Ritröð Guðfræðistofnunar - 01.01.2007, Blaðsíða 53

form ofphronesis, a practical wisdom, close to Aristotle’s understanding of that
term. Scotus taught that theology was concerned with God as the supreme
good and therefore the ultimate goal of human life. Objective knowledge of
this goal was necessary for believers engaged in the way of discipleship, to aid
them in moving towards their true goal and destiny.5 The Protestant Reform-
ers tended to follow in this Scotist tradition, regarding theology as a practical
science with central pastoral and existential elements.
In a Christian university the Faith was the ultimate norm, and all other
subjects were expected to serve and find their telos in theology. Theology and
indeed the university as a whole were involved in and tied to the magisterium
or teaching office of the Church. But from the beginning the tradition of the
medieval university was ambiguous. At its best it held that education was for
the whole person, body and soul, for time and for eternity, that community
mattered, that Christian truth must be expressed in practice. At its worst, it
encouraged an arrogant thought police which stultified the enquiries and the
teaching of the whole university.
Post-Reformation and Enlightenment universities continued to have theol-
ogy at the heart of their enterprise, ruling as Queen. And they saw the task of
theology in the university as essentially a practical one, particularly concerned
with the education of ministers for the service of the church. The theological
faculty stood alongside medicine and law as one of the three ‘higher faculties’,
with explicit remits for the formation of professionals. The university as such
was concerned with struggling with truth and also educating for good prac-
tice. The university understood its concern with theory as directed towards
the goal of practice.
In Scotland, for instance, there developed an Enlightenment tradition
which insisted that at the heart of the academic enterprise there was a Queen,
now understood not as ‘pure’ theology but as a theologically informed moral
philosophy which had as one of its central concerns the education of good
practitioners.6 This tradition continued in Edinburgh at least up to John
5 W.Pannenberg, op. cit., pp. 232-3
b I sometimes wonder whether a difFerence in terminology points to a more substantial difFerence between the
Scottish and the Oxbridge traditions: In Scotland one “does’ a subject, even iFit is metaphysics; in Oxbridge one
‘reads’ a subject, even iF that subject is engineering!