Can the University and the Church save each other?

At least at present, the Church and the University need each other in order to regain their right minds. A Church which, in a phrase popular in the UK at the moment, is 'mission-shaped' (1) is drawn to an instrumental vision, in which all its learning--its learning of doctrine, of Scripture, of its own history--is filtered and processed until it becomes fuel for a practical purpose, and the disruptive strangeness of those sources is in danger of being hidden in the rush to use. The University can, despite its own battles with the instrumentalizing of study, remind the Church of that disruptive strangeness: it can even, at its best, point to the vital uselessness of God. The University, on the other hand, whilst pointing to this disruptive strangeness, has forgotten what is involved in living with it: it has forgotten (if it ever knew) that living with a fundamental openness to disruption is transformative, that it envelops and reshapes the whole person; it has forgotten that learning in the face of disruption is a spiritual discipline. Re-awoken to the disruptive strangeness of its sources (and of its Source), the Church in return can give what the University has rediscovered a name, and with the name a doorway into traditions of hard-won wisdom about the demands and possibilities of learning. If the University can save the Church, the Church might also save the University.

These are abstract claims, but they emerge for me from a concrete context. Every Wednesday evening, I spend two hours in an unkempt, barn-like room somewhere on the main campus of the University of Exeter, teaching Christian theology to a disparate group of mature students drawn from the English South West. Many of these students take the evening classes simply out of interest, their eyes caught by a poster or a plausible paragraph in a prospectus, but about half of the faces in front of me on any given evening belong to people studying theology as part of their training for accredited ministry in the church--normally Anglican and Methodist ordinands and Anglican Reader trainees, but sometimes others as well. Nevertheless, all of the students are, by the time they get into the room, students of the University, pursuing at least this part of their studies in a government-supported institution, their fees subsidised by public money, their teachers 'public servants,' and one of my tasks at the beginning of each academic year is to help them think through the anxieties which some of them have about this strangely mixed arrangement. Even in a British setting where both historically and currently borders between public universities and church-based colleges have been porous, blurred and weaving, some of my students worry that behind the facade of muddle and compromise, the University and the Church secretly stand on opposite sides of some fenced and ugly ditch. Some worry that their serious studies are about to be compromised by the need to humour ecclesial special interest; far more worry that their devout faith is about to be attacked and belittled by teachers waving a Godless academic banner. The more articulate of these students have no problem in finding vocabularies that enable them to name their worries: What has, they ask, a secular University to do with religious training? Is there any space in a non-confessional University for a confessional programme of study? Isn't academic freedom in conflict with Christian commitment? The battle lines are easily drawn, and Athens faces Jerusalem over an old and familiar border.

In order to win these students into a coherent class that can go forward in their studies together, I have had to think about this rather tired confrontation again--to look for new ways of articulating the relationship between Church and University so as to enable students to step out of an embattled mindset. And, as the years have gone by, I have grown more confident in my attempts; from offering well-rehearsed apologies and familiar ameliorations, I have graduated to ever bolder and balder claims as to the propriety--even the necessity--of the strange bipartisan turf on which the students find themselves.

In what follows, I'm going to concentrate (largely but not exclusively) on the arguments which might be offered to those who regard the Church as the home of their learning, and who initially feel that they have strayed behind enemy lines when walking through the doors of my University class room. I argue:

  (i) that at least in my context the university might help to save the
  church from the forces of secularization--insofar as
  instrumentalization is one virulent form of secularization;
  (ii) that in so doing the University might recall the Church to the
  literal sense of scripture; and
  (iii) that the University might even remind the Church of her
  identity.

I will also, however, argue

  (iv) that the University desperately needs the Church's help if it is
  to be properly academic.

I don't pretend that these are subtly phrased and judiciously qualified; I have developed them as I look for bold ways of breaking my students out of some imprisoning assumptions. But the claims are nevertheless serious, and I offer them seriously to you now, in the hope that they might have legs enough to carry them beyond the peculiarities of the Exeter situation.

