Faith and Imagination in the University

Extract

This article takes as its point of departure Roderick Strange’s interesting article ‘Faith and Theology in the University’ but it is not really intended as another contribution to the somewhat closed debate on the place of Theology in the University. That is a fairly specialized question which theologians tend to worry about when their public relations have grown particularly remote, but has little reference to anyone outside their context, and may reasonably be left to them to resolve.

The problems implied in it, though, are not confined to the University context for several reasons; first, the privilege of having sufficient time to give thought to the health of one’s own religion is not the prerogative solely of dons and undergraduates; secondly, a lot of people read books which have been conceived and realized in the context of the University but are not themselves in a position to take account of what that genetic context has had to do with the making of the book; and, thirdly, the tensions between faith and reason do not confine themselves to professional theologians, but are part and parcel of every man’s consciousness.

Roderick Strange’s solution to the question, ‘Should the academic theologian permit his own faith to be involved in his professional activity?’ seems to me to be based on treacherous ground in the form of Dr Ian Ramsey’s rather unsatisfactory contribution to the problems of religious language. This latter debate has not yet made any real progress I think, and will continue to be unsatisfactory so long as it remains an eclectic science taking only piecemeal ideas, now from linguistics, now from literary criticism, with the result that it does justice to neither and leaves its own problems unresolved.