International Journal of Systematic Theology Volume 00 Number 0 June 2019

doi:10.1111/ijst.12361

(Un)wise Theologians: Systematic

Theology in the University
LINN MARIE TONSTAD*

Abstract: Systematic theology is primarily pursued within the university,

but the effects of that setting have not yet been given the theological
attention that they need. Some theologians who have sought to consider
theology’s marginalization in the university argue that theology ought to
reclaim its status as queen of the sciences, or should order the relations of
other disciplines to each other and to itself. Using 1 Corinthians 1:18–31,
this article argues that these moves transform academic theology into a
discourse of wisdom rather than foolishness. Humility, unmastery and
foolishness in relation to God become ways of claiming authority in
relation to the neighbor. Further, such claims fail to recognize, and thus
to counter, the nature and depth of the distortive effects of theology’s
presence inside university contexts structured by discourses, and to an
extent practices, of scarcity. In conversation with Martin Luther and Karl
Barth, I outline an alternative, non-defensive theology that admits its
own foolishness: its participation in history’s incompletions, its need for
eschatological verification, and its vulnerability to the desire for mastery.
Such a theology could struggle more effectively with its own failures.

In reflecting on the nature and task of systematic theology in this article, I

argue that theology needs to pay more attention to the setting and context
within which theology is typically pursued today, that its setting affects
systematic theology in ways theology often has difficulty accounting for, and
that some influential strategies that do take theology’s context into account end
up frustrating rather than advancing the very aims they believe theology ought
to seek. In the introduction, I give a brief and programmatic justification for
approaching the nature and task of systematic theology from this direction. I
then proceed to a sketch of the effects that concern me most, before turning to

* Yale Divinity School, 409 Prospect St, New Haven, CT 06511, USA.

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2 Linn Marie Tonstad

an examination and critique of two attempts to think seriously about the place
of theology. In the conclusion, I outline one possible alternative.
The setting that I have in mind is, of course, the university, in the many forms
that it takes in an age of globalization. This is not to deny that theology is and can
be done outside the university, but it is to take seriously the actual context in which
most theologians ply their trade. The relevant context is not just the university itself,
however, but universities as they come to see themselves within larger contexts,
especially financial, that put pressure on unprofitable parts of the university, as
well as on faculty and students generally, in terms of innovation, excellence, time
and money. While theologians recognize and debate the ambiguity of theology’s
position in relation to the research university, that recognition is often tempered by
interpreting such pressures as ancillary, best countered by the virtuous formation
of the individual theologian. Imagining virtuous formation as a counter neglects,
however, the concrete materiality of these pressures, especially the insusceptibility
of global capitalism’s effects to intentionality or virtuous practices of any kind.
An immediate counter-question to this starting point can presumably be
expected. Is not the object of theology God (though God is not an object)? If so,
does that not imply that to approach the nature and task of systematic theology in
this way risks a fundamental distortion? Let the first point be granted. To the
second, one might counter with the historicity of human existence and activity,
including the theological task. Systematic theology is itself arguably a product of
the modern university (more on that anon). But whatever relation between
principles, sentences, summa, loci and systematics one might posit – whether
development or discontinuity – the case can be made that theology must be done
in the concrete context the theologian inhabits. That is, theology is done by actually
existing humans. And most actually existing humans who do systematic theology
today do so in the context of colleges, universities, seminaries and schools of
divinity, which face the kinds of pressures that are my concerns in this article.1
This investigation is thus prefatory, in a significant way, to the real question
of the nature and task of systematic theology. Yet it is not merely prefatory.
The theologians examined recognize, though in my view inadequately, the
significance – and temptations – for theology of its relation to the university.
My hope is that this examination – itself too cursory and inadequate – might
encourage a more fundamental reordering, one in which systematic theologians
would develop better strategies for making the conditions of possibility of their
work visible and theologically salient in new and deeper ways.
When considering theology’s oft-lamented marginalization in the university,
some theologians argue that theology ought to order and rule the production of
knowledge in the research university, and that non-theological disciplines are
simply inadequate because they fail to consider the relation of all things to God.

1 The pressures on those who pursue the task of systematic theology in the context
of religious houses are different enough that they fall outside the scope of a short
article.
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Systematic Theology in the University 3

But I argue that when Christian theology claims to be queen of the sciences,
ordering and ruling the production of knowledge in the research university, it
positions itself as a discourse of wisdom and so as a discourse of the ‘Greeks’,
thus making itself into something according to the logic of 1 Corinthians 1–2 (the
point of departure for my analysis) – the kind of something that God will make
into nothing. In response to such overblown claims for theology and for the task
of the Christian theologian, I offer an internal critique of theology’s desire to set
itself up as the arbiter of other disciplines instead of attending first and centrally
to its own failures and incompletions. I argue that systematic theology needs to
make its own situation an object of theological inquiry in a different way than it
has typically done. By confronting the depth of the deformations to which
theology is susceptible in the university, a theology chastened in this way can offer
its contributions to the world as gifts rather than Gift.2
The claims in 1 Corinthians 1:18–2:5 that guide this argument run as
follows: the wisdom of the wise and prudent is destroyed; the scribe and the
disputer (or scholar) are rendered irrelevant (vv. 19–20); the ‘Greeks’ are seekers
after wisdom (v. 22); God chooses the foolish in order to confound the wise
(v. 27); God brings what is to nothing while choosing that which is nothing
(v. 28) so that no one may boast (v. 29). This sequence of claims implies, I believe,
that assertions of the priority of theology in the contemporary academy make
theology a discourse that God brings to naught.
When theologians propose a change in the relationship between theology
and other disciplines in which theology would order the relationship of other
disciplines to each other and to itself, or enlighten other disciplines about
their inadequacy in light of the methodological naturalism on which they are
premised, they risk making theology into a discourse of wisdom in two ways.
One, by transforming theology into a practice of (purportedly humble) mastery,
and two, by establishing theology prudentially inside contexts structured
materially and imaginatively by scarcity. In the former case, theology tries to
master other disciplines, not just by defending itself against critiques from them,
but by going on the attack against them. In such attacks, theology situates itself
in relation to the wisdom of those who are wise, placing itself on a continuum
with them and so, in an indirect and inverted sense, identifying with them. In the
latter case, theology as a discipline functions also as a form of self-securitization
and self-assertion in ways determined by the nature of the university in times
of scarcity. In terms taken from the Corinthians passage, theology becomes a
form of prudence in relation to the right ordering of life inside a particular
social system with its own values of excellence. I then discuss sociological as

