TRACING back memories can be tricky. We often remember things as rose-tinted when they may not have been. None the less, I recall, having been recommended for training, an impatience at the prospect of three more years at college. Here were more hurdles over which one had to leap. Would I make it?
In the event, the teaching that I received changed my entire consciousness. An exciting world opened up. Gospel writers capturing Jesus differently were not a threat, but a source of nourishment; understanding how doctrine developed over two millennia breathed a new freedom; Christian insights on moral issues became vital. Theology became one of the most energising stimulants in my life thereafter. “Hats off”, as they say, to my teachers. But this feeling hardly appears to be universal. What has happened?
Allow me leap back in “political time” for a moment. Commentators on Harold Wilson’s time as Prime Minister noted that, in response to arcane or recondite arguments, his ultimate put-down was to describe them as merely theological. Having dismissed them as irrelevant or beside the point, he would move on.
Reflection on current trends in the Church of England suggests that such an attitude has now seriously infected our own self-consciousness. It is easy, of course, to see why theology, as with any other academic discipline, with its wealth of technical language, can feel impenetrable and daunting. But such a perception becomes deadly serious when even the professionals respond similarly.
SUCH reflection points us back to initial training. Throughout several generations, the Church of England has shown a lack of generosity, even a miserliness, in funding theological training. Colleges and their libraries are expensive luxuries, instead of nurseries of profoundly rooted mission. The very continuance of residential training stands on a knife-edge — will any colleges survive?
Courses that have only a minority of time in residence often employ talented scholars, but the period of training is kept as brief as possible. This residential “deficit” results in far less time to absorb and debate theology alongside regular corporate prayer and the sacraments. We would be terrified to think that similar stringency on the cost of training was the case with medics or engineers. Equally depressing is the way in which serious theology is crowded out by increasing amounts of institutional or professional training, ambiguously labelled as “hard skills” and consuming further acres of the timetable.
This theological deficit has had a serious knock-on effect on theology at universities. The Church of England has been a key supplier of both students and teachers across the full range of British and Irish universities. The number of such institutions closing the doors of theology faculties and departments is frightening (News, 20 March), and reduces further the numbers studying theology and religious studies at secondary education level.
An example of this knock-on effect came a few years ago at a day-seminar on Austin Farrer — probably the most creative Anglican theologian of the 20th century — at Keble College, Oxford, where he had been the Warden. More than 100 people came, and the essays were collected in a monograph: Austin Farrer: Oxford warden, scholar, preacher (SCM Press) (Books, 5 June 2020).
The editors, Professor Markus Bockmuehl and I, wrote this in the introduction, referring to the plight of theology, once known as “Queen of the Sciences”, and in the light of the brilliant scholar who was focus of the seminar: “In a recent volume on the challenge of holding together academic and pastoral vocation in the Church and Academy, an Oxford chaplain raises the pointed question. ‘Where have all the Austin Farrers gone?’ . . . a sense of panic in response to the secular has rapidly debased the Church’s idea of ‘mission’ amid widespread gasping for the supposedly clean air of management and leadership. . .
“Theology, by contrast — the skilful, patient, and public articulation of the love of God with the mind — seems non-essential and even counterproductive to that new currency of ‘mission’. And thus . . . participation in the dialogue of faith and reason, church and university, come to be actively devalued and disincentivised.”
WHAT, then, is the point of theology? Why does it matter? It matters because, more than anything else, God matters. “Mattering” is itself a vital philosophical concept, and, in this case, takes us deeper than any other mattering with which we engage — because it is mattering about our existence and the creation and sustaining of our world by the God of our Lord Jesus Christ.
Mattering inexorably drives us back to theology. This sense of mattering underlies the incarnation, and the life, teaching, Passion, death, and resurrection of Jesus. Without this underpinning our ministry and formation, we shall offer only the thinnest of gruels.
On the plaque giving thanks for the life of Archbishop Michael Ramsey, himself an esteemed theologian, set in Canterbury Cathedral’s cloister, there is just one sentence from Irenaeus: “The glory of God is a living man.” We dare not let theology wither. Let us pray, let us work, let us think, and ask how best do we restore its “regal status”. Most crucially, it requires generous investment in those who are trained to be priests: those whom Farrer called “walking sacraments”.
The Rt Revd Stephen Platten is a former Bishop of Wakefield.