Massimo Faggioli has warned us that theology in Catholic colleges and universities is in danger of disappearing. (Massimo Faggioli, Theology and Catholic Higher Education, Orbis Books, 2024) Let me suggest an approach that might revive it.
Clifford Geertz
Clifford Geertz was an anthropologist
respected enough to gain a position at the “Institute for Advanced Studies,”
the institute that housed Albert Einstein and J. Robert Oppenheimer.
In his book (Clifford
Geertz, Religion as a Cultural System. Tavistock, 1966) and
other writings, Geertz proposed that there are four ways that humans interpret
their experiences:
1. common sense
2. scientific
3. aesthetic
4. religious
The common sense way is the way we live
from day to day. We experience things and don’t question our experiences. We
eat breakfast and assume that the milk and bread we consume are safe. We expect
the car to start and the office we go to will be there when we arrive. Geertz
cites the phenomenologist Alfred Schutz who wrote about this way of
experiencing reality.
The scientific way of approaching
reality is an attitude of questioning. When we study anything scientifically,
we take nothing for granted. We verify everything by experience. No
interpretation (theory) is final. The next observation may upend all our
previous theories. Think of how Einstein’s theories replaced Newton’s.
The third way humans approach reality is
the aesthetic way. Here the focus is on pure experience. When we stand before a
painting, we enjoy the experience of contemplating the work. We can think about
what the artist was trying to share, but that speculation is secondary to our
simply enjoying the experience of looking (or listening, or using any other of
our senses). We bask in the immediate experience. The artist has presented us
with something; each of us can experience it in our own unique way, and no one
way is definitive.
The fourth way is the religious way.
This is similar to the common sense way in that we do not question our
experiences. But the focus of our attention is not on everyday life but on what
Paul Tillich called “ultimate reality,” the foundations of existence. What is
life all about? What is the meaning of my existence? Why is there a universe?
Religious traditions answer these questions, with their stories and symbols and
rituals.
The problems of theology
The ancient slogan is “fides quaerens
intellectum,” faith seeking understanding.” The slogan says that the
“understanding” that we seek is a deeper appreciation of what religious
experience gives us. The goal is not to destroy religious experience, it is to
deepen it.
The scientific revolution began when
thinkers such as Galileo and Copernicus began to question traditional
interpretations of ultimate reality, on the basis of empirical observations.
Galileo’s observations verified the theory that the earth is not the center of
the universe—it goes around the sun. That theory upended many people’s
religious assumptions. I recall seeing a Berthold Brecht play that portrayed
the social chaos that Galileo’s ideas caused. The scientific method became highly
developed in Germany in the 1800s.
The effort to incorporate the German
scientific approach into religious issues caused many religious people to lose
sight of the “faith seeking understanding” goal. The first scientific
observations in the field of religion focused on the texts of the bible. Close
examination reveals that there are four different strands of tradition behind
the text of the book of Genesis. Roman Catholic church authorities saw this
interpretation as corrosive of faith and banned the approach for Catholic
scholars, a ban later reversed by church authorities. Archeologists began to
discover ancient texts whose similarity to biblical texts suggested a more
human origin of biblical texts than older theories of revelation accepted. For
example, the 1945 discovery of texts in the upper Egyptian town of Nag Hammadi
revealed what is now called the “Gospel of Thomas.” Babylonian excavations
discovered similar biblically analogous texts. Scholars began to think of the
bible as a human creation that was shaped by the cultures surrounding Judaism.
Martin Luther correctly accused medieval
theologians of destroying faith by putting too much emphasis on Aristotle, one
of the first philosophers to use observation as a companion to speculation.
Thomas Aquinas used Aristotle’s writings as a stimulus for his thinking about
God. Thomas himself started with faith, and used his mind to understand it more
deeply. As later philosophers moved away from seeing their work as a way to
enrich faith, their speculations did indeed corrode faith.
Theology as companion to piety
If religion is interpretation of reality
that one accepts without questioning, then theology should not be focused on
questioning the faith but on enriching interpretation of faith. How might this
be done?
It can be done by studying, through
observation and discussion, how people have developed their experiences and
understandings of God.
There are two basic questions that lie
behind all theological work: What is God like? What does God want of us?
