Dear Friends:

I'd like to come out of the 'lurking status' to address the issue of specialists and generalist within our academic institutions -- despite the work load that has come upon me as a generalist in a Christian liberal arts university where I teach, yet a generalist who has tried to keep involved in the specialist activity of my graduate training in early Second Temple Judaism, all at the same time anchored in the life of a local congregation as we struggle to remain unified in our own life and in a shared life with those who are poor. Whether this attempt is delusional or not, I'm still not sure. Usually I think that it is.

There is no doubt that as a result of these multiple, intense commitments, I become highly "irresponsible" within all three of these "different" sociological units: the guild, the university, and the congregation (I should be spending this time (a) working on my Chronicles commentary as my colleague Tom Phillips has reminded me this morning -- I do have a contract; or (b) grading the stacks of papers for my undergraduates or at least in chapel right now; or (c) calling persons for board nominations at the church, or arranging for Bill Hatcher to have appropriate support when the car in the church's parking lot in which he has been living (and dying) the past three years becomes towed away this coming Monday. Even to spend time to think outside these sociologically distinct assignments is obviously highly irresponsible.

The discussion draws me into it, however, because they have mirrored very intense and at time difficult discussions we have had in the School of Theology at PLNU this spring. They are issues behind the accreditation discussions we have undergone. PLNU itself speaks more and more in terms of the specialization of our faculty in terms of our work. Discourse on the Christian liberal arts in our accreditation review has been very sparse; faculty exhibit a much deeper concern to find more time and energy to their professional work. In the area of our disciplines, we are told to find our "voice" in order to make a different in the world. This is not an abstract issue here, but one that cuts to the very core of the future of PLNU.

As I have read and thought, there are issues of time, resources, course loads, tuition, etc. at work that make this issue very complex within institutions like ours that are so tuition-driven, without large endowments. Yet it seems to me that as my colleague Brad Kelle has noted, the issue is ultimately one concerning the nature of the Christian liberal arts university, and behind that, even the very nature of rationality. In the past several days, I have read in two different contexts the same issue that has been discussed on the WTD -- except by academic 'specialists' that want to call into question the genealogical origins of theological specialization in the university.

First, Lewis Ayres (Emory) has an essay in a new book, "Christian Theologies of Scripture: A Comparative Introduction" (New York University Press, 2006). He concludes, "for early and medieval Christians scripture was fundamental resource for the Christian imagination. There was no 'biblical studies' distinct from 'systematic theology.' Thus, to appropriate early and medieval exegetical method is to engage a method of thinking theologically that is fundamentally different from the modern academic models that mark our institutional and professional structures. . . . we thus need . . . to ask ourselves how far these accounts of scripture's place within the Christian imagination -- accounts that gave rise to basic creed and conciliar formulae that are institutionally or traditionally normative for the vast majority of modern Christians -- can and should challenge us to rethink the theological methods of modernity" (p. 18).

Second, the May 2006 issue of First Things links modernity, the liberal democratic political order, and theology as a 'discipline' within the academy. The central discussion in the issue is "Theology as Knowledge". James R. Stoner, Jr., a political scientist at LSU, argues that "the secularization of the public square resulted from the prior secularization of the university. . . . The academics' decision that theology is not a branch of knowledge, merely an elaboration of belief, helped turn America away from a religiously informed public square " (p. 21). "In America, it seems to have been around the beginning of the twentieth century when theology was eclipsed in the curriculum of the nation's leading universities, as they transformed themselves from Protestant seminaries into research institutions influence by the German model" (p. 21). He finishes by arguing "for now the urgent need is to restore a serious sense of mission among academics who study theology" (p. 23). If one would follow the argument in Christian Smith, editor (sociologist, UNC), "The Secular Revolution: Power, Interests, and Conflict in the Secularization of American Public Life" (University of California Press, 2003), one could argue that this secularization of the university was a concerted effort by a certain academic elite to make the US more in tune with classical liberal political commitments against the then current elite Protestant evangelical hegemony.

The respondents to Stoner's essay each press him farther. Stanley Hauerwas argues "we must bring to an end the disciplinary divisions that invite theologians to say, 'I cannot comment on St. Paul's understanding of the gospel because scripture is not my field.' Indeed the attempt to make theology 'objective' through the transformation of theology into a historical discipline must be seen for what it is: a way to separate theology from its source, which is the praise of God" (p. 24). Paul Griffiths (UI at Chicago) pushes the same direction, but recognizes that "theology is not for everyone. It is not a public discipline. It is a work of the Church, a work of the faithful, an elucidation of what God has revealed the and the Church dies its best to understand and teach"
(p. 25). Of course, the disciplines would lose their rigidity and 'natural status' because we would be serving a different constituency than the contemporary liberal nation-state. David B. Hart is most aggressively rhetorical -- "I confess I am being intentionally extreme". Yet he argues that "modernity is secularity. It is, in its essence, a project of detaching moral, legal, and governmental reasoning from any authority transcendent of the state or the individual. It is the project of ethics conformed not to divine justice but to human reason and popular consensus" (p. 27). He argues that more is needed than a 'bland recommendation for a theological appreciation of modern academic pluralism. . . As soon as it [theology] consents to become a perspective among the human sciences, rather than the contemplation of the final cause and culmination of all paths of knowledge, it has ceased to be theology and has become precisely what its detractors have long suspected it of being: willful opinion, emotion, and cant" (p. 27). The disciplines and specialization emerge as a modernist 'discipling' of the church through social pressures of the state in the name of 'objective reason'. This should not be a surprise to anyone who has read any Foucault.

