The Department of Theology at our University, the University of Notre Dame, has recently been ranked number 1 in QS rankings for Theology, Divinity, and Religious Studies, including this year, toggling places with Oxford and Harvard for the top three places over the last five years. Since I served as Chair of the Department from 1997-2010, people have approached me to ask how a Theology Department specifically manages to rank highly in territory that is largely populated by programs of Religious Studies which are often decidedly and even aggressively secular. They often operate at best on neutral premises about questions of faith but maybe even more often on premises that are antagonistic to the faith of believers, and especially to “orthodoxy.” In scholarly circles of the study of religion this word is often featured with scare quotes to make the point that it represents a completely subjective judgment which is the result of a more powerful party winning debates and therefore has very little to do with “truth,” itself a debatable and illusory value in any event.
Whatever one may think of these observations, they nevertheless do form the background of questions I am asked about rankings. More or less it is asked, “How can a Department of Theology achieve top rankings given the dominant intellectual trends that are ranged against it in the academy and that seem, in effect, to deny theology academic status?” It is added, implicitly or explicitly, that one does not find Departments of Theology in secular schools of Arts and Sciences. How does one compete and not, over time, give up one’s identity?
Speaking for no one but myself, I would answer that the first rule of rankings, like the first rule of Fight Club, is: Don’t talk about rankings. In fact, don’t think about them. Stop thinking about rankings. Don’t seek rankings. Don’t value rankings.
Instead—the second rule—value truth instead. Seek truth, not rankings. A Catholic theology department cannot give up on the idea of truth. Still less can a Catholic university afford to do so. Certainly, truth-claims can reflect bias and the hidden interests of the powerful. But it is self-defeating for any intellectual project to give up on the idea of truth, because then all that is left is power. The pursuit of truth for its own sake is also ennobling. People are attracted to it if it is executed with all due humility, without being sanctimonious about it. And rankings at their best ultimately reflect an admiration for a set of ideals and for their evident execution.
Third: Stay true to the discipline of theology as a discipline. Avoid keeping the name without the reality. Theology is “faith seeking understanding.” Its formal object is revelation, the Word of God, as that is authoritatively proclaimed in Scripture and Tradition and served by the magisterium of the Church (see Dei Verbum §10). Revelation consists in truths about God and all things in God that cannot be attained by reason alone. Strictly speaking, what is revealed are “mysteries,” which, as such, are received in faith. Nor do they cease to be mysteries once they are revealed. For example, that “God is Love” is a truth of revelation, and the mystery of this Love is always “higher” than reason, more awesome than human reason can imagine and, further and therefore, it demands the conversion of reason so that we do not replace this Love with simulacra and idols of our own making. The work of theology is to use reason to seek to “understand” this revelation, not so that it is rationalized away, so to speak, but so that its true dimensions of grandeur are glimpsed ever more fully and articulated every more persuasively.
These dimensions of grandeur or sublimity include the connections between this fundamental revelation and others, such as, that God is Trinity, that the Word of God, Light from Light and true God from true God, emptied himself (Phil 2:7) and became flesh (Jn 1:14), and even was made to be sin, though he knew no sin (2 Cor 5:21), that the Incarnation is a complete and utterly gratuitous divine self-gift, that the Church is, in some sense, a continuation of the Incarnation (see Lumen Gentium §8), and that the Church, understood properly, is herself a mystery of God’s love, intended by God from all eternity as the goal of creation (see CCC §760, citing the Shepherd of Hermas).
One can immediately see that to use reason to “seek to understand” the mysteries of faith without flatlining them or translating them into truths which reason on its own could discover will require the most exacting precision of thought. One has to thirst for academic excellence because one thirsts to be responsive and responsible to the revelation of the Love that is God and the God that is Love. One will therefore want to recruit the absolute top talent from persons with the highest levels of expertise in their own domain and who are driven by the desire to “seek understanding” of revelation and to be faithful to God’s Word as it has been revealed and handed on by the Church. It must be someone who has taken the first three steps on the road to wisdom mentioned by Augustine in the de doctrina christiana, namely, fear of God, piety, and erudition. Fear of God means fear of distorting the truth of his Word. Piety means humble submission to God’s Word as such. Erudition means mastering all of the relevant academic skills with the greatest degree of rigor. Insist on these highest standards in hiring and you will find the synergy between academic excellence and Catholic identity unfolding itself before your eyes.
