12 8月 Can the University and the Church save each other?

Is there any space in a non-confessional University for a confessional programme of study?

At least at present, the Church and the University need each other in order to regain their right minds. A Church which, in a phrase popular in the UK at the moment, is 'mission-shaped' (1) is drawn to an instrumental vision, in which all its learning--its learning of doctrine, of Scripture, of its own history--is filtered and processed until it becomes fuel for a practical purpose, and the disruptive strangeness of those sources is in danger of being hidden in the rush to use. The University, on the other hand, whilst pointing to this disruptive strangeness, has forgotten what is involved in living with it: it has forgotten (if it ever knew) that living with a fundamental openness to disruption is transformative, that it envelops and reshapes the whole person; it has forgotten that learning in the face of disruption is a spiritual discipline. Re-awoken to the disruptive strangeness of its sources (and of its Source), the Church in return can give what the University has rediscovered a name, and with the name a doorway into traditions of hard-won wisdom about the demands and possibilities of learning. If the University can save the Church, the Church might also save the University.

The University can, despite its own battles with the instrumentalizing of study, remind the Church of that disruptive strangeness: it can even, at its best, point to the vital uselessness of God

These are abstract claims, but they emerge for me from a concrete context. Every Wednesday evening, I spend two hours in an unkempt, barn-like room somewhere on the main campus of the University of Exeter, teaching Christian theology to a disparate group of mature students drawn from the English South West. Many of these students take the evening classes simply out of interest, their eyes caught by a poster or a plausible paragraph in a prospectus, but about half of the faces in front of me on any given evening belong to people studying theology as part of their training for accredited ministry in the church--normally Anglican and Methodist ordinands and Anglican Reader trainees, but sometimes others as well.