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The critic and the visionary

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 February 2009

F. Young
F. Young*
Affiliation:
Department of Theology University of Birmingham P.O. Box 363 Birmingham B15 2TT
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Extract

The first Edward Cadbury Professor of Theology was H. G. Wood. The subject of his Inaugural Lecture given in 1940 was The function of a Department of Theology in a modern University. Appropriately enough he took up the views of John Henry, Cardinal Newman, the one Birmingham theologian whose work is on the way to becoming classic. In the present climate, Newman's book The Idea of a University is worth looking at again. As he showed over a hundred years ago, purely utilitarian values cannot produce good education. Nor can a general acquaintance with a bit of everything. Specialisation and in-depth study is the only way to learn how to think rather than pick up information jackdaw-like. Scholarly grappling with the great minds of the past, the so-called ‘irrelevant’ and ‘ivory-tower’ occupation of those who inhabit an Arts Faculty, is essential for the formation of minds. ‘To open the mind, to correct it, to refine it, to enable it to know, and to digest, master, rule, and use its knowledge, to give it power over its own faculties, application, flexibility, method, critical exactness, sagacity, resource, address, eloquent expression’ – this Newman regarded as ‘an object as intelligible as the cultivation of virtue’.1 Society needs minds and not just technicians, and in an institution which is concerned with truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, theology is indispensable to the universality which a University should embrace.

Type
Research Article
Information
Scottish Journal of Theology , Volume 41 , Issue 3 , August 1988 , pp. 297 - 312
Copyright
Copyright © Scottish Journal of Theology Ltd 1988

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Footnotes

*

An inaugural lecture given by Frances Young on her appointment to the Edward Cadbury Chair of Theology in the University of Birmingham.

References

page 297 note 1 The Idea of a University, ed. Svaglic, M. J., Rinehart Press, San Francisco, 1960, p. 92.Google Scholar

page 298 note 2 Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine, ed. Cameron, J. M., Pelican Classics, 1974, pp. 241–270.Google Scholar

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page 304 note 9 See further Young, Frances M., ‘The God of the Greeks and the Nature of Religious Language’, in Early Christian Literature and the Classical Intellectual Tradition, in honorem Grant, R. M., ed. W. R. Schoedel & R. L. Wilken, Théologie Historique 53, Editions Beauchesne, Paris, 1979 Google Scholar; both for justification of this claim and for detailed development of much else in the following statement.

page 305 note 10 Clement, Stromateis 5.12.81.2.

page 306 note 11 Ibid. 5.4.20–10.66.

page 306 note 12 E.g. Mühlenberg, E., Die Unendlichkeit Gotles bei Gregor von Nyssa, Göttingen, 1966 Google Scholar; Heine, R. E., Perfection in the Virtuous Life, Patristic Monograph Series 2, Philadelphia, 1975.Google Scholar

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page 308 note 14 Introd. to Essay in aid of a Grammar of Assent, University of Notre Dame Press, 1979 Google Scholar; see also the discussion in Cameron, Introd. to Essay on Development… cit. sup. and Coulson, John, Religion and the Imagination in aid of a grammar of assent, Clarendon, 1981.Google Scholar

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page 311 note 17 Polkinghorne, John, The Way the World is, Triangle, SPCK, 1983.Google Scholar