The Disappearance of Public Theology From the Public Square

 In 1967 the Benedictine monk and Catholic University of America professor Patrick Granfield reflected on the state of theology and theologians: “Theology, to the delight of some and to the consternation of others, is ‘in.’ Liberated from stuffy classrooms and stuffier journals, it speaks no longer to an elite, but to the millions—and millions listen.” With this observation, Granfield introduces his book Theologians at Work. He begins this collection of interviews with sixteen theologians by invoking some details:

Theology has become newsworthy. Hans Küng draws a spellbound audience of five thousand in Washington to hear his views on theological freedom; the “death of God” phenomenon becomes a Time cover story and a television “special”; articles on theology appear in Look, Atlantic Monthly, and The Saturday Evening Post; and the newspapers of the world recount for four years the daily events of the Second Vatican Council. . . . Books on theology are best sellers.

I first read these words about twenty-two years ago—about thirty-five years after Theologians at Work first appeared in print. My reaction then remains what it is now: things have changed. In the year 2024, theology is no longer “in.” To adapt Granfield: Theology, to the regret of a few and to the indifference of most, is “out”—or, at least, it is on the sidelines.

Theology is no longer newsworthy. Numerous obstacles punctuate the steps in a theologian’s career. No theologian reasonably aspires to become a Time cover story. Many of them merely hope to secure a full-time faculty position. Those who land the increasingly sparse academic post suffer a very limited range of professional activities. Theologians no longer have a large audience. Few of their recent books ascend to “bestseller status” (and those that do are only bestsellers on very narrow lists). Indeed, many are delighted to have even a handful of serious readers. (This limited readership applies to academic journals as well.) In 1967 Granfield celebrated theology’s liberation from “stuffy classrooms and stuffier journals.” Today the number of classrooms and journals open to theologians dwindles. The theologian’s pool of academic peers and colleagues is also quite small. Anyone who regularly attends theology conferences grows accustomed to seeing, more or less, the same names and faces.

Like all academicians, theologians desire to practice their craft. Unlike some academic disciplines, theology is absolutely necessary for humanity. Alchemy eventually fell out of currency. This fate will not ever befall Christian theology. Why? Revealed truth is necessary for salvation (Dei Verbum, §6). As the Catechism of the Catholic Church says: “theological research . . . deepens knowledge of revealed truth.” Theology can never fall into oblivion.

Hence, theology finds itself in an awkward position. The human mind will always seek to understand divine revelation. And yet theologians appear to be stuck. Frustrated.

What has happened to theologians?

Christian Intellectuals in Public Life: Interpretation

The frustration of today’s theologians is accentuated when one contrasts their present profile with the prominence of those in previous generations. There was a time when the public square not only listened to what some theologians had to say but even gave them a platform to say it. Perhaps the most visible American theologian of yesteryear was Reinhold Niebuhr.

Niebuhr’s Christian voice was not an obstacle to his public prominence. He appeared on the cover of Time magazine on March 8, 1948, and he was regarded as one of the most significant American voices during the mid-twentieth century—Christian or otherwise. His theology was not a problem. Niebuhr saw his faith-based understanding of human nature as immediately relevant to questions of justice and politics. In a noted essay on the disappearance of the “Christian intellectual,” Alan Jacobs observes:

For Reinhold Niebuhr, there was no real problem of this kind: it was not necessary for him to choose between being free and being audible. He could teach at Union Seminary, write for every major periodical in America, have his books published by a venerable New York house (Scribner); whatever conflicts he may have experienced in his career he did not experience as Christian intellectuals do today.

The theologian Niebuhr spoke and the people listened.

Jacobs argues that the Second World War partly explains why “serious Christian intellectuals . . . occupied a prominent place on the national stage.” The war’s all-encompassing turmoil begged for intelligible interpretation and pacific resolution. The foundations of civil society were in complete disarray. Christian intellectuals were called upon to serve as a “class” of interpreters.

No one knew, for sure, how the war would end. But these Christians were concerned about what would happen after it was over. The interpretation that they provided, thus, was not only diagnostic but also prognostic.