2 Following Ernst Käsemann, Commentary on Romans (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans,

1980), p. 203: ‘What a person wants is salvation. What he creates is disaster. This
is also true, and especially so, of the pious who are faithful to the law.’ Quoted in
Ian A. McFarland, In Adam’s Fall: A Meditation on the Christian Doctrine of
Original Sin (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), p. 24.
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4 Linn Marie Tonstad

well as theological reasons not to position theology in such ways, and counter
some potential objections to the analysis offered. Finally, I suggest that a non-
defensive theology of failure, incompletion and foolishness that accepted its
marginalized status in the university could better name, analyze and respond to
the challenges that are the concern of this article.

Theology in the research university

There are two especially important aspects of the situation of theology that
determine the discipline’s current structure. These pressures are not
unprecedented, but the existence of the university ‘amid the force fields of
capital’,3 and the expansion and simultaneous defunding of universities that has
taken place in the Euro-American academy under neoliberalism’s reign, has
made them more present to consciousness, thereby intensifying their material
impact even further. The first is the ambivalent relationship of theology to other
academic disciplines, and so also to the research university as such. The second
is the notable increase in competition among theologians (connected to the
dueling pressures of expansion and contraction in higher education), along with
the pressure to produce ever-greater quantities of published research and to
have prominent profiles that attract students and research funding.
Although it is impossible not to oversimplify materially in a brief
description, the familiar story of theology’s marginalization in the
transformations of the university over the past several centuries provides the
context needed for the rest of the argument.4 In concert with the establishment

3 David Hollinger, ‘Money and Academic Freedom Fifty Years after McCarthyism:
Universities amid the Force Fields of Capital’, in P.G. Hollingsworth, ed.,
Unfettered Expression: Freedom in American Intellectual Life (Ann Arbor:
University of Michigan Press, 2000), pp. 161–84.
4 For further reference, see among others Thomas Albert Howard, Protestant
Theology and the Making of the Modern German University (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2006); Julie A. Reuben, The Making of the Modern University:
Intellectual Transformation and the Marginalization of Morality (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1996); Linell E. Cady and Delwin Brown, eds.,
Religious Studies, Theology, and the University: Conflicting Maps, Changing
Terrain (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2002); George Marsden, The
Soul of the American University: From Protestant Establishment to Established
Nonbelief (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994); Gerard Loughlin, ‘Theology
in the University’, in I. Ker and T. Merrigan, eds., The Cambridge Companion to
John Henry Newman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), pp. 221–3;
William Clark, Academic Charisma and the Origins of the Research University
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006); Gavin D’Costa, Theology in the
Public Square: Church, Academy, & Nation (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2005),
pp. 6–18; Johannes Zachhuber, Theology as Science in Nineteenth Century
Germany: From F.C. Baur to Ernst Troeltsch (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2013); and Edward Farley, Theologia: The Fragmentation and Unity of Theological
Education (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1983).
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Systematic Theology in the University 5

of the modern university (taking Friedrich Schleiermacher’s involvement in

the founding of the University of Berlin as paradigmatic), some theologians
sought to make their work more recognizably wissenschaftlich, a response
simultaneously driving and complicated by the fragmentation of the discipline
into (roughly speaking) historical-biblical, practical and constructive studies.
Often understood as the heyday of retreat and accommodation, theologians
retained cultural relevance through historicism and insistence on consonance
between the forms in which the gospel is expressed and broader cultural
changes. In a parallel development (taking Charles Hodge and B.B. Warfield
of Princeton Theological Seminary as paradigmatic), theologians fought to
hold onto as much as possible of what they had once had. They resisted the
implication that scientists like Charles Darwin, or biblical scholars using the
tools of the so-called higher criticism, could dictate the limits of Christian
belief. Both of these alternatives transformed theology into a defensive practice
in relation to the rest of the university, however constructive the writings of
theologians in either camp may have been.
This situation has now changed, again according to the standard story.
Theology is no longer a discourse that needs to accommodate itself to the
received conditions of disinterested, scientific validity in a research university,
nor need it carve out an entirely separate sphere for itself in which it might
reign supreme in a kingdom of one. The intellectual developments once
denominated by the now-unfashionable label ‘postmodernism’ have put
scientific standards themselves to the question, particularly the idea that it
might be possible to bracket all committed perspectives within any area of
study. Engaged studies resembling constructive rather than historical studies
exist in multiple academic departments, especially ethnic, gender and sexuality
studies.5 That said, theology still comes in for particular opprobrium, not only
because its object (God) is presumed to be unknowable or non-existent, but
also because theology is in the main pursued by believers committed to what
many see as a deeply unjust tradition, the Christianity that in one form or
another is frequently held responsible for the making of modernity through
the slave trade, colonialism, the wars of religion, and the concomitant rise of
the nation-state and transition to full-fledged capitalism.6

