Origen (c. 184–253) provides a clear example of one of the first theologians; one who practised theology in a more formal and dedicated manner. Origen spent the majority of his life engaging in philosophy and teaching others. In his work, he always strived to employ logic and rational thinking, which earned him recognition as one of the first true theologians (Bevans 2009:215; Kannengiesser 1989:116). As a theologian, he strived to take his philosophical reflection to the wider Christian community. At first, Origen instructed new converts to the faith. In this way, he equipped all believers with basic theological skills and an understanding of Christian doctrine. Then, as time progressed, Origen began to teach more mature believers (Gonzalez 1989:25). Here, it can be seen how theology was not an isolated or exclusive enterprise.

Nor was it something everyday Christians only partook in subconsciously. Origen, in his work, showed a great correlation between a theologian’s task and the need for this to be rooted in the local Christian community. His philosophical and theological reflections followed certain ‘academic’ principles, yet were also employed to aid the local community. Origen, as an ‘academic’ theologian, occupied a leadership position aimed at helping the rest of the believing community practise more robust theology. He demonstrated that theology can be undertaken by all believers.

Moving on a few decades, we come to the example of Augustine. Augustine of Hippo has been classed as one of the all-time greats and a founding figure in Western theology. As such, he forms a central character, which one must investigate to unearth the nature of theology.

A highly intellectual individual with a great desire to study,² Augustine’s theological endeavours were anything but privatised. The very content of Augustine’s theological reflections arose through the daily reality of leading the church. The challenges of Donatism brought about ecclesiological reflections, while debates with Pelagius brought on works more of a soteriology nature (see Bevans 2009:227). What Augustine reflected on in his study was brought to him by the daily happenings of the church and taken back into the church in service of it. As he writes:

Academic study was not an activity of leisure, undertaken for its own reward.

Rather, it was pursued to aid the Christian Church, the body of Christ, in its daily reality. Augustine saw his role as a theologian akin to that of a pastor. Theology was part of the pastor’s and indeed all believers’ search for God’s wisdom. As Strachan (2015:74) says, ‘Theology for the Bishop of Hippo creates habits of thought and action that in turn produce a life of godly wisdom. There is no wisdom, then, without theology’.

As Augustine was to lead and guide the rest of the believing community in their own search for wisdom, theological training was essential. Theology, as such, was something all partook in, while the theologian was the one who instructed, interpreted and guided this reflection. Often this leadership took theological reflection in new directions and introduced new ideas, but the leadership of the Church, not academic curiosity, was steering the direction theology took.

Again, moving on a few decades, we come to Anselm of Canterbury. Anselm is most well-known for his maxim describing theology as ‘faith-seeking understanding’; a definition which is used even today. As such, it is worth inspecting this definition in more detail to unearth the nature of theology behind it.

In the first chapter of his Proslogion, Anselm writes at length to explain the maxim:

Anselm is showing that theology is not simply an academic enterprise but intrinsic with and dependent upon faith; theology cannot be practised separately from belief, and belief cannot flourish without theology. Here, then, a clear correlation is shown between faith and theology. One cannot exist without the other, and, as such, theology is always more than an exercise in logic. This correlation can be used to argue that the theologian should not peruse theological knowledge for its own sake but as part of their function in the body of Christ.

Faith, while personal, is not a privatised endeavour, and thus, theology should also not be privatised. Anselm, with his maxim faith-seeking understanding, quoted above, shows theology to be a central tool in building faith and thus vital to avoid speculative or privatised matters. In short, academic theology and the everyday experience of faithful believers were unavoidably correlated.

Moving to a final historic example, Calvin’s works in Geneva provide a further example of a theologian avoiding an exclusivist study of theology to work as a guide for the local community. Martin Luther or Ulrich Zwingli could have ably provided a demonstration of theology as a public endeavour for the good of the believing community. Yet Calvin, through the establishment of La Congrégation (The Congregation), the publication of various volumes of the Institutes and his writings on the office of the ‘Doctor of the Church’, provides the richest and the clearest example.

La Congrégation was a discussion of the scripture in which any interested party could attend and the local pastors and doctors had to attend (see Manetsch 2016:83–84). The purpose of the meeting was to help both the laity and the clergy to come to a deeper understanding of the scripture and, in doing so, build their theological repertoire (see De Boer 2006:398–408). La Congrégation served as a form of theological education accessible to anyone interested. This education was not privatised or cut off from the local congregation but was wide open to it. While led by a professional, anyone was welcome to participate.

