In my Sept. 2 column, I suggested that we turn upward as we begin the school year to meet the responsibility that flows from the privilege of a Duke education. Turning upward means exploring the Life Questions that are embedded in every human heart—why am I here, what makes for a Good life, does my existence even matter—and attending to our spiritual flourishing just as much as we attend to our intellectual, social and professional flourishing.
I also noted that graduation day can arrive without our having given those questions their due and, worse, that Duke endorses that outcome by conferring degrees on programs that do not address, even remotely, a single Life Question. That institutional issue is the subject of today’s considerations.
Put simply, the University and its curricular offerings should play a substantial role in a student’s examining of the first questions of life. Furthermore, students should be able to undertake that examination within a theological framework. For the answer to each Life Question is, at its core, affected by whether God exists and what that existence may mean to the significance of human life. Unfortunately, at Duke, rigorous engagement with religious truth claims—both philosophical and scriptural—is confined, if not relegated, to the Duke Divinity School. For undergraduates, who are coming of age intellectually and spiritually, that sequestration impedes, if not prevents, formal exploration of the highest dimension of reality—the transcendent.
That God and a theistic conception of the universe are not accorded a place in the curriculum—much less in the departmental structure—of Trinity College itself speaks sad volumes about the orientation of our university. The unmistakable implication is that the existence of God, the proper conception of God and the impact of that conception on the meaning of our existence are, in the view of Duke as an institution, not worthy of mainstream undergraduate study. They are, instead, regarded as matters of personal opinion, private judgment and sentimentalized faith, and they are exiled to campus ministries and devotional life.
That perspective, which is common among large research universities, seems to have been inherited from the steroidal skepticism and epistemological reductionism of the Enlightenment. The result has been an equivalence of “science” with “total knowledge” that has led to a reverence for STEM and a cultural obsession with technological progress and material consumption. While all would agree that science and technology have improved our material lives enormously, they provide for a meaningless existence if they are not framed with sound answers to the Life Questions. But those questions do not directly pertain to the material realm, cannot be answered empirically and require a mode of inquiry that proceeds beyond the physical to the metaphysical.
That mode of inquiry is properly known as “theology” or, literally, “the study of God.” Theology has two primary branches. Philosophical theology, which includes metaphysics and epistemology, reasons discursively to arrive at understandings of the existence of God, the nature of God, the nature of the human person made in the image of God and the ethical consequences of the answers to those questions. Sacred theology investigates the metaphysical, anthropological and ethical claims of sacred scripture.
Theology provided the fulcrum of a respected university education for centuries. Europe’s first universities in the thirteenth century were locuses of theological study with the greatest intellectual rigor of the day. Theology’s place as the “queen of disciplines” persisted at universities throughout the scientific revolution and most of modernity. In the mid 1800s, John Henry Cardinal Newman promoted theology as the keystone and unifying element in higher education in his hallmark work, “The Idea of a University.”
The same perspective gave birth to Duke. Trinity College (named, of course, for the Triune God) and the motto of our university—eruditio et religio, “knowledge and religion”—bespeak a tradition that provides theology with not just a legitimate but a central role in a university education. Moreover, the very layout of our campus affirms theology’s place at the heart of our studies. West Campus is cruciform in design, and the massive Chapel at the epicenter fulfills James B. Duke’s wish that “the central building be a great towering church which will dominate all of the surrounding buildings, because such an edifice would be bound to have a profound influence on the spiritual life of the young men and women who come here.”
For Duke to offer a genuine university education in which Life Questions and their answers frame our lives as moral persons who seek knowledge, Duke must reclaim its academic heritage in the form of a theology faculty and department within Trinity College. The Department of Religious Studies addresses religious beliefs primarily from historical or sociological perspectives. Those courses generally do not address religious truth claims on their merits — the soundness of the premises upon which the claims are based or the implications if the claims are true. Nor do most of those courses attempt to understand religious claims from within their own frameworks: what conception of God informs a religious tradition and how does that conception affect its perspective on morality and human meaning?
During my time at Duke, the Philosophy Department has shown little interest in metaphysics and the traditions within which it is situated. Since the 2009 passing of Father Ed Mahoney, a revered medieval philosophy professor, the university’s Philosophy Department tolerates in its curriculum a glaring 1400-year hole from roughly 200–1600 A.D. In doing so, the department has declared that many of the greatest thinkers in both Western and Eastern traditions, including Augustine of Hippo, Moses Maimonides, Al-Farabi, Avicenna, Averroes, Anselm, Thomas Aquinas and Bonaventure, are not worth studying. With that, the richest conversations about the merits of theological and philosophical truth claims, and the religious beliefs that flow from those claims, are confined to late-night dorm-room conversations or worship services.
Reclaiming theological offerings within Trinity College would respect years of academic inquiry and discourse, avoid the reductive and unfulfilling epistemologies of skepticism and materialism, and acknowledge Duke’s specific history and tradition. Most importantly, though, reincorporating theology into Trinity College would assist students to turn upward. It would guide us in fulfilling our responsibilities as human persons, made in the imago Dei, to consider the Life Questions as part of our privileged and formative education at this otherwise great place of learning.
William Rooney is a Trinity senior. His column runs on alternate Wednesdays.
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