5 Mark Jordan, ‘Religion Trouble’, in GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 13
(2007), p. 573.
6 This ethical aspect of theology’s marginalization in the university has not yet
received the attention it deserves, though it is often most visible in the anxieties of
influence and origin that drive religious studies to maximize its self-distinction
from theology and Christianity. John Webster’s ‘clusters of reasons’ for the
marginalization of theology include ‘the marginalization of moral and religious
conviction’ and acceptance of the standards of Wissenschaft or methodological
naturalism, but he says nothing of the role played by ethical critiques of
Christianity; see John Webster, Confessing God: Essays in Christian Dogmatics II
(London: Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 2005), pp. 12–13 and p. 16.
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6 Linn Marie Tonstad

Rather than accepting these developments, some theologians instead seek

to reconquer lost colonies. Several influential theologians construe theology
as an offensive vanguard rather than rearguard action. They argue that the
validity of the university depends on theology’s role, even dominance, within
the university, which reflects theology’s capacity to order knowledge into a
coherent whole. Such theologians claim pride of place for theology in the
university. Rather than accepting its marginalization by other disciplines,7 or
pursuing its own separate ends (as many other fields do), theology ought to
rule or at least reshape the university as a whole, and structure knowledge-
production within it.
Since the world depends on, and participates in, God as Creator,
Reconciler and Consummator, the argument runs, any investigation of the
world that abstracts from or sets aside the world’s relation to God will be
unable to achieve its own ends. Seeking knowledge of the world in such a way
sets aside just that which makes the world what it is. Theology’s position as ‘the
contemplation of the final cause and consummation of all paths of knowledge’,8
in David Bentley Hart’s words, is taken to mean that theology cannot be just
one discipline among others in the university. Theology must have priority, or
must claim an all-embracing status for itself, in order to be faithful to the
object of its knowledge. To bracket any sphere of inquiry as inaccessible to
theological determination would be to deny the dependence of the world on
the one who orders it into a unified whole.
John Webster rightly avers that ‘Reflection upon the place of theology in
the university requires … a theology of theology, and a theology of the cultural
acts and institutions of the civitas terrena’.9 He recognizes that theology’s
location in the university matters to its practice, so he looks to identify the
principles according to which theology is pursued generally, and the effect of
the university on that pursuit. ‘Theology is a comprehensive account of all
things in the light of God’, so theology illuminates not only the nature of
things but the nature of intellectual inquiry itself.10 The revelation given to
redeemed intellects ‘generates actual knowledge, not just its possibility’.11

7 Webster dismisses such acceptance as a ‘lesser calling’ since theology’s ‘content

[would] be supplied by natural religion rather than by the wisdom which comes
down from the Father of lights’, John Webster, Domain of the Word: Scripture and
Theological Reason (London: Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 2012), p. 172.
8 David Bentley Hart, ‘Theology as Knowledge: A Symposium’, First Things 163
(May 2006), p. 27.
9 John Webster, God Without Measure: Working Papers in Christian Theology, 2
vols. (London: Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 2016) (hereafter GWM), II, p. 157. See
GWM II, pp. 165–7 for Webster’s brief summary of the contemporary university
situation.
10 Webster, Domain of the Word, p. 181. See also GWM I, p. 213 and p. 224; II, pp.
141–4, and John Webster, Holiness (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2003), pp. 11–12.
11 Webster, Domain of the Word, p. ix; similarly in GWM I, pp. 217–18.
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Systematic Theology in the University 7

Webster admits that reason is fallen and limited, but he avers that ‘any talk of
reason’s depravity … must be set … under the sign of redemption’.12 Presuming
that one of the reasons for the marginalization of theology in the university is
the assumption that intellectual pursuits are utterly self-generated rather than
God-related, Webster emphasizes that the intellect does not move ‘with
absolute spontaneity or originality’. Rather, ‘God moves … the proper power
of the intellect in its dependent but real spontaneity; God moves from within,
not simply as a causal force from without’.13 This potentially uncontentious
compatibilism opens up into a much wider claim: if the ‘work of the intellect’
belongs within ‘the economy of God’s illuminating presence and gift’, then ‘to
study the humanities is to participate in this movement’.14 Webster justifies
this move, following Bonaventure, by defining theology as ‘not a “faculty” but
… a mode of thought, prayer and holiness which permeates all acts of
intelligence’.15 That definition suggests that any devout student of the world is
also on some level a theologian, but Webster claims rather more.
Although ‘theology is not competent to make direct recommendations’ to
other fields, such as ‘prescrib[ing] methods of historical study’, theology is
nonetheless ‘an exercise of apostolic intelligence from which we may
legitimately expect instruction about what it means to be and think as a
creature’.16 Despite the admission that theology is always in via, theology
knows ‘what [it] has been given to know… and what it knows it seeks to
commend’ to others.17 Any recognition of significant disagreement among
theologians is absent here,18 as is the perhaps more significant implication of
the admission that, since theology ‘participates in our fallen condition … [and]
knows only in part’,19 theology in truth does not yet know what it knows. The
line where knowledge stops can be known only in relation to the whole, and it

12 Webster, Domain of the Word, p. 125. Webster typically discusses these dynamics
in terms of mortification and vivification; see, for instance, Confessing God, pp.
64–5 and GWM II, pp. 104–5.
13 Webster, Domain of the Word, p. 188. See also GWM II, pp. 144–7.
14 Webster, Domain of the Word, p. 187.
15 Webster, Domain of the Word, p. 181.
16 Webster, Domain of the Word, p. 189.
17 Webster, Domain of the Word, p. 189.
18 Webster discusses disagreement elsewhere in the book; conflict is ‘sin against
peace’, which can only be recognized by ‘the moving of the mind by the Holy
Spirit’, Webster, Domain of the Word, p. 161. Theological controversy is allowed
when ‘it is a work of charity, … an exercise in common discernment of divine truth
… and … when it arises from and tends toward peace’, Webster, Domain of the
Word, p. 166. Notably, significant disagreement about the nature of the theological
task is ruled out. Webster terms such disagreements ‘fundamental divergences
about the gospel’, which imply that there is no shared task for divergent theologians
since they are not faithful to the same God: ‘In such cases concord must wait for
conversion to the truth’, Webster, Domain of the Word, p. 169.
19 Webster, Domain of the Word, p. 189.
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8 Linn Marie Tonstad