The Fourth Rule: Respect truth, wherever you may find it. Again from the de doctrina (2.28), the Christian should not fear truth, wherever it is found, for wherever it is found, it is his Lord’s. One can see immediately that this will involve some of the most difficult intellectual issues of our time, and really of all time, which will require the best theological thinking we can find. For example, Lumen Gentium mentions the genuine truth that can be found in other religions (see, e.g., LG §§16-17), while Dei Verbum also notes that the “Christian dispensation, as the new and definitive covenant, will never pass away and we now await no further new public revelation before the glorious manifestation of our Lord Jesus Christ” (DV §4). How do we honor the truth discovered to be present in other religions without at the same time lapsing into relativism and giving up the claim that the fulness of truth is “spoken” in the Incarnation, passion, death, and resurrection of the Word of God? This question is largely sidestepped in contemporary theology, but it certainly will not be answered if one settles for the repetition of conventional wisdom, received platitudes or cultural cliché.
The same is true for balancing claims of scientific discovery without reneging on basic biblical commitments such as the intrinsic relationship between sin and death, etc. A theologian cannot have contempt for scientific truth, but also cannot renege on fundamental biblical and traditional truths such as original sin, the goodness of creation, and the idea of the human being as an enfleshed spiritual creature. And, by the way, what precisely is a soul, that spiritual dimension that constitutes the uniqueness of the human being as an animal among other animals? You can see how insistence on academic excellence comes out of the pressing desire to be faithful to the Tradition and to respect truth wherever it is found. These are complementary and mutually implicating aspects of the same pursuit of truth at the very highest level.
Fifth Rule: Be accountable to the Church. There is no abstract accountability to the truths of revelation. These truths are authoritatively proclaimed by the Church and receiving them means receiving, in piety, the teaching authority of the Church. Concrete accountability means remembering that, as Augustine taught, and theologians as diverse as Pope Benedict and Walter Kasper taught, theology is intrinsically ordered towards proclamation. Pope Francis insistently asked us to refrain from being “armchair theologians” whose connection to church and world was merely abstract. Theology is ultimately not an abstractly conceived speculative discipline, but a ministry of the Word, different from, but also related to, evangelization, preaching, and catechesis. Accountability to the Church means forming faithful, well-educated leaders for the Church where intellectual formation is integrated with pastoral and spiritual formation, with the struggle to integrate intellectual formation into a symbiosis with the other two. This dimension of accountability to the only community that ultimately cares about theology, the Church, adds another dimension to the imperative to think precisely, to settle for nothing short of true excellence, so that leaders at all levels will be able to persuasively “offer an account of the hope that is in them” (1 Pet 3.15). All to the end that the Church may be as persuasive as possible in preaching that God is Love—Love for such a troubled world as is our own poor, needy, and suffering world.
Sixth Rule: Do not pit graduate education against undergraduate education. Institutions seeking rankings will generally favor graduate education and Ph.D. education in particular, because rankings are mainly focused on the perceived prestige of doctoral education. But privileging doctoral education over undergraduate education will ultimately lead to a decrease in both academic acuity and creative fidelity to the Tradition. For one thing, teaching introductory and core courses to undergraduate students forces everyone, in every subfield, to think deeply at the ground level, the level of the very identity of the discipline itself. Some of the knottiest questions are encountered here, such as the idea of the inspiration of Scripture, the interpretation of narratives such as Noah’s ark, the narratives of conquest, the meaning of creation, what the mystery of redemption entails, what happens after death, etc. The challenge to seek to understand so as to engender understanding and, through understanding, to engender a love for the biblical text—this is a challenge that impels one to a profundity of thinking and believing at once, together.
This will affect all other levels of teaching and scholarship too. Encountering undergraduates with all of their very urgent questions about meaning and faith, God and Church, questions which, for all their urgency, they do not always know even how to ask or sometimes even that they have them, makes you want to help them. It makes you want to be the best theologian you can be. Students, in return, are grateful to have found a discipline that seems to offer something beautiful, that has answers and not only questions about meaning and purpose in life, and that is able to offer its answers by thinking at a level of sophistication familiar to students from every other discipline in the university. Students, almost in spite of themselves, begin to want to study theology.