The instrumental and the contemplative (2)

One contrast that I have found gives me useful leverage over the 'secular' versus 'religious' contrast is that between the instrumental and the contemplative. By 'instrumental', I mean to refer to processes of learning that simply fill in the gaps within a structure we already possess--perhaps providing information to fill in the detail in a picture we have already drawn, perhaps providing skills to enable us to carry out a task we have already formulated. 'Contemplative' education, on the other hand, does not leave us in control in this way, but places us before some subject matter that we do not control, and for which our current categories are inadequate. If efficient accumulation is the hallmark of the instrumental, waiting and paying attention are the hallmarks of the contemplative. And I take it as clear that although education for ministry will properly involve a certain amount of instrumental learning--training in the performance of certain well-understood tasks (like taking a funeral or chairing a church council)--if it is to be truly theological, if it is to have anything to do with God, it must always also involve 'contemplative' learning.

One way of putting this is that theological education must always include learning which is not 'for my sake' or 'for the job's sake'--i.e., it must always involve more than learning that simply fits into the structure provided by my existing state or the job I think I have to do; it must involve the kind of transformative learning that takes place when learners are brought into contact with something that they can't control, and opened up by it. Theological education must always place any quest for mastery that it contains within the broader context of being overmastered.

In my experience of working on the boundaries between the University and the Church, it seems to me both that the temptation to let the instrumental colonize the contemplative is deeply secularizing (it drags our horizons down until they fit within the boundaries of our own limited world), and that it can be found in all its strength on both the Church and the University sides of the border. The turning of Higher Education into a product, the delivery under threat of litigation of precisely the goods which the customer--student has demanded be specified in advance, is familiar enough. But it is equally clear that a similar ethos pervades much Church-based theological training--and that, at times, the temptation there is even more deadly. The temptation can be to demand that all the teaching which an ordinand (say) receives be useful, that it serve certain clearly specified goals, that it fit clearly within a clear practical strategy and equip the student for pursuing that strategy. Yet even if the strategy is mission, such a thinning-down of learning is still instrumentalizing, still secularizing, still a turning away from that which we cannot use but can only acknowledge. And one of the services that the University can provide in such a setting is precisely a resistance to this instrumentalizing: a refusal to allow that the subject matter under consideration lines up so neatly with the needs and plans of the churches.

For all its failings, all its own instrumentalization, the University--at least the one in which I work--still preserves an ethos of learning 'for the subject-matter's sake': attention to the difficulty, the awkwardness, the intransigence, the questionability of the subject matter under consideration: useless learning for delight's sake. And it might just be that this ethos of continued resistance to total usefulness is precisely what is needed to help save the Church from the secularization of theological education.

Literal and spiritual senses

Have I made my case so far only by sleight of hand, though? I said earlier that 'if [education for ministry] is to be truly theological, if it is to have anything to do with God, it must always also involve "contemplative" learning'--but you might quite understandably feel that there is a gap between the rather general sense of 'contemplation' which I went on to describe and a properly theological contemplation facing towards God. In another context, I would want to argue that the gap is not as large as all that--that there is a strong sense in which all contemplation, to the extent to which it assists in the breaking apart of illusions about God's world and feeds truthfulness, is connected to contemplation of God. In this paper, however, I will try to make the point more directly, by looking very briefly at ways in which the University context can shape training in the use of the Bible, and training in attention to the Church--and help the student see that the Bible and the Church are not simply grist for her mill, but strangers which call the student to account, and which call forth her contemplation.

If we turn our attention first of all to study of the Bible, the 'instrumental' versus 'contemplative' distinction maps on to a better-known distinction: the distinction between 'spiritual' interpretation and 'literal' interpretation. One way of attempting to pinpoint that latter distinction is to say that 'spiritual' interpretation is precisely that kind of interpretation which has to find the Bible useful, or tie it into the framework of already-known truth, whereas literal interpretation is precisely that kind of interpretation which pays attention to the ways in which the Bible resists use--the ways in which it is awkward, diverse, and difficult.

Classically, spiritual interpretation arises precisely when the reader encounters something awkward in the literal sense--paradigmatically, something that is not edifying. By following strange strands of subterranean connection that link this awkward text to others, the spiritual interpreter discovers multiple ways in which the text can be woven back into edification. The text's strangeness, registered by literal reading, becomes a doorway to the questioning and recovery of what is already known, but it will be a recovery which drives the already-known more deeply into the reader--or the reader more deeply into the already-known. Rather than aligning contemplation simply with spiritual reading per se--which might seem the obvious way to go--we might more properly say that contemplation arises within this whole literal--spiritual process: that it is driven by literal reading's discovery of strangeness, and explored by spiritual reading's determination to wait until that strangeness speaks edification.

