THE TEACHING OF RELIGION
By ARNOLD NASH
UNTIL quite recently relationships between the Christian Churches in England had been embittered for several generations by controversies in the field of religious educa- tion. The temporary truce which the present generation has experienced is at an end and there are many indications that the cleavage along denominational lines, when the con- troversy was at its height in the opening years of the present century, is but a surface crack when compared with the pre- sent division of opinion. There is no better illustration of the cleavage in contemporary thought than to contrast the conception of religious education implicit in a recent leader in The Times, occasioned by the setting up of a Readership in the University of Oxford in the subject, with that enter- tained by the head of the Department of Education in that University, M. L. Jacks, in a broadcast about the same time.
The Times welcomed the possibility of such an appoint- ment on the ground that it would enable teachers of religion to receive a training comparable to that which teachers of other subjects have long enjoyed. The Times is not alone in thus regarding religion as one subject among others. A leading Anglican weekly, commenting upon the addresses given to the recent Conference of Educational Associations, urged that " the object of teaching religion in Universities is to put the subject on the same basis as other subjects in a University curriculum," whilst at a service in Westminster Abbey for members of the Conference the preacher, himself a distinguished theologian, took his stand upon the fact of specialisation within University education, and urged that each University should provide the opportunity for the specialised study of religion as one subject among others.
Mr. Jacks, however, in his broadcast address on " Religion in Education," adopted a radically different view of the matter. To him all education, if it is true, must be religious, and hence he argued that " religious education " construed as one subject among many is neither religion nor education. If Christianity is true it must unify and pervade all subjects taught ; the truths of Scripture, there- fore, cannot be learnt in a period for religious instruction, but only in and through all subjects. Mr. Jacks frankly acknowledged that such a view of the matter is not generally accepted, and that on the contrary the school curriculum con- sists largely of a number of unrelated and highly specialised subjects with no underlying unity. He concluded, therefore, that if our educational system is to be directed towards the fulfilment of a Christian purpose attention must be turned not to the provision of more Church schools or the prepara- tion of agreed syllabuses but to the reform of the Teachers' Training Departments.
Thus the real source of the present secular anarchism which runs through our whole educational system lies in the Universities, since they on their part make no attempt to give any unified conception of the world but are content to be simply centres for the distribution of factual knowledge. It is, indeed, the proud boast of British Universities that they set out to teach " facts "—history without propaganda, science without metaphysics and economics without political bias. No one who knows the history of the mediaeval University under the complete control of ecclesiastics or of the modern University under the domination of the single political party in totalitarian countries will seek to deny that freedom and independence in teaching and research must be conserved. Neither can it be disputed that one task of the University is to witness to the value of the independent and critical pursuit of truth as such, and not to buttress the doc- trines of political parties or religious bodies. The University, in fact, betrays its mission as soon as it claims to teach final and ultimate truth in the form of scholastic systems which have no place for new facts, whether Thomistic or Marxist or Fascist.
The liberal Christian University teacher will readily agree with what has just been said, since to him any intellectual synthesis which declines to believe that " the Lord hath yet more light and truth to break forth from His Word " is in- tellectual idolatry. He could point out that the liberal conception of knowledge for which he stands was only achieved after a long struggle, which began a century before the Renaissance, against the scholastic attitude towards truth. Indeed the mediaeval synthesis broke up inevitably because one group of thinkers, the theologians, were claiming the right to decide what other groups, e.g., economists and natural scientists, should believe and teach, just as the mediaeval Church lost its power because ecclesiastics claimed the right to tell other men, e.g., the merchants, what they could and what they could not do within their own vocations. Hence there arose in reaction " science," " economics," &c., as autonomous spheres. This position, however, to the Christian is ultimately a kind of intellectual polytheism, for if the Christian account of the world is true, we live in a " Universe " and not a " Polyverse." Hence, however we may reject the scholastic Weltanschauung, we must, as Christians, acknowledge the need for " Universities " and not " Poliversities."
In short, what is needed are Christian University teachers whose specialised conclusions are not dictated by theologians but yet are related to theology. Such teachers are rare. The thought of the natural scientists has been moulded by Eddington and his followers, for whom religion and science do not clash because they never meet. Philosophers and historians rightly refuse to allow their conclusions to be dic- tated by religious affiliations, but seldom do they see with Berdyaev that although the Christian thinker is not bound to make his conclusions conform with orthodoxy, whether Catholic, Protestant or Marxist, as a Christian he must strive to acquire the mind of Christ, and thus his approach to the historical process must be different from that of his non- Christian colleagues. The economist views economic science as concerned with means and not ends. That is legitimate, but here again ends are often relegated to a subjective realm where the writ of reason does not run.
What is needed is a movement of lay theologians con- scious of their aim and purpose as Christian intelligentsia to bring unity with freedom to an intellectual world which has gone adrift. Such a movement would take as its starting- point a rigorous investigation of the shortcomings of the self- sufficient scientific and capitalist outlook which has moulded the life of Western Europe. Domination by science and capitalism has meant that the modern world has been created by men so concerned with immediate means that instead of construing them as means towards an ultimate end they have been viewed as ends in themselves. Thus the modern man has found himself more concerned with the part than the whole and he has expressed this idolatrous behaviour by crying " business is business " or " art for art's sake." The Christian intellectual must insist that these lesser loyalties, like those of Church, class or nation, must be subservient to that which transcends them all, the Sovereignty of God.
But that will not carry with it the right of theology, as man's attempt to understand God's revelation of Himself, to dictate the conclusions of scholars engaged in other branches of study. God, not theology, is Sovereign. Yet there will still be a place for theology in any future speculum mentis, since there will always be the need for the serious study of the Bible as the record of God's revelation through His chosen people and in the life of His Son. But unlike the clerical theology of the past, this new lay theology would be related to and illuminated by the wider setting of man's knowledge of the Universe in which it takes its part but to which it gives ultimate meaning.
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