Theological Education in the Catholic Tradition: Contemporary Challenges

Theological Education In The Tradition: Contemporary Challenges. Edited by Patrick W Carey and Earl C. Muller, S.J. New York: The Crossroad Publishing Company, 1997. 423 pp. $29.95 (paper). The title of this book is somewhat misleading to Protestants who use the term education to refer to graduate level training for the ordained ministry. Two of the twenty-six essays in this collection are indeed about the vexing issues of seminary training. The rest of the essays touch upon the teaching of theology within Roman colleges and universities. The organizing theme for the collection is the role and use of theology in the maintenance and development of a distinctively Roman ethos and identity in higher education. Most of the papers contained in the collection were given at a conference on the subject at Marquette University in August of 1995. This book will be relevant to Anglicans for the issues it raises. Some of these issues are peculiar to the Roman church, such as the relationship between professional theologians and the official magisterium of the church, but it does not take much imagination to identify the parallel issues in our own church life. The fragmented and hyper-professionalized nature of much academic theology, the polarization of approaches to the theological task, the divorce of theology from spirituality and from ecclesial life-these problems manifest themselves in particular ways within the Roman World but they are problems with which all of the mainline churches are familiar. It is particularly interesting for Anglicans to overhear Roman Catholics attempting to answer the question of what constitutes Catholic and what ought to be the commitment of Roman institutions to the teaching of that tradition. The theological ethos of many faculties is generically neo-Kantian. In many places there is a lack of interest in and skill for the kind of historical investigation that can sustain a dynamic tradition. Some of the authors in this collection are asking whether there is enough competent knowledge of the and understanding of what is historically distinctive about Roman philosophical and theological investigation to make the teaching of Catholic possible in the American context. Matthew Lamb of Boston College sounds the alarm in a sobering essay on the Challenges For Graduate Theological Education. A survey of all the Ph.D.s in theology at universities completed over the past fifteen years indicates that 75 percent of them have been studies of twentieth-century figures or questions. If the nineteenth century is added, it will account for almost 90 percent of all the completed Ph.D.s. There is a dangerous lack of balance in terms of the expertise required to carry on the long intellectual tradition (p. 125). Lamb fears that without this expertise contemporary Theology will succumb to the Enlightenment opposition between faith and reason and that the teaching of theology will degenerate into the repackaging of contemporary secular methodologies. …