Ritröð Guðfræðistofnunar - 01.01.2007, Side 54

Macmurray’s tenure of the chair of moral philosophy in the 1940s and 50s,
and was for many years influential in American colleges and universities
which shared the Scots intellectual tradition, where characteristically the
President would give lectures on moral philosophy to the whole student
body.
Over a number of centuries the idea of theology as the Queen ofthe Sci-
ences was gradually eroded, except in the more conservative Christian lands,
where it survived through blood transfusions as part of the struggle against
modernity, liberalism and modernism. A recent attempt by John Milbank
to reaffirm for today theology’s queenly role in the university is thoroughly
quixotic.7 In typically swashbuckling style, Milbank declares that the secular
atheist or agnostic suspicion of theology must be challenged:
And the grounds for this challenge would be simply that they have got every
thing the wrong way round. They claim that theology, alone among purported
academic disciplines is really ‘about nothing’. But theological reason, if it is
true to itself, replies to this with a counter-claim - all other disciplines, which
claim to be about objects regardless of whether these objects are related to
God, are, just for this reason about nothing whatsoever.8
Milbank advocates ‘the most extreme mode of counterattack’, arguing that
unless other disciplines are ordered to theology they are ‘objectively and de-
monstrably null and void, altogether lacking in truth’.9 I find it hard to take
this sort of thing seriously. It just is not an option today for theology - or
indeed for any other discipline in the modern university. And that is surely
just as well, since the Queen ofthe Sciences model precludes theology fulfill-
ing a serious servant role, or intellectual ministry, in the diverse modern
university.
7 John Milbank, ‘The Conflict of the Faculties: Theology and the Economy of the Sciences’, in Mark Thiessen
Nation and Samuel Wells, eds., Faithjulness and Fortitude: In Conversation with the Theological Ethics of Stanley
HauerwasJtL&mbutffii: T. and T. Clark, 2000, pp. 39-57.
8 Milbank, op. cit., p.4l.
9 Milbank, op. cit., p. 47.