Lachish, from the Israelite Tel Suite, by Sandra Bowden

Education in the Catholic faith takes place on three levels—primary evangelization, catechesis, and theology. Presupposing that the student has become a believer through evangelization and has learned the principal teachings of the Church through catechesis, theology engages in a systematic search for deeper understanding.

In his 1998 encyclical on faith and reason—Fides et Ratio—Pope John Paul II defined theology as a “reflective and scientific elaboration of the understanding of God’s word in the light of faith.” The pope went on to say that to understand revelation and the content of faith, one must analyze carefully the texts of Scripture and the texts “which express the Church’s living tradition.”

Theology has traditionally had a home in Catholic universities, though today some deny that theology belongs in the university at all on the grounds that it is dogmatic and uncritical. In the 19th century, Cardinal John Henry Newman, among others, brilliantly made the case for giving the discipline a prominent place in the university because it deals with a significant body of truth that has a bearing on practically every other branch of knowledge.

Pope John Paul II, in his 1990 Apostolic Constitution, Ex Corde Ecclesiae, taught that theology together with philosophy enables university scholars to overcome the fragmentation of disciplines and synthesize their specific contribution in the light of Christ, the Logos, the center of creation and of human history. “Because of its specific importance among the academic disciplines,” he wrote, “every Catholic university should have a faculty, or at least a chair, of theology.” Later, in an allocution to the most recent general congregation of the Society of Jesus, the same pope declared that the teaching of theology in Jesuit universities “must strive to provide students with a clear, solid, and organic knowledge of Catholic doctrine, focused on knowing how to distinguish those affirmations that must be upheld from those open to free discussion and those that cannot be accepted.”

Within universities, this ideal is difficult to realize in practice. For a number of reasons, teachers of religion and theology in American universities are inclined to avoid focusing on the content of Catholic faith. One reason might be the American preoccupation with technique and method. As a pragmatic people, we are inclined to look for what William James called the “cash value” of theory. We specialize in know-how rather than know-what. And in some ways, it is easier to talk about method than about content. By concentrating on how to proceed rather than what ought to be held, we can avoid some bitter controversies.

A second reason for the doctrinal decline in Catholic theology is that Catholic theology has traditionally relied heavily on metaphysics. Natural theology enabled theologians to identify the anthropomorphisms and metaphors in the Bible and to formulate a coherent concept of God. The doctrine of God as personal, infinite, and utterly simple was basic to the Trinitarian theology of the Catholic tradition. It provided clues for understanding how there could be three divine persons and still only one God.

In the past two centuries, natural theology has fallen into disrepute. In the academic world, it is almost taken for granted that this branch of philosophy was demolished by the critiques of David Hume and Immanuel Kant. Hume’s skepticism and Kant’s assault on metaphysics, whatever their weaknesses, have made a deep impression on many intellectuals. As a result, it takes a person of great courage to base anything today on the metaphysics that undergirded classical theology.

A third factor, equally deleterious to doctrinal theology, is the reigning suspicion of authority. Kant himself proclaimed as the first principle of the Enlightenment the slogan sapere aude—have the courage to use your own intelligence. While acknowledging that the clergyman may be required to follow the doctrine of his Church, Kant insisted that the scholar in the university has the freedom and, in fact, the obligation to use his own reason, without deference to authority. In matters of religion, Kant believed, immaturity is especially unfitting.

The fact is, however, that the doctrines of the Catholic faith are received on the basis of authority. They come from revelation, which is transmitted by those who speak and write as inspired and assisted by God. The mysteries of the Christian religion are truths so hidden in God that they are incapable of being discovered by purely rational inquiry. If we reject authority as a matter of principle, we cannot find a secure basis for holding the doctrines of the Church. There is plenty of room for critical reasoning in theology, but unless people accept the authority of accredited witnesses, they cannot be believers or theologians.