is just that whole that theology does not know. As Herbert McCabe points out,
even ‘shar[ing God’s] knowledge of [Godself]’ would of necessity ‘to us … look
like darkness. So that our faith seems like … an increase of ignorance’.20 On a
different matter, G. Egner responds to McCabe with the claim that, in theology,
‘not only is our linguistic medium inadequate; it is inadequate to the task of
drawing bounds to its inadequacy’.21 But that unknowing is, for Webster,
enfolded within a confident reliance on divine action and regeneration that
places a heavy burden on the sanctification of the theologian.22
John Milbank moves well beyond the claim that all other disciplines
cannot fully know the objects of their study if they do not know them in
relation to God. Milbank maintains that since ‘other disciplines … claim to be
about objects regardless of whether or not these objects are related to God [,
they] are … for this reason about nothing whatsoever’.23 Unless organized
under or by theology, other disciplines have no objects of study. A stronger
acclamation of the wisdom of theology in distinction from the foolishness of
the world could hardly be imagined. Indeed, Milbank’s founding claim in
Theology & Social Theory is that ‘the pathos of modern theology is its false
humility. … If theology no longer seeks to position, qualify or criticize other
discourses, then it is inevitable that these discourses will position theology.’24
Milbank insists that theology’s status as ‘a master discourse’ is grounded in its
‘non-mastery’ which alone is ‘able to position and overcome nihilism itself’,25
since theology recognizes participation in God as a form of mediation between
the infinite and finite particularity. Such assertions come to a head in
suggestions that theology ought to be the queen of the sciences. In such claims,
the status of theology as a discourse of the ‘Greeks’ becomes evident.
Theology transforms itself into a discourse of mastery and wisdom by
going on the attack against other academic disciplines. These attacks are often
directed against the critiques of theology and Christianity brought by the
masters of suspicion, who play significant roles in some of the discourses
against which theology defines itself. The autonomy of such discourses is

20 Herbert McCabe, God Matters (London: Continuum, 1987), p. 20.

21 G. Egner (P.J. FitzPatrick), ‘More Thoughts on the Eucharistic Presence’, in
McCabe, God Matters, p. 155.
22 See John Webster, Holy Scripture: A Dogmatic Sketch (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2003), pp. 26–8, for a more general account of sanctification,
and GWM II, pp. 152–6 for a description of regenerate intellectual life.
23 Milbank’s claim is a ‘counter-claim’ to the assertion of the ‘secular atheist, or
agnostic, consensus’ that theology is about nothing. John Milbank, ‘Theology and
the Economy of the Sciences’, in M.T. Nation and S. Wells, eds., Faithfulness and
Fortitude: In Conversation with the Theological Ethics of Stanley Hauerwas
(Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 2000), p. 41.
24 John Milbank, Theology & Social Theory: Beyond Secular Reason (Oxford:
Blackwell, 1990), p. 1.
25 Milbank, Theology & Social Theory, p. 6.
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Systematic Theology in the University 9

undone by the re-crowning of theology, but this strategy alone does not suffice;
theologians also go on the attack in order to invalidate those who seek to
invalidate them. In this move, theology claims mastery for itself by subsuming
all other discourses under the banner of ‘discourses seeking mastery’. Newly
emboldened to counter-attack, these theologians no longer retreat behind
demythologizing or the death of God. As Milbank puts it, theology will only
be ‘on secure ground if it adopts the most extreme mode of counter-attack:
namely that unless other disciplines are (at least implicitly) ordered to theology
(assuming that this means participation in God’s self-knowledge … ) they are
objectively and demonstrably null and void’.26
Counter-attacking sometimes means out-narrating, telling a story that is
purportedly so much more beautiful, comprehensive, clear and compelling
that others will find themselves drawn, almost irresistibly, to see the world the
way theologians describe it. Counter-attacking might also mean out-arguing:
identifying all the weaknesses of an opponent’s argument – perhaps through
ungenerous or reductive readings – thus proving the superiority of ‘the’ Christian
approach to whatever issues are in play. (That ‘the’ Christian approach is
itself contentious within Christianity is then assumed as yet another virtue
demonstrating the bankruptcy of less aggressively certain Christianities.)
Counter-attacking often proceeds via genealogical undermining: such-and-
such a concept (tolerance, for instance, or human dignity, or peace) or such-
and-such a discipline (the social sciences), or such-and-such a social structure
(the university) originally derived from within Christianity; after giving up
the Christian contexts and commitments that originally determined them,
these concepts or institutions seek to be self-grounding in a way that none of
them can be. The implication is that Christianity alone can ground concepts
such as universal human dignity, or can build a firm conceptual edifice that
will not dissolve into nihilism and incoherence. The cleverness and apparent
intellectual sophistication of these styles of argument, with their grand
narratives and heavily footnoted descriptions of decisive turning points in
the thought of one or another deplored scholar, renders them both exciting to
many readers and difficult to counter.
Even ostensibly humble descriptions of the unmastery of the theologian in
relation to God can transform into dramatic claims for theology’s capacity to
rule. Rowan Williams elides faith and its object in so smooth a way as to be
almost unnoticeable. He argues, first, that faith is valid only if it ‘looks to

