As is the case in so many other countries, the Australian government is revisiting the question of higher education. The United States isn’t all that different. We’re worried about how to finance our gigantic system, and we’re concerned about how to ensure that various institutions are doing a decent job.
The rub, of course, comes in deciding what counts as good, or at least good enough. With the usual Byzantine bureaucratic complexities, various organizations in Australia are setting about to establish educational standards, what the educational establishment calls “learning outcomes.”
The document produced by an association of Australian and New Zealand theological schools, ” Threshold Learning Outcomes in Australian Theological Education ,” makes for interesting reading.
OK, not interesting, but at least telling—a reminder of why it’s a very bad idea to empower contemporary academics to police theological education.
First, we find the usual rhetoric about diversity, openness, and critical freedom.
“Particular church commitments are respected [whew!], while at the same time not shielded from scrutiny—critique and commitment go hand in hand.” Sure, but we know which gets to let go when it wants.
Indeed, unlike physics, chemistry, and biology, where a student denying basic theories will surely be denied a degree, apparently the study of theology imposes no deep cognitive commitments: “Holding to any particular world-view cannot be required for a person to graduate with a degree in theology.”
But wait. There’s critical freedom and then there’s critical freedom. Somehow, the committee that drafted the learning outcomes feels confident that one can expect the study of theology, like other disciplines, to lead to “a lifestyle of integrity.” “Attitudinal outcomes are therefore looked for,” the document ominously intones. And those “attitudinal outcomes”? Here’s a hint: “Since theology is concerned with what is ultimately real, true and good, its own commitments continue to set fairness, consistency and openness at is heart.”
In other words, respectable study of theology imposes no worldview—except, of course, for the worldview of liberal modernity. Lots ends up being excluded, not the least of which is the traditional view of theology as the act of intellectual obedience to the Word of God.
What about the commitment to consistency? As this document makes clear, liberal modernity seems to exclude intellectual consistency. Somehow, the “attitudinal outcomes” of “fairness” and “openness” don’t entail a worldview? Somehow believing that “holding to any particular worldview cannot be required” is not itself an extremely aggressive and obligatory worldview?
Parochial—to imagine one’s own way of thinking self-evident and universal. Are there any people on earth more parochial than modern liberal academics, including (and perhaps especially) modern liberal theologians?
