler, grasp things in the mind without grasping them
with the fingers or the mouth. By invoking their names we can simply hold
them in mind without them being present. We can also question whether
or not what I have experienced is in point of fact what I have supposed it
to be. Our intention here is not circumscribed by the needs of the
biological organism: will it or will it not meet those needs? Rather, it is
open-ended, aims at what is true, is a response to what one must admit is
simply a natural desire to know.
Philosophy, for Lonergan, has for its task showing how this constitutes a
source of confusion and how one would break the duality of ones knowing.
For both have their point, and elementary knowing is not mere appearance
while the other reaches reality. Elementary knowing proves its point by
survival, while any attempt to dispute the validity of intellectual knowing
involves the use of that knowing. It must go beyond the realm of experience
to the realm of asking questions about our experience, whether or not we do
know in this non-biological sense, and it involves further reflective
questioning about our answers in order to press towards some judgment.
IV
When a non-interiorly differentiated human person (non-converted)

philosophizes about what is real, he is likely to think of it in terms of
some or other body, the already out there now. We think of it as
somehow what it is to us, out there resisting to some or other extent our
subjective approach. In the view we are opposing, the real is thought to be
that which one can somehow imagine, whereas from the point of view of
intellectual knowing ones imagination is used to throw up a variety of
possible interpretations of the data, and what is real is whatever we come
to critically judge actually is the case, on the basis of all available
evidence. This will include what is out there, of course, tables and chairs
and so on, but can also accommodate things such as atoms (which we
never see) or myself, which Hume, for example, struggled to find any
verification for.
If what is real is somehow linked to how we see things, or our seeing
how things are is the final criterion for their reality, then what is real must
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be some kind of body, and its spatial contours will be in part definitive of
it (it is there). And that means that we can envisage bodies within bodies,
within the cell there are molecules and the molecules are made up of
atoms, and so on. And so we are pushed towards the obvious corollary: its
the analysis in terms of the basic parts that is the more basic analysis or
explanation: reductionism. This however does not obtain when we take
seeing not to be the criterion of what is real, but rather reflective
considerations to do with whether or not or to what extent our ideas do in
fact account for the data, in other words, judging.
Lonergan (1972, pp. 2389) explains it well:
Intellectual conversion is a radical clarification of an exceedingly
stubborn and misleading myth concerning reality, objectivity, and human
knowledge. The myth is that knowing is like looking, that objectivity is
seeing what is there to be seen and not seeing what is not there, and that
the real is what is out there now to be looked at.
But this myth overlooks the difference between the world of
immediacy (the world of the senses, experienced by the infant) and the
reality of everything we experience through its meaning. The world of the
infant is but a tiny fragment of the world mediated by meaning. So we
cannot just look at reality; we need to learn how to be a critical adult,
thinking about the evidence, judging our understanding critically.
Knowing is not just seeing. Nor is objectivity reached through seeing
alone (but through seeing, understanding and judging). And the real is not
just what we can touch and see: it is what we aim at getting to know
through being attentive, being intelligent, and being reasonable in our
judgments.13
We can clarify what is meant here by these remarks on objectivity. We can

take David Hume as the arch empiricist, whose ideas about what
knowledge properly speaking should be like were hugely influenced by the
methods of the relatively new natural sciences. Hume (1740/1969) thought
that we reach an objective account of things by linking our ideas to their
verification in our sense experience. That seems sensible enough, at first
glance. But it seems less than sensible when one considers that for Hume
we get to know ourselves as subjects and agents in the same way: by
observation. As the subtitle of Humes Treatise explains (An attempt to
introduce the experimental method of reasoning into moral subjects) he is
trying to apply the method of empirical science to understand human
persons. So what our beliefs are, we can only know through scientific
observation, which seems a bit peculiar. The subject and agent, in other
words, disappear: all the evidence we have from being conscious of what
we are doing when we come to a belief is discounted in the Humean
approach as mere folk psychology, an uncritical account in terms merely
of how it appears to me. And no headway is made by claiming, as dualism
does, that alongside the external point of view there is some immediately
accessible and certain knowledge of ones self by the subject.
A further problem for the Humean outlook arises when one considers
how one can be sure that what is in ones mind corresponds to what is out
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there, that ones images are accurate. For checking ones image involves
having an image of it, equally questionable as to its accuracy, and so
imploding the integrity of the checking process. From this problem of
infinite regress one concludes to a scepticism about knowledge, as Hume
did.
In the received modern philosophical history, lined up against the
Scottish empiricist Hume we have the German rationalist Kant. For Kant
the senses dont give you realityyour mind actively shapes your
knowledge. Nevertheless the connection with reality is secured by the fact
that we have in our sense experience (merely) the appearance of reality. It
is clear that he is still thinking of reality as what is out there, and what is
out there is the lodestone for objectivity, it secures objectivity so far as any
objectivity is possible for human beings.14
In contrast to both these traditions Lonergan says, forget extroversion as
the model for securing objectivity. The realism of the animal with
extroverted consciousness secures its own proper objectivity. But this is
not the way rational consciousness reaches objectivity. For rational
affirmation is not an instance of extroversion, and so it cannot be objective
in the manner proper to the already out there now (1972, p. 439). This
is not a reason to despair of realism. The senses do not give you the
appearances of things but furnish data for our inquiring mind. Two people
can agree on the objective truth of the matter even they have different
perspectives (how things seem to them), because both see that the one
interpretation and not the other is the more reasonable, covers all the
evidence.
So objectivity is properly understood as precisely a quality of our
reasonableness: it is the achievement of our intellectual capacities, it is
moving to a new level, from simply sense experiencing to being intelligent
to reflective judgment of the probably accuracy of our ideas. And these
transitions are growth moments. This kind of discrimination in ones
capacity for intelligence is perhaps quite rare. Mores the pity. To be sure,
what we are talking about here, intellectual conversion, finds its place on a
spectrum with analogous growth moments on the level of ethics, which is
the fuller context, the more important awakening to the attractiveness of
living by values, of finding the response in ones set of desires not just to
what will satisfy but to what is simply good.
At any rate it is in this sense that existentialists pointed out that modern
philosophy had forgotten the subject. Kierkegaard begins to formulate the
categories of interiority, the subjective way to the truth. It involves a
personal journey, he emphasizes. And this should have huge implications
for how academic inquiry is understood at universities. How could there
be this journey unless it was specifically catered for?
Science then is properly seen as an achievement of our faculties of selftranscendence, the systematic critical questioning of our beliefs. Perhaps
this idea should not be too difficult to appropriate but it is. For the
implications are that if we can self-transcend in this way then we can take
up an attitude to the universe as a whole, understand it, and also value it.
We make meaning out of it, we are not fully immersed in or stuck in our
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P. Giddy
perspective without remainder: thats the point of intellectual conversion,

it liberates our minds.15 We can take up an attitude to our lives as a whole,
not being immersed simply in each segment, parcelled out without
perspective. More, we are able to evaluate the adequacy of our religious/
cosmic attitudes: we can develop our understanding of this, as the Biblical
prophets did, for example, and as Charles Taylor argues is happening in the
modern period through secularisation. The human capacity for transcendence does not have to be tied into a pre-secular world-view, and
intellectual conversion sees objectivity as not tied into any absolute time and
space framework (as Newton thought it must be) but rather to our capacity
for reasonable judgment which is part and parcel of a natural universe, not
apart from it. But how would one explain this capacity, this power, if not by
one or other of these forces? And is not the idea that one can live by values,
an illusion? The rise of modern science, the new realisation of our powers of
observation as the path to knowledge, has obscured the need for this kind of
processing. Science and technology have been accompanied by a myth
about what is real, about what the real should look like. This phenomenon
can be summed up in the idea of the vanishing subject and agent.
The myth accompanying modern science has it that we precisely are
thus stuck, lacking transcendence. Reality (and this includes our human
reality) is nothing but the bits making it up. We have argued rather that
reality is whatever we tend to know through insight and judgmentit
cant be specified by some idea of what it looks like, or how it feels. But
this does not imply the demise of the subjective perspective, as
philosophical naturalism would have it. It simply says that perspective
is part of our lived world, to which we always refer back but with the
awareness that such perspectival view is now intelligently differentiated
from how things are judged to be in themselves.
The difficulties associated with understanding this self-transcendence,
uncovered by our analysis, means that without structuring in a systematic
treatment of the issues raised here in the academy and in culture in
general, simplistic answers are likely, uncritical picture-thinking in
religions and in the human sciences a dismissal with sarcasm of the
claim to an autonomous religious dimension of life.16
I want now to link the admittedly abstract notion of conversion as we have

explained more explicitly with religion, and with appropriating ones
subjectivity, and bring in the fuller context of the reality of the person who
is the university student and the persons who make up the community of
scholars.
The distinction Lonergan makes in theological studies is that between
those disciplines in which the foundational conversion is implicit, and
those in which it is explicit.17 The first deals with research into religious
texts (scripture and tradition are not foundational, just data), interpretation
of those texts, historical understanding of the religious tradition.
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537
Still it is doctrine and its explanation in systematics that brings to a head

the issues we have raised. By resituating the heart of theology, its pivot, in
the existential subject, the foundational pressure is taken off dogmatics,
now free to be pursued as a proper discipline. The point is that Lonergans
intentionality analysis allows for systematic theology to use psychological
rather than metaphysical categories (Lonergan, 1972, p. 343). And here
explicit mention of the structures of self-actualization we have mentioned
are needed and form the basis for discriminating between aspects of
religious traditions that are authentic and other aspects that are less
authentic. This is bound to be controversial in the current understanding of
basic values of our culture. For being unable, in the dominant paradigm of
knowledge properly speaking, to thematize our subjectivity and agency,
any foundation for ethical values seems to some extent arbitrary. The
upshot is a list of basic individual human rights which is admittedly
culturally founded, and linked to the values of tolerance and equality. This
is an ethical approach that struggles to pronounce judgment on particular
cultural and religious traditions, discriminating between their more helpful
and less helpful aspects. In our understanding the problem lies with the
unconverted scholar, not coming to terms with the dialectic we have
pointed to and which, when faced down, yields a non-arbitrary foundation
for ethics in the normative structure of the self-appropriating subject and
agent. The university has a role to play in challenging the dominant but
unhelpful view of knowledge, and in this way facilitating religions in
their task of getting the best out of their traditions.
By the foundational reality of theology we are talking of the theologian
who can study the religion, its foundational texts, their interpretation and
history, but who must also pronounce on which doctrines are true, how
they should be re-expressed perhaps so as to indicate their critical import
in contemporary culture and not remain dead words. The foundation of
theology is conversion, religious, moral and intellectual. And conversion
in every case is a kind of self-transcendence.
Perhaps this seems terribly subjective. Not so. Conversion as we have
described it is a deliberate decision about oneself. But we have to
understand that we are not talking about an arbitrary act of will. That
might suggest itself if one is thinking of the self in terms of faculty
psychology. Lonergan rejects this analysis of the human person in terms
of a faculty of the intellect and a faculty of the will. Instead he sees the
human person as operating on different levels, less full and fuller levels of
being human, of actualizing the powers of ones personhooddreaming,
conscious and experiencing, inquiring intelligently, being reasonable in
ones reflections on ones ideas, and of course discovering a dynamism in
oneself towards the truth of things, and valuing thisand so moving to
realize one must appropriate ones deliberations.
It is at the fuller level of deliberation that conversion has its place. It is a
wide-eyed commitment, intelligent (turning from complacency), reasonable (turning from an irrational leap), and responsible (so putting a stop
to simply drifting). It is (a) not arbitrary, but selects the true horizon for
theological truth, rather than any less than adequate one; (b) not an act of
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P. Giddy
will but rather a consent to ones inner dynamism; (c) an achievement not
to be taken lightly because as Lonergan says, for the most part people
merely drift into some contemporary horizon; (d) personal but not
private, because it is only with social groups are horizons fixed, so one can
actually choose them (1972, pp. 2689).
Foundations are in our own case not a set of basic propositions from
which all others can be deduced. Such an idea gives rise to obvious critical
questions about how such basic beliefs are themselves grounded, and in
contrast suggests (this is Sosas classic metaphor) perhaps that knowledge
is less like a pyramid and more like a raft which has no basic bits to it
(Sosa, 1980). Lonergan (1972, p. 270) mocks the first as basically
unintelligent: One must believe and accept whatever the bible or true
church or both believe and accept. But X is the bible or true church or
both. Therefore, one must believe and accept whatever X believes and
accepts. Moreover, X believes and accepts a, b, c, d . . . Therefore, one
must believe and accept a, b, c, d . . .. And this clearly unreasonable
conception of the foundations of our set of beliefs might lead to despair at
any relatively systematic or methodical exposition of how beliefs cohere
with one another, the raft idea.
Foundations refers rather to a method which is justified transculturally
because the drive towards self-appropriation is transcultural. What needs
to be founded are not propositions but the process of putting forward ideas
and judging them so as to furnish the ongoing development of doctrine
and its authentic re-expression in new contexts. What is needed is control
of the process, reversing the incoherent ideas on knowing, reality and
objectivity, by accepting the coherent one which includes the subject and
agent and invites ever fuller appropriation of ones capacities for getting to
the truth of things and for self-determination. This control is secured in the
ideal case by investigators who are intellectually and morally converted.
Much more needs to be developed if this radical shift in doing theology
is to be carried through. I have not spoken much of the essence of religion,
the healing element of gracea charged field of love and meaning . . .
ever unobtrusive, hidden, inviting each of us to join. Our action here is in
the nature of a response, a different but equally vital complement to the
active structures of self-appropriation. And join we must if we are to
perceive it, for our perceiving is through our own loving (1972, p. 290).
Religious conversion is a fated acceptance of a vocation to holiness
(1972, p. 240). With this eye of love and being loved one sees values in
their splendour, and is able to realize them in ones choices, and one of
those values is the value of truth, believing the truths of the tradition, in
fact, and here we have the seeds of intellectual conversion, for these kinds
of truths are not had through observation but the whole person
responding.18
Because it is through religions that the explicit reference to the
structures of conversion in their full existential reality is to be found, the
study of theology at university could contribute to a more authentic
reworking of the disciplines, and allow the university to have a liberating
potential in the society as a whole. Hugo Meynells proposal for the study
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539
of theology within a religious studies department is to create a new

category (call it X) which corresponds to the second, mediated, phase of
Lonergans theological studies.19 We have identified an inevitable
dialectical moment in academic study consequent upon the duality in
our knowing and the existential demand for a response founding any
subsequent inquiry (in Lonergans terms, a need to break the duality).
This can now be used to frame a mediated religious method for the study
of any religion or quasi-religion such as Marxism: we can assume its
expressions will be able to be encompassed by the structure of the
subjects self-appropriation. This would legitimate the study of theology
(faith in God seeking understanding) as a subdivision of X. What X
teaches is religion as the expression (in ideas, acts, and feelings, and
institutionalized in social forms) of a natural human desire to make sense
of ones life as a whole. Mediated religious studies or X makes conversion
explicit. By distinguishing the latter from dialectics, Lonergan makes
possible a proper integration of theology in a university curriculum:
dialectics is thrown up by questioning in accordance with methodological
agnosticismour starting point at the university; different responses are
possible and different formulations suggested and among these is found
mediated theologyof whatever religious traditionwith its particular
formulation of conversion expressed in historically specific symbols,
whether the cross or the crescent, or the spirits of the ancestors, and
alongside of which is to be found for example mediated Marxism taken
not strictly speaking as a science but as an existentially significant
philosophy or ethic.20
VI
In summary, I have argued that theology can be taught within the

parameters set by university academic standards properly understood,
because personal knowledge, of which it is an instance, is at the heart of
academic inquiry. And it should be taught because critical engagement
with basic ways of taking ones life as a whole furnishes a critique of those
aspects of contemporary culture (its one-dimensionality) which hamper
personal growth and the development of more convivial social arrangements. I have presented Lonergans idea that the basic appropriation of
ones subjectivity (and intellectual powers) entails an awareness of an
existential dialectic which pushes towards a decisive option for affirming
an intelligibility of the universe and also motivates a commitment to the
efficacy of living by values. Because of this, conversionprecisely
defined in terms of this dialectichas not only a religious but also
importantly moral and intellectual dimensions and its promotion goes to
the heart of the academic enterprise. Nevertheless the full articulation of
this personal reality foundational for the integrity of the pursuit of
knowledge is to be found in the humanities and particularly in theology
but contemporary culture to a large extent works with a model of
knowledge which disinherits these intellectual traditions, which leaves the
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P. Giddy
university impotent to challenge social structures which fail to enhance