26 Milbank, ‘Theology and the Economy of the Sciences’, p. 45. See also p. 53, where
he suggests that a ‘neutral stance’ in relation to other disciplines within a theology
and religious studies department (a stance that does not admit that ‘the department
is still – as a whole and primarily – committed to theology’) will lead to the
eradication of ‘theology as an academic venture’. Other disciplines should not just
accept but welcome such theological ‘hegemony’, for without it they too will
disappear (p. 54).
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10 Linn Marie Tonstad

something beyond the state of my – or anybody’s – consciousness, only if it

shows itself to be answerable to … what it does not have under its control’.27
The humility of this position is then belied by Williams’s further claim: faith
‘must believe, passionately and argumentatively, that it [faith] is capable of
opening to human beings a new possibility of unillusioned, unafraid living. It
must see itself as a gift and as judgement’.28 Suddenly faith, rather than its
object, opens such a possibility; faith, rather than its object, gives and judges.
In this way an argument for the mastery of unmastery is made: although the
faithful person submits himself devotionally to the judgement of God, he
nonetheless retains a God-like capacity in relation to the neighbor. Indeed, the
former grounds the latter.
John Webster argues similarly that a theology that sees itself as a ‘gift
which comes down’ ought to ‘trust … that its exegetical and dogmatic resources
are adequate’ to provide ‘a comprehensive account of the nature and ends of
intellectual activity’ as well as ‘of the ways in which humane studies are an
element in the moving of created intellect by God’.29 This would return
theology to ‘her’ rightful position, although ‘she’ would refrain from exercising
‘her’ power unrighteously: ‘The queen of the arts is gentle and modest, not a
high-handed dominatrix.’30 Webster even worries, based on the same
Corinthians passage that structures my argument, that theologians will
underrate rather than overestimate the rational capacities God has granted
them, since only ‘unredeemed reason’ is brought to nothing.31 Elsewhere,
Webster praises Zacharius Ursinus for his simultaneous humility and
confidence as a theological teacher. While Ursinus knows himself to be
unequal to his object of study, he also knows that God works through the
weak, and that God speaks certain truths through ‘the Church’ and the Spirit,32
setting up a similar relationship between recognition of weakness and fallibility
in relation to God and aggressive certainty in relation to the neighbor.
Here we part ways. Given theology’s self-understanding, theologians
ought perhaps to see themselves as humble and foolish interpreters of a truth
unknowable by human insight alone. But it is difficult to follow Webster on the
nature of such humility and the consequences it has for the relationship

27 Rowan Williams, ‘Faith in the University’, in S. Robinson and C. Katulushi, eds.,

Values in Higher Education (Glamorgan: Aureus Publishing / University of Leeds,
2005), p. 35.
28 Williams, ‘Faith in the University’, p. 35. Similarly, Webster, Confessing God, p. 29.
29 Webster, Domain of the Word, p. 172, p. 171.
30 Webster, Domain of the Word, p. 189. The gendering of the personification of
theology disguises the fact that the exercise of ‘her’ authority is massively
dominated by male human beings. In Confessing God, for instance, Webster
himself cites only one woman theologian, and two women in total, out of more
than eighty names.
31 Webster, Domain of the Word, pp. 125–6.
32 Webster, Holy Scripture, pp. 107–11.
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Systematic Theology in the University 11

between theology and other disciplines. There is a positive correlation between

humility and certainty: as (asserted) humility increases, so does the certainty
of assertion and, consequentially, of rulership – not always directly, but often
via triangulation. Theology is able to rebuke the university because of its
relation to God, the virtues of its practitioners, and its capacity for self-
critique, pursued with ‘confidence, vigour, and intelligence’.33 I am suspicious
of just this correlation.
The need to outdo other storytellers, to defend one’s territory, is a
response to the way the masters of suspicion accuse theologians of idolatrous
bad faith. ‘No, we’re not, you’re nihilists!’ theologians counter. Such a counter-
attack refuses the painful recognition of theology’s own idolatrous tendencies.
Theology has idolatrous, bad-faith elements. Not all Christian theology at
all times in every way has confused God the Father with the father (Freud),
or has been generated by a desire to turn becoming into being because of
an ungrounded will to mastery that resents its lack of mastery (Nietzsche),
or proved nothing but a mystification and justification for unjust social
relationships in the present (Marx). But theology also has been and done all
these things. These are real temptations for theology, just as the discourse of
humility is often the most naked form of the will to power. Understandably,
theology wishes to respond to such uncomfortable critiques by positioning
itself as a discourse of wisdom, of plenitude, and as the only mastery that is
unmastery. But in refusing to make the inevitability and seriousness of such
theological failures a programmatic concern, theology loses the ability to act
in full recognition of itself as a discourse of foolishness. Rather than simply
asserting its own foolishness and unmastery in relation to God and the virtues
of its excellent practitioners, theology ought to structure itself and its relations
to other disciplines in ways that actually embody such a recognition. Theology
that accepts its own foolishness serves the ends it seeks more effectively than
when it strives to outdo its critics in the ways I have described.

The university in the age of austerity

Before developing an account of theological foolishness, the critique just

developed can be intensified by turning from the issue of the relative ordering
of disciplines to each other to the material effects of the university on the
theologian. Inside the university, no sharp contrast between theology and
other disciplines is possible. Both those who seek to excise theology from
the university, and those who commend its dominance, fail to recognize the
blurry distinctions between theology and other fields within the university.
Theologians trained in university settings and teaching there, like those
we have considered, depend heavily on insights from other disciplines in