An instrumentalized Church, however, lives in a broken version of this economy, in which two things have changed. On the one hand the meaning of 'edifying' has shifted towards 'useful'; and on the other the spiritual reading it pursues when faced by texts which do not feed this usefulness is not a form of patience, waiting on the awkwardness discovered by the literal sense, but a form of impatience: a desire to find forms of reading which will not allow this awkwardness to intrude or distract. If literal reading is that kind of reading specifically designed to register and highlight those places where the text is awkward, where it is problematic, where it stands in the way of the uses we would made of it, then we might say that the instrumentalized Church suffers most of all from a refusal of the literal sense.

The kind of literal reading that such a Church needs to learn in order to be saved from itself is one that pays serious attention to the strangeness of the text; it is that reading which 'resist[s] the premature unities and harmonies of non-literal reading'. (3) Serious attention to textual questions, to grammar, to lexicography, to genre, to redaction, to historical context, to the various hermeneutics of suspicion--all the forms of questing attention which the University encourages--can serve precisely this purpose, and so make true spiritual reading (one which wrestles with the awkwardness uncovered until dawn) possible.

Of course, this may be a service that the University performs despite itself, if its practitioners believe that with the disruption of settled belief, of religious use, their job is done. Churchly readers need to learn also to hold on for a blessing: to learn alongside this renewed literal reading a renewed spiritual reading that is patient with the awkward text and trusts that deeper edification will come, even if this means that the instrumental hip is put out of joint. (4)

Is such a renewed spiritual reading, grounded in an openness to the awkward literal sense, possible? Well, my suspicion is that resources for such disciplined waiting are not lacking in the traditions of the Church's reading: they have simply been neglected, temporarily forgotten. But that claim brings us to another way in which the University might be of use.

The responsible and the responsive

The University has become, often to a greater extent than the Church itself, a repository of the Church's memory. It is often more in the University than the Church that the works and ways of earlier generations of the Church are attended to--including the works and ways of earlier generations of the Church with the Bible. It is not, however, simply as a possible source of guidance for a renewed spiritual reading that this University memory is of importance for the Church.

Christian ministry (whether informal or formal lay ministry, or ordained ministry) is called to be both responsive and responsible. That is, it is called to be responsive to the particular situation in which it is carried out, responsive to the particular gifts of the one ministering, responsive to the resources available in the immediate community. But it is also called to be responsible: answerable not just to that minister and that situation, but also to God, to the Bible, to the wider Church--and to earlier generations of the Church. Both by responsiveness and by responsibility, the Church's mission is called to account--the practitioners of that mission slowed down and called to wait, and to pay attention.

Theological education feeds both responsiveness and responsibility, providing resources which enable attention to the specific difficulties of a particular location, but also constantly making connections with the wider Christian tradition: allowing what happens here to be called into question by a community which stretches in time and space far beyond the local.

Now, training in responsiveness, in detailed attention to the local, is still often valued by Churches whose view of theological education is instrumentalized. It is a form of training that appears to feed effectiveness directly, by showing how the practice of mission needs to be reshaped in order to work well here. What I have been calling responsibility is less clearly valued. Imagine a program of study that included both a module in the sociological analysis of a local community, and a module in the Christological debates of the fourth Century. If both responsiveness and responsibility appropriately hold ministry to account, it will not be the case that the former module has to do with ministry whereas the latter does not.

Much could be said about the resources that the University might have to offer to the learning of responsiveness, of appropriate and open-eyed analysis of the current situation. There is patient attention needed there, and very much so--and it is patient attention which might well be honed and deepened by disciplines nurtured in Universities. In my context, however, it is the help that the University might give in the learning of responsibility that needs arguing for. And yet it is vital to the Church's present health that the Church be reminded of forgotten aspects of its past identity. The University, precisely because it is the sort of institution that has a large library, precisely because it has experts in strange places and times, precisely because it fosters the study of dead languages--precisely because of those features that have so much of the smell of the ivory tower about them--can nurture rich, multi-hued attention to the Church of distant times and places better than can the Church itself. The University is, in other words, an institution that has de facto had delegated to it the holding of a significant portion of the Church's memory. It is in the University, for instance, that the complexity--the deep horrors and occasional joys--of Christians' historical relationship with Judaism can be uncovered; it is in the University that the strange but powerful struggles of the early Church to affirm the goodness of creation can be explored; it is in the University that the detailed historical context of the division between denominations can be examined. By attending diligently to these memories, the University can illuminate the responsibilities, the difficulties and the possibilities which the Church today faces, whether it be in overcoming anti-Semitism, in pursuing environmentalism, in advancing ecumenism, or in almost any aspect of the Church's ministry that has a history. The University can, by bringing the Church's past to bear in these and other ways, help to sensitize and complexify the Church's present, calling it to an acknowledgement and understanding of what it has been in such a way as to open up possibilities for what it can become.