human flourishing.21 By distinguishing theological disciplines mediating
the religious tradition (such as hermeneutics) from those in which the
tradition is mediated by the existential stance taken by the theologian and
re-articulated for the contemporary context (such as systematics),
Lonergan opens the way towards seeing Islamic (for example) theology
presented as one world view among others (such as Marxism), the critical
element necessary for any university discipline being situated precisely in
the standards set up by the demands of the existential dialectic.
Correspondence: Patrick Giddy, School of Philosophy and Ethics,
Howard College Campus, University of Kwazulu-Natal, Durban, 4001,
South Africa.
Email: giddyj@ukzn.ac.za
NOTES
1. For one example see Paddy Kearneys 2009 biography (winner of the 2010 Andrew MurrayDesmond Tutu prize) of Archbishop Denis Hurley of Durban, Guardian of the Light: Denis
Hurley.
2. In contrast, the inland Pietermaritzburg campus of the university has, through its insider or
emic approach to religion studies, successfully brought into its cluster the various church
denominations. By this the needs of the community would seem to be served. Be that as it may,
our discussion addresses the question of whether or not the university is compromised by this
approach. For a recent survey of Christian adherence in sub-Saharan Africa in general, excluding
South Africa, see Gifford, 2008. For a position paper on developments up to 2007 in religious
studies departments at South African universities see Jarvis and Moodie, 2009.
3. I take this approach as parallel to Keith Wards (2008, pp. 2030) situating of the religious
believers dissent from Dawkins demolition job on religious faith, as an issue not of whether or
not God exists but more of the adequacy or otherwise of materialism as an interpretive frame
for understanding reality as a whole.
4. An approach currently put forward as a way through the epistemological impasse that is at stake
in our discussion, and worth careful consideration is that framed by critical realism; see Archer,
Collier and Porpora (2004), Transcendence. Critical Realism and God.
5. Religion being identical with the distinctive characteristic of man, is then identical with selfconsciousnessthe consciousness which man has of his own nature. And this is what Feuerbach
(1957, p. 2) calls his inner life, having a life which has a relation to his species, to his general,
as opposed to his individual, nature.
6. Two prisoners are apprehended for a crime of which they are indeed guilty. If both remain silent
under interrogation both will benefit. But Prisoner A calculates that if Prisoner B confesses he
(B) will get a lighter sentence and A bear the brunt of punishment. Before the breakdown of
community, trust defined each individuals sense of self, and so no prisoners dilemma arose.
Now however although social order might be affirmed at a general level in any given instance my
disembedded self-interests will always incline me to calculate in a way not conducive to the best
interests of both. I turn state witness before he does!
7. The period around 800 to 200 BCE when a general shift towards the interiorization of religiosity
has been noted by scholars, in the Old Testament prophets, in the teachings of Buddha, in the
classical period in Athenian thought, and in the emergence of Confucianism and Daoism out of
their parent traditions.
8. I have given an extended argument to this effect in Giddy, 2009. More relevant to the present
topic is my experience of trying to introduce a module at my own university here in Durban on
philosophy of religion. My detailed proposal was in the first instance rejected by the Faculty:
r 2011 The Author
9.
10.
11.
12.
13.
14.
15.
16.
17.
18.
541
what could be the particular subject matter of this module? A colleagues PhD topic on religion
was cited as exemplary: Progressive Islam in South Africa. In other words, the implication was,
only a sociological study (for example) of religion could be objective, intellectually valid. I had
to defend philosophical method as distinct from this. What philosophy would study, I replied
with reference to the given example, was what would count as progressive in the matter of
religion. The proposal was passed.
See in particular Nagel, 1979, discussed in Giddy, 2009.
See further my article Common Features in the Structure of Inquiry in Science and Religion
(Giddy, 2006). Traditional views are not able to be taken as reasonable to believe and are in this
way made other: a 2009 display of traditional African religion in the American Museum of
Natural History in New York mentioned the key traditional belief in vital force running through
all living things as something that we might call magic. The assumption is that in science one
addresses an audience (the we) homogeneously distanced from those traditional beliefs.
This is pointed out by Doran (1990, pp. 1512) with reference to Lonergans opening chapter of
Method in Theology. Conceiving theology on the model of the natural sciences or as an art, are
both inadequate.
We could also explore the way in which psychic conversion is needed, as suggested by Robert
Doran (1990). I am very much indebted in this article to Dorans far-reaching study of the
implications of Lonergans intentionality analysis for theology and indeed for the human
sciences in general, in particular for rethinking depth psychology.
Lonergans own very useful summary of his architectonic work, Insight. A Study of Human
Understanding, is his essay, Cognitional Structure (Lonergan, 1988). The best account of
which I am aware of how to place Lonergan in contemporary philosophy is that of Michael
McCarthy (1990), The Crisis of Philosophy (see also Morelli and Morellis [1997] introduction to
their The Lonergan Reader). For my own account of how Lonergans cognitional theory can
impact on the self-understanding of the social sciences in general see Giddy, 1996.
Kants conclusion (1783/1966, para.19) is that objective validity amounts to no more than
necessary universality (because of the common structures of our mental capacities).
Robert Doran (1990, pp. 3841) stresses the liberatory aspect of Lonergans analysis of
intellectual self-appropriation, with reference to Paulo Freires methodological pedagogy of the
oppressed. Of significance for our own project of arguing for the should of our title, is Dorans
argument that the postmodern context has heightened the importance of Lonergans theological
approach, a context constituted by the necessity of choosing between, on the one hand, the
anticipation of a post-historic homogeneous State incrementally moved toward by terrorist and
counter-terrorist violence, and on the other hand the anticipation of a truth above and beyond
divergent points of view, a truth that, while preserving the sharpest sense of subjectivity,
provides access to a new organic civilization on a transcultural or world-cultural basis (pp. 155
6). Doran opens up lines of thought that go far beyond the scope of our present paper.
The analysis given here, illustrated by contrast with the well-known philosophical approaches of
Hume and Kant, purports to offer a foundation for evaluating all philosophies by securing a
philosophical foundation (i.e. a normative ideal) in the subjects own appropriation of their
cognitional powers. An engagement with the very many post-Kantian expressions of this
recovery of the subject and of agency (Lonergan for example has taken much from
phenomenology), is beyond the scope of this paper. A useful account of the recovery of the
subject in this regard is that of Bracken, 2009. A reversal of the more usual account of the
influence of modern philosophy on religious belief as negative, is given by Buckley, 2004.
Lonergan (1972) has four functional specialities in the mediating phase of theology,
corresponding to the levels of human self-appropriation of our subjectivity and agency, namely
experience (Research), understanding (Interpretation), reflective judging (History) and
responsibility (Dialectics). Corresponding to the phase of theological studies mediated by the
theologian we have again four key specialities corresponding to the fuller and less full accounts
of how we actualize ourselves as human beings: responsibility ( 5 Foundations), reflective
judging ( 5 Doctrines), understanding ( 5 Systematics), and experience ( 5 Communications,
i.e. Pastoral Theology).
Kierkegaard lays great emphasis on the way theology is presented, so as to cut off any chance of
religious truths being understood in a less than personal way; he points to the paradigm cases of
the binding episode of Abraham and Isaac (in Fear and Trembling); and the paradox of the
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542
P. Giddy
eternal in time, in Philosophical Fragmentsboth instances of an offence to (a less than

personal) reason.
19. Meynell, 2000.
20. Ward (2009, pp. 1415) is happy to use the term theology of an atheist belief system, which is
stretching it a bitand the same is true of Polkinghorne (2000, p. 19). I have tried previously
(Giddy, 2000) to bring out some crucial inadequacies in Marxism as a social ethic, in the context
of post-Apartheid South Africa, insofar as it neglects the personal journey, and the concomitant
virtues of character which are realistically core to any ethic.
21. For the past thirty years Nicholas Maxwell (with no theological interest in mind) has been hard at
work making a very similar pointsee his 1987 and the discussion on the website
knowledgetowisdom.org.
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(London, Routledge).
Armstrong, K. (1994) A History of God (New York, Ballantine Books).
Bracken, J. (2009) Subjectivity, Objectivity, and Intersubjectivity (West Conshohocken, PA,
Templeton Foundation Press).
Buckley, M. (2004) Denying and Disclosing God. The Ambiguous Progress of Modern Atheism
(New Haven, CT, Yale University Press).
Doran, R. (1990) Theology and the Dialectics of History (Toronto, Toronto University Press).
Doran, R. (1993) Subject and Psyche (Milwaukee, WI, Marquette University Press).
Feuerbach, L. [1843] (1957) The Essence of Christianity, G. Eliot, trans. (New York, Harper
Torchbooks).
Giddy, P. (1996) The African University and the Social Sciences: the Contribution of Lonergans
Epistemological Theory, Method: Journal of Lonergan Studies, 14, pp. 133157.
Giddy, P. (2000) A Critical Ethic of Transformation: Dialogue with Marx and Aristotle, Theoria,
95, pp. 7993.
Giddy, P. (2006) Common Features in the Structure of Inquiry in Science and Religion, Journal of
Theology for Southern Africa, 124, pp. 5669.
Giddy, P. (2009) Objectivity and Subjectivity: An Argument for Rethinking the Philosophy
Syllabus, South African Journal of Philosophy, 28, pp. 359376.
Gifford, P. (2008) Trajectories in African Christianity, International Journal for the Study of the
Christian Church, 8, pp. 275289.
Jarvis, J. and Moodie, A. (2009) Recent Developments in Theology and Religious Studies: The
South African Experience, in: D. Bird and S. Smith (eds) Theology and Religious Studies in
Higher Education (London, Continuum), ch. 11.
Kearney, P. (2009) Guardian of the Light: Denis Hurley (London, Continuum).
Hume, D. [1740] (1969) A Treatise of Human Nature (Harmondsworth, Penguin).
Kant, I. [1783] (1966) Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics, P. Lucas, trans. (Manchester,
Manchester University Press).
Lonergan, B. (1972) Method in Theology, 2nd edn. (London, Darton, Longman and Todd).
Lonergan, B. (1988) Cognitional Structure, in: Collected Works of Bernard Lonergan, vol. 4
(Toronto, University of Toronto Press), ch. 14.
Lonergan, B. [1957] (1992) Insight. A Study of Human Understanding, in: Collected Works of
Bernard Lonergan, vol. 3 (Toronto, University of Toronto Press).
Lonergan, B. (2001) Phenomenology and Logic. The Boston College Lectures on Mathematical
Logic and Existentialism, in: Collected Works of Bernard Lonergan, vol. 22 (Toronto,
University of Toronto Press).
Maxwell, N. (1987) From Knowledge to Wisdom, 2nd edn. (London, Blackwell).
McCarthy, M. (1990) The Crisis of Philosophy (Albany, NY, SUNY Press).
Meynell, H. (2000) Religious Studies and Theology. Available at: www.ucalgary.ca/rels/files/rels/
Meynell
Morelli, M. and Morelli, E. (1997) The Lonergan Reader (Toronto, University of Toronto Press).
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Nagel, T. (1979) Subjective and Objective, in: Mortal Questions (Cambridge, Cambridge
University Press), pp. 196213.
Ogilvie, M. (2001) Faith Seeking Understanding: the Functional Specialty, Systematics, in
Bernard Lonergans Method in Theology (Milwaukee, WI, Marquette University Press).
Polkinghorne, J. (2000) Faith, Science and Understanding (London, SPCK).
Sosa, E. (1980) The Raft and the Pyramid: Coherence versus Foundations in the Theory of
Knowledge, Midwest Studies In Philosophy, 5.1, pp. 326.
Taylor, C. (2004) Modern Social Imaginaries (Durham, NC, Duke University Press).
Taylor, C. (2007) A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA, Belknap Press of Harvard University Press).
Ward, K. (2008) Why There Almost Certainly is a God (Oxford, Lion).
Ward, K. (2009) God and the Philosophers (Minneapolis, MN, Fortress Press).
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Christian Higher Education, 2,1:4969 2003

Copyright 2003 Taylor & Francis
1536-3759/03 $12.00 + .00
DOI: 10.1080/15363750390175636
Taylor &. Francis

Taylor & Francis Croup
RELIGIOUS STUDIES IN CHRISTIAN UNIVERSITIES

IN CONTEMPORARY ASIA: ITS RELATIONSHIP
TO CHRISTIAN THEOLOGY
PAN-CHIU LAI
Department of Religion, The Chinese University of Hong Kong,
Shatin, Hong Kong
How to handle the tensions among the Christian ethos of the university, the
academic character of the discipline, and the religiously pluralistic context of
Asia, constitutes a serious challenge to religious studies in Christian universities
in Asia. The tension is particularly acute in its relationship with theology.
Through studying some of the cases in the West and reflecting on the Asian
context, it is argued that for Christian universities is Asia, religious studies
and theology should neither be separate from each other nor to dissolve the identity
of any one of them. The relationship called for is comparable to the Chalcedonian
understanding of the two natures of Jesus Christdistinction without separation,
being united for the benefit of the whole world.
The research and teaching of religious studies in Christian universities in Asia face challenges from various directions. A skillful balancing act seems to be essential for those who attempt handle the
tensions inherent in these complex challenges
On the one hand, because the university is situated in Asia, a
religiously pluralistic continent in which the Christian population
is a minority, a radically pluralistic approach to the research and
teaching of religious studies is expected. Furthermore, since religious studies is not a well-established subject in Asian universities,
religious studies may also have to defend its qualifications to be an
academic subject to be studied at universities. For this reason, religious studies may tend to emphasize from time to time the scientific character of its research and teaching, such as impartiality,
neutrality, and objectivity. In order to strengthen its academic image, religious studies may prefer to distance itself from Christian
theology, which appears to be even less scientific. Eventually,
Address correspondence to Professor Pan-chiu Lai, Department of Religion, The
Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shatin, Hong Kong. E-mail: pclai@cuhk.edu.hk
49
50
Pan-chiu Lai
religious studies may identify itself as nonreligious or

nontheological studies of all religions, particularly non-Christian religions.
On the other hand, because the university has a Christian
background, it is supposed that the research and teaching of religious studies should reflect rather than contradict the Christian
ethos of the university. For instance, the research and teaching of
religious studies may be dominated by the study of Christianity.
Sometimes, it is even expected to foster Christian values and to
promote Christianity over other religions.
There seems to be some sort of tension between the Christian ethos on the one hand and the Asian and university contexts
on the other. This kind of tension is even more acute when the
university has theological studies too. A concrete and illustrative
example can be found in Chung Chi, a Christian college with a
Theology Division situated in a Department of Religion in a government-funded university in Hong Kong. The theological education provided is not only academic knowledge about Christianity
but also a comprehensive training for ministry.
Other than the practical competition for financial resources,
the contest between theology and religious studies involves also
the apparent methodological differences between the two disciplines. Whereas Christian theology seems to concentrate on the
study of one religion, religious studies covers all religions. While
Christian theology appears to be normative and is subjected to
the authority of the Christian tradition, religious studies is supposed to be based on objective evidence alone and is not expected
to be responsible to any religious community. Unlike Christian
theology, religious studies requires no religious beliefs from its
teachers or researchers and maintains neutrality or impartiality
with regard to different religions. Given these apparent differences,
Christian theology is considered by some scholars as incompatible
with Religious Studies (Council of Societies for the Study of Religion, 1997). Some Western scholars of religious studies consider
the relationship between religious studies and theology to be a
continuing conflict and argue for a clear separation between theology and religious studies (Wiebe, 1999). Some seminary-based
Chinese Christian theologians also attempt to draw a sharp distinction between religious studies and theology (Chow, 2001; Kalun, 2000). However, as some Christian theologians realize,
Religious Studies/Theology in Asia
51
theological education cannot do its job properly if remaining

