Rector’s Reflections
Monday 24th March 2025
A Theologian For The Modern World: Edward Schillebeeckx
Have you ever wondered what professional theologians actually do? Are they an irrelevance to the Church, pursuing obscure questions in impenetrable prose? Do their thoughts and conclusions make any difference at all to way that ordinary Christians live out their faith in their everyday lives?
These are good questions to ask. Different branches of the Church take different views as to the importance of academic theology. Some church traditions consider it to be very important indeed, and allocate significant resources towards supporting it. An example of such a church would be the Roman Catholic Church, which has been at the forefront of theological thought and research since at least 13th century. Other churches pay little attention to it, taking the view that most people aren’t interested in deep theological issues, and so the church’s role is simply to introduce people to Jesus and to give them a transforming experience of the Holy Spirit. The Pentecostal churches have largely taken this approach, although in recent years there has been an increasing interest in exploring theology from a Pentecostalist perspective, and increased engagement with academic theology among at least some members of the Pentecostalist community.
And how about the good old Church of England? The Church of England sits somewhere in the middle. All clergy in their training have to demonstrate at least a basic understanding of the outlines of Christian theology as it has been understood in Western Christianity since the days of the Early Church up until modern times. I say theology as it has been understood “in Western Christianity” because the flavour and focus of Christian theology varies around the world. For example, the theology of the Eastern Orthodox Churches feels quite different to the theology of Western Christianity, although both traditions have much in common.
So all Church of England are expected to know a bit of theology. But only a bit. The Church of England does not expect its clergy to be theological experts. As a broad generalisation, most Church of England clergy cease their theological studies once they have finished their initial training and started in parish ministry. The advantage of this is that it recognises that the Church of England isn’t about placing sophisticated theologians into parish churches. It about training and paying clergy to take services, do pastoral care and to run parishes, which is a very different thing. The disadvantage is that this means that most parish clergy are out of touch with the academic theology of the last 50 years or so. Is this a problem? Most clergy are either blissfully unaware of this, or quite unconcerned. I should add that it doesn’t seem to bother the Bishops, either.
However, the Church of England has traditionally seen itself as learned and well-educated Church, and so it has kept close contacts with some University theology departments, especially at Cambridge, Durham, and Oxford. These links used to be much closer than they are today, and it is getting harder for the Church of England to maintain its traditional connection with the world of academic theology. In part this is because there are fewer clergy around than there used to be. Another factor is that some people argue that the Church needs to be quite separate from the academic world, because otherwise Church considerations will compromise academic integrity and freedom. Finally, there is the question of funding. The Church of England is finding it harder and harder to resource its various ministries. At the same, University budgets are under threat, and cuts to Departments of Theology or Religious Studies are an easy way of balancing the books, at least in the short term.
Should these developments worry us? Should we be bothered that the Church of England increasingly has little if any commitment to serious engagement with academic theology?
As mentioned at the start of today’s reflections, much depends on our understanding of what theologians actually do in the modern world. In the days ahead, I will be exploring this question by looking at the life and writings of Edward Schillebeeckx (1914-2009), a Roman Catholic theologian who is in many ways the quintessential modern theologian. I should add that he has the added advantage of being a theologian who sought to engage with the Christian community as whole, rather than limiting his engagement to the world of academic theologians. He could also be quite controversial, which makes him rather interesting!