Ritröð Guðfræðistofnunar - 01.01.2007, Blaðsíða 59

maintenance between disciplines, with sometimes absurd consequences. The-
ology should have a central concern for community, and for communication
across boundaries and through barriers.
Let me give an example of the problems we face. A leading British social
scientist concerned particularly with issues of public policy, Professor David
Donnison, despairs of the capacity of the modern university to provide the
wisdom that society requires. At the root this is because in a culture where
most people believe that God is dead, moral judgements have become re-
garded as ‘little more than approving or disapproving noises - expressions
of personal preference or taste, much like the words we use when choosing
between vanilla and strawberry ice-cream’.19 Since there is no academically
acceptable way of resolving conflicts about moral judgements, the common-
est strategy is to side-step the issue. Academics are concerned with weighing
evidence and assessing logical coherence; because morals are now regarded as
arbitrary matters of taste and prejudice they are pushed to the margins and
deprived of intellectual dignity:
‘As for moral dispute - that has been banished from the lecture rooms alto-
gether, for it leads people to say things like, ”You ought to be ashamed of
yourself”, and this is not the kind of things you say in a seminar. To make the
distinction unmistakably clear, politicians and priests are brought into such
academies from time to dme to conduct moral debate; but on a one-off basis,
usually at the invitation of student societies, speaking from a different kind
of platform - thereby exposing to everybody the unscientific status of their
pronouncements.
This, Donnison concludes, leads to a narrowing and distortion of academic
life, which is in many cases condemned to irrelevance or irresponsibility.
In such a situation the place of Theology in the university assumes a fresh
importance. Getting this relationship right may be significant for the academic
enterprise as a whole, and helpful to a range of other disciplines. So I would af-
firm that Pracdcal Theology exists in the academy to afifirm that all theology is
practical, just as biblical studies reminds theology of the centrality of scripture,
and systematic theology points to doctrine as an unavoidable element in the
^9 David Donnison, A RadicalAgetida. London, Rivers Oram Press, 1991, p.42.
20 Donnison, op.cit., p.44.