All these "specialized scholars" agree that theology must be more than "one discipline among others" to be true to its nature. It must be the rational inquiry into the very nature of things as we find all things in light of their origin and end in the Triune God, who revealed true Reason in the bloody, crucified body of Jesus Christ, witnessed to in the Scriptures and the Tradition of the church catholic. Grounded in Christ, we therefore are 'undisciplined', freed to see the very nature of all things as creatures brought forth from nothing by the Triune God.

All academic disciplines, all human work, not merely the so-called 'theological disciplines', must be both chastened and purified and elevated in light of God the Father's revelation in Christ by the power of the Spirit for the glory and praise of God -- all academic disciplines must ultimately be raised up to God through Christ in the Spirit as doxology and prayer. The social/institutional presuppositions of the secular university excludes such an understanding of rationality -- and it does this for and by irrational reasons. Thus, the extreme importance of Christian liberal arts universities remaining true to their calling, rather than trying to conform to the (false, imaginary) disciplinary restrictions provided by the secular university, anchored in a Weberian encyclopedic Wissenschaft or a Nietzchean anti-reason genealogical reason.

Alasdair MacIntyre's "Three Rival Versions of Moral Inquiry" shares the same historical diagnosis as all the above thinkers. The concern for specialization arises out of the Enlightenment understanding of reason as seen in the "Encyclopedia" in which different discourse can be laid out rationally, objectively side-by-side with each other. Yet this agenda undercut itself, among other reasons, because a change in education. "It was not merely that academic enquiry increasingly became professionalized and specialized and that formal education correspondingly became a preparation for and initiation into professionalization and specialization but that, for the most part and increasingly, moral and theological truths ceased to be recognized as objects of substantive enquiry and instead were relegated to the realm of privatized belief. . . Questions of truth in morality and theology -- as distinct from the psychological or social scientific study of morals and religion -- have become matter for private allegiances, not to be accorded such formal badges of academic recognition" (p. 217). Genealogical reason, the eclipse of Enlightenment reason by power, has moved into the university, but in so doing, merely duplicates the structures of that reason that it reacted against -- Nietzchean thought ironically as ressentment! MacIntyre's argues that "what it signals is the capacity of the contemporary university not only to dissolve antagonism, to emasculate hostility, but also in so doing to render itself culturally irrelevant" (pp. 218-9).

The solution? To begin to ask the right question, the one behind the question of academic specialists and generalists: "'What are universities for?' or 'What peculiar goods do universities serve?'" The frame of the question, therefore, behind our discussion of specialization is concerning the nature of the university: "when they are true to their own vocation, institutions within which questions of the form 'What are x's for' and 'What peculiar goods do y's serve?' are formulated and answered in the best rationally defensible way.' That is to say, when it is demanded of a university community that it justify itself by specifying what its peculiar and essential function is, that function which, were it not to exist, no other institution could discharge, the response of that community ought to be that universities are places where conceptions of and standards of rational justification are elaborated, put to work in the detailed practices of enquiry, and themselves rationally evaluated, so that only from the university can the wider society learn how to conduct its own debates, practical or theoretical, in a rationally defensible way" (p. 222).

The question of specialists and generalists arises in the Christian liberal arts university today because we have lost the ability to answer such questions for our institutions. Like the world around us, we in the Methodist/Holiness movement academies have become fragmented, not only in our answers, but, as MacIntyre argues, even in what comprises a proper argument and relevant data: "Nothing is more striking in the contemporary university than the extent of the apparently ineliminable continuing divisions and conflicts within all humanistic enquiry" (p. 6). As a result, we become cultural irrelevant to the church and thus to the wider society, even if we produce more and more disciplined knowledge to contribute to various market-shares within a commodified society.

Perhaps no greater common commitment is needed for Methodist/holiness academics than this is we are to contribute to the task of Christianizing Christianity, a contribution to the catholicity of the church. If we cannot arrive at even asking the right questions in our sociological irrelevance and socially marginal institutions in relationship to the wider society and world, how can we expect anyone else to do so amidst an era in which reason itself finds itself slipping away?