There is no point in asking whether God
exists. No one can prove that God exists, and no one can prove that God does
not exist. The important question is, if God exists, and religious people
assume that to be as true as that the sun will rise tomorrow, what is God like?
There are answers to that question.
Jewish writings provide answers. Christian writings provide answers. Muslim
writings provide answers. Atheist writings do not provide answers because they
start with the assumption that God does not exist, and so asking what God is
like is a meaningless question.
Religious traditions take God seriously.
People live their lives based on the stories the traditions tell.
Theology starts with the question: How
have adherents of any faith arrived at their understanding of
God? To answer this question, we have to do two things. We have to
understand what people of faith say about God, and we have to appreciate what
their understanding means to the people who live by it. We have to take
seriously experiences based on piety.
Theology as a STEM discipline
Saying that theology is a form of
“Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics” is an overstatement, but my
purpose in saying it is that theology is as important for good living as
knowledge of any of the STEM disciplines. We do theology because we want to
enrich the lives of everyday people, just as we teach mathematics. We want them
to see God from a broader perspective, enriched by, for example, what
christians experience when they practice christianity, and how their religious
traditions and texts lie behind their experiences.
The theology that I studied for four
years in the seminary was a STEM discipline. It was focused on what priests
should know, based on what Catholic tradition says about God, and about what
God wants of us. That seminary theology did not ask questions, it told us what
it thought we needed in order to help the people we were expected to serve.
What it did not do was examine where the traditions came from, how they
developed, and how they helped or hindered people’s closeness to God.
A curriculum for religious education and college theology
For years I have heard college
professors complain that students arrive in college with twelve years of
Catholic education and know nothing about Catholicism. I have no experience
with what goes on in Catholic grade and high schools today, but sixty years
ago, when I taught “religion” in Catholic grade school and high school, the
experience even then had me asking, “what are we trying to do here?”
The Baltimore Catechism will not cut it.
We do not need catechisms, we need something that will enrich and deepen young
people’s understanding of what God is like and what God wants of us. We need
something that is not boring, but also has enough structure that the student
can see ahead to what is coming, and look forward to what further study might
provide.
I suggest that religious education on
all levels, primary, secondary, and college/university should follow a
recurring and deepening sequence:
2. Ask where the
text or ritual came from, what christians have done with it, what the text
taught them about what God is like and what God wanted of them. Learn how later
generations have changed the interpretation of that text, why they changed it,
and whether the change was justified in the light of the overall objective of
knowing what God is like and what God wants of us.
3. Ask how
christians have lived out that interpretation in good ways. We have hundreds of
years of christian history and of the effects of the text on broader historical
events.
4. Ask about the
pathologies of interpretation that the text has created, how people have used
the text to do bad things, like start wars or diminish personal dignity.
5. Compare the
text with texts from other religious traditions, such as Islam, and ask what
people of other religions have done with their texts or traditions, how their
understandings have developed over time.
Five steps,
structuring the enterprise. Select a text or ritual, study how religious people
of a certain denomination have accepted or changed the text, study how
christians have lived holy lives based on the text, and how christians have
done evil things based on the text. Finally, compare the text or experience
with texts or experiences from another religion or religions.
Then start over, on a deeper level. And
start over again, with the same five steps, with each repetition going deeper
into history and the literature surrounding the history.
The goal is to learn what God is like
and what God wants, using texts and how people have interpreted the texts along
with experiences that people have had using the texts.
There is meat in this approach. There is
direction to it. If the texts are well chosen, and information supporting each
of the four steps is carefully and critically selected, the student knows that
the next step might deepen his or her faith. It will not be boring.
This plan will require teachers to know
the material, the historical facts, the ways that so many people have
understood religious texts, with the depths of the teachers’ knowledge
depending on the age of the students they are teaching.
For religious teachers below the college
level, who may not have had the benefit of college study, online sources of
information are available, but the teacher will have to evaluate each text for
accuracy and spiritual benefit. Wikipedia is one possible tool, especially if
someone has prepared reliable guides toward entries in that source.
To repeat:
1. What is
the text or experience?
2. What do
the text or experience tell us about what God is like and what God wants of us?
3. How have
religious people interpreted the text or experience in fruitful ways?
4. How have
religious people interpreted the text or experience in ways harmful to
themselves or others?
5. What
texts in religious traditions other than one’s own can enrich one’s
understanding of the text?