33 Webster, Confessing God, pp. 24–9, here p. 29.

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12 Linn Marie Tonstad

order to do their own work. Conversely, many thinkers in fields other than
theology work at the boundaries between theology and other disciplines,
most commonly intellectual history, philosophy of religion, and the
numerous discourses sometimes characterized under the designation
‘theory’. Even if this were merely the effect of Christian dominance in
Western intellectual history (and I would contend it is not), theologians
work inside the university, without the possibility of clearly separating its
practices from their own.
Theology cannot but be affected by its position inside the modern
university: it comes to value what the modern university rewards.34 The
research university is structured ever more intensely by discourses, and to
some extent realities, of scarcity, as well as by emphasis on positional goods.
The university values what is new and groundbreaking; it values the originality
ascribed to a single scholar; it values radical programs or critiques of existing
structures, discipline-shifting paradigms; and it values productivity of a
measurable sort (publications), especially in prestigious venues. The more
radical and counterintuitive the program, the more it may be rewarded. These
values therefore affect not only the shape theology takes as a profession, but
also the influence and attention granted certain kinds of theological projects
– at least in the short to medium term, the time periods within which such
rewards have the greatest impact on behavior.
Nevertheless, theology does not wish to submit fully to these strictures:
theologians remain critical of just these logics of scarcity, individuality and
competition, and of the marketplaces that engender and sustain such
structures. Theologians often hope that their projects are determined in
fidelity to the object of their study. But none of us can claim a purely good will
for ourselves. Given the logic of scarcity, the proliferation of sub-disciplines,
and the hunger for the new and unique in academic marketplaces currently, an
unusual project – especially if it goes against the grain of standard readings in
the particular academic discipline to which it belongs – secures one’s position
within the very structures theologians spend their professional lives and
intellectual energies critiquing.35 Theology requires an enormous investment
in terms of intellectual energy, time and sacrifice of productive years on the
labor market. All the pressures associated with the financial constraints of
pursuing doctoral work in the humanities are exaggerated for theologians,
whose average remuneration (due to their employment in so many smaller,
church-related institutions of higher education) is lower than that of the vast

34 The problems identified here could not be solved by moving theology out of the
university into some other form of community-support for life and labor. That
sort of move is another form of repristination that pretends that theology could
render itself immune to structural deformations.
35 As D’Costa admits, Theology in the Public Square, p. 5.
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Systematic Theology in the University 13

majority of other academics.36 The pressure to distinguish oneself within a

field offering shrinking rewards becomes ever more intense. The impetus to
situate oneself within a formal or informal ‘school’ of thought enjoying a
period of attention and prestige is also strong, since such ‘schools’ offer access
to a ready-made array of opportunities for networking, publishing, conference
presentation and so on.37
Theology, as a result, becomes a practice of self-protection. Theology, due
to the logic of the marketplace, is – not only, seldom only, but also – a discourse
of securitization, of prudence and wisdom.38 That theology is a discourse of
wisdom is already evident in its position inside the university, an institution
that explicitly seeks wisdom and knowledge. Theology as a discipline, as a
career, even as a vocation, functions partly as a form of self-securitization, as
a (somewhat) prudent way to live a well-ordered life in the world.39 The
cleverness and originality of any individual contribution to the discipline
become modes of access to the increasingly weak forms of self-protection that
late capitalism’s privatization of risk requires: retirement savings, health

36 The Chronicle of Higher Education reported in 2017 that the average salary for new
assistant professors in theology and religious vocations at four-year institutions in
the United States in 2016 was $57,794, approximately in line with English, history
and the performing arts. See https​://www.cupahr.org/wp-conte​nt/uploa​ds/2017/07/
FHE-2016-2-Digit-Avera​ge-Salar​ies-Tenur​ed-and-Tenure-Track.pdf (accessed 22
May 2019). The average is somewhat inflated by university-related seminaries and
divinity schools. The Bureau of Labor Statistics estimated the median wage at
$71,890 for all postsecondary teachers in philosophy and religion, which is
somewhat inflated by the conflation of philosophy and religion into a single
category. See http://www.bls.gov/oes/curre​ nt/oes25​1126.htm (accessed 21 May
2019). While these salaries are far higher than the national mean wage across all
professions ($52,960 in 2018, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, https​://
www.bls.gov/oes/curre​nt/oes_nat.htm#00-0000 (accessed 21 May 2019)), they do
not take into account the relative impact on lifetime earnings overall or the
temporary impact of lower income during the extended duration of training in
theology. For white women and people of color, these constraints – along with the
well-known impact of children and singleness on academic prospects for women –
are so strong that they may combine with the disciplinary conservatism of theology
to deeply depress the number of women and people of color in the field.
37 The sudden explosion in recent years of genealogically oriented doctoral
dissertations diagnosing the origin of nihilism in one thinker or another in the
Western canon is best approached as part of such a development.
38 Webster commends just these strategies. He recognizes the dangers posed by
money and prestige, but offers a prudential and to my mind far too abstract and
unrealistic account of how such dangers may be avoided in GWM II, p. 169.
Webster is, of course, thinking of the wisdom of God, but my argument is that the
wisdom at play is far too often that of the world.
39 A yet stronger critique could be made from the reality of competition among
Christian institutions of higher learning for financial resources, students and
prestige, but since my focus is on theology in relation to the research university, I
leave that critique for another time.
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14 Linn Marie Tonstad

insurance, disability insurance, mortgages and rent in increasingly tight

housing markets, payment of student loans, saving for college if one has
children and so on. More desirable yet, because intrinsically scarce (as
positional goods), may be the tangible rewards that follow the production of
new and exciting research programs: a special session on one’s book at the
American Academy of Religion meeting, a prestigious professorship at Oxford
or Yale, or a book award from Christianity Today. Permanent posts at elite
institutions tend to go to those who have generated just such new programs, as
do speaking invitations, awards and honorary degrees.
Theology participates in a kind of marketplace, a marketplace that takes
ambiguous forms in relation to the various forms of capital in play, a
marketplace that is never totally visible as such, yet a real marketplace.40
Denial of the way the marketplace affects theology creates a bad-faith naiveté
and a claimed innocence in which theologians exempt themselves from the
need to examine the forces that affect the content of their own theological
proposals. As long as Christian academic theology refuses in this way to make
its own status as a discourse of wisdom and prudence a part of its theological
inquiry, instead claiming that theology needs repristination and a return to its
royal position at the apex of the research university, it will continue to cloak
the way it is affected by logics of scarcity.