mono-religious; the most crucial question is how to make the difficult marriage between Christian theology and religious studies work
(Knitter, 1991).
Historically speaking, theology was not invented by Christianity, but was adopted from ancient Greek culture in which theologia
was not something restricted to a religious community, but was
part of the Greek general education (paideia). In fact, comparative, critical, and constructive discourse on God or gods can be
found in the writings of ancient Greek philosophers (Gerson,
1990). Because Christianity does not have a monopoly or copyright on the word theology, there can be Islamic theology, Jewish
theology, and so forth.
Religious studies as a modern academic discipline evolved
from the matrix of Christian theology (Sharpe, 1986). However,
when scholars attempted to argue for the independence of religious studies, a sharp contrast between religious studies and theology was made. In Europe, religious studies and theology are often
combined in one department or faculty predominated by the study
of Christianity. The demarcation between theology and religious
studies was strengthened during later developments in North
America. Following a U.S. Supreme Court ruling that distinguished
between the practice and teaching of religion and teaching about
religion, religious studies began to mushroom in public institutions in the 1960s (Hodgson, 1999). (Peter C. Hodgson suggests
that the distinction between teaching of and teaching about
religion is merely a partial truth, useful for legal purpose, but finally not persuasive since one of the things about a religion is
precisely its own distinctive claims and insights.) Religious studies
came to be regarded as an objective and scientific study to be conducted in secular or state universities, whereas theology is recognized as a confessional activity to be restricted to denominational
theological seminaries. However, the separation of religious studies and theology is not absolutely clear in actual practice. Some
sort of overlapping seems to remain unavoidable (Smart, 1989).
There is no simple answer to the question concerning how
theology and religious studies are to be related. Ones answer depends largely on ones definitions of the two disciplines. Unfortunately, scholars of respective disciplines give rather different
definitions to the disciplines and even contradictory method-
52
Pan-chiu Lai
ological proposals. Given this difficulty, this paper attempts to

start with a particular case: the thinking of Friedrich Daniel Ernst
Schleiermacher (17681834) (Lai, 2001). Schleiermacher is regarded as the father of modern Protestant theology as well as the
first modern Christian theologian to take the multifaith context
seriously (Smith, 1981). He made a tremendous contribution to
the development of religious studies and played an important role
in the founding of the University of Berlin, which became the prototype of the modern research university and included a theology
faculty as one of its higher faculties alongside law and medicine
(Richardson, 1991). All these make the case of Schleiermacher a
very good starting point for our discussion. After examining
Schleiermachers view of Religious Studies and Theology as well
as the subsequent debate concerning the issue, this paper will conclude with a reflection on the context of the Christian university
in contemporary Asia.
Schleiermacher on Religion, Religious Studies,
and Christian Theology
According to Schleiermachers On Religion, the nature of religion
or piety (Frmmigkeit) belongs to the realm of feeling (Gefhl),
rather than knowledge or action (Schleiermacher, 1799/trans.
1988). By feeling, Schleiermacher does not mean to refer to a
purely subjective or psychological emotion or mood (Lamm, 1994).
For him, religion is an intentional immediate self-consciousness
(Schleiermacher, trans. 1986, 3). It can be regarded as a vision
(Anschauung) prior to analytic and reflexive reason, a direct apprehension of events (Williams, 1978, pp. 2326), as well as an
original expression of an existential relationship (Schleiermacher,
trans. 1981). Since the human being exercises a certain degree of
autonomy as well as influence vis--vis the rest of the contingent
and finite world, only the Absolute or the Infinite can inspire the
religious feeling of absolute dependence (Schleiermacher, trans.
1986, 4). This implies that religion as a feeling or self-consciousness is relational and receptive. The religious feeling of absolute
dependence signifies an awareness of the relationship between a
finite human being and the Infinite or God (Schleiermacher, trans.
1986, 4.4). Schleiermacher further suggests that religion is part
of human nature and the human being is born with the religious
53
capacity (Schleiermacher, 1799/1988, p. 146). Religion as an activity of the human spirit is distinct, but not separable, from knowledge and action (Schleiermacher, 1799/1988, pp. 107108;
Thandeka, 1992). According to this view of religion, religious studies can become an academic discipline with its own integrity and
should not be reduced to any other discipline because religious
studies possesses a specific subject matter of investigation, that is,
the religious activity or function of the human spirit.
For Schleiermacher, the essence of religion is the piety within,
while rituals and dogmas are external expressions of it. As the essence of religion cannot exist without these external forms, religion is by nature social (Schleiermacher, 1799/1988, p. 195). He
affirms that the multiplicity of religion is the necessary outcome
of the nature of religion and that no one is absolute and can embody the totality of religion, not even Christianity (pp. 190191).
The implication of Schleiermachers understanding of religion is
that it is impossible to understand religion through studying only
one religion. Since the essence of religion manifests in all historical religions, one has to study comprehensively all the historical
expressions and contemporary phenomena of different religions
in an empirical way with various approaches in order to understand what religion is. Schleiermachers theory of religion leads
to empirical studies of various religions, including the psychological, sociological, comparative, phenomenological, and historical
approaches, rather than an abstract delineation of the essence of
religion (Capps, 1995).
With regard to Theological Studies, Schleiermacher suggests
that the curriculum include different branches with different training and methods brought together by virtue of their relation to a
special mode of faith (Schleiermacher, trans. 1990, 1). Its unity is
constituted not by a unified method shared by all of its branches,
but by the fact that they are all related to Christian faith and are
combined for a practical purpose. Similar to Medicine and Law,
Theology has its practical taskproviding training for church leadership (Schleiermacher, trans. 1990, 3, 26). Apart from this external or teleological unity, theology has also an internal principle
of unity constituted by the idea of the essence of Christianity.
According to Schleiermacher, theological studies consists of
three main parts: philosophical theology, historical theology, and
practical theology (Schleiermacher, trans. 1990, 31). Historical
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Pan-chiu Lai
theology can be divided into three sections: the knowledge of primitive Christianity (exegetical theology), the knowledge of the total
career of Christianity (church history), and the knowledge of the
state of Christianity at the present time, which can be divided further into dogmatic theology and church statistics (85).
As the task of historical theology is to study the actual situations of Christianity at different times and their relationship with
the essence of Christianity, it requires a preparatory treatment
provided by philosophical theology (Schleiermacher, trans. 1990,
24 and 28). The task of philosophical theology is to understand
the distinctive nature or essence of Christianity in two ways: (1) in
comparison with faiths of other churches and religions, and (2) as
a function of the human spirit vis--vis other human spiritual activities (21). Concerning philosophical theology, Schleiermacher
suggests,
Its material is that which is historically given and which lies as the basis of
investigations concerning the distinctive nature of Christianity as well as
those concerning the contrast between what is healthy and what is diseased.
The outcome of these investigations, however, determines the value for
development of particular moments in the history of Christianity first,
consequently determining historical perspective on its entire course.
(Schleiermacher, trans. 1990, 65)
Perhaps one may summarize the division of the three main

parts of theological studies in this way. Philosophical theology is a
preparatory study distinguishing the essence of Christianity from
other spiritual activities and other religious communities; historical theology aims at a historical understanding and explication of
this essence; and, practical theology applies this understanding to
the activities and works of the community of faith.
According to Schleiermacher, Christian theology is basically
a practical/professional training and is ecclesiastically orientated.
But it can be a university discipline because Christian theology
is basically a positive science with a definite and concrete subject matterthe historical Christian faith (Gerrish, 1993).
Schleiermacher assumes that dogma is to be taken as a literary
and systematic expression of the living faith of a religious community under certain historical circumstances. This presupposition is
reflected in the methods employed by him.
In some respects, Schleiermachers theological method is quite
55
similar to the phenomenological method advanced by Edmund

Husserl (18591938), which brackets metaphysical and existential problems, such as the origin and the truth or falsity of the
Christian religious consciousness, and focuses solely on understanding and describing the content of this consciousness (Williams, 1978, pp. 613). Since the task of dogmatic theology is to
understand and express the Christian faith adequately, hermeneutics also plays an important role in Schleiermachers theological method. According to Schleiermachers hermeneutics
(Ormiston & Schrift, 1990, pp. 1314) as an interpreter of the
Christian faith, the theologian has to understand the documents
of faith of the church, including the Bible and creeds, and to
re-express their meaning. In this process, the theologian is not
merely an impartial observer. The theologians interpretation
of the texts is not restricted to the scientific exposition in accordance with the grammatical rules. Rather, the theologian
must also attempt to understand the Christian faith from within
as an insider before interpreting it in a new way. By expressing
the religious faith in a new way, the theologian inevitably participates in the reconstruction and development of a religious
tradition. In other words, dogmatic theology, which is the knowledge of the doctrine that has currency in the contemporary
church concerned (Schleiermacher, trans. 1990, 195), does
not only describe and analyze the religious consciousness expressed in dogma, but also criticizes and improves the existing
dogmatic formulation (Schleiermacher, trans. 1986, pp. 9293).
We can see that the actual methods employed are closer to human sciences than to natural sciences and that there can be
significant continuity and similarities between religious and
theological studies.
Integration Versus Separation of Theology and Religious Studies
For Schleiermacher, the task of theology requires the study of other
religions, but it does not presuppose the absoluteness, uniqueness, or superiority of Christianity. Traditional Christian theology
tends to focus on one particular religion, Christianity, and to underestimate or disregard the theological value of other religions.
The underlying presupposition is that whereas Christianity is truth
itself, other religions are simply falsity and possess no truth at all.
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Pan-chiu Lai
However, in view of the extensive similarities between Christianity

and non-Christian religions, Schleiermacher definitely rejects this
presupposition (Schleiermacher, trans. 1986, 7.3). According to
him, Jesus Christ did not proclaim himself as the sole mediator
and he often pointed to the living truth coming after him. Likewise, Jesus disciples acknowledged the freedom of the Holy Spirit
and made no attempt to restrict the work of the Holy Spirit
(Schleiermacher, 1799/trans. 1988, pp. 219220). Schleiermacher
believes that if we understand that religion is the result of the endlessly progressive work of the Spirit in human history, the multiplicity and plurality of religion can be affirmed (Schleiermacher,
1799/1988, pp. 192).
Many Christian theologians attempt to address the problem
of non-Christian religions from the perspective of dogmatic theology. The most often debated issue is whether other religions are
valid ways to salvation. In this kind of discussion, other religions
are merely objects of dogmatic assertion. Alternatively, some Christian theologians may take the study of other religions as an extension of practical theology and discuss other religions from a
missionary perspective. Sometimes, this approach may imply a hidden agenda of comprehending (knowing) other religions in order to comprehend (overcome/convert) them. In contrast with
these two approaches, Schleiermacher prefers to include the study
of other religions in the theological curriculum as part of philosophical theology. This is not to be confused with the attempt to
demonstrate the Christian faith or to establish the foundation of
dogmatic theology by philosophical and/or religious studies.
Schleiermcher refuses to prove the truth and necessity of Christianity (Schleiermacher, trans. 1986, 11.5). What he proposes is
that through a critical general history of religions, one can have a
comprehensive classification of the historical religions, which can
help theologians to understand or identify the essence of Christianity (Schleiermacher, trans. 1986, 9.2). As the psychological,
sociological, historical, and phenomenological studies of Christianity as well as other religions can help Christian theologians to
understand the distinctive character of Christianity, religious studies
is indispensable for theological studies. It is a preparation for, rather
than an extension or application of, dogmatic theology; its execution and result should not be dictated by dogmatic theologians.
57
According to Schleiermachers approach to the study of Christianity, making the theological judgment with regard to the essence of Christianity is unavoidable. Historical study always involves
a process of making judgments (Wyman, 1991). An absolutely neutral, objective, impartial, and presupposition-less study of religion
is impossible. A theological approach (in the sense of a normative
study concerning the distinctive identity of a religion) to the study
of religions should not be excluded from the academic study of
religions. If religious studies ignores the theological approach and
denies the endeavor of normative inquiry, it will be inadequate.
According to Schleiermacher, theological and religious studies are able not only to complement each other in actual practice,
but also to enrich each other at the level of methodology. The
study of Christianity in theological studies requires the methods
also used in religious studies, and the theological method used by
Schleiermacher (phenomenology and hermeneutics), can also be
used in the study of other religions. Furthermore, Schleiermachers
approach may engage into critical dialogue with some of the contemporary trends in religious studies. These trends may include:
pretending to be objective or neutral, attempting to avoid making
normative judgments, and reducing religion to a mere phenomenon of human culture while implicitly assuming a somewhat theological position in method. As David Ray Griffin points out, there
is a naturalistic tendency in the contemporary social scientific explanation of religious experience (Griffin, 2000a; Preus, 2000;
Segal, 2000; Griffin, 2000b). For example, some scholars attempt
to explain the origin of the sense of God in a purely psychological,
sociological, or anthropological way, under the assumption that
there is no God whatsoever and the origin of the sense of God has
nothing to do with God (Bowker, 1973). For Schleiermacher, this
sort of naturalistic explanation is inadequate because religion is
relationala divinely constituted as well as human phenomenon.
Schleiermachers approach undoubtedly tends to take religious studies as a handmaid to theology (theologiae ancilla) rather
than theological studies as a branch of religious studies. However,
his approach to relating religious studies with philosophical theology can preserve the autonomy of religious studies. Furthermore,
his theological method does illustrate a way of doing theology,
which assumes the multireligious context and is methodologically
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Pan-chiu Lai
compatible with religious studies. His concept of religion also

points to an inclusive understanding of religious studies open to
the theological approach to the study of religions (Conolly, 1999).
In the 20th century, Karl Barth (18861968) launched a fierce
attack on the theological tradition traced back to Schleiermacher
(Lai, 2000). Barths dealing with the issue of religion aims at tackling the vertical relationship between revelation and religion, rather
than the horizontal relationship between Christianity and other
religions. For Barth, there are two approaches to relating revelation with religion. One is to view religion from the perspective of
the revelation of God and to regard religion as one of the many
theological issues. The other is to take religion as the only problem of theology and to explain or evaluate revelation from the
perspective of religion (Barth, trans. 1956, pp. 295297). Barth
finds that modern Protestant theology usually chooses the latter
approach, which leads to revelation of religion, but not religion of revelation (Barth, trans. 1956, p. 284). This approach is
dangerous not because of its being a free investigation, but because of its adopting a nontheological understanding of religion
and thus constituting a hindrance to the free inquiry of the revelation of God (Barth, p. 292). It will level down revelation to religion and give religion an independent or autonomous status,
placing religion above revelation or even replacing the revelation
of God with religion (pp. 293294). In order to avoid this pitfall,
Christian theology must view religion as a reality of human life
from the perspective of revelation and faith, rather than adopting
some definitions of religion from nontheological perspectives first
and then establishing its relationship with some theological concepts (pp. 296297). Barth admits that it is possible to criticize
religion from within, using the data from the history or phenomena of religion to demonstrate that people of religion fail to achieve
the aims they propose. However, this kind of internal criticism,
Barth continues, fails to fully expose the reality of religion. Barth
believes that only through the revelation of God in Jesus Christ
can we discern the true nature of religion as idolatry, self-righteousness, and unbelief (p. 314).
It is well known that Barth defines Religion as unbelief and
suggests Revelation as the Aufhebung of Religion. (According to
Barths own theology and also in line with the ordinary and philosophical (Hegelian) usage of word, Aufhebung may paradoxically
59
mean abolition as well as exaltation.) It is important to note that

