Before a crowd of 300 students, faculty, and community members on Thursday night (November 8), Dr. Stanley Hauerwas, Gilbert T. Rowe Professor of Theological Ethics at Duke Divinity School and “America’s Best Theologian” (according to TIME magazine in 2001), asserted that theology belongs in the university, secular and otherwise.

Hauerwas, the author of countless books and articles, including his most recent work The State of the University (2007), was at the University of Minnesota to deliver the Institute’s 12th Annual Holmer Memorial Lecture. The lecture honors the memory and scholarship of the late Paul Holmer, who was a philosophy professor at the University of Minnesota before he joined the Yale faculty where he became the Noah Porter Professor of Philosophical Theology until his retirement in the mid-1980s. Hauerwas began his lecture by recounting fond memories of his days as a student in Dr. Holmer’s classes and as a visitor in his home.

Hauerwas built his lecture as a series of responses to leading thinkers concerned with the state of higher education. Richard Levin’s 1993 address to the incoming class at Yale University concerned the need to return to a vision for liberal education, which Levin believes has to do with the “how,” not the “what” of thinking. While acknowledging that Levin’s has become the standard account of American higher education, the reality is that he simply can’t account for the diversity of American education, especially its highly utilitarian focus.

The second thinker with which Hauerwas dealt was Lawrence Veysey, who has given an “extraordinary account” of the period from 1865 to 1910 when the shape of the American university was solidified. The German research university ideal first balanced and eventually conquered the elitist Oxbridge model imported from Great Britain. American universities adapted modern bureaucratic methods and a strong disciplinary emphasis that means, said Hauerwas, “you can’t understand the person down the hall” whose discipline is different than yours. The American universities exalted science, and the power to control our world, even seeking to defeat death itself. With the absence of theology and the supremacy of modern, critical methods that aim to “rationally and objectively” analyze scriptural texts, Hauerwas argues, the purpose of the university is to produce workers who serve the state, and the state alone.

John Henry Newman, a mid 19th century theologian who wrote the classic work The Idea of the University, was the third thinker to whom Hauerwas turned his attention in the lecture. Here Hauerwas finds a like-minded scholar whose argument for theology in the university curriculum was that theology fosters the interconnection of knowledge, resulting in “the power to view many things as part of a whole.”

The real problem, say Hauerwas, is that science (as the normative epistemological framework for universities today) tries to explain more than its method will allow. It cannot claim to be anything more than a method. The sciences, in fact, “need theology” in order to make sense of knowledge in general.

Hauerwas acknowledges that theologians are considered the “bottom-feeders” in the modern university. Ironically, therefore, theologians read more widely in other fields than those in other fields, and, thus, have “to know what others are thinking though they (those in other fields) do not have to know what we are thinking!”

Hauerwas concludes that while the university desperately needs the return of theology, theology must not over-promise nor must it resurrect the hubris of Christendom. Rather, as a truly humble field, it must glorify God and serve people, which is why it is so very, very interesting. Rather than ghettoizing theology, as seminaries all too often do, theologians must and do have something of great significance to offer the university.

Hauerwas concluded: “The challenge before us, therefore, is not really whether we can convince our colleagues in the rest of the university that theology matters. The challenge is whether we are capable of performing the work of theology with the joy and confidence the subject of theology requires.”