A non-defensive theology in the university

Theology ought to take its own failures much more seriously than it does in
these counter-attacks, and these failures ought to affect the claims theology
makes for itself as a discipline. Refusing sustained attention to theology’s
failures forbids the recognition of the place of Christian theology within a
world of scarcity, of competition for recognition and social and material goods.
Claiming a need to defeat theology’s opponents does not really oppose the
logics of competition and violence: it simply reintroduces competition, mastery
and scarcity in cloaked form. In rejecting accusations of idolatry and bad faith
by turning them on one’s opponents, one invites their application to oneself.
In reasserting theology’s mastery as a discourse of non-mastery, theologians
move past legitimate critiques of theology all too quickly. Rather than tracing
linkages between textual Christian orthodoxy and the disasters that resulted
in theological gifts being transformed into Gift (poison), theologians argue
that theology went wrong at some historical point that can now be fixed by

40 Indirectly, but with increasing intensity, another element plays into this: the need
to attract donors for private universities (in the United States), and state funding
that depends on positional excellence (as seen in the Research Assessment Exercise
in Great Britain or the Excellence Initiative in Germany; in Great Britain and
Germany, unlike in the United States, many publicly funded universities offer
instruction in theology).
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Systematic Theology in the University 15

speaking rightly of participation and analogy, or that theological failures

are effects of individual lack of humility and submissiveness in relation to
magisterial or creedal authority, or that well-formed theologians simply will
not be very susceptible to the dangers described.
In truth, theology’s failures are not merely occasional, but both structural
and theologically significant. If theologians accept the negative side of this
diagnosis, that theology too seeks wisdom, mastery and prudence, and cannot
free itself from those desires, they might instead recognize that theology both
is and ought to be a discourse of foolishness and failure. Theology might then
be the sort of discourse in which God makes something out of nothing, as 1
Corinthians suggests.
We have already considered the impact of the university’s structures of
validation on the sociology of theological knowledge-production. In this
regard, a partial antidote may be administered to the discipline if it accepts,
instead of fighting, its sidelining in the modern university. This sidelining has
salutary effects for theology, first simply as a reminder that there is realistically
no way for theology to regain its status as queen, but second, and far more
importantly, because it requires theologians to admit that they would like more
power than they have, which opens the door to developing practices of
resistance to their own desires for mastery. The theological, rather than
sociological, reasons for accepting that theology is a discipline of failure and
incompletion are therefore the most important for the confessional theologian.
Negatively, one might refer again to theology’s idolatrous tendencies.
Theologians sometimes pretend that they only stand accountable to God, or
perhaps also to magisterial and creedal authority; thus, no one else can call
them to account for their own failures and desires for mastery without being
subjected to accusations of infidelity, nihilism or unbelief in return. The result
is assertorily established invulnerability to critique, combined with a rather
ugly tendency to denigrate numerous forms of humanistic reflection. Positively,
genuine theological humility requires theologians to admit rather than deny
the distorting effect desires for mastery and practices of prudence have on
their work.41 The masters of suspicion and Christian theologians agree on at
least one point: that the human being is not the master of her own desires, and
that she is not transparent to herself in any simple fashion.
There are, however, noteworthy resources from within certain strands of
Christian theological reflection that could generate an alternative vision of a

41 The theologians discussed might object here that the problem of wisdom applies
only to theology’s opponents, or to – at most – non-confessional theologizing.
Based on 1 Cor. 2:6–16, they might argue that theologians have the mind of Christ
(v. 16) so that their theologizing may be thought to take part in God’s self-
knowledge, as implied by the role of the Spirit in sharing God’s knowledge of
Godself with believers (vv. 10–13). Such an argument repeats the basic claim and
defense already critiqued.
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16 Linn Marie Tonstad

theology that, rather than pretending that it alone can safely practice mastery,
would instead be a gracious guest or non-defensive presence in a university.
Such a theology would pursue a methodologically and substantively open-
ended search for knowledge and learning of all kinds, while seeking to join
with others in imagining and enacting ways to make research universities more
just structures without destroying livelihoods and dissipating the resources
that make a life devoted to theology, or to humanistic reflection, possible to
begin with.
Such a theology might be developed in conversation with Martin Luther
and Karl Barth, two sophisticated diagnosticians of the tendency of Christians
to deny the depth of their own distorted desires. Barth maintains that
‘tolerance, and … a theological consideration of religion, is possible only for
those who are ready to abase themselves and their religion together with man,
with every individual man, knowing that they first, and their religion, have
need of … a strong forbearing tolerance’.42 That ‘religion is unbelief’ ‘above all
affects ourselves also as adherents of the Christian religion’.43 The knowledge
of God as Lord is given to believers ‘as religious men’, that is, in unbelief, not
‘in the activity which corresponds’ to that knowledge, that is, faith.44 Luther
insists that the knowledge of the crucified Christ be given to the believer in
such a way. The distinction between a theologian of glory and a theologian of
the cross hinges on the tendency of the theologian (identified, according to
Luther, as fool who claims to be wise, Rom. 1:20, 22) to believe oneself capable
of recognizing the invisible things of God in the visible.45 To prefer wisdom to
foolishness and good to evil makes one an enemy of the cross of Christ.46
Knowledge, wisdom and money all play a role in generating the ‘lust of life’
that can only be controlled by running in the opposite direction, that is, by
fleeing one’s own lust for power and honor. Yet that flight cannot be performed
by one’s own strength or by doing what is in one (echoing the Heidelberg
Disputation differently)47: the self has no power to ‘crucify’ the self. One’s own
claimed humility and unmastery can do nothing, then, to ensure that one is a
theologian of the cross rather than a theologian of glory, for the believer’s
tendency is to ‘misuse the best in the worst manner’.48 Theologians as a guild
and individually would be better equipped to relate to one another as well as
to their ambiguous position inside modern research universities if they were to
take this tendency in themselves seriously.