The academic is formational

By aligning 'academic' with 'contemplative' in these ways, I'm also gesturing towards something else. Good academic study is a form of spiritual formation--in the sense that (at its best) it is a process in which one is stripped of illusions of control and mastery, and overwhelmed by a subject matter that does not fit neatly into one's life. It is a process in which one both repeatedly has to risk interpretations, but in which one is also repeatedly opened up to judgment. And so it is a process in which the learner is--or can be--trained precisely in contemplation: in patient, risky, transformative exposure to an as-yet-ungrasped truth which can only be encountered with a humility that is willing to lay down preconceptions and fixed ideas.

Let me illustrate this with a personal example. The particular experience I have in mind is that of struggling some years ago with the realisation that one lengthy part of my Ph.D should be deleted. My idea had been to combine a theological study of the work of the American theologian Hans Frei with a study of a particular congregation in Cambridge, in order to show that the concepts and arguments with which this academic theologian was working connected in interesting ways to patterns of practice and habits of thought amongst 'ordinary' Christians. Now my commitment to this strange combination was very strong. I put a great deal of effort into it. All sorts of people in the theology faculty, and in the congregation I was studying, knew about and supported my endeavour. I had publicly defended the idea of doing this study in various talks and papers. And I had, with some arrogance (I now realise) cheerfully asserted that what I was doing was new and relevant, and would breathe fresh vitality into theological discussions that were in danger of becoming dry and useless. Over several years, this project had become part of my self-perception, and part of my self-presentation: I was a theologian, but not just any kind of theologian--I was a theologian who also did ethnography; a theologian who paid serious and (I hoped) sophisticated attention to the muddles of ordinary Christian practice. And, by the end of the Ph.D, that's simply who I was.

And yet--behind the scenes I was finding it persistently difficult to tie the conceptual knots that would bind together my study of Hans Frei and my study of this congregation. I built various conceptual and argumentative bridges between the two, but never quite got to the point where I was completely happy that I had succeeded--never quite got to the point where I felt I had established my case. I worked hard at it, and produced various schemes that looked good on paper--but I was, I think, constantly aware at some level that whenever I had built a bridge that looked firm and usable on paper, I had done so at some loss to the seriousness and attentiveness of my study both of Frei and of the congregation. Those two studies did not want to sit together: they did not want to be made to speak with a common voice, as parts of a single argument--and I felt their resistance as I pushed them together. I didn't admit this, of course: I had committed so much time, so much effort, so much of my public image--so much of myself to doing the project in this way. I couldn't admit it to myself, let alone any one else. And so it eventually, despite my misgivings, made it into the final Ph.D; I passed the viva, and was awarded my doctorate. But almost as soon as the viva was over, and one kind of pressure to make the Ph.D succeed relaxed, I finally admitted that the attempt--interesting and imaginative though I still think it was--had been a failure. I had ended up misrepresenting Frei, and I had ended up misrepresenting the congregation, in order to make sure that my argument worked--not maliciously; not with any kind of deliberate falsification; but simply because I had not been brave enough to allow the difficulty of my subject matter to overthrow my neat ideas, and make me start again.

