A DEFENCE OF THEOLOGY: BIASED AS HELL

 

By Nathan Hobby

 

 

When people ask me what I study and I tell them, first off they ask, ‘Oh, you like rocks?’ because they think I said ‘geology’.  Maybe that’s because I have a slight lisp; I can almost live with that. 

 

When I explain it’s a ‘th’ not a ‘g’ they either ask what that is or ask, ‘Are you objective and study all the religions?’   I groan a little and say that I study Christian theology and it is the critical study of the Christian tradition from within.   Or, ‘No, it’s as biased as hell!’

 

I shouldn’t get this response so often at Murdoch.  Surely most people here have been saturated with the idea that no study can be ‘objective’, right?   The study of anything involves adopting some sort of viewpoint - if you study physics then you’ve decided that the study of physics is an important thing and deserves your time.  We bring to any discipline assumptions about method, outcome and language because otherwise we couldn’t study anything.  We may change these assumptions one at a time, but we can’t start without them.  There is no view from nowhere; all views are from somewhere.

 

So, even if I did study ‘all the religions’ (and, sadly to my mind, not other non-theistic ideologies!) it wouldn’t be an objective study.  But if I did, the discipline would be comparative religion, a branch of sociology, taught at ECU.  It wouldn’t be Christian theology as the discipline has been understood through the centuries. 

 

So, A105 Structure Thought and Reality rehash over, why is a publicly funded university offering a ‘biased’ subject?  Because let’s face it, theology IS ‘biased’. It concerns itself with the study of what the ancient Israelites and the church believed and did in the past through traces in history and through the study of the Old and New Testaments and asks what it means or should mean to be the church today and in the future.  It is the degree people who wish to be church ministers study.  And so just like teaching students are allowed and encouraged to approach teaching with the idea that education and schools are valuable, theology students are allowed and encouraged to approach theology with the idea that churches and Christian faith are valuable. 

 

People spout a lot of vague new-age ‘tolerance’ talk (and tolerance is an important virtue!), but they fail to carry it through to the conclusion that it means that others should be tolerated when they subscribe to a viewpoint other than new-age pluralism. 

 

In a related incident, the chaplains who are involved in counselling and student support as well as nurture of religious communities on campus, received permission to mail-bomb all students informing them of a Christian worship service to mark the beginning of the semester.  They received back many abusive emails complaining about the fact that religion was being ‘pushed’ in their faces. 

 

I think these responses were ignorant.  It’s not as if ‘religious people’ have beliefs and everyone else is ‘neutral’ or ‘open’ or ‘objective’.  Everyone has an understanding of the world and lives according to it!  A sustainability workshop is ‘biased’ because it believes sustainability is important.  A graduation ceremony is ‘biased’ because it shows an understanding that tertiary education and pomp and circumstance are necessary.  Dreaming of earning lots of money with your commerce degree is ‘biased’ because it shows a belief in the value of money and status at the expense of starving people in the third world.  So, in conclusion, stop all this uneducated anti-religious ignorance, you who are objective and open and want to avoid having ‘beliefs’ pushed in your face.