In the continuous writings of his Institutes, Calvin shows more of his academic flare. While the 1539 edition could be classed more as popular writing, later editions were definitely in the ‘academic’ realm (De Greef 2004:43; Hesselink 2004:76; Zachman 2006:58). This academic work, which drew on multiple sources to firmly establish what Calvin saw as the true intended form of the church, also aimed at clarity of speech and presentation (see McGrath 1990:148–149). Thus, while more academic, it was not privatised but open to being read by anyone with a learned interest. Calvin’s Institutes did not require years of specialist training to be understood but simply a desire to grow one’s theological knowledge.

Finally, in the ecclesiastical ordinances, Calvin lays out the role of the Doctor of the Church (the theologian).

Although brief, the section prescribes the Doctor with ‘the instruction of the faithful in true doctrine, in order that the purity of the Gospel be not corrupted either by ignorance or by evil opinions’ (Calvin 1954:62). As Calvin (1960) would write in the 1559 edition of his Institutes 1.14.4, ‘The theologian’s task is not to divert the ear with chatter, but to strengthen consciences by teachings things, sure and profitable’. Here the theologian is seen to be a leader among the community whose duty is to help grow the believing communities’ understanding of the doctrine and the scripture. They are to work as a guide to upbuild theological knowledge in all. In no way should their task be a speculative or exclusivist endeavour.

In this brief history, it has been clearly demonstrated how academic theology and the theologian do not function in isolation or as an exclusive discipline. Time and again, the theologian has been demonstrated as a leader to the believing community at large. This has meant that an academic education has been vital for them to fulfil this role, yet their education did not form an end in itself. Nor did their education remove them from the local community. The theological enterprise was always rooted in the needs of the local church and always aimed to feedback into its daily happenings. Theology was accessible and while theologians held a high position, they did not function in isolation and made sure their work was accessible to the general community.

Rankings and league tables have become the holy grail of most universities within South Africa. Bragging about world rankings and upward table movement has become common practice.¹⁰ Thus, theology performed within a university tends towards the same agenda. It is no secret that one’s social location affects their being and theology is no different in this regard. ‘The concrete situation of theology helps to shape the questions that are raised and the priorities that are set’ (Migliore 1991:14). Within the university environment, then, one of the priorities theology has set is to achieve high rankings. A recent article published by Buitendag (2016:6–7) presents several graphs and statistics to demonstrate the high rankings of the Faculty of Theology and Religion at the University of Pretoria. For Buitendag (2016:9), ‘academic excellence is not negotiable’ and forms the main focus of theological education. This article leaves no doubt that rankings are viewed as vitally important and something which academic theology should aim for.

However, it also highlights how local appropriation of this knowledge is left to the individual churches¹¹ (cf. Buitendag 2016:9). It is left to the church to provide the necessary in-house or local training to become an effective minister and produce robust local theology. Yet, as Naidoo (2017:6) has pointed out, ‘Theological education must involve training and equipping pastoral leaders to do theology by involvement at the grassroots level and developing responsiveness to that level’. If one looks to the example of medicine, Doctors are not only given academic training but also practical training as part of their degrees. Those pursuing a medical career are not only taught in the academic, abstract, but also in a real-life setting; this should also be the case for theological education (Wood 2008:290). The church, as well as the university, should form a key centre of learning away from a purely academic enterprise to integrate life experiences. As much as rankings are desired within the university context, it should be engaged in contextual research that impacts and transforms society. As Molobi and Saayman stated (2006:325), ‘too much theological reflection still starts and ends in the classroom’. As Ford stated (Ford 2017b:6), ‘there is no international university league table for measuring all that, but in the end it is what matters most of all’. Whilst international ranking may be necessary for theology at a university, it should not develop an exclusivist theology isolated from local needs.

Another significant contributor to theological education’s captivity to the ivory towers of academia is its Eurocentric focus. Within South Africa, a Western-orientated approach to theological education remains, which has seriously weakened the effectiveness of theological reflection in South Africa (Venter 2012:147). One such example is how the Western approach has downplayed spiritual realities (Balcomb 2013; Pobee 2013). Maluleke (2006) has explained these issues at length using a fictional story by Mbiti to explain how theology in South Africa is largely irrelevant. He concluded that theological education should be training the graduate to cope with the African reality but all too often ‘much theological and religious education on the continent continues to be essentially foreign to the African context and often designed to alien Africans from Africa’ (Maluleke 2006:71). In a more recent article, Duncan (2016:7) has commented how a ‘veneer of Africanisation’ has been installed, while academic theology continues to function in isolation from the wider South African situation. As such, theological education has been taken out of the everyday concrete situation of the local believers and placed within a Westernised bubble of ideas, making it inaccessible