It was in this context—a democratic West seeking to understand why it was fighting and what it was fighting for—that the Christian intellectual arose. Before World War II there had been Christians who were also intellectuals, but not a whole class of people who understood themselves, and were often understood by others, to be watchmen observing the democratic social order and offering a distinctive interpretation of it (“The Watchmen”).

Intellectuals felt a moral imperative to help the world navigate through the complexities of the war and its aftermath. It seemed that victory was guaranteed to whomever possessed technological superiority. And Christians were apprehensive about a potential technocracy that could captivate the world after the laying down of arms. The triumph of a naked democracy was not a consoling prospect. Modern man would not be saved by voting privileges alone. Nor would a triumphant democracy ever truly be alone. Political order never subsists independent of other, fundamental, presuppositions and convictions. The war would not resolve the problems of the modern world.

In other words, these intellectuals were attuned to a hidden conflict underlying the visible warfare: a battle of ideas. Guns, tanks, and the threat of nuclear destruction might distract from latent moral and metaphysical questions, but such questions could not (and would not) remain veiled forever. Insouciance before such questions would amount to defeat in the war of ideas. And defeat in the war of ideas, some feared, could amount to a social devastation far worse than that of World War II.

The end of the war did not dissolve the influence of Christian intellectuals. If one wishes to understand their disappearance, Jacobs suggests that a “longer and a more complex answer” is required. He calls attention to the issues debated during the ensuing decades. Specifically, he homes in on the 1960s.

Contrary to what one might expect, Jacobs does not highlight the sixties because of the Vietnam War or civil rights. Christians advocated for opposing sides in these debates. Thus, neither Vietnam nor racial discrimination can account for the decline of the Christian intellectual. Rather, he perceptively calls attention to the sexual revolution and to the “changes in the American legal system that accompanied it: changes in divorce law, for instance, but especially in abortion law.”

When these new disputes—of a moral-political order—absorbed the attention of Americans, Christians were unable to offer the same intellectual leadership they had provided during the war. Why? Christian intellectuals had already relinquished their role as sage voices in the public sphere. By the time these new questions dominated public discourse, “Christian intellectuals found themselves suddenly outside the circles of power.” And why did they find themselves outside—no longer “in”? It was not because they had been excluded from the conversation. Rather, they had recused themselves from their office as social interpreters. They had moved on to other things—things of their own making: “Christians had built up sufficient institutional stability and financial resourcefulness to be able to create their own subaltern counterpublics.”

The decline of the Christian public intellectual can be traced back to a certain insularity that they eagerly cultivated in the 1950s. “The twenty-five years after the conclusion of World War II saw dramatic growth in Christian publishing houses, magazines, colleges, and universities—Catholic and Protestant alike—in quality as well as numbers.” New Christian initiatives, thus, distracted their intellectuals from the radical shifts taking place within post-war culture. And “by the time they realized just how dramatically the culture had changed, it was too late for them to learn its language—or for it to learn theirs.” Their plight, then, is one of self-marginalization through institutional isolation. Christian intellectuals could no longer interpret the world that they saw, and the world that they saw could no longer understand their interpretation.

Catholic Intellectuals in Search of Respectability: Translation

As we have seen, Christian intellectuals were deeply attuned to the presuppositions that were shaping modern society. These Christians were specifically concerned about the allure of a “techno-utopian” vision of the world—even as they receded from the world into their own “subaltern” circles. Neither technology nor science could, ultimately, save humanity. And within the burgeoning Catholic institutions, the question of science occupied (and, perhaps, even preoccupied) a lot of Catholic intellectuals—even before the war.

If theology was “in” during the first half of the twentieth century, science was even more “in.” Charles Darwin published his revolutionary book On the Origin of Species in 1859. A mere twenty years later, Leo XIII promulgated his papal encyclical Aeterni Patris. Secular culture heralded a new conception of science among its citizens precisely when the Catholic Church mandated a revival of Thomism among her intellectuals. This timing was not coincidental.