42 Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics, 4 vols. in 13 pts., ed. G.W. Bromiley and T.F.
Torrance (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1956–75) (hereafter CD), I/2, p. 299.
43 CD I/2, pp. 299–300.
44 CD I/2, p. 301.
45 Martin Luther, ‘Heidelberg Disputation’, in Luther’s Works, volume 31: Career of
the Reformer I, trans. H.J. Grimm (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1957), p. 40, p. 52.
46 Luther, ‘Heidelberg Disputation’, p. 40.
47 Luther, ‘Heidelberg Disputation’, pp. 53–4.
48 Luther, ‘Heidelberg Disputation’, p. 41.
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Systematic Theology in the University 17

The critique offered by Barth and Luther can be supplemented by positive

reasons to revalue a theology as a discipline of failure, incompletion and
foolishness. These positive reasons derive from classical motifs of creation and
eschatology, as well as from the logic of the 1 Corinthians text itself. The result
would be, rather than counter-attacks, a non-defensive theology of failure and
foolishness. A theology of failure and incompletion recognizes that it is only
with the grace of God and at the eschaton that its claims will be finally
validated.49 Indeed, they may very well not be validated, for believers may be
told on the last day that the Lord does not recognize them (as suggested by Mt.
7:21–3). Such a theology will have a different approach both to the marketplace
of ideas and to its relations to other disciplines. A theology that recognizes its
own proclivity toward failure, and its own incomplete status prior to the
eschaton, will offer its propositions tentatively rather than dogmatically (in
the non-theological sense of the latter term). Instead of using its own subjection
to God’s judgement to exercise mastery over other disciplines, such a theology
would worry more about its own desire to proclaim the judgement of God on
the other.
Classical Christian accounts of creation insist that God creates human
beings as historical creatures, which means not only that humans are always
in via, but that human life is always in a state of incompletion outside of
eschatological fulfillment. Because theology, faithful to divine self-revelation
though it may wish to be, is not identical with such revelation, it too cannot but
participate in such incompletion. No theological system can then claim finality
either for itself or for its claims with any specificity; but such incompletion
should be considered good, since temporality, movement and change are
intrinsic to the goodness of creation as such. Theology’s incompletion is one
of its virtues rather than a fault. Such a theology will also give up the attempt
to control the relation of other disciplines to each other. Those theologians
who believe that nothing can truly be known, in some ultimate sense, if its
relationship to God is bracketed, might then have to admit that they do not yet
know what they themselves do not know. A theology adequately attentive to
change and historicity would not commend its own certain knowledge to other
disciplines, especially not in order to order the relations of other disciplines
to one another. Instead, it would rejoice in the ability of other disciplines to
illuminate the world from different directions than theology itself does. Such
a theology would also seek to learn especially from disciplines that study the

49 This theme is crucial in Pannenberg’s theology: ‘The finitude of theological

knowledge … is grounded especially in the time-bound nature of this knowledge.
… the deity of God will be definitively and unquestionably manifested only at the
end of all time and history’, Wolfhart Pannenberg, Systematic Theology volume I
(Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1991), p. 54. As a result, all theological statements have
the status of hypotheses and provisionality until the eschaton (p. 56). Pannenberg
does not draw the same conclusions on this basis that I do.
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18 Linn Marie Tonstad

world as a whole, as well as human beings, with attention to diversity and

change.
Finally, note the logic of divine action suggested in the text that structures
my argument. See 1 Corinthians 1:28a: ‘God chose what is and despised in the
world, even the things that have no being in order to bring to nothing things
that have being.’50 The logic of this statement is directly opposed to the
structure of being on which claims to mastery depend. If the wisdom and
foolishness of the cross is the logic of choosing things that have no being, then
any claim to wisdom or rulership that is grounded in the participation of things
in divine being must be set aside. Theology ought not, perhaps, actively to seek
to be ‘low and despised in the world’, for that entails a risk of Nietzschean
tricksterism of the bad-faith variety, but – assuming that it is low and despised
in some ways – it ought to accept that status while admitting how much it is
bothered thereby. If Karl Barth is right that ‘grace and judgment are … for
both Jew and Gentile in the very best that they can do, their worship of God’,51
then the target of a theology of failure and foolishness is the theologian, not
the theologian’s opponents.
A theology of failure and foolishness applied first and last to itself requires
theology to take up a non-defensive position in the university. Decisive
theological reasons for applying such critiques first and last to the practice of
theology itself are available, and, I argue, more in line with the logic of divine
foolishness described in the 1 Corinthians passage. Such a non-defensive
position does not seek to colonize other disciplines by instructing them in their
proper ends or by accusing them of being about nothing. For the text instructs
theologians that God sometimes chooses what is nothing for God’s own ends,
and it is not the business of the theologian to determine when God is doing
just that. What academic Christian theology needs is not repristination but
theological therapy for its desire for recognition. That is the task systematic
theology needs to take up.

50 Following Alexandra R. Brown’s translation in ‘Paul’s Apocalyptic Cross and

Philosophy’, in J.B. Davis and D. Harink, eds., Apocalyptic and the Future of
Theology: With and Beyond J. Louis Martyn (Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2012),
p. 115.
51 CD I/2, p. 306. Barth emphasizes here that ‘because Christ was born and died and
rose again, there is no such thing as an abstract, self-enclosed and static
heathendom’ and by implication no stance from which the Christian theologian
may permit herself to pronounce as though such a thing exists.
© 2020 John Wiley & Sons Ltd