In the years following Vatican II, which ended in 1965, many universities converted their departments of theology into departments of religious studies. This shift was motivated by the desire to avoid having to assume a posture of faith. In the discipline of religious studies, Christianity or any other religion can be approached from a nonconfessional point of view with the tools of history, sociology, and psychology. Unlike theology, religious studies makes no claim to settle questions of religious truth.

A fourth source of difficulty is the pervasiveness of the critical spirit. Since the time of René Descartes in the 17th century, the critical program has been dominant in academic circles. Research begins with a bias toward doubt rather than belief. The fiducial component in knowledge is rejected or ignored. The Church, on the contrary, insists that faith is the key. Theology itself has been defined as fides quaerens intellectum—faith seeking understanding. Yet in the United States today, it is rare for a university professor to enter the classroom and declare that adherence to the faith is the true path to understanding.

A fifth source of difficulty is the contemporary distaste for propositional truth in matters of religion. Some maintain that faith consists in an existential surrender to sheer transcendence, an encounter with the ineffable. In such existential theology, the term belief is redefined. Traditionally viewed as an acceptance of revealed truth on the authority of God the Revealer, religious belief is instead taken to mean a human effort to express the experience of faith in human language: The statements are symbolic and should not be taken literally. Religious belief in this sense runs no risk of coming into conflict with science or history, but it gains immunity at the cost of being unable to say anything literally true about the things of God.

The Catholic Church, however, is firmly committed to the view that the dogmas of the Church, propositional though they be, are revealed truths to be accepted on the authority of God. They do yield information—for instance, the facts that God is everlasting and that Jesus Christ literally rose from the dead. The statements may be analogous, but they are not mere metaphors.

A sixth factor that makes it difficult to transmit the doctrines of the Church in the classroom is the currency of historicism, or cultural relativism—the conviction that all human truth-claims are historically and culturally conditioned. In this view, past statements may have been true in the sense of being relatively adequate for their own day, but they can no longer be accepted at face value.

Although this kind of historicism contains a modicum of truth, it cannot be defended in the radical form espoused by modernists a century ago or as further radicalized by some postmodernists of our day. Pope John Paul II, in his encyclical on faith and reason, warned against the errors of historicism and postmodernity insofar as they deny “the enduring validity of truth.”

A seventh challenge to the presentation of dogma in educational institutions is the fear of offending the conscientious convictions of some students. In Catholic universities today, it can by no means be taken for granted that all students are committed Catholics. A given classroom may well include marginal Catholics, Protestants, Jews, agnostics, atheists, and possibly some Muslims, Buddhists, or Hindus. For such a mixed audience, it seems tactful not to present ideas that are specific to Catholic Christianity.

Historians of the Catholic religious curriculum have documented the shift from faith-centered courses to offerings that make no reference to any specific sacred order. Before 1965, Catholic universities in the United States usually offered courses on the Trinity, Christology, sin, grace, redemption, the sacraments, and the like. Then they introduced courses dealing with ecumenism and comparative religion, in which Catholic doctrine was presented as one point of view among others. And finally, after 1975, they began to teach courses that made no reference to the specific beliefs of any religious community. Their catalogues contained titles such as “Affirmation and Doubt in Modern Thinkers,” or “Global Ethics,” or “Death and Dying.” If consistently applied, this move toward neutrality would deprive the theology department of its reason for existence and would severely limit the power of the university to hand on the faith.

An eighth and final difficulty is that relatively few Catholic students today have the necessary background for theological study. Many do not firmly believe the Catholic faith. Those who do believe may not have been adequately catechized. Theology, as a deeper reflection on faith, presupposes that the student is prepared to accept the principal articles of the faith as the framework in which theological reflection is conducted. For unprepared students, the discussion of complex theological questions can lead only to frustration and confusion.