The rise of modern science and the Catholic renewal of Thomistic thought did not coexist comfortably. There was undeniable friction between them. The full title of Darwin’s book helps to explain why: On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life.[1] Darwin did not shy away from the social implications of natural selection.[2] Some of his followers advocated on behalf of a Darwinism unencumbered by theological and political referees.[3] And the Catholic Church represented both.

A growing number of secular intellectuals recognized the possibility of shaping evolutionary development through science and technology.[4] Artificial contraception would be an instrument of natural selection. It is not difficult to see why Catholics were conscientious objectors before such proposals. The Church’s teachings on marriage, the sanctity of human life, and the common good regarded the question of birth control with grave suspicion—even before the 1968 promulgation of Humanae Vitae. Moreover, Catholic doctrine about human nature and the universality of divine causality are irreconcilable with some forms of evolutionary theory.[5] Here, again, the moral and metaphysical presuppositions latent in modern discourse seemed to require further reflection.

Alexander Pavuk’s recent book, Respectably Catholic and Scientific: Evolution and Birth Control between the World Wars, examines the legacy of three influential Catholic priests: John Montgomery Cooper, John A. Ryan, and John A. O’Brien. If Jacobs emphasizes the role of interpretation in his analysis of Christian intellectuals, Pavuk identifies translation as the motive that unifies these Catholic clerics. “All three ultimately shared a fervent desire to translate the Catholic ethos, as they understood it, into the vocabulary of the modern age, the vocabulary of science.” And they deployed their translation efforts in the arena of public discourse about evolution, eugenics, and birth control.

Cooper, Ryan, and O’Brien sought to reassure modern persons that Catholic doctrine was not a threat to (and was not threatened by) the new scientific categories. “Perhaps their most common denominator was a belief that the language of science was the Rosetta stone that would crack the wall between them and Catholic intellectual respectability in the American public square while providing access to the broader intellectual communities they sought to both reach and influence.” They were attempting to broker a deal between Catholic doctrine and modern thought—a deal through which both could profit. They would communicate Christian truth through science, and in exchange they would receive scientific respectability.

Their project proved to be a formidable one. The priests “viewed science as a kind of language that should be learned—and used—by Catholics if they were to be heard in a larger national tribe’s public square.” They labored mightily to speak in avant-garde idiom without compromising their Catholic identity or convictions. Thus, they endorsed a more progressive way of thinking—considering “neo-scholasticism” to be anachronistic and counterproductive. Specifically, they distanced themselves from Thomistic thought.

Catholic principles, however, were not easy to translate into the categories of modern social science. Pavuk observes that “the possibility of such scientific language being unable to translate what they thought distinctive about their message, or even the ramifications of their being framed as ‘going native’ for scientism, seems not to have occurred to them much.” They were optimistic about their project and prolific in their publications.

Consequently, they adopted a rather fluid academic lexicon in order to accommodate the concerns of both their scientific audience and their Catholic coreligionists. For example, the natural law did not serve as a starting point for their discourse on evolution. They relied, instead, upon “the consensus of social science” in their publications about eugenics and contraception. Nonetheless, from time to time, they still felt compelled to acknowledge the natural law with “perfunctory nods.”

In the end, their efforts were unsuccessful—their project, frustrated. Their writings frequently betrayed ambiguous positions or conflicted arguments. The very real distinction between artificial contraception and (what we would today call) natural family planning was obscured. They even published articles that appeared to contradict, explicitly, what they had written in earlier articles. Pavuk concludes that their work “unintentionally helped excise traditional religious language and frameworks from the discourse on evolution and birth control.” Not only did they fail to garner stable intellectual respectability, they inadvertently helped to solidify secular conceptions of evolution, birth control, and eugenics in the modern mind. What their secular colleagues heard them say was far different from what they intended. Their Christian message got lost in their academic translation.

The more these “Catholic intellectuals tried to fit in with the shifting American culture of intellectual scientific rationalism, the more they unintentionally contributed to dissolving the very religious certainties they were trying to uphold in the realms of human origins and development.” In short, their project ended up betraying itself—and them.

Catholic Theologians: Contemplation

Theology is no longer “in.” Culture and academia are vastly different from what they were in 1967. Theologians, however, still exist. They continue to work. They teach, they publish, and they attempt to influence. And yet they remain on the outs. Why?