Now, it seems to me that one way of describing what happened there is that I failed to learn. Of course, I learnt all sorts of things, and picked up all sorts of skills--just as anyone who spends four years doing a Ph.D must. There is much in my Ph.D that I still think is pretty good. And actually, there's a more subtle point here. It was only because I learnt all sorts of things--only because I read a great deal of ethnographic and social anthropological literature, only because I had read widely and, I hope, deeply in the theology of Hans Frei and in his sources and colleagues and conversation-partners--only because I had accumulated the Ph.D student's usual bundle of microscopically detailed, massively obscure knowledge, that I was able to register the resistance which threatened to break my PhD in two in the first place. Nevertheless, despite having learnt all that, I still failed to do justice to--to learn--my subject matter, in one quite fundamental way. And that failure can be described as a failure to let myself go; when the realisation finally dawned, it was with a feeling of disillusionment, in the strict sense that I felt an illusion being stripped away: an illusion about my subject matter, but also an illusion about myself. It was an experience of what a certain kind of theology would call un-selfing: an experience of the dying of a small part of my self that I had tended and nurtured for some time. I was left in a far less controllable, far less secure position: determined to re-write the Ph.D in the light of this stark realisation, willing to drop the part that had not worked (despite all that I had invested in it), and committed to doing greater justice to my subject matter--even though that meant letting go of any very clear idea of where I was headed, and (for quite some time) any very clear idea of what kind of a theologian I was; any very clear idea of who I was. And I knew that, if I were to avoid a similar failure to learn, I needed to be willing to be overturned, judged, condemned and remade as I continued to study. I could only learn to the extent that I gave up on security, and on a strong sense of control over my direction. (5)

Now, this experience of 'un-selfing', of disillusionment was a thoroughly academic experience. The exposure to judgment that lay at its heart was made possible by a detailed extension and refinement of my ways of thinking. The stance of openness to judgment which this work forced on me, slow though I was to realise it, was not at all something that stood in opposition to the detail and rigour which good academic work calls for. Rigour and openness go together. (6) After all, if I am woolly enough, if I wave my hands enough, if I cut corners enough in this article, I might be able to render it all but invulnerable to critique. I may be able to make what I say spongy and elastic enough that I can simply ride any punch that my readers want to throw at me, spongy and elastic enough to bounce over any obstacle without noticing it. On the other hand, I will only say something worth listening to if the proposals I make have enough content to them, and enough structure to them, to allow them to be criticized, to allow me to be called to account by having counter-examples, or gaps in my argument, or alternative ways of seeing things, or disastrous consequences of what I have said, brought to my attention. To develop and extend our ways of thinking and acting, therefore, can be a way of stiffening the flabby and woolly ways in which we engage with the world, and so of allowing new and deeper ways of opening ourselves up to questioning and testing, new and deeper ways of opening ourselves to the possibility that we're heading in a mistaken direction.

In other words, academic study, if it is good academic study, is formational--spiritually formational. It plays a part in the process by which we are properly disillusioned, in which our self-understanding and understanding of the world are brought up against that which is beyond them and broken open for the sake of new, truer growth. The quality of academic study is so caught up with questions about overcoming pride and security and delusion that we might say that a good academic training might at the same time be a training in some of the virtues that an instrumentalized Church most needs. Beyond the specific subject matter to which the University might alert the Church--the awkwardness of the Scriptures, the richness of the tradition--a partnership with the University might assist in the renewal of the contemplative stance that those realities require of the Church.

Yet I cannot finish on this note without noting a gift that might be offered in return. The Church is not wholly instrumentalized; it has not wholly forgotten contemplation and has certainly not forgotten the need for, and challenges of, spiritual formation. And although I am adamant that good academic work is and must be spiritually formational, that does not mean that Universities are institutions which have much practice in understanding the context of care needed to foster such formation, or in facing the personal and communal challenges which it brings in its wake. Faced with their own temptations to instrumentalization, the Universities--if they in turn are to be the help to the Church which I have suggested they might be--need all the help they can get if they are to foster the kinds of spiritual formation of students and staff that good academic work requires. In other words, just as much as the Church needs the University in order to be itself, the Universities desperately need the wisdom of the Church, and of the religions more widely, if they are to be themselves.

Notes

1. The Church of England, Mission-shaped church: church planting and fresh expressions of church in a changing context (London: Church House Publishing, 2004)

2. This distinction parallels Aquinas' distinction between the 'speculative' and the 'practical' in Summa Theologiae 1.1.4.

3. Rowan Williams, 'The discipline of Scripture' in On Christian Theology (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), pp.44-59: 47, earlier printed as 'The literal sense of Scripture', Modern Theology 7 (January 1991), pp. 121-134.

4. I'm alluding, of course, to Genesis 32:25.

5. The completely re-written study of Frei was eventually published as Christ, providence and history: Hans W. Frei's public theology (London: T & T Clark, 2004).

6. To put this in the form of a slogan: only a pedant is truly open-minded.