The principal article of faith and revelation, according to Catholic teaching, is God Himself. The catechism of the Catholic Church quotes as still valid the following words from the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215: “We firmly believe and confess without reservation that there is only one true God, eternal, immeasurable, and unchangeable, incomprehensible, almighty, and ineffable, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, three persons indeed, but one essence, substance, or nature, entirely simple.” More than six centuries later, Cardinal Newman wrote this excellent summary of the classical concept of God in his The Idea of a University: “God is an individual, self-dependent, all-perfect, unchangeable being, intelligent, living, personal, and present, almighty, all-seeing, all-remembering, between whom and His creatures there is an infinite gulf, and who has no origin, who is all-sufficient for Himself, who created and upholds the universe, who will judge every one of us sooner or later according to that law of right or wrong which He has written into our hearts.” Newman’s concept agrees with that set forth in 1870 by the First Vatican Council.

If the conception of God, which the Supreme Magisterium of the Church sets forth as a matter of faith, is questioned or denied in the teaching, the whole edifice of Catholic theology becomes vague and unsteady. New concepts of God imported from pantheism, panentheism, pragmatism, or process philosophy are unacceptable and cannot sustain the system of Catholic dogma.

Teachers of theology who deny the traditional concept of God or place it in brackets, as many are wont to do, seriously undercut all other branches of theology. When assigned to teach Christology, for example, they are strongly tempted to avoid the dogma of the Incarnation, which involves the divine nature of Christ, and focus by preference on the humanity of Jesus. Under the rubric of theology, they discuss the historical Jesus—a product of historical method unaffected by revealed truth. Attempting to get at the Jesus of history, they decide to discount the testimony of John and Paul who, they consider, speak too dogmatically. They look only at the synoptic Gospels and do so very selectively, judging that any claim for the divinity of Jesus cannot belong to the original tradition, but must be an insert of the post-resurrection community. As a result of this approach, their courses inevitably come up with a portrait of Jesus as a rabbi hailed as a prophet and regarded by some as the promised messiah. This minimalist approach more often than not serves to weaken the faith of students. A Catholic education should do better.

Courses in ecclesiology are likewise emptied of theological content if they do not presume that Jesus, the founder and lord of the Church, was the Son of God, and that God is the eternal triune being. Dogmatically, the Church is to be seen as the mystical body of Christ, the temple of the Holy Spirit, commissioned by Christ to be the teacher of all nations until the end of the age.

It has become common in many places to study the Church by preference from below, that is to say, as though it were a purely human and historical community, which of course, it is not. From this perspective, it becomes impossible to understand why the Church should be necessary for salvation. The claim that the Church should evangelize all nations can no longer be defended. The teachings of the Church cannot be presented as having divine authority. It becomes senseless to speak of the heavenly Church, or to look forward to the final eschatological fulfillment for which Christians pray.

On the college level, courses in the basic doctrines of the Church should be offered and highly recommended for Catholic students. Such courses should be taught from a Catholic point of view—the sacraments explained as divinely instituted means of grace, the sacrificial character of the Mass and the real and substantial presence of Christ in the Eucharist—in spite of the many objections I have mentioned. Measures should be taken to ensure that Catholic college students are familiarized with the essential teachings of Catholic faith and morals and that they gain some idea of why the Church teaches what she does. Students should be equipped to answer common objections to the faith, perhaps through courses in apologetics. They should take introductory courses in holy Scripture and Church history, so as not to be ignorant of Christian origins and development. The philosophy department should offer courses, preferably required, that convey a realist theory of knowledge and a sound metaphysics. In this way, our graduates could be somewhat prepared to stand up against the agnosticism and relativism of the day.

Catholic universities have a unique role to play in the culture wars now being waged. They are privileged places in which the Church can mobilize her resources to hand on the faith, as she must, and foster the intellectual revolution that Pope John Paul II envisaged in Fides et Ratio. Only when faith and reason embrace in harmony can the human spirit rise to the full heights for which God has destined it.

Cardinal Avery Dulles, SJ, is the Laurence J. McGinley Professor of Religion and Society at Fordham University, and was the visiting Gasson Professor in theology at BC in 1981–82. His essay is drawn from a talk delivered on October 12, 2005, in Gasson 100 entitled “The Faith that the Church Hands On,” sponsored by BC’s Institute of Religious Education and Pastoral Ministry.