We may feel inclined to cite changes in the world or in the Church as reasons for the theologian’s decline. There is truth to this sentiment. The secularity of the modern mind is much greater than it has ever been. No one would dispute this. It could also be argued that the emphases of the Catholic Church (and of Christian communions generally) are very different today from what they were in the previous century. Nonetheless, these changes, alone, cannot explain the theologian’s present marginalization. As Jacobs has shown, Christian intellectuals enjoyed an influential interpretive voice precisely when the world was changing (and dramatically so). Moreover, the Church had already endorsed major interior changes by 1967—precisely when Granfield had observed that theology was “in.” Thus, changes in the secular and ecclesial orders cannot fully account for the decline of the theologian.

With regard to the future, we may also be inclined to conclude that theologians should continue projects of rapprochement like that of Cooper, Ryan, and O’Brien—just do them better. Perhaps these priests merely—if inadvertently—lost their Catholic bearings in the labyrinth of an admittedly complex conversation. Theologians of a more erudite, cautious, and committed stripe could, perhaps, serve as more competent translators.

This proposal, too, contains elements that ring true. Pavuk points to a certain naivete in their writings and initiatives. Without doubt, their project would have benefitted from a deeper possession of what they knew and a greater awareness of what they did not know. Nonetheless, better translation alone will not usher theologians back into the spheres of public influence. Why? Theologians have been preeminently engaged in this translation project for generations—and it has not worked.

Dialectical methods and dialogical practices have come to predominate theology. To an almost unprecedented degree, today’s Christians have appropriated the categories of modern science, philosophy, history, sociology, and psychology. Theologians have translated Christian doctrine into the categories of other disciplines for almost a century. Yet people take notice less and less. Few secular intellectuals take Christian rapprochement seriously. And what is most alarming: fewer and fewer Christian readers find this project compelling (think of the falling numbers and shrinking sizes of theological faculties).

The situation of the theologian is bleak. Nonetheless, there is still firm reason to hope. To reinvoke the Catechism: “theological research . . . deepens knowledge of revealed truth” (§94). There will never be a time when human persons have no need of theology.

I propose that the frustration of the theologian will not be alleviated through new or revitalized dialectics. The reason why theologians are “out” is that they have forgotten who they are—and what they are about. The office of theologian will only be restored through a rediscovery of theology itself. Theologians have lost the sense of what theology truly is. They need to recover a knowledge of—and an appreciation for—their sacred discipline precisely as a sacred discipline. Only when theologians recover their disciplinary identity will they, again, be able to fulfill the roles of interpretation and translation that are theirs by disciplinary birthright.

In a recent book, Johannes Zachhuber notes that “the continuing presence of the sometime Queen of Sciences in the academy” is somewhat tenuous. He also highlights the disintegration of theology as a unified discipline. “With few exceptions, the development of scholarship since the early nineteenth century has tended towards increasing subject specialization.” Theology has lost hold of its cohesive essence. This disintegration at least partially accounts for the difficulties theologians experience today. “The price theologians have to pay for the ticket that grants them entry into the world of academic respectability, some have urged, is too high as it robs their work of its specifically theological character.” Here their frustration is on full display: in order to become academic theologians, they have to disown what makes theology, well, theology.

The essence of theology becomes ambiguous to the degree that the practice of theology becomes academically parasitic. If Christian theology loses its own identity, essence, and mission, then its practitioners can no longer look to theology for their professional identity. Theologians are, consequently, compelled to look to others—to other non-theological disciplines and experts—for justification, legitimacy, and standing. The marginalization of today’s theologians is, thus, unsurprising. As practitioners of an ambiguous discipline, theologians struggle to find a distinctive voice in the conversation—certainly nothing approaching the insightful and penetrating Christian voices of generations past. Zachhuber keenly observes: “Whatever the changing conditions of the world around them, without a proper understanding of the purpose and the nature of their own enterprise, the theologians’ voice cannot be expected to be heard, respected or even discerned.”

