Ritröð Guðfræðistofnunar - 01.01.2007, Page 57

most seminaries, reflect and reinforce the increasing specialisation and frag-
mentation of modern life. The ticly ordering of the medieval university, with
theology as the Queen of the Sciences, is unrecoverable, but we are faced to-
day with various and conflicting endeavours to give some kind of coherence
to the academic enterprise as a whole. The way the definition and relations of
disciplines are arranged, the way a university is structured, express implicitly
or explicitly an ideology, a world-view, an overarching interpretation. In pre-
modern days the general effort was to locate specific studies within a biblical
grand narrative;13 in modern times the Bible, religion, the Christian faith,
theology and ethics are to be fitted into the project of an ‘encyclopaedia’, or-
dering all knowledge in terms of some more or less secular principle. Alasdair
Maclntyre argues that the Ninth Edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica
(1873 ff.) pointed towards a time when ‘[t]he Encyclopaedia would have dis-
placed the Bible as the canonical book, or set of books of the culture’.14 Ac-
cordingly, the Bible (and all thinking rooted in the Bible), ‘is judged by the
standards of... modernity in a way which effectively prevents it from stand-
ing in judgement upon that modernity’.15
It is here, I think, that central problems lie: is it possible for Theology to
be in the university, but not domesticated or tamed by the university? How
can Theology maintain a distinctive critical distance from the increasingly
secular and confused values of the university so that it can play a specific sort
of constructive role? Is a dual responsibility, to church and to the academy,
any longer viable?
Maclntyre suggests that in the nineteenth century there was a mounting
tendency to ascribe priority to morality and to ethics or moral philosophy, on
the assumption that there was a ‘social agreement, especially in practice, on the
importance and the content of morality’, which none the less ‘co-existed with
large intellectual disagreements concerning the nature of its intellectual justi-
fication’, although almost everyone concurred in the belief that such justifica-
tion was in principle possible.16 General consensus about the nature of right
13 So Hans Frei and others.
14 Maclntyre, op.cit., p.19.
15 Maclntyre, op.cit., p.179.
16 Maclntyre, op.cit., p.26.