when Barth talks about religion, especially religion as unbelief,
what he means is religion rather than religions. By unbelief,
Barth refers to the human attempt to justify oneself by human
endeavor, and thus reject or replace the forgiving grace of God.
This critique of religion applies to all religions and the Christians
are those who particularly deserve to be judged in this way (Barth,
trans. 1956, pp. 300, 326). This judgement, however, does not necessarily lead to a total rejection of religion (p. 300). He says, The
abolishing of religion by revelation need not mean only its negation: the judgment that religion is unbelief. Religion can just as
well be exalted in revelation, even though the judgment still stands
(p. 326).
Barth emphasizes that the judging of religion as unbelief is a
judgment pronounced by God, which does not prevent us from
appreciating the truth, goodness, and beauty of religions from a
human perspective (Barth, trans. 1956, p. 300). Furthermore, Barth
also suggests that revelation can make true religion become possible (p. 326). According to Barth, Christianitys being a true religion or the locus of true religion is comparable to the justification
of sinners, in the sense that it is not based on its own superiority, if
any, in comparison with other religions, but is due to the divine
election (p. 325ff). Christianity as the locus of true religion is not
due to its doctrine, not even its doctrine of sola gratia, which can
also be found in some other religions, but that God did give His
grace to it in Christ Jesus (p. 345).
In the eyes of Barth, the attempt of liberal theologians to demonstrate absoluteness or superiority through historical and/or
comparative studies of religions is idolatrous, because as a historicalcultural phenomenon, Christianity is neither superior nor
absolute. As other religions, it is under the same divine judgment
(religion as unbelief) and cannot justify anyone. Christianity should
thus never try to prove itself to be superior or absolute, even if
there are ways to do it, for example, through the comparative study
of religions (Barth, trans. 1956, p. 333).
According to Barths view, Christian theology and religious
studies should be distinct and completely independent of each
other. The definition of religion as unbelief is based on the divine
judgement already made in the revelation of Jesus Christ and thus
not subject to the historical-comparative study of religions (Barth,
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Pan-chiu Lai
trans. 1959, pp. 24, 2728). Scholars of religious studies may regard (or disregard) Barths definition of religion as nothing but
an illustrative example demonstrating that ones own definition
of religion usually reflects ones own ideology or prejudice, and
there is no objective or neutral definition of religion (Green, 1995).
However, Barths view may let religious studies be a free and open
investigation of all religions without significant interference from
Christian theology. When Christians engage in the academic study
of religions, including the comparative study of Christianity and
other religions, they should not have any hidden agenda of attempting to devalue other religions in order to prove the superiority of Christianity. If they discover that other religions are superior
in certain aspects, they should and can frankly admit as much and
freely admire them.
It is noticeable that Barths critique of religion derives basically from his interpretation of the Epistle to the Romans, especially its view of the law. One may thus query whether this is the
only biblical view of the law. In the perspectives of theology and
religious studies, Barths critique of religion as well as his separating Christian theology from religious studies is problematic in a
more fundamental way.
From the perspective of history of religions, Barths view of
religion as unbelief does not fully reflect the historical relationship between Jesus of Nazareth and Judaism. Many scholars agree
that Jesus of Nazareth was a faithful Jew, whose hope was the fulfillment of the promise of God concerning the restoration of Israel, rather than to establish a new religion alongside Judaism
(Vermes, 1983a, 1983b, 1993). Those who rejected him were mainly
the Roman officials and the Jewish priests. Those who wanted to
see Jesus crucified were the Sadducees associated with the priestly
class. To make them representatives of Jews or Judaism is very problematic because in the eyes of most Jews at that time, they were
heretics (Maccoby, 1995). At the time of the Second Temple, Judaism was so pluralistic that one can hardly reduce the relationship between Jesus and Judaism to merely one of antithesis. From
the perspective of Judaism, the law is a sign of covenant; keeping
the law can be regarded as an expression of trusting God, believing in His gracious call, rather than of unbelief. This interpretation of Judaism may call into question the stereotype or caricature
61
of Judaism, which identifies Judaism as religion of law, legalism, and unbelief. This sort of anti-Judaic bias, which is not to
be confused with anti-Semitism, is noticeable in Barths theology
(Sonderegger, 1992). This bias against Judaism originated from
and was deeply rooted in the anti-Judaic attitude in the New Testament (Ldemann, 1997). One of the possible ways to overcome
this kind of bias may be nonconfessional academic study of and
actual dialogue with Judaism. However, Barths emphasis on the
theological approach of from revelation to religion tends to undermine this sort of from religion to revelation approach.
Barth is quite right in insisting on the principle that the proper
subject matter of theo-logy should be God, rather than religion.
However, the sharp demarcation between the two approaches made
by Barth tends to force them oppose each other directly and
squarely. This may eventually overlook the complexity of the methodological relationship between revelation and religion. Even if
one accepts the Christocentric position that the nature of religion
can only be seen in the light of the divine revelation in Christ
Jesus, in order to understand it, a finite human being has to start
with religion, particularly the cumulative tradition of the Christian religion (Smith, 1964, pp. 9, 156157). The two approaches
from revelation to religion (as unbelief), and from religion (as
cumulative tradition) to revelationinstead of being mutually
exclusive, may work in a complementary way.
Many modern Christian theologians found that Barths separation of Theology from Religious Studies is not tenable and attempted to reconcile the theological approaches pioneered by
Schleiermacher and Barth respectively. The most crucial issue in
this kind of attempt is the relationship between history of religions and the divine revelation (Niebuhr, 1960; Pannenberg, trans.
1991). In recent years, some Western scholars have attempted to
retrieve and further develop Schleiermachers approach. Based
on the insights of Schleiermacher and hermeneutics, Francis
Schssler Fiorenza challenges what he calls the myth of the contrast between theological and religious studies. Fiorenza argues
that the contrast between religious and theological studies assumes
a very misleading demarcation: subjective faith versus objective
knowledge, epistemic privilege versus scientific neutrality and committed advocacy versus disinterested impartiality (Fiorenza, 1991,
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Pan-chiu Lai
pp. 121126). Fiorenza summarizes his view in this way: In short,

religious studies challenges Theology to overcome its danger of
dogmatism. Theology challenges Religious Studies to overcome
the danger of historicism (pp. 139140). As Fiorenza admits, his
account takes Schleiermachers view seriously and points to practice as a hermeneutical link significant for the reconstruction of
identity and for the encounter with distinct religious traditions,
and even with nonreligious traditions (p. 140).
Nowadays, due to the intensification of interreligious dialogue
and the rise of comparative theology/world theology, which is
neither impartial nor confessional, the boundaries between religious studies and theology become blurred (Capps, 1995; Clooney,
1995). (Comparative theology consists of a comparative study of
the theologies of two or more religions, attempting to make them
engage in critical dialogue with each other. One of its possible
results is world theology, which is an attempt to form a theology
constituted by and reflecting the faith of all religions.) From an
academic point of view, religious pluralism does raise the theological questions about the ultimate truth or reality to which different religions point. For scholars of religious studies to keep on
refusing to discuss this kind of questions is academically inadequate.
As Edward Farley puts it, Utter existential indifference to the truths
posed by or laid claim to in the subject matter is a deadly virus, a
virtual AIDS of education (Farley, 1988, p. 180).
In recent years, urgent global issues such as the ecological
crisis have become matters of concern for people of different religions. This makes many intellectuals find it unacceptable if the
academic study of religions is entirely irrelevant to the practical
issues humankind faces. The practical and normative dimensions,
which are characteristics of theological studies, are believed to be
vital for religious studies too. As Frank Whaling puts it,
Theology can no longer focus primarily on God; Religious Studies can no
longer focus primarily upon human beings in their religiousness; neither
can afford not to focus upon the world of nature and the ecological crisis
that now threatens the natural world. (Whaling, 1999)
In view of these recent reflections and developments within

the academic circle, one has to ask then whether the dividing line
between theological and religious studies is clear, tenable, and
desirable any longer.
63
Contextual Reflection
M. Thomas Thangaraj appreciates Schleiermachers taking seriously the multifaith context, but finds his approach to teaching
theology inadequate for the multifaith context of Asia. He points
out that Schleiermachers approach locates the study of religious
consciousness and other religions within the domain of philosophy of religion, an exercise separate from the main body of dogmatics. Thangaraj further asserts that Schleiermachers putting
Christianity at the apex of the history of religions presupposes a
dubious scheme of evolution/development and will undermine
the validity of other religions. It totally nullifies Schleiermachers
effort to build Christian theology on a broader base and switches
the main body of his dogmatics back to the heresyorthodox model,
which takes theological activity as a self-contained ecclesiastical
activity aiming at correcting and conserving the doctrines of the
church. Admittedly, Schleiermacher has not formally advanced the
dialogic theology that Thangaraj calls for (Thangaraj , 1996).
Thangarajs comment seems to overlook the positive implication of Schleiermachers relating the study of other religions to
inquiry of philosophy of religion/philosophical theology. For
Schleiermacher, the main body of dogmatics is supposed to be an
analysis and representation of the Christian faith of a particular
church. The implication is that the claim that Christianity is at the
apex should thus be open for further academic investigation and
debate, rather than assertion to be held dogmatically. For the belief of the superiority of Christianity is not an integral part of the
Christian faith and is not necessary for Christians to accept.
Admittedly, Schleiermacher did not call for any interreligious
dialogue. However, as Fiorenza points out, Schleiermacher emphasizes very much the centrality of dialogue, exchange, and conversation for thinking itself (Fiorenza, 2000). This is reflected in
the apologetic intent underlying his On Religion: Speeches to its Cultured Despisers. Similarly, what Schleiermacher proposes to do in
philosophy of religion is precisely what Thangaraj calls apologetic
in the good sense of the term, which aims at defending and explaining ones religious faith in light of, and at times in contrast
to, other religious traditions (Thangaraj, 1996, pp. 146148). If
Schleiermacher were living in contemporary Asia, he might have
engaged in dialogue with the Asian religions as he did with the
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cultured despisers of religion in 18th century Europe.

Another limitation of Schleiermachers philosophy of religion
is its taking religions in isolation and assuming no intermingling
among them. This assumption is apparently dubious. In Asia, it is
rather common to find the blurring of boundaries among religions. As Wilfred Cantwell Smith correctly points out, since there
are so many interactions among religions in history, it is appropriate to speak of A History of Religion in the Singular (Smith,
1986, ch. 1). According to Schleiermacher, what the Christian theologian attempts to expound is not religious truth in general, but
the faith of a particular church in a particular historical context.
Should the Christian community concerned incorporate resources
from the Asian religions, there is no a priori reason for the Christian theologian to exclude them. The question Schleiermacher
might raise is the even more fundamental theological problem as
to whether these resources are actually and rightly included in the
faith of the particular Christian church concerned, for example,
whether the inclusion of particular cultural resources is a healthy
or diseased development of the Christian tradition.
Viewed in Schleiermachers perspective, in order to benefit
the development of Christianity in Asia, both religious and theological studies are necessary. If to make contribution to the development of Christianity in Asia is part of the Christian ethos of
Christian universities in Asia, the integration of religious studies
and theology is definitely in line with the Christian ethos of an
Asian Christian university.
The discussion so far concerns mainly the research, which is
the strength of the Berlin model of a research university, but not
so much about the teaching, which is the emphasis of the liberal
education (Schleiermacher, 1808/trans. 1991). Based on the Greek
idea of paidei and the ideal of liberal education, Peter C. Hodgson
suggests,
If the goal of liberal education as a whole is to nurture wisdom and love,
enhance appreciation, and encourage practices of freedom and justice,
then the differences between religious studies and theological studies
cannot be as sharp as they are often represented to be. (Hodgson, 1999,
p. 132)
Viewed from this perspective, separation of theology and religious
65
studies should be considered as against the ideal of liberal education advocated by many of the Christian universities in Asia, including Chung Chi College.
John Henry Newman (18011890), a famous advocate for liberal education, suggested that the university is the place where
universal knowledge is taught. With this principle, he argues that
the study of theology should be included in the university
(Newman, in Turner, 1996). According to the same principle, the
study of non-Christian religions should not be excluded from university education and should not be restricted to the study of the
religions local to the city or the country of the university. Rather, it
should cover in principle all the religions and the scope of teaching may be limited only for practical (e.g., financial) reasons. In
fact, this is also in line with Schleiermachers proposal of assigning the study of other religions to the sphere of philosophical theology rather than practical theology. If one considers the practical
use of knowledge of non-Christian religions from the perspective
of practical theology (e.g., missiology) one may find only those
religions directly related to the missionary field relevant. This will
make the study too parochial and may thus contradict the spirit of
university. This temptation of parochialism may be particularly
strong among Asian Christian universities. However, if one adopts
Schleiermachers approach to relating the study of non-Christian
religions to philosophical theology, one may find that to locate
Christianity in the global context of history of religions requires
the knowledge of all religions of earth in the past and present. It
should not be restricted to the handful of world religions (excluding the primitive religions) or the few religions dominating
the local religious scene. These are some important implications
of the ideal of liberal education for the teaching of religious studies in Asian Christian universities.
During Schleiermachers lifetime, the use of the concept might
be unavoidable. But in the postcolonial and postmodern 21st century, the Asian (probably a concept invented in the West) people
may have to reconsider some of the categories imposed on them
by the West. Apart from the Western concepts of religion and religious studies, one may perhaps have to reconsider also the demarcation between theology and religious studies, which seems to be
based on a view of rationality inherited from the Enlightenment
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in the modern West. If one returns to the Asian tradition(s) of

religious studies, one may find that the sharp demarcation or dualism between objective and subjective studies of religions is quite
foreign to the traditional/indigenous study of, say, Buddhism and
Hinduism. In these traditions, both participation and detachment
are required in religious inquiry (Rolston, 1984).
The most serious problem with Schleiermachers approach
to theological education is perhaps its church-centered tendency,
which fails to take seriously the problems for the society external
to the church. This problem is not so acute in the Europe of
Schleiermachers lifetime, where church and society were basically
coterminous. However, this is definitely the case in contemporary
Asia. In Asia, to have conversation or dialogue with people of other
religions is not only a daily-life experience, but also a necessity.
The serious economic, political, social, ecological, and spiritual
problems in Asia call for closer cooperation with other religions
in the struggle for a better future for Asia. As the religions in Asia
(including Christianity in Asia) may be one of the contributing
factors towards the formation, intensification, or solution of these
problems, it is morally irresponsible for scholars of religious studies to remain neutral and refuse to discuss the relevance of different religions to contemporary problems. To be indifferent to the
suffering in the society is definitely against the ethos (of love) of
Christian universities in Asia. Therefore, in addition to religious
pluralism, the problems of poverty, human exploitation, ecological crisis, and so forth, in Asia make the separation of theology
and religious studies in Christian universities in Asia neither desirable nor justifiable.
Conclusions
The research and teaching of religious studies will contribute to
the mutual understanding between Christianity and other religions
as well as the development of indigenous Christian theology in
Asia. To be open to religious studies is a reflection and enhancement rather than a betrayal of the Christian ethos of an Asian
Christian university. Religious studies can benefit Christian theology most if its research and teaching are free from the dogmatic
interference of Christian theology.
Christian theology, especially that in Asia, cannot proceed in
67
disregard of the reality of religious pluralism and all the spiritual,

social, and ecological problems in Asia. With regard to the relationship between religious studies and theology in an Asian Christian university, one may put it in this way: Negatively speaking,
Christian theology is not to be identified as a nonacademic (or
less academic) study of Christianity alone; and, religious studies
should not be restricted to nonreligious or nontheological studies
of all religions or non-Christian religions alone. Positively speaking, there should be a unity in diversity or distinction without
separation between theology and religious studies. Perhaps it is
possible to think of the relationship between religious studies and
theology as analogous to the divine and human natures of Christ
according to the Christological formula of Chalcedon in 451 (Lai,
2000). (According to the formula, the distinct characters of the
two natures are preserved in the hypostatic union, which is formed
in the Incarnation for the salvation of the whole world. Lai, 2000b)
If Christian theologians are open to other religions and the method
used in religious studies, while scholars of religious studies are
open to theological discussion, a happy marriage between theology and religious studies may work out. Their mutual openness,
together with their respective openness to the world, may benefit
the two disciplines, the university, and the universe as well.
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NEWMAN'S AESTHETIC VISION: THEOLOGY AND THE EDUCATION OF THE WHOLE PERSON
Christie, Robert C
Journal of Interdisciplinary Studies; 2011; 23, 1/2; ProQuest
pg. 41
NEWMANS AESTHETIC VISION: THEOLOGY
AND THE EDUCATION OF THE WHOLE PERSON
Robert C. Christie
DeVry University
The evolution of scientism, relativism, and the resultant fragmentation of

knowledge over the past century have led to a crisis in contemporary
university education. John Henry Newman, a nineteenth-century philo
sopher of education, a major figure in educational theory and applied
research, and author of the classic work on education, The Idea of a
University, faced similar problems in his time, and his work is valuable in
addressing contemporary dilemmas. Newmans philosophy of mind and his
vision of the unity of knowledge, which reflects an aesthetic dimension, and
the resultant essential role of theology in education, are key elements for re
imagining the university. An analysis of Newmans spirited Eighth Discourse
anchors this retrospective and commends his work to higher education today
by recalling an earlier ideal of the integration of all disciplines.
BACK TO NEWMAN: A WAY TO THE FUTURE?

