Here is more provoked by O’Donovan’s move (see post below).
In every university in the UK administrators are making it difficult to do any academic theological work. But administrators don’t start out as administrators, but as academics, people excited by ideas. But those academics who do not care to explore the wonderful world of the Western intellectual tradition right back to its beginnings, are very likely to run out of ideas. Then they will lose interest in their subject, be attracted by anything that relieves of what they will then see as the burden of teaching, they will be drawn into preoccupation with syllabuses, examining and funding, and so be drawn into administration.
Those who search that long intellectual tradition will find there all sorts of ideas about what it is to be human and what humans have to hope for. Their wonder at the tradition will communicate itself through them. They will not run out of ideas, but will be happy to pass on the excitement they find there, and so they will find satisfaction in teaching and be content to remain academics.
Debate is the real business of the university. But debate costs a lot of nervous energy and the risk of public loss of face is high. It is easy to turn to administration and settle for the satisfactions of paperwork, the more social soul might well get enough satisfaction from rounds of meetings. Demanding paper trails, and complying with the demand for paper trails, is certainly easier than debate.
Administrators are there to serve the university and thus to serve the debate. But because administrators do not attend the seminars in which debate takes place they are never subject to that debate, in the way every academic is. They are not subject to the conflict of ideas or to the testing of those ideas. Debate – the imperative of setting out your ideas before your colleagues and having to defend them – is a very severe discipline. Administrators are those academics who can no longer face that discipline. They place themselves above it. They put themselves beyond the control of the university – that is the universe represented by the various disciples – and so become a separate and superior class, above the academics of the university, who are thereby demoted to the status of the producers of mere product.
The Humanities (literature, history, philosophy, sociology….etc) are that part of the university particularly concerned with what it is to be human, and what humans can do and can hope for. In the long term the health of the humanities is dependent on their staying in touch with the thought of all previous generations on what it is to be human. But it is always tempting for the Humanities to patronise previous generations, to think that they know the long tradition without having read it, or even to believe that they have surpassed all previous generations and no longer need to learn and cultivate that tradition. This temptation always puts the Humanities on the edge of a crisis. When they reach this crisis, produced by laziness or arrogance, they are tempted to believe that the crisis is particularly bad for that discipline most clearly associated with a long history and commitment to things that happened centuries back – Christian theology. But Christianity is very clear about the importance of looking back, faithfully, because it understands that our ability to look forward, hopefully, depends upon it. Christian theology has a very strong definition of what it is to be human and so has a very distinct message. Unlike any other discipline of the humanities, as long as theology listens to the gospel and continues to look back and forward, theology does not lose its way.
It is Christianity (along with Platonism) that is behind whatever agenda other humanities still faintly remember. It is the Humanities which are in crisis, not theology, and this crisis will continue as long as they deny that Christian theology and the ancient tradition of paideia (Plato) offer definitions of human being and what human being may aspire to. Humanities administrators project their crisis onto theology, by appointing to theology teaching positions those who are so poorly acquainted with the Christian theological tradition that they do not understand Christianity as a tradition of thought about how to be human, and a course of education in being human (on the definition revealed in the gospel).
Here is my point. In the UK we have such administrators appointing to theological positions people who have never learned, or learned to love, the Christian tradition of doctrine, and whose assumption that the Christian tradition is in crisis is never challenged by serious engagement with that tradition. These administrators – academics who themselves no longer have anything to teach – appoint to theological positions people like themselves, who pass on this myth of crisis on in their teaching.
I told you this blog is all about stating the blooming obvious.