Our Department has a flourishing culture of undergraduate theology. While only 10-15 students enroll each year with the intention to study theology, that number swells in the years that follow. After a decade of continued growth, we are now home to nearly 850 students, with around 290 majors and 560 minors. (By way of comparison, numbers in the range of 5-50 are more typically found among peer departments.) These students are not drawn by the prestige of the “#1 Theology faculty in the world.” They are drawn by the encounter with mentors who show them the beauty and intellectual coherence of the faith and so also the beauty and coherence of the lives it invites us to lead. In everything from “Saints and Warfare,” to “Character and Conscience,” and “God, Suffering, and Evil,” students find meaning and depth in courses they not infrequently only wished “to get out of the way.” As one graduating senior told us in her exit survey, “I’m deeply grateful for how the theology program has shaped my thinking, writing, and sense of vocation. It has taught me how to hold complexity with care and helped me see intellectual life as a spiritual practice. The professors I’ve encountered model this beautifully. Thank you.”
These kinds of courses persuasively invite students to “take a second look,” as it were, at the faith of the Church, something they thought they had outgrown, left behind, or never paid much attention to in the first place. They release students from caricatured versions of the mysteries of the faith that they often unknowingly harbor, wholly unattractive banalities that they mistake, through no fault of their own, for what the Tradition actually teaches. Students respond to this disambiguation of caricature from truth, which allows a glimpse of true meaning and beauty to be seen for the first time, and to the new intellectual sophistication which makes these visible. They respond with gratitude for the gift of something they had been looking for but did not know they were looking for.
Courses, on the other hand, which take a pervasively deconstructive approach to the Tradition seem to tell students, there is nothing much here to take a second look at, except to reveal the play of power that theological truth-claims mask in favor of hidden vested interests. Such courses deliver the message, intended or not, that there is no ideal, invitation, or meaning in revelation worth giving yourself to, no “pearl of great price” worth selling all that you have to buy it, or at least, worth minoring in, let alone majoring. Such an approach to core courses results, often, in cohorts of majors in the single digits, or not much beyond.
Dedicating oneself to undergraduate teaching in this way makes the whole department feel as though it stands for something, not just for “critical thinking,” often a somewhat amorphous ideal though genuine enough, but also for the disciplined reception of past wisdom, including the very sense that wisdom can be had, the conviction that truth is in fact worth pursuing for its own sake, and that faith and reason can be woven together into an intellectual culture that is at once dispassionate and also a passionate witness to God’s Word. Above all it promotes an investment in the imagination, and this investment is maybe the single most important thing in defying the stultifying effect of rankings, which prompt conformity to cultural trends and resistance to imaging things anew. This commitment to a corporate theological identity in imagination, in fidelity, and in thirst for precision and rigor in thinking, in turn will affect doctoral level teaching so that it resists the temptation to become merely guild initiation and rather finds itself responsible for training scholars and future teachers who themselves are formed in a culture of “faith seeking understanding” at all levels of scholarly endeavor, and who are able to become apostles, as it were, of this kind of formation wherever they may teach and for whatsoever journal they may write.
There are many other considerations that come into play, of course, in achieving excellence in the pursuit of truth in the discipline of theology, but these are either in the practical domain, that is, in the arts of achieving consensus on ideals and on appointments both within the department and with Administration, or in the domain of mentoring, both of younger faculty and students at all levels. But the fundamentals are laid out in the six rules above, as I see it.
Oh, and maybe one more thing: true excellence takes time to cultivate and to mature. The gardener who plans a tree-lined avenue must have it in his or her head what it will look like when the trees are grown, but also must resign himself or herself to bequeathing the fullness of the vision to someone else, perhaps beyond their lifetime. On the other hand, the beneficiaries of such vision and trust have the obligation to receive the maturing, stately, graceful tree-lined avenue with respect for the sacrifices of the original plan, and work never to grow complacent, and always to enhance and nurture and continually renew the vision they have inherited. But probably this is not worth adding as a seventh rule. Not because it is not important—it is most important! But because the virtues of patience, and resistance to complacency, are assumed as part and parcel of anything worth doing, virtues applicable to any endeavor, theological or otherwise, to which it is worth giving over one’s life to accomplish.