to many observers, contemporary university education is in
According
crisis. Yet this state of affairs is not new. John Henry Newman, a
nineteenth-century philosopher, theologian, and controversial
convert, already confronted such a crisis. Newman, the author of the classic
work, The Idea of a University (1852), had a lifelong preoccupation with
education. As he wrote in his private journal: Now from the first to the last,
education . . . has been my line (1957: 259). Avery Dulles, author of the
Newman volume of the Outstanding Christian Thinkers Series (2002),
provides a succinct account of Newmans history in the field, including his
involvement in the establishment of the Catholic University of Ireland, where
he was installed as its first Rector, which propelled him to write a series of
lectures during the early period of this project. Acclaim for The Idea of a
University is universal. Dulles notes that Walter Pater spoke of it as the
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
42
JOURNAL OF INTERDISCIPLINARY STUDIES
perfect handling of a theory, while James M. Cameron called it the most

influential (I suppose) book yet written on university education, and Jaroslav
Pelikan concluded that it is the most important book ever written on
university education (2002: 135). Dulles identifies a theme at the heart of the
contemporary crisis of education in that Newmans Idea expresses much of
his deepest thinking about theology in its relationship to other disciplines such
as philosophy, literature, and the natural sciences (2002: 135). Hence, this
essay focuses on Newmans thoughts on theology as it relates to the education
of the whole person. When Newman wrote The Idea of a University, notes
Martin Svaglic, higher education was in the early stages of its long trend
towards secularism, on the one hand, and toward utilitarian specialization on
the other (1982: viii). Today, university education is even more engrossed
in the secular-specialist trend, since technology-focused education has
transformed the educational landscape. Thus, a reexamination of Newmans
thoughts on education in the university setting is quite relevant and
appropriate today. For Newman, the university is the locus for the
cultivation of the intellect, and not a foundry or treadmill (1982: 109).
Can Newmans ideal of the integration of all disciplinesincluding
theology into a wholeness of vision and a true enlargement of the mind
inspire the rediscovery of the proper role of a university to educate the whole
person? This overarching question leads to two specific questions that
challenge university education today: what is the role of the university, and
what does it mean to educate the whole person? Newmans philosophy of
education is particularly relevant on three points: his ideal of the integration
of all disciplines, the notion of producing a wholeness of vision, and the goal
of an enlargement of the mind.
Of particular relevance is Newmans Eighth Discourse of The Idea of a

University, titled Christianity and Scientific Investigation: A Lecture Written
for the School of Science (1982: 343-61 ). Ian Ker notes that this is the most
famous of the Discourses concerning the relation between the religion of
intellectual culture and religion itself. The distinction is crucial (1988: 388).
A comparison and contrast of science and religion are highly relevant, since
the scope of these two fields involves two primary ways we acquire
knowledge in the search for truth, which is the ultimate objective of
knowledge in all fields. What I would urge upon everyone, Newman writes,
whatever may be his particular line of research, - what I would urge upon
men of Science in their thoughts of Theology, - what I would venture to
NEWMANS AESTHETIC VISION
43
recommend to theologians, when their attention is drawn to the subject of

scientific investigations, - is a great and firm belief in the sovereignty of
Truth (1982: 360). Svaglic proposes that the spirit of most of the pieces
of Newmans Idea is best perceived in this great essay, which is in many
ways an epitome of the entire volume and which protests encroachments of
theology on science, as early in the discourses he had protested the reverse
(1982: xxiv-xxv).
NEWMANS EIGHTH DISCOURSE
As for the Eighth Discourse, the first of its eight Sections begins by
acknowledging that there is antagonism between science and religion, a
tension that Newman thought is needless (1 982: 343). The fields of science
and religion represent two modes of human intellectual activity, with the
former characterized by the use of reason and the latter by the act of faith,
although both modes utilize the other. Real faith is not devoid of reason.
When faith scoffs at reason, it often results in religious fundamentalism. True
reason, on the other hand, contains elements of faith, without which there
would be no scientific curiosity, since scientific progress only occurs when the
prevailing knowledge is transcended. On the other hand, when reason scoffs
at faith, it often results in a scientific fundamentalism. In regard to these two
fields, as well as all fields of academic study, Newman holds that while each
has its place and boundaries, all are related, and none privileged, since all have
truth as their common objective. Thus, a universitys special function,
according to Newman, is to draw many things into one, to form one great
social establishment (1982: 344-45).
Newman presents his argument from two perspectives: a philosophy of

mind and a philosophy of knowledge. Key to Newmans philosophy of mind
are two terms that may seem anachronistic in contemporary perspective. The
first is the concept of imperial in regard to the intellect. Newmans sense
of the term describes the overarching great capacity of the human intellect
which governs perception in its search for truth. This capacity is related to the
second term, discrimination, which Newman employs to describe the
potential of the mind, which increases as it is properly and continually
developed, to grasp or see the various shades of differences in intellectual
perceptions, rather than their mere indiscriminate black and white
alternatives. The result of Newmans reflections is his concept of the
imperial intellect, described as follows:
44
The philosophy of an imperial intellect, for such I am considering a

University to be, is based, not so much on simplification as on
discrimination. Its true representative defines, rather than analyses. He
aims at ... a following out, as far as man can, what in its fulness is
mysterious and unfathomable. Taking into his charge all sciences,
methods, collections of facts, principles, doctrines, truths, which are the
reflexions of the universe upon the human intellect, he admits them all,
he disregards none, and, as disregarding none, he allows none to exceed
or encroach (1982: 346-47).
Newman then relates this function of the intellect to the nature of the
mind itself: The very immensity of the system of things suggests that the
contrarieties and mysteries, which meet (us) in the various sciences, may be
simply the consequences of our necessarily defective comprehension (1982:
347). Here, Newman introduces his theory of mind that includes a wholeness
of vision, what one might call an inherently aesthetic capacity in the sense
of wholeness, entirety, of being inclusive of all possible and necessary
dimensions, parts, and elements of the subject under discussion. Newman
relates that all the various kinds of knowledge form the whole circle of
truth, and, thus, a single, almost visual image governs the work (1982:
343). Truth, then, and the quest for knowledge as the pursuit of it, both have
an inherently aesthetic quality. The former is the objective; the latter is part
of the method.
Thus, Newman advocates a breadth and spaciousness of thought, in
which lines, seemingly parallel, may converge at leisure, and principles,
recognized as incommensurable, may be safely antagonistic (1982: 346).
This includes the experience of paradox, or apparent contradiction. However,
Newman claims that we know that we cannot say with certainty that the
apparent contradiction really exists, and hence must allow for the possibility
that in fact it may not exist. Newmans epistemology, then, espouses four
points: (1) truth cannot be contrary to truth; thus, paradox is a possibility; (2)
truth often seems contrary to truth; (3) we must be patient with these
appearances, and not over-evaluate them, because of (4) the limitations of
knowledge, all of which are worked out through the development of the
intellect.
When the intellect reaches this cul-de-sac, it is assisted by a critical

dimension of the mind that one may call the aesthetic sense. Newman
45
implicitly employs this in describing his vision of the whole-in constructing

his epistemology, in support of which he offers six examples of mystery,
which consist of apparently incompatible insights that may nevertheless be
compatible. One is drawn from religion, four from science, and a final one
from mathematics. This is methodologically important, since Newman will
argue that if his position holds for science, then it applies equally to religion.
Thus, he argues by analogy, which is a form of aesthetic reasoning. He begins
with the religious example, and Ker notes that Newmans case, then, rests on
the premiss that theology is a genuine branch and religion a genuine part of
the subject-matter of knowledge. Otherwise the eighth Discourse may well
appear to contradict what has preceded, with liberal culture and religion
appearing as irreconcilable enemies (1988: 388). Thus, this section of the
Discourse and the one that follows are critical to Newmans entire Idea.
The first is the idea of God. Newman writes that: I allude to our
knowledge of the Supreme Being .... He, though One, is a sort of world of
worlds in Himself, giving birth in our minds to an indefinite number of
distinct truths, each ineffably more mysterious than any thing that is found in
this universe of space and time .... But we still are not able to accept them
in their infinity, either in themselves or in union with each other. Yet we do
not deny the first because it cannot be perfectly reconciled with the second,
and so on (1982: 347-48). Shifting his argument from religion to science, so
it is with Newmans second example. Such, for instance, is the
contemplation of Space ... for we find it impossible to say that it comes to a
limit anywhere; and it is incomprehensible to say that it runs out infinitely.
Newman s third example parallels that of space: And so again in the instance
of Time. We cannot place a beginning to it without asking ourselves what
was before that beginning; yet that there should be no beginning at all . . . is
simply incomprehensible. Here again, as in the case of Space, we never
dream of denying the existence of what we have no means of understanding
(1982:348).
Newman suggests in his remaining examples that these contain the same
kind of irreconcilable insights: the interaction of soul and body, both the
physical and social laws that simultaneously affect us, and the concept of
infinity in mathematics (1982: 348-9). In brief, for Newman, the natural
world is flush with experiences that are nothing short of mystery, beyond
explanation by the scientific method, yet we have a basis on which to accept
these paradoxes as true. This is precisely the situation, then, with the content
46
of religious experience and its dogmas. The truths and claims of religion are
no greater in their challenge to the human mind than are many issues raised
by the sciences. What Newman does here is to balance the argument, or,
aesthetically speaking, to complete the picture. It is no longer either science
or religion, but both science and religion, since they each develop evidence
in support of truths that one cannot prove, given the limitations of the human
intellect. Based on these examples from both science and religion, explaining
the work of the intellect, Newman then makes his methodological move by
introducing a justification for the major stumbling block for many
scientifically-minded thinkers: knowledge through revelation, or divinelygiven truths inaccessible to human reason alone. At this critical juncture,
Newman claims that there exists an analogy between scientific and religious
incompatibilities: as with nature, so it is with revelation:
What I would infer from these familiar facts ... in the secular sciences
one truth is incompatible (according to our human intellect) with another
or inconsistent with itself; so you should not think it very hard to be told
that there exists, here and there, not an inextricable difficulty, not an
astounding contrariety, not (much less) a contradiction as to clear facts,
between Revelation and Nature .... The Divine Unity contains in it
attributes, which, to our finite minds, appear in partial contrariety with
each other; as we admit that, in His revealed Nature are things, which,
though not opposed to Reason, are infinitely strange to the Imagination;
as in His works we can neither reject nor admit the ideas of space, and
of time, and the necessary properties of lines, without intellectual
distress, or even torture .... When nature and Revelation are compared
with each other, there (are) discrepancies ... in the reasonings . . .
proper to their respective teachings (1982: 350).
INTELLECTUAL FREEDOM AND THE DISCIPLINES

When it comes to freedom of thought, an issue related to the role of
theology in the university, Newman is the first to defend such freedom in the
sciences, but he again balances it with equal concern for theology. In both
endeavors, the investigator should be free, independent, unshackled in his
movements (Newman 1982: 354). On the other hand, specialists should not
exceed their province of expertise-whether in science or religion. Both
scientists and theologians must be cognizant of the limitations of their
expertise, and not extend the claims of their disciplines into the realm of the
other. As Keith Ward cautions, when an understanding of theism is
47
defective, it fails to distinguish clearly between scientific and metaphysical

(or philosophical) beliefs, which causes one to misunderstand the nature of
the conflict between science and religion, and to invent conflicts where none
exist (1996: 96). Newman is even-handed in applying this principle to both
disciplines. He holds that dogma, therefore, is really no shackle on the
intellect, and that sensitivity should be shown towards the thoughts of others.
Yet one must also be wary of increasing specialization in contemporary

education. Bernard Lonergan, highly influenced by Newman, characterizes
todays specialist as one who knows more and more about less and less
(1990:125). Commenting on Newmans Idea, Ker sums up the dilemma of
specialized knowledge in the university: Individual branches of study are
bound to give rise to normative questions which cannot be settled exclusively
within the terms of reference of the particular intellectual discipline (1988:
391). This reductionist tendency was no less a problem in Newmans day, as
A. Dwight Culler observes: The trend toward specialization, however, was
due not merely to the increase in knowledge but also to a new attitude which
was abroad concerning the purpose of knowledge, namely, that it was power
(1955: 193). Here, Newmans argument for respect of the great variety of
disciplines is most relevant today.
As to the nature of research, Newman applies his aesthetic vision to a
discussion across the disciplines, positing several principles regarding the
search for truth and intellectual method. Crucially, Newman invokes
philosophy and its necessary relation to theology to argue against the
utilitarian view of education. Newmans imperial intellect is also the
philosophical habit of mind which underlies all intellectual endeavors.
Dulles admits that: Newmans point about the formative role of philosophy
is of course unacceptable to utilitarians. They assert that such cultivation of
mind, although it may prepare students for a life of leisure, does not equip
them for any trade or profession, and is consequently useless (2002: 138).
Newman rebuts this claim on the ground that it is inimical to human nature to
seek knowledge for its own sake, citing Cicero who in enumerating the
various heads of mental excellence, lays down the pursuit of Knowledge for
its own sake, as the first of them (1982: 78).
One of Newmans primary philosophical insights concerning aesthetic

reasoning is that truth can never be contrary to truth. Thus, religion must
always be open to accept the verified findings of the sciences, and the
48
sciences, when dogma does not violate its verified findings, must be respectful
of religious dogmatic principles. If a dogmatic assertion cannot be proven to
be false, then it cannot be rejected simply because it cannot be proven. Today,
one would say that such a question one that cannot be falsified is properly
not a scientific question. Karl R. Popper maintains that the criterion of
falsifiability says that statements or systems of statements, in order to be
ranked as scientific, must be capable of conflicting with possible, or
conceivable, observations (1963: 38). Thus, the question of the existence of
God, for example, cannot be addressed by using the scientific method. The
question is simply beyond the province of science.
Newmans second philosophical point is that it is a law of the mind that

thought is circuitous, a dynamic process that results in the fact that error often
leads to truth: It is the very law of the human mind in its inquiry after and
acquisition of truth to make its advances by a process which consists of many
stages, and is circuitous. There are no short cuts to knowledge; nor does the
road to it always lie in the direction in which it terminates, nor are we able to
see the end on starting (1982: 357). To demonstrate this principle, Newman
once again proposes analogies that suggest that the path to truth is not always
straight. In the case of locomotion, for example, we do not go straight up a
mountain, and in the case of tacking, we maneuver to and fro to reach a
destination. Thus, we often do not move directly towards our destination in
order to reach it, but away from, or at various angles, to it. Seeing the whole
picture enables us to do this an aesthetic insight to which the eye of strict
logic is blind. Newmans approach recalls Albert Einsteins famous statement
regarding the necessary relationship between science and religion: Science
without religion is lame, religion without science is blind (201 1: 26). This
leads to Newmans conclusion that: All minds need elbow room (1982:
358). The principle of freedom of thought is essential if the mind is to work
circuitously, consistent with its nature. Having laid the groundwork justifying
knowledge through revelation and the necessity for freedom of thought for
both science and religion in respect to the intellectual quest, Newman then
specifies his argument that therefore theology, as an intellectual pursuit, must
be accorded its proper place among the disciplines.
THE SOVEREIGNTY OF TRUTH AND THEOLOGY

Newman addresses one of his major premises throughout the Discourses
a belief in the sovereignty of truth and its relation to the discipline of
49
theology. This is expressed also in Discourse IV, Bearing of Other Branches

of Knowledge on Theology, which emphasizes the necessary link between
theology and the university in the search for truth. Newman contends that:
Whereas it is the very profession of a university to teach all sciences, on this
account it cannot exclude Theology without being untrue to its profession . .
. . All sciences being connected together, and having bearings one on another,
it is impossible to teach them all thoroughly, unless they are all taken into
account, and Theology among them (1982: 74). Thus, one can conclude
from Newmans analysis that without the inclusion of theology in a
universitys course of studies, there would not be an integration but a
fragmentation of the disciplines.
Theology, in tandem with science, offers the mind a scope for the
exploration of mysteries beyond the limits of the scientific method, a scope
commensurate with, and thus demanded by, the very nature of the mind itself.
In fact, this enlargement of the mind through engagement with all the
disciplines developed by human reflection and investigation is necessary in
the pursuit of truth. As such, a university that seeks to educate the whole
person must include theology in its curriculum, lest these questions that
transcend mere science go unexplored, or subject them to misleading answers
from other disciplines whose limitations render them ill-equipped for the task.
Culler concludes that: For the sake of truth, Newman wished science to be
conjoined with religion .... But the disciplines themselves he wished to be
kept distinct .... Taken together, they formed a unified body of truth which
Newman called Philosophy, and in his younger days and at the beginning of
his work in Ireland he had been entranced by the beauty and perfection of this
ideal. There is no reason to suppose that he ever ceased to be entranced by it
(1955: 269). Cullers description of the unified body of truth that includes
both ends of the epistemological continuum science and religion as beauty
is a confirmation of the aesthetic dimension of Newmans own mind
externalized in his vision of the university. In sum, Newmans Idea is
simultaneously rational, beautiful, and aesthetic.
Newmans arguments expose the mistaken notion of antagonism

between science and religion. In reality, the various fields of human
intellectual endeavor form a unity. The nature of the human mind, and the
knowledge which it both perceives and also perceives that it cannot perceive-transcends the limitations imposed by field-discipline restricted insights when
it grasps not only the nature of its own field but that of other fields, that is,
50
JOURNAL,
OF INTERDISCIPLINARY STUDIES
when it learns to discriminate. Such discrimination understands the

limitations of human knowing and develops an appreciation of mystery,
leading it into the wider realm of knowledge which admits all disciplines but
without encroachment one upon another, in a vision of the relatedness of one
to the other. A further appreciation is gained of the differing methods by
which the various fields operate, understanding that truth cannot contradict
truth. Employing the logic of analogical reasoning and imagination, Newman
teaches that the truly educated person achieves a wholeness of vision, an
aesthetic insight, which results in an entrancement by, through, and in the
experience of this beauty.
Newmans ideal of the integration of all disciplines into a wholeness
of vision and a true enlargement of the mind can indeed inspire the
rediscovery of the proper role of a university to educate the whole person,
returning to the intellectual unity of the medieval university, prior to its
dissolution beginning with the intellectual vitiation of faith and reason with
the onset of the Scientific Revolution. The university would not be whole
without the inclusion of theology among its disciplines, because theology
entertains questions that transcend science, and also because its intellectual
method is inclusive of the aesthetic insight that corresponds to the reach of the
human mind, producing the greatest possible vision of ultimate truth. This is
the essence ofNewmans Idea, as Svaglic put it, the expression of a yearning
as old as man himself: the desire ... of seeing life . . . whole (1982: xvi).
Newman offers succinct advice in drawing his argument to a close: What I
would urge upon every one, whatever may be his particular line of research,
is a great and firm belief in the sovereignty of Truth. Error may flourish for
a time, but Truth will prevail in the end. The only effect of error ultimately is
to promote Truth (1982: 360).
CONTEMPORARY RELEVANCE OF NEWMANS IDEA
Dulles contends that Newmans masterful work remains unsurpassed,

as relevant for education today as in Newmans time, given the cognitive
value of faith and the importance of philosophy and theology for the
integration of knowledge (2002: 147). Dulles notes Pope John Paul IIs
suggestion that: Newmans Idea needs to be taken up in a new context today
(2002: 144). Drawing on John Paul IIs Ex corde ecclesiae (1990), which
recalls Newman, Dulles identifies the cultural similarities of present-day
society to those of Newmans time: a crisis of truth and alienation, the
51
dehumanizing effects of technologys reducing the individual to an

instrument, fragmentation of the university curriculum into specialized,
unrelated disciplines, a reduction of the human to what is solely measurable
by the glorification of empiricism, and frustration in the search for truth, since
in a mechanized and consumerist society the ethical is subordinated to the
technical, the spiritual to the material, and the order of being to that of having
(2002: 145).
John Pauls solution echoes Newman. Fragmentation can be overcome

through an organic vision of reality in which everything has its due place,
hence the university should offer a higher synthesis in which the whole range
of universal truth is taken into account (Dulles 2002: 145). Notably,
references to vision and everything are aspects of the aesthetic dimension
of intellectual understanding. Furthermore, like Newman, John Paul also
contends that theology plays a central role in the synthesis of knowledge and
in the dialogue between faith and reason. In brief, philosophy and theology
are the means by which students acquire an organic vision of reality (Dulles
2002: 146).
Pope Benedict XVI struck a similar chord in his address to Catholic
educators: With regard to the educational forum, the diakonia of truth takes
on a heightened significance in societies where secularist ideology drives a
wedge between truth and faith .... When nothing beyond the individual is
recognized as definitive, the ultimate criterion of judgment becomes the self
and the satisfaction of the individuals immediate wishes .... Christian
educators can liberate the young from the limits of positivism and awaken
receptivity to the truth, to God and his goodness (2009: 75-76). In a 2008
press release for the diocese of Rome, Benedict XVI noted that this discourse
applies to universities: There is talk of a great educational emergency, of
the increasing difficulty encountered in transmitting the basic values of life
and correct behaviour to the new generations .... This is an inevitable
emergency: in a society, in a culture, which all too often makes relativism its
creed relativism has become a sort of dogma in such a society the light of
truth is missing.
Curiously, secular scholars confirm many of the dilemmas affecting

university education. Already in The Closing of the American Mind, Allan
Bloom observed that: The university now offers no distinctive visage to the
young person. He finds a democracy of disciplines (which) is really an
52
__
anarchy
In short, there is no vision nor is there a set of competing visions,
of what an educated human being is. The question has disappeared (1987:
337). Bloom goes even further in tracing the core problem. The crisis of
liberal education is a reflection of a crisis at the peaks of learning, an
incoherence and incompatibility among the first principles with which we
interpret the world, an intellectual crisis of the greatest magnitude, which
constitutes the crisis of our civilization (1987: 346). Liberal educations
erstwhile unified view of nature and mans place in it has decayed into
only specialties, the premises of which do not lead to any such vision
(Bloom 1987: 347).
Mortimer Adlers response to Bloom was titled Reforming Education:

The Opening of the American Mind (1988). As the editor of Adler s book put
it: Our preoccupation with the truth of scientifically verifiable findings as the
only existing truth, Adler regards as the source of the impoverishment of mind
and soul that Bloom and others lament (1988: xiv). Adler holds that the
causes that generated the result Bloom deplores were philosophical
positivism and the relativism of sociology and cultural anthropology (1988:
xxx). Adler articulates an educational agenda of general education to make
a good life for oneself through the use of ones own mind, generated by
teaching that inculcates not only knowledge but mental skills, so that the mind
will grow to understand fundamental ideas and issues. Adlers agenda is
strikingly similar to that which Newman recommended for his Age.
Regarding the effect of the technological revolution on culture, Adler

writes that our ancestors were able to think more soundly about liberal
education because ... the wonders of technology had not created the religion
of science, with the consequent exaggeration of the place of scientific studies
in the curriculum (1988: 111). But Adler also introduces a religious
dimension, if not directly to education, then to life, when he identifies five
dimensions to life, the first four of which are on the purely natural plane:
sleep, work or labor, play, and leisure. Then Adler adds a fifth aspect that he
cannot fully account for on the purely natural plane. That fifth part I call rest
.... But I must then add immediately that, as I understand rest, its meaning
is supernatural. It is the sense in which God rested on the seventh day (1988:
98). This prompts Adler to conclude that religious education is the least
negligible part of education (1988: 177). Adlers insights lead one back to
consider one of Newmans major tenets --the role of theology in education.
George Marsden, author of numerous critiques of American education and
53
culture, contrasts Newmans Idea with our time, noting that Newman would
be alarmed by the dominance of technical and vocational education, with no
unifying idea, and especially the exclusion of theology ( 1 996: 302). Over the
past century, societal change impacted the role of religion in education: The
virtual exclusion of religious concerns from scholarship seemed a good way
to preserve equity and to help keep the peace . . . promoting what has become
a very strong rule about religion in intellectual life~any religious expression
is widely thought to be unscientific, unprofessional, and inappropriate
(Marsden 1996: 307).
But, Marsden asks, might there be a middle way? Religious views that
are intellectually responsible, supported by evidence, valid argument, and that
engage in civil scholarly dialogue should be encouraged as legitimate parts
of a pluralistic intellectual enterprise (Marsden 1996: 312). Marsden
believes that Newmans relevance in this area lives on: Perhaps the time has
come, then, to take up once again Newmans academic agenda, which
includes theological as well as other perspectives .... The essence of this
theologically oriented agenda should challenge people of the twenty-first
century seriously to reconsider some of their assumptions about education and
theology (1996: 317).
In The Decline of the Secular University, C. John Sommerville holds that

while American universities have grown increasingly secular, that trend runs
counter to that of American society (2006: 4). His thesis is that the secular
university is increasingly marginal to American society, as a result of
secularism, since the questions essential to the universitys mission, such as
the nature of the human being, how to assess religions in an age of
increasingly diverse contacts, and the distinction between fact and value, are
now too religious for it to deal with (Sommerville 2006:4). But perhaps
most notable is his call to critique secularism itself. Sommerville suggests
that the assumption of so much contemporary education secularism should
be subject to the same scrutiny that applies to all other disciplines, including
religion. Sommerville proposes expanding the universitys discourse to
include religion (2006: 5). He nowhere mentions Newman, thus providing
an independent perspective that just happens to agree with Newmans: The
universities have lost touch with important questions by their secularization
(Sommerville 2006: 9). Yet Sommerville sees reason for hope: Now we are
moving into a hermeneutic and personalist stage in which the task is to
explore human meanings, where religion may again be relevant .... We cant
54
even discuss the concepts of wealth, justice, sanity, truth, the human, and the
humane without finding their irreducibly religious dimensions (2006: 13,21).
Sommerville addresses two major problems at the heart of the

contemporary educational crisis: the concept of the human being and the
distinction between fact and value, is and ought. As to the first, he
identifies the contradiction at the heart of Peter Singers secularist philosophy
in Animal Rights and Human Obligations that there is no actual or con
crete difference for the moral gulf which is commonly thought to separate
animals and humans .... There seems to be no relevant characteristic that
human infants possess that adult mammals do not have to the same or a higher
degree (Sommerville 2006: 29). But as Sommerville points out: Only
humans feel the moral obligation in his title. So the animal rights movement
itself is evidence for the gulf between animals and humans that Singer says
does not exist .... It means that all animals are not equal (2006: 30). As to
the second aspect, many scholars are pointing out the surprising fact that . .
. facts themselves are value-laden .... The perception or definition of facts
depends on concepts, and concepts are always subject to criticism and
therefore to value judgment (Sommerville 2006: 41). Sommerville follows
Michael Polanyi regarding epistemologys religious dimension to support his
argument that the university could profit from religious voices (2006: 43).
For Polanyi, theology as a whole is an intricate study of momentous
problems. It is a theory of religious knowledge and a corresponding ontology
of the things thus known (1958: 135). Sommerville concludes that: In its
heyday, the fact / value dichotomy progressively narrowed the scope of the
universitys activities, hence a reversal of this decline requires the
readmission of silenced voices, in particular religion, to the discussion
(2006: 144).
Illustrative of this dilemma is the dialogue of Oxfordians Keith Ward and
the neo-Darwinian biologist and atheist Richard Dawkins. Ward rejects
Dawkins thesis made popular by his The Selfish Gene (1978). Ward holds
that most of the evidence from evolutionary biology that Dawkins so
brilliantly presents actually points in the direction of purpose and a built-in
tendency towards the realisation of value in the cosmos .... The theory of
evolution is not in opposition to religious claims. On the contrary, it presents
a new and exciting vision of the way in which the purposes of a divine creator
are worked out in the cosmos (1996: 187-88).
55
Wards note of vision recalls the theme of aesthetic insight. Ward

offers a specific conceptualization of that vision, different from that of the
traditional metaphors of Darwinism such as battle, struggle, and survival of
the fittest that stand in stark contrast to a theistic vision of the world ( 1 996:
86). Ward draws on the insights of Darwin himself, who, in his less known
writings, provides evidence that he also held another perspective: How
infinitely complex and close-fitting are the mutual relations of all organic
beings (1996: 87). Ward sees this and other similar statements by Darwin as
grounds to support a different view of the evolutionary process as one destined
to continue in ways that increase beauty, harmony, and complexity without
limit. As Darwin reflected: I can see no limit to the amount of change, to the
beauty and infinite complexity of the coadaptations between all organic
beings (cited in Ward 1996: 87). Wards major contribution lies in how all
this applies to intellectual method: Commitment to experimental method is
in itself entirely commendable. But when it begins to exclude every other
understanding of truth, one may suspect that it will result in a radically
Theism . . . carries with it the
impoverished view of reality as a whole
belief that aesthetic, ethical, personal and relational aspects of experience
provide distinctive paths to truth (1996: 101).
.....
CONCLUSION
So what, then, of the role of religion in education, and in particular,

Newmans view of that role? John P. Hittinger confirms the relevance of
Newman s case for the interdisciplinary value of theology. Hittinger observes
that students today exhibit the effects of the fragmentation of knowledge, in
that experienced and jaded beyond their years by multicultural ism, gender
and gay studies or the latest deconstructive sport of their professors ....
They have no center; they cannot even begin to recollect and trace the lines of
the great circle of knowledge, which Newman sees as the great joy of liberal
arts education. This in part because Newman thinks theology lies near that
center (1999: 66). The educational crisis today extends, according to
Hittinger, to a failure of the judgmental faculty. The ultimate importance of
Newmans case rests on his definition of theology as the Science of God, on
the truths we know about God put into a system (1982: 46). This is the
explicit content of the monotheistic tradition. In brief, at the center of
Newmans argument is his understanding of the nature and function of God:
Hittinger identifies one of Newmans major contributions as providing an
inescapable rationality to belief, expressed in a fitting one sentence
56
summary by Newman: Religious Truth is not only a portion, but a condition

of general knowledge(1999: 67). Hittinger concludes that: It is Newman's
case for theology that undergirds his argument for liberal education as an end
in itself (1999: 61).
Two of Hittinger s recommendations to address the current crisis apply

to this essay. First, theology must be revived, including its historical context.
Second, openness to mystery and the use of models in science and religion can
add to interdisciplinary learning. But this implies a willingness to be open to
changes in methodological and philosophical assumptions regarding know
ledge. Marsden also proposes two strategies to address these issues. The first
is an active campaign seeking the consistent application of pluralism.
Marsden points out that, since the 1960s, the relativists have become the new
normativists who want to eliminate from academia those who do not broadly
share their outlook (1992: 38). A pragmatic broader pluralism is the only
live option by which Christian and other religious traditions can re-enter the
conversation. Marsden s second option is to go outside the entire system by
creating distinctly Christian institutions.
A fitting conclusion might draw on the insight of Newman scholar Louis
Bouyer, who comments on a passage from the Idea in which Newman
underlines the fact that there are different practical approaches to reality, but
some may be more englobling than others, and this appears to be the case,
eminently, for an authentic religious view of the world, compared to either a
scientific or merely philosophical approach (1988: 172). Bouyer laments that
we have not come close to grasping the importance of such considerations,
or even more, from having drawn all the implications of such views for our
present cultural situation (1988: 1 73). Newmans work, though embedded in
a given historical context, transcends that context due to its enduring
philosophy of mind, while his theological analyses are timeless as well.
REFERENCES:
Adler, Mortimer. 1988. Reforming Education: TheOpeningof the American Mind.
New York: Macmillan.
Bloom, Allan. 1987. The Closing of the American Mind. New York: Simon &
Schuster.
Bouyer, Louis. 1988. The Permanent Relevance of Newman. In Newman Today,
ed. Stanley Jaki. San Francisco, CA: Ignatius Press: 165-74.
57
Culler, A. Dwight. 1955. The Imperial Intellect. New Haven, CT: Yale University
Press.
Dawkins, Richard. 1978. The Selfish Gene. London: Granada.
Dulles, Avery Cardinal, S.J. 2002. Newman. New York: Continuum.
Einstein, Albert. 2011. Out of My Later Years. New York: Open Road Integrated
Media..
Hittinger, John P. 1999. Newman, Theology and the Crisis in Liberal Education.
Journal of Interdisciplinary Studies XI (1/2): 61-82.
XVI. 2008. Letter of His Holiness Benedict XVI to the Faithful of
Benedict
Pope
the Diocese and City of Rome on the Urgent Task of Educating Young People
(2 1 January). Englewood, CO: Catholic News Agency.
. 2009. Address to Catholic Educators at the Catholic University of America
(17 April 2008). Manassas, VA: Center for the Study of Catholic Higher
Education.
Ker, Ian. 1988. John Henry Newman: A Biography. New York: Oxford University
Press.
Lonergan, Bernard. 1990. Method in Theology. Toronto: University of Toronto
Press.
Marsden, George M. & Bradley J. Longfield, eds. 1992. The Secularization of the
Academy. New York: Oxford University Press.
Newman, John Henry. 1957. Autobiographical Writings. New York: Sheed &
Ward.
. 1973. The Letters and Diaries of John Henry Newman. Eds. Charles S.
Dessain & Thomas Gomall. Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press.
. 1982. The Idea of a University. Ed. Martin Svaglic. Notre Dame, IN: Notre
Dame Press.
Polanyi, Michael. 1958. Personal Knowledge: Towards a Post-Critical Philosophy.
London: Routledge.
Popper, Karl R. 1963. Conjectures and Refutations. London: Routledge & Keagan
Paul.
Regan, Tom & Peter Singer, eds. 1989. Animal Rights and Human Obligations.
2nd ed. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall.
Sommerville, C. John. 2006. The Decline of the Secular University. Oxford, UK:
Oxford University Press.
Ward, Keith. 1996. God, Chance and Necessity. Oxford: Oneworld.
Robert C. Christie teaches philosophy and religion at DeVry University, 630

US Highway One, North Brunswick, NJ 08902.
Practical theology and postmodern religious education

O'Brien, Maureen R
Religious Education; Summer 1999; 94, 3; ProQuest
pg. 313
PRACTICAL THEOLOGY AND POSTMODERN

RELIGIOUS EDUCATION
Maureen R. OBrien
Duquesne Un i versity
Abstract
This article gives an overview of practical theology as an emerging
paradigm, and discusses problems and possibilities in using the para
digm for religious education of Generation X in a postmodern con
text. The article posits that a postmodern sensibility does not imply
the cognitive capacity for a truly postmodern style of meaning-making.
Drawing on Robert Kegan and the authors teaching experience with
young adults, the article raises the caution that Generation X may
not be prepared developmentally for postmodern educational ap
proaches. Possibilities for using practical theological elements such as
story, playfulness, and making connections are raised in relation to
this age-group.
INTRODUCTION
Recently I taught a small undergraduate section on The Church,

with a focus on eeclesiology as expressed in key documents of the
Second Vatican Council. The students were mostly of traditional col
lege age, in their third or fourth year of undergraduate studies. Ten
out of twelve were white. Some were taking the course only to fulfill
a distribution requirement. Others were clearly interested in the
subject. We were discussing a Vatican II document, Lumen Gentium
(Dogmatic Constitution on the Church), in which nuanced statements
are made about how the church is in close relationship with the reign
of God, yet the two are not coterminous. The document also states how
the definitive news of salvation is announced by Christ and his church,
while noting that Gods presence may still be glimpsed in other faiths
and, indeed, in all times and places. I had introduced this reading as
part of the ongoing dialogue of Christian tradition with individual and
communal experience in diverse cultures throughout history. AnticiReligious Education
Vol 94
No 3 Summer 1999
313
314
PRACTICAL THEOLOGY, POSTMODERN RELIGIOUS EDUCATION
pating that my students would be typical" young adultsspiritually

engaged yet anti-institutional I had expected either a ho-hum reac
tion (Why work so hard at setting up this complex argument when all
that matters is personal faith?) or a ready acceptance of the docu
ments paradoxical quality as it affirmed traditional teachings while
facing new realities.
Instead, I found that several students were passionately responsive
to the topic and critical of the nuances. Simon steadfastly maintained
that Christ was the way, the truth, and the life as scripture attested,
and that no one who did not confess him could be saved. Others, with
more theology courses in their background, were strongly committed
to a narrow interpretation of Christian belief in Jesus as the only way
to salvation. Mark, alter several days of discussion on the two mes
sages presented in Lumen Gentium, turned to me and asked help
lessly, But which one is right?
Another student, Peter, who is majoring in theology, came to see
me about the question. A faithful Catholic, he has traveled and min
istered with evangelical Christian student-athletes. While well-read
in Catholic apologetics, he finds himself uncomfortable with the stri
dency of his friends approach and yearns to be able to present a clear
response to their assertions regarding the true church. I wasnt
born when the council happened, he said, but I feel more like a
pre Vatican II Catholic than post Vatican II. I'd rather have things
cut-and-dried. Since I cant have that, I want to study what Lumen
Gentium retilly says about this question, and how' it compares with
prior church teachings.
Encounters such as these shape the questions I bring to this essay.
My approach to teaching is firmly grounded in the pedagogy
of practical theology. Thomas Groomes shared praxis method (1980,
1991) and Don Brownings fundamental practical theology (1991a,
1991b) have particularly influenced me. Until recently I have taught
adult ministry students, mostly in their thirties and beyond, with
substantial experience in life in general and ministry in particular.
They had embraced the practical pedagogy'. Why didnt my under
graduates?
In this essay I will explore the nature of practical theology and the
problems and possibilities of using its approaches for the religious
education of todays young adults (Generation X) in a postmodern con
text. My own experience a beginning point for practical theology'
suggests that the description of young adults today as uniformly post-
MAUREEN R. O'BRIEN
315
modem is not adequate. Young adults may well name their own out
look as postmodern. However, such a self-designation does not nec
essarily point to the habit, or even the capacity, for ordering ones
world in a postmodern wav. The possible discrepancy between cultural
expression and expectation and ones own stance within culture pro
vides both opportunities and significant challenges for religious edu
cation.
After a brief overview of practical theology' and of contemporary

attempts to respond to the spiritual needs of young adults, I will ex
amine the question of whether living in a postmodern culture auto
matically results in a postmodern generation, and raise objections to
an uncritical equating of the two. drawing in particular on Robert
Kegans In Over Our Heads (1994). I will incorporate anecdotal infor
mation from my teaching of young adults in a university setting, not to
suggest that my impressions of students are normative for the broader
population of Generation X, but simply as a counterpoint to sweeping
generalizations about this age cohort. Finally, I will suggest possibili
ties and limitations in the use of a practical-theology method with this
age-group in this culture.
PRACTICAL THEOLOGY AND ITS PREVALENCE
AS A MODEL
Practical theology (the term pastoral theology is also used, although

sources and methods vary somewhat between the two) is a form widely
used in the education of future scholars and ministers in university and
seminary settings. The term carries a rich history' of shifting meanings
in both North America and Western Europe. In the recent past it
was commonly associated with the application of theory' to practice,
assuming a one-way transmission of knowledge from the traditional
branches of theology' to students, who would then apply it in their
ministry. Related to this notion was the use of the term to distinguish a
cluster of applied, skill-related areas of ministerial study7: counsel
ing, eatechesis, preaching, and so on (see Maddox 1990. 656-59; Holifield 199S; Imbelli and Groome 1992, 128-29).
Today, however, practical theology is widely recognized as an
emerging approach to the enterprise of theological reflection. In this
sense it follows closely in the trajectory of a praxis-based mode of
religious education, often rooted in Freirean and liberation pedago
gies and now used extensively in congregational and other communal
316
PRACTICAL THEOLOGY. POSTMODERN RELIGIOUS EDUCATION
settings (see Groome 1980, 1991; Evans, Evans, and Kennedy 1987).
It is increasingly framed as a hermeneutical conversation" between
interpretations of tradition and interpretations of culture for the sake
of transformation, following Tracy (1985; also see Lee 1998; Veling
1998). A professional organization called the Association of Graduate
Programs in Ministry includes the following in its mission statement:
The Association of Graduate Programs in Ministry supports the
emergence of a new theological paradigm in graduate education for
ministry. This theology, common lv referred to as practical or pastoral
theology, is a mutually interpretive, critical and transforming con
versation between the Christian tradition and contemporary experi
ence. ... [It] takes place in a community of faith, implies a spirituality
that is both personal and liturgical, and is directed towards individual
and social transformation in Christ. (1992)
Practical theology generally involves a beginning descriptive and ana

lytical phase in relation to individual or communal practice: the formu
lation of a hypothesis to explain the situation; a plumbing of the situ
ation for elements of the normative religious tradition; an articulation
of a new understanding of the practice; and recommendations for
its transformation (Dingemans 1995, 92 -93 i . While considering the
interpretive community to be in some sense "church though this
can include a variety of ecelesial forms, such as small intentional faith
communitiesit promotes a communal breadth of inquiry that em
braces the needs of the world as well as the church (Browning 1991b,
296, 308). Its hermeneutically based, interdisciplinary, experientially
grounded approach lends itself well to educating adults who will bring
the resources of their faith traditions into ongoing dialogue and action
with the issues of our world. It is concerned for both the authentic
appropriation of the communal religious story and the development
of strategic commitment and action in service of the common good.
While in some sense every person of faith is called to be a "pastoral
theologian, engaged in ongoing theological reflection, there is a vital
role for those trained pastoral theologians who can mediate a deep
level of understanding of the tradition in the academy and the congre
gation (Imbelli and Groome 1992, 137).
In my own descriptions of the method ol practical theologv, I
continually use the adjective disciplined to describe the quality of
the conversation. What does this mean? First, it implies the commit
ment to keeping all the necessary partners in the conversation, al-
MAUREEN R. O'BRIEN
317
though their "voices may be more or less crucial at various points. All
individuals and communities with a stake in the outcome of the con
versation must be included, along with key prior interpretations of
central texts from the tradition, the pivotal experiences of the partici
pants both within and outside the communitys experience, and the
cultural situatedness of all participants. Second, participants are regu
larly called to pause in their conversation and to take note of its pro
gress, of voices heard and not heard, of possibilities being opened and
pathways being closed an exercise which we can frame cognitively as
thinking about our thinking and spiritually as a prayerful discern
ment process. Third, the conversations discipline is a mark of our diseipleship: the followers ol fesus remain faithful through keeping the
faith tradition as a privileged (Whitehead and Whitehead 1995) or
normative (Dingemans 1995, 92) conversation partner and through
ongoing attention to its resonance in our experiences and practices.
Finally, grace is assumed to be active in the process, causing insights to
be woven together in new. transformative, and accountable ways more
fully in tune with the reign of God (Barry 1990).
While its roots are in modernism, especially as part of the semi
nary curriculum, practical theology in its emerging forms is compat
ible with aspects of postmodernism. Chopp and Taylor point to kev
discursive shifts affecting contemporary theology: ( 1.) from melting
pot as the American ideal, to collage as a more adequate wav to ex
press the relationship of diverse groups ol people; (2) the emergence
of crisis language, leading both to denouncement of suffering and
injustice, and the announcement" of new ways to address the crisis;
(3) a postmodern cultural shift, generally associated with a new aes
thetic sense focusing on diversity (collage itself is a popular post
modern term); a questioning ol the abstract ideas ot liberal human
ism; and a foregrounding of values of ambiguity, fragmentation, and
openness (Chopp and Taylor 1994, 6). Rather than the deconstruc
tion advocated by some postmodernists, however, thev urge a recon
struction of theology through altering and reformulating theology's
own resources of symbol and doctrine (20).
Thus, in its customary openness to a hermeneutical process of
theological reconstruction within the complexity ot multiple, shifting
standpoints in a multicultural and pluralistic w orld, its concern for the
impact of gender, power, and race on traditional theological methods,
and its passion for transformation, practical theology has a postmod-
318
ern character. It distances itself from some secular postmodernist

approaches, however, in crucial wavs. Practical theologians are con
vinced that meaning is likely to result from sustained, interpretive re
flection, rather than subscribing to the meaninglessness inherent in
some postmodernist approaches. While rejecting an uncritical em
brace of all diverse viewpoints in a fragmented world, practical the
ology continues the search for insight that is infused with practical
wisdom (Groome 1991; Veling 1998; Lee 1998; Daloz et al. 1996) even
if this is not named the truth. While not systematic in the standard
sense of treating all theological topics comprehensively and in hier
archical order, practical theology is vitally concerned with making
a sense of the world that is holistic and healing. Maddox argues that
practical theology7 should attend primarily not to comprehensive
system building, but to teasing out the community's orienting con
cerns as derived from its central stories, with an eye to those stories
that speak most clearly to the present situationan approach compat
ible with postmodernism (1990, 670-72).
If todays young adults are themselves also postmodern in their
cultural formation and personal commitments, there should be natu
ral congruence in using a practical-theology7 approach in their religious
education. Let us turn to current understandings of Generation X in
order to engage this hypothesis.
POSTMODERNISM AND THE EXPERIENCE
OF YOUNG ADULTS
Older adults observations of Generation X are particularly dark

in some cases, and lean toward the deconstructionist perspective of
postmodern philosophy and art. Feeney describes college students he

has taught who are wounded in their postmodernism, evidencing a
sense of exhaustion, a loss of feeling and meaning, minimal expec
tations and hopes, and a desire to parody everything (1997, 13). He
cites essay responses by his students in which they characterize their
worldview; for example, one young woman writes:
Everything lias to be taken for what it ischance. Life has to be
viewed from a certain distance, or seriousness will set in and kill all
the fun. Life is meant to he lively. . . . No matter what methods are
employed, no reason can be found in the world. This is a comic state.
(Feeney 1997, 15)
MAUREEN R. O BRIEN
3] 9
Feeney advocates a healing role for adult mentors, who can offer the
fruits of humanistic education as a coherent worldview for these suf
ferers.
Others take a more broad-based and hopeful view of the inner po
tential of voung adults to connect with faith communities and to in
vigorate their own religious commitments. Two contemporary books,
one expressing a Catholic and the other an evangelical Protestant per
spective (Ludwig 1995; Long 1997). examine the role of faith in the
postmodern lives ol young adults, and attempt a viable reconstruc
tion of their respective Christian traditions to reach this population.
Thev identify similar forces affecting Generation X: widespread di
vorce; the experience of following behind the dominant baby boom
ers; the rejection of, or at least decreased emphasis on, organized reli
gion; uncertain economic prospects; the dominance of consumerism
and niche marketing; cynicism regarding institutions; decline in reli
gious literacy; environmental degradation; and an overall loss of hope
in the future. They situate these factors within the emerging paradigm
of postmodernity, thus presenting the particular need of Generation X
as a harbinger of ongoing postmodern realities and of the needs of
generations to come.
These authors decry the polarization and ideological struggles that
too often dominate the identities of established churches, and urge at
tention to the ways these conflicts alienate young people. At the same
time, thev point to deep spiritual hunger, passion for service, and com
mitment to community (often experienced as one's peer group) as
hopeful signs in this age cohort. They urge adult mentors to recon
struct Catholicism or to generate hope through an evangelical mes
sage for this generation in ways that honor young adults unique expe
rience and yearning. These approaches could readily be characterized
as expressive of practical theology in their description and analysis of
the contemporary scene, in their mining of the tradition for evocative
narratives, and in their strategic goals of bringing young adults back to
their foundational faith. The approaches' orienting concerns" include
Jesus, the constant availability of grace, identity as adopted children
of God and. especially, community as the context for hope and possi
bility.
This brief overview suggests that practical theology as a construc

tive, conversational, communal, disciplined activity has much to offer
voung adults. However, there are significant cautions against simply
320
transferring its method from present congregational and higheredncation settings to the religions education of Generation X in a post
modern context. In the next section I raise some questions about the
approach, followed by suggestions of possibilities.
DISCREPANCIES
Besides the course on "The Church mentioned in my introduc

