There are gains from theology entering the university rather than being the exclusive preserve of bishoprics or monasteries, such as greater freedom to speculate and explore, interaction with other disciplines, rigorous academic standards, to name but three. There are also potential losses. For instance, for at least the first thousand years of Christianity theology was understood to involve both a way of life (as with ancient philosophy) and prayer. Let us take the former first.
When theology is understood as serving God and the church then one of its aims must be to enable phronesis, practical wisdom, for its hearers/readers. In our contemporary setting priests and pastors (let’s not quibble about title at this point) should be reading theology and translating it into teaching accessible for their churches. Here it is important to note that the way we describe certain situations is, at least partly, constitutive of those situations. For instance, if I constantly overeat because I am addicted to cakes, it makes a difference whether I want to stop because I think it somehow base or bad or vulgar (not fully human) that I cannot control myself, or if I want to stop because I am preventing myself from attaining further pleasures or goods (by lowering my life expectancy or my ability to climb stairs, for instance). (I take this point and example from Charles Taylor Human Agency and Language). This is what Hauerwas means when he says theology and ethics are the same thing.
Our ‘self-interpretations are partly constitutive of our experience…certain modes of experience are not possible without certain self-descriptions’ (Taylor, Human, 37). Experiences and insights modify one another, the movement works both ways. If this is the case then belonging to a particular community, by which I mean a community that regularly physically gathers together and shares its life together (say, a church), will enable certain experiences and insights that are not otherwise available to us. For instance, I know someone who used to need to use my church’s food pantry but who now runs this food pantry and helps others. Or I’ve met asylum seekers from Iran, when we slept overnight in the church together in winter, who showed me a video of a hanging on their mobile phone they had taken to explain why they were seeking asylum. Or I know people who are poor and need our financial support from time to time. These connections are rendered stronger if I understand these people to be my brothers and sisters, the image and presence of the God I worship, if I cannot love that God without loving them practically. This broadens out to political and social questions, which is why liberation theology is so important. We should compare here the Hebrew prophets’ calls for justice so that religious ritual is not rendered a travesty.
So if my theology does not, at least sometimes and in some ways, help me deal with these particular situations and people, it is somehow failing. We could contrast this with working in a department of a university in which I have no obligations other than to be civil to my colleagues (though co-workers do not always follow these obligations). So although a professional theologian does have academic responsibilities to the academic community, it would be a mistake to think the academic community is one in the same sense as a gathered local church. The latter entails more relationships (of, if the church is a good one, greater racial and class diversity than is typical in university departments in Britain I suspect). It provides a form of life that enables certain insights otherwise not available. Such as feeling love for people you would not otherwise regard in that way.
As for prayer, it would be best to read St Symeon the New Theologian, Sarah Coakley, Rowan Williams and James Alison, but I’ll say something briefly. In contemplative prayer we go through a process of being changed, of having some of our idolatrous ideas about God challenged. “The experience of prayer is that of the gradual learning to rejoice in my induction by an entirely gentle, trustworthy power, into freedom from all my ways of being tied in to the place of shame, one by one, and discovering this as given to me as a ‘real me’ in a series of new desires for new projects which share the huge affection and gentleness towards others that I have found myself receiving.” (James Alison, On Being Liked, 144). When we know ourselves as loved by God unconditionally, we can begin to love others in the same way. This being known is a realisation of God’s constant loving regard towards us, and the ability to relax into it, to learn to accept that we are loved and liked; that we are being loved into being, both in existing and in who we are becoming as we learn to see ourselves as the object of this loving regard. This is not something we can understand in merely intellectual terms, but is a process of transformation of the self (one, incidentally, which is not experienced as caused by the self).
So prayer and belonging to a particular church community are practices that orient the theologian’s responsibilities towards God, the church in general, their own particular church, and the whole world really. I don’t think the university generates a similar orientation (not that the two are mutually exclusive) as Adam’s characterisation of theology as ‘intellectual masturbation’ suggests. Does this suggest a potential loss for theology if it moves exclusively into the university, that of self-centred play rather than an attempt to render truth and justice? That is not to say that any individual is selfish, only that a mode of theology might be.
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