Ironically, it is precisely because theologians have been desperately trying to get back “in,” that they have forfeited what once made them valuable voices on the inside.

It is increasingly difficult to distinguish theology from other, secular, academic disciplines. In the 1980s, Protestant theologian Edward Farley said that “theology and ethics thus search for that which will give them scholarly status, and to this end easily transpose themselves into the categorical worlds of history of thought, social science, or philosophy.” This quest for scholarly status has resulted in the “fragmentation” of theology. Theology has dissipated into a weakly associated group of different genres. “The literature which pursues, interprets, and is entitled ‘theology’ seems endless. Such a massive and complex articulation clearly indicates that the term theology is fundamentally ambiguous. This ambiguity does not simply mean that systematic theologians dispute the nature and method of theology, but rather that the term refers to things of entirely different genres” (emphasis original). Theology has lost its unity. Theologians have lost their identity. What Farley calls a “system of scholarly guilds” has taken over Christian academia following the diaspora of unified theological science.

Theology’s all-consuming desire to assimilate the “categorical worlds” of secular academia has only intensified its own “subaltern counterpublic” isolation. Theology’s subaltern culture is all too eager to take its cues from others to such a degree that it retains less and less of what makes it itself. Not only can theology no longer speak to the world, but theologians can now only speak to themselves—and in their idiosyncratic appropriation of the language and categories of the world. Now approximating a Quasimodo discipline, theology is insular and, at times, even non-theological—insecure before the world and unrecognizable before the faith. Theology was previously a privileged contemplative inside the cathedral of divine truth. It now rings the cathedral bells to a strange melody that is neither sacred nor secular, and everyone tunes it out.

In a prolonged effort to get back “in,” theology has forgotten its own proper tongue. Perhaps as never before, theologians are now open to things—perspectives, principles, methods, and even doctrines—outside of the Christian faith. And yet the theological guild continues to shrink in number and to shrivel in influence. The depositum fidei no longer serves as the supreme—and distinguishing—guide of theological discourse. In their efforts to speak in other academic tongues, theologians have forgotten their own native language. They cling to the hope that academic syncretism can erect what might be a disciplinary Tower of Babel.

What is Theology?

Theology is out. But it is sorely needed on the inside. The questions of the twenty-first century are no less important than the questions Christian intellectuals addressed in the early twentieth century. Nor are the stakes lower now than they were then. Indeed, given the intricacy of the questions presently debated in the public forum, one could argue that we need theologians today more than ever.

Before theology can effectively exercise its sapiential offices of interpretation and translation, however, theologians must rediscover what their discipline can uniquely see and communicate. Zachhuber’s counsel is both apt and wise: “theologians are well advised to reflect on the peculiar character of their own discipline.” What does it mean to be a theologian?—not just in the twenty-first century, but in all centuries. This is the pressing question of the present moment.

Of course, this is not a new question. Theologians have been reflecting upon the nature of their sacred science for two millennia. What is interesting, however, is that an acute form of this question preoccupied some Catholic theologians right before Christian intellectuals began to erect their own subaltern counterpublics in the 1950s.

In 2023, Jon Kirwan and Matthew K. Minerd published an annotated English edition of essays by Dominican theologians titled The Thomistic Response to the Nouvelle Théologie. The book’s subtitle captures what these theologians were vigilant about: “Concerning the Truth of Dogma and the Nature of Theology.” They did not want their colleagues to lose sight of the fact that it is God—and God alone—who founds theology’s identity. Thus, divine revelation establishes theology’s unified essence. They emphasized the sacred character of theology. What is sacred theology? It remains faith seeking understanding—an understanding that terminates in nothing less than the truth of God himself.

Even if some will not agree with the conclusions of these Dominican theologians, all can recognize that they rightly recognized the question’s importance. Moreover, their essays collectively represent one of the last extended considerations of the nature of sacred theology before the marginalization of theologians began. Their consideration of this question in the 1940s immediately preceded the decline of the Christian intellectuals in the twentieth century. Perhaps revisiting this question can help the restoration of theologians—and of Christian intellectuals broadly speaking—in the twenty-first century.