I am also teaching a large "core class on theological anthropol
ogy. "Christian Understanding of the Human Person. The students
are almost all freshmen and sophomores, all white. For many of them,
this will be their only theology' course during undergraduate studies.
I continually use some version of practical theology in teaching
this course, incorporating description and analysis of common experi
ences of the young adults themselves as students at the same univer
sity, as a peer group, or as participants in popular cultureto engage
them with theological themes such as human freedom, the search for
God, the experience of grace and revelation, and patterns of prayer
and ritual. While taking care not to proselytize (even in a Catholic uni
versity!), I stress my goal that the course should offer important
resources tor self-exploration and for making sense of their world, thus
encouraging their transformed and self-aware engagement in life. We
recently discussed in class the meaning of the adage, Live life to the
fullest a disposition with which they all agreed and compared it
tion,
the ministry of Jesus. I continually try to make reference to the

complex issues and decisions of their lives and to elicit a conversation
between their experience, critically reflected upon, and the theologi
cal themes we study.
It works, to a degree. Cultural themes as glimpsed in movies like
Armageddon and events such as the death of Princess Diana are inter
esting to them. They move with me from these analytical exercises to
consider the key theological concepts for that class session. Hoyvever,
they typically have great difficulty making insightful connections from
the concepts back to the cultural themes, and resist complexity7 in this
process. The resistance is motivated, in part, by their desire for clear
definitions and notes that they can use in studying for exams. Hoyv
ever, as in mv church course, they are often either uncomfortable yvith
historically grounded consideration of sacred texts (Hoyv can the
Genesis creation story be just a myth?), or they discard the possi-
yvith
MAUREEN R. O'BRIEN
321
bilitv of meaningfulness with the adoption of hermeneutics ( "If it's all

just hermeneutics, then why read the Bible at all?' ).
I have therefore begun to distinguish the experience of life in a
postmodern culture from a true postmodern capacity in these voung
people. Thee have the first, but seem to lack the second, or at least thev
show an inconsistency in appropriating it. For example, I distributed
a survey with a list of statements with which thev were to agree or
disagree. Included in the survey was the quote from Feeneys student,
cited above. Of thirty students who responded to this section of the
survey, sixteen agreed with the quote. However, thirteen of the same
students also agreed with the following statement: The world is basi
cally good, and we can look for goodness and help it to grow through
the wav we live every day hardly a postmodern perspective fo
cused on meaninglessness and chance. Further, almost all agreed with
statements that God exists and is active in the world, and that we
can experience God in everyday life. When asked to rank the major
factors leading to their viewpoints, the top three cited were cir
cumstances and events in my own life, circumstances and events in
mv familys life, and an inner eonviction/faith. What my religion
teaches me was cited by very few as a significant factor. While hardly
a broad sample, mv class at least raises cautions for me about gener
alizations that refer to a widespread loss of conventional Christian
belief, the prevalence of deep cynicism and ironv, and so on within
Generation X.
While these students outlooks may be more optimistic and their

spirituality more vibrant than anticipated, there remains the question
of how to understand their sensibilities, if not as postmodern. Draw
ing on the terminology of Jack Mezirow, one can ask about their hab
its of expectation, the structure of assumptions which thev bring to
interpretation of their experience ( 1990, 2). If' both these habits and
tbe culture in which they live are disjointed and somewhat ambiguous,
does that really mean that these voung adults themselves are post
modern? Or have they not yet achieved a modern and adult ability
to reflect on relationships, abstractions, paradoxes, and their own selfconsciousness?
The work of Robert Kegan supports the latter possibility. In Over
Our Heads (1994) builds on Kegan s earlier work in The Evolving Self
(1982) in distinguishing orders of consciousness as principles of
mental organization, each permitting the self to reflect on the elements
322
that constituted the self at preceding orders. Kegans third order rep
resents (or him a traditional or pre-modern way of thinking. It in
cludes the expectation we have of adolescents that they become so
cialized into a community as full participants, owning its values and
abiding by its norms. Such a third-order self is constituted by abstrac
tions, mutuality, and inner states of self-consciousness; but it is only at
the fourth order that he or she can reflect upon these qualities. At that
point the self is constituted by a more complex network of abstract
systems, institutions, and self-authorship, but cannot reflect on these.
Kegan sees the fourth order as the modern level of cognitive func
tioning, and maintains that it is the normative expectation for adults in
our society. Demands that workers be continually engaged in setting
their own goals on the job; that adult students be self-directed learn
ers, able to evaluate critically the fruits of their learning and deter
mine their own educational course; that couples construct their re
lationship with the awareness that neither partner is constituted by
the others experience of him or her, thus freeing themselves from
needing to please the other all of these are fourth-order stipula
tions. They constitute the dominant curriculum and challenge of con
temporary life.1
For my students, fourth-order thinking might be shown by the
ability to explain and justify both their own perspective and the per
spective of another. This would illustrate their capacity to reflect on
abstractions and to appreciate diversity-', valuing the wholeness of the
others viewpoint while not necessarily agreeing with it.
Additionally, however, Kegan glimpses a fifth order emerging in
our society that he terms postmodern." Attained by only a few adults,
this dimension allows one to reflect on all systems, including self-assystem, and consequently to recognize them as incomplete rather than
fully formed. The fifth-order subject is cognitively transideologieal,
with a sense of selfhood characterized by interpenetration with other
selves. For a married couple, he illustrates, this could take the form
not only of acknowledging the dominant differences between myself
and my spouse, but in fact being able to perceive both myself and my
spouse as incomplete systems, each possessing characteristics of the
other (1994, 307-34). Kegan warns that people operating in the fifth
order tend to be highly educated, privileged elitestypically college
professors!and in their postmodern enthusiasm they tend to ask for
1
See Kegan s summary of these expectations ( 1994, 302-3).
MAUREEN R. O'BRIEN
323
the same capacities in their students. Misattributing the nature of

peoples mental challenges jeopardizes our capacity to receive the
actual people we would hope to support. Misattributing the nature of
the real mental transformations people are seeking makes us good
company for the wrong journey (1994, 336-37). lie argues that the
main curriculum for adult life should he the modem/fourth-order cur
riculum, as it represents the primary cultural demand at that point in
life. In education, this means focusing on the development of critical
thinking and self-directed learning in particular.
If we revisit the students I described earlier, Kegans caution seems
well-placed. These young women and men are in many cases strug
gling to achieve, or perhaps even resisting, arrival in the fourth order.
Peter seems to be acknowledging the need to attain this capacity, al
though with reluctance. Mark is not able to comprehend that ab
stractions such as the churchs varied teachings on salvation can coexist
in tension with one another, and so is clearly disturbed by a fourthorder approach. My students in "Christian Understanding of the
Human Person seem to incorporate some postmodern tendencies in
the cultural sense without seriously engaging ambiguity and inconsis
tency of viewpoints, either their own or others. Thus they appear to
be far from a postmodern order of consciousness in Kegans sense.
They are novices in the project of adulthood described by Parks as
a way of making meaning. To be an adult is (1) to be aware of ones
own composing of reality; (2) to participate self-consciously in an on
going dialogue toward truth; and (3) to be able to sustain a capacity
to respond to take responsibility for seeing and reweaving (in the
ones every day) a fitting pattern of relationships between

the disparate elements of self and world (1986, 6). These are fourthorder tasks. Thus a practical-theology method, which older adults are
able to use in ways approaching fifth-order, may be "over the heads of
activity of
these younger students.

Furthermore, the open-ended, even messy, quality of theologi
cal reflection in a practical mode is uncomfortable for students in this
university setting. In their concern for getting clear definitions of key
terms and determining what will be on exams, and thus what they are
responsible for, they seek to close off ambiguity and center them
selves on a clear base of received knowledge (Belenky et al. 1986).
This is not a new problem for college professors, especially in teaching
younger students. However, the gap between this attitude and the am
biguity and fragmentation of students postmodern lives becomes ever
324
PRACTICAL THEOLOGY, POSTMODERN' RELIGIOUS EDUCATION
wider in our society. Perhaps students are seeking to major in skilloriented fields rather than the liberal arts in part to avoid taking on
these thorny questions, besides expecting that they will get higher
paving jobs as a result. Additionally, their cultural immersion in post
modern ambiguity and disconnection may exhaust them to the point
of fleeing for safety to uncritical, rote learning and thinking.
Despite these limitations, I believe there are elements of practical
theology- that can be employed in an open-ended way to sponsor
young adults in confronting the issues of their lives, even with the dif
ferences in their capacities vis-a-vis postmodernism.
POSSIBILITIES
A key- strength and attraction of practical theology- lies in its sense
of story. Rather than focusing primarily on doctrines when invoking
the tradition, participants engage the central stories of the faith com
munity with the stories of their own lives. In teaching undergradu
ates, I have frequently used a diagram of the intersection of personal
story and communal story as constituting an individuals unique
way ol faithfully searching for ultimate meaning. By liberally using key
orienting narratives in practical theology7, educators not only in
crease the imaginative reservoir available to students in their move
ment toward fourth-order self-construction, but also engage them in
more appealing conversations. Boundaries for the use of story are pro
vided through the disciplined engagement of conversation partners
and through the perspective of phronesis, drawing on Lee's sense of
phronetic theology as a form of theology- whose appropriateness de
rives from discipleship to Jesus Christ who proclaims and begins to
actualize the reign of God among us, and which constitutes a spiritu
ally- charged form of eeclesial life (1998, 5). Whether or not students
actually profess Christianity-, they can learn how boundaries shape re
sponsible conversation within its understandings.
A further strength is found in practical theology 's sense of play as
an activity- that is not merely ironic or parodic, but yvhieh imaginatively
and flexibly seeks neyv insights even in the midst of frustrating ambi
guities (Veling 1998, 206-7). Students can be encouraged to see Wis
dom itself at play in revealing Cods presence, and can learn to value
the aesthetic quality of skillful theological play as yy-ell as simply find
ing it enjoyable.
As one y-ehiele for heightening cognitive capacities, practical the
ology also has a pragmatic value to young adults. The skills Kegan
MALI REEK R. OBRIEN
325
names as essential for adult life in the "modern world are nurtured
through practical theological reflection that is self-directed toward in

novative action helpful for those aspiring to successful careers. In
addition, these heightened capacities may enhance the quality of life
overall. As Mezirow states unequivocally:
More inclusive, discriminating, permeable, and integrative perspec
tives arc superior perspectives that adults choose if the\ can because
they are motivated to better understand the meaning of their experi
ence. Meaning perspectives that permit us to deal with a broader
range of experience, to be more discriminating, to be more open
to other perspectives, and to better integrate our experiences are su
perior perspectives. (1990. 14; emphasis in original)
While guarding against elitism, we can nevertheless propose that

students will be happier the number-one personal goal cited bv
my Christian Understanding students if they develop such per
spectives in coping with posti nodemitv and change their practices as a
result.
Practical theology' explicitly begins in the experience of conver
sation partners. While young adul ts have less of this experience than
baby boomers, the experience has been more intense in its pace and
increasing complexity than that of older people, and provides a rich
educational resource. Young adults probably lack adequate knowledge
and experiential bases in the core orienting metaphors of faith com
munities, howeverreligious illiteracy is a realityand so the norma
tive phase of practical theology may require more intentional pre
sentation of central religious themes, rather than relying on the young
adults to draw these forth themselves.
Making connections, even more than critical thinking, is inte
gral to practical theology and provides a hope-filled approach for
young adults. If the educational goal is a level of personal integration
that can shape lifestyle, rather than systematic mastery of a theo
logical subject, the focus shif ts to wholeness, healing, and community
rather than academic success. As a teacher I try continually to evoke
students integrative responses to the theme under discussion, and to
hold up each persons response as potentially insightful for all. Grades
still loom large on the students horizon, but I hope that the horizon
has been widened.
Practical theology can name the spiritual hungers of young adults
as fundamentally a quest for truth, reconceived for postmodernity.
Chopp and Taylor cite the authors in their collection as showing Chris
tian thinkers interests in presenting their claims as truth, according to
326
contemporary views of truth (1994, 12). Some students will continue

to be uncomfortable with this historically based understanding of
truth. If theological reflection is presented as permanently engaged in
conversation with culture and individual and group experience, how
ever, the search for truth becomes the disciples way of life and not an
abstract or futile exercise.
CONCLUSION
Kegan warns:
Whatever the virtues of the fifth order, no one should assign us the
postmodern curriculum until we are readv for it. Nor does anvone
do us a service bv assuming that we understand it when we do not
or are engaged in it when we are not. Those who understandable
champion its merits, and who disdain the limits of modernism, might
consider that before people can question the assumptions of whole
ness, completeness, and the priority of the self, they must first con
struct a whole, complete, and prior self. More people can be appro
priately challenged by the postmodern curriculum when there are
more people who have mastered the mental demands of modernism.
(1994,351)
When confronted with a diverse group of students, with more or

less constructed whole selves," the educational challenge is great.
However, the themes discussed in the preceding section of this
essaystory, play, integration, success, happiness, and hope can
all be presented in a fourth-order framework. Practical theology7 fre
quently operates at this level, even in its emerging concern for at
tending to diverse voices. We as a group, church, or community can
learn to appreciate another group as whole and complete and thus
worthy of respect, even if in disagreement with ourselves. At this level,
for example, my students in The Church might be able to cultivate
ecumenical and interreligious openness through valuing the integrity
of other faiths (a fourth-order skill), even without a postmodern at
tempt to confront the ambiguity7 and lack of wholeness within the
other and our own tradition (fifth order).
In conclusion, I wonder whether a more adequate orienting con
cern for practical theology7 with young adults may be integration,
rather than the reconstruction advocated by some authors. The latter
implies an older generations need to put back together what it has
taken apart. Young adults, however, have inherited a deconstructed
MAUREEN R O BRIEN
327
world without a lived memory of the old structure. Their task is that of
the basket weaver, gleaning straw from the fields previously harvested
and playfully fashioning whole, unique, and beautiful creations. With
out taking the task too seriously.
toral
Maureen R. O'Brien is Assistant Professor of Theology and Director of Pas

Ministry at Duquesne University in Pittsburgh.
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Association of Graduate Programs in Ministry. 1992. Informational brochure.
Bam; W. A. 1990. Faying attention to God: Discernment in prayer. Notre Dame, Ind.: Ave
Maria Press.
Belenkv. M. K., et al. 1986. Women 's ways of knowing: The development of self, voice, and
mind. New York: Basic Books.
Browning, D. S. 1991a. A fundamental practical theology: Descriptive and strategic pro
posals. Minneapolis: Fortress Press.

-. 1991b. Toward a fundamental and strategic practical theologv. Pp. 295-328 in
Shifting boundaries: Contextual approaches to the structure of theological education,
edited bv B.G. Wheeler and E. Farley. Louisville: Westminster/ John Knox Press.
Chopp, R. S., and M. L. Taylor. 1994. Reconstructing Christian theology. Minneapolis:
Fortress Press.
Daloz, L. P.. (4 al. 1996. Commot i fire: Lives of commitment in a complex world. Boston:
Beacon Press.
Dingemans. G. D. J. 1995. Practical theology in the academy: A con temporary overview.
Journal of Religion 75 (3): 82-96.
Evans, A. F., R. Evans, and W. B. Kennedy. 1987. Pedagogies for the non-poor. Marvknoll,
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Feenev, |. 1997. Can a worldview be healed? Students and postmodernism. America 177
(15): 12-16.
Groome, T. H. 1980. Christian religious education: Sharing our story and vision. San
F ra n ci sco: Harper a n d R ow.
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Holifield, F. B. 1998. The practicality of theology in America. Audiotape of a lecture pre
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Imbelli, R. P., and T. II. Groome. 1992. Signposts towards a pastoral theology. Theological
Studies 53:127-37.
Kegan. R. 1982. The evoking self Problem and process in human development. Cam
bridge: Harvard University Press.
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Lee, B. 1998. Practical theology as phronetie: A working paper from/ for those in ministry
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Long, J. 1997. Generating hope: A strategy for reaching the postmodern generation.
Downers Grove, 111.: InterVarsity Press.
Ludwig, R.A. 1995. Reconstructing Catholicism: Fora new generation. New York: Cross
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THEOLOGY IN

Christian Higher Education, 6:143159

CONNECTION WITHOUT CONTROL: THEOLOGY AND

university should be able offer students the opportunity for a

Connection Without Control

without advocating any particular model. It should be noted that

lights. For the purposes of this paper, these quotations remind

Connection Without Control

I take her argument to point towards the incompleteness

Connection Without Control

that precludes consideration of the autobiographical perspectives

Connection Without Control

integration, but a much looser and less systematic exercise in

Connection Without Control

after some interdisciplinary discussion has taken place. My guess

6. Autonomy (rather than interdependence) as a major value

Connection Without Control

step back from many of the kinds of requirementin curriculum

What are the values on which your discipline is based? At what

He also provides examples of questions for particular disciplines,

These kinds of questions facilitate the development of a

Connection Without Control

Gasper includes the following three: there should be research

Connection Without Control

Journal of Philosophy of Education, Vol. 45, No. 3, 2011

Why Theology Can and Should be Taught

The ghost of the apartheid-aligned Christian National Education

Why Theology Can and Should be Taught at Secular Universities

Support for my suggestion comes from Charles Taylor (2004, p. 18). He

Contemporary philosophy however struggles to find any way through to

Why Theology Can and Should be Taught at Secular Universities

With this background we can get a first idea of what Lonergans

Why Theology Can and Should be Taught at Secular Universities

When a non-interiorly differentiated human person (non-converted)

We can clarify what is meant here by these remarks on objectivity. We can

Why Theology Can and Should be Taught at Secular Universities

perspective without remainder: thats the point of intellectual conversion,

I want now to link the admittedly abstract notion of conversion as we have

Why Theology Can and Should be Taught at Secular Universities

Still it is doctrine and its explanation in systematics that brings to a head

Why Theology Can and Should be Taught at Secular Universities

of theology within a religious studies department is to create a new

In summary, I have argued that theology can be taught within the

university impotent to challenge social structures which fail to enhance

Why Theology Can and Should be Taught at Secular Universities

r 2011 The Author

eternal in time, in Philosophical Fragmentsboth instances of an offence to (a less than

Why Theology Can and Should be Taught at Secular Universities

r 2011 The Author

Christian Higher Education, 2,1:4969 2003

Taylor &. Francis

RELIGIOUS STUDIES IN CHRISTIAN UNIVERSITIES

religious studies may identify itself as nonreligious or

Religious Studies/Theology in Asia

theological education cannot do its job properly if remaining

ological proposals. Given this difficulty, this paper attempts to

Religious Studies/Theology in Asia

Perhaps one may summarize the division of the three main

Religious Studies/Theology in Asia

similar to the phenomenological method advanced by Edmund

However, in view of the extensive similarities between Christianity

Religious Studies/Theology in Asia

compatible with religious studies. His concept of religion also

Religious Studies/Theology in Asia