I have found a new hero – he is Gavin D’Costa. I heard him give an impressive paper last summer on the origins of the university in the medieval Catholic Church. He introduced it by saying that after twenty years of teaching theology in Religious Studies departments he has just come out – as a Christian. This was moderately amusing (and this is the best I can do for an emotional response to D’Costa’s revelation). D’Costa’s paper was the last thing I ever attended at the systematic theology seminar of King’s College London – it might have been an epitaph on what had been until two years previously the last place in England in which Christian theology could be studied.
But now, on the day I was in Edinburgh to make the case for Christian theology for the university’s sake (see postings in ‘Theology and the University’) I found D’Costa’s Theology in the Public Square: Church, Academy and Nation. It is a joy. Here is a blast from the last page:
Education is central to the development of civilization and if the Church fails to transform education at every level, then the future of the Church and the world are in the deep trouble. If the North American and English public cannot see this, then they should drop all the rhetoric about fostering genuine pluralism and admit the ideological nature of their secularism. This would involve suppressing history – as the recent contested European constitution exemplifies, where the Christian heritage of Europe is passed over in silence. It is up to the churches in North America and English to take up this challenge, to bring the light of God to shine through the portals of the university, to allow for a revitalization of Christian culture so that God may be given glory and the common good thereby served.
This book says what seemed to have become unsayable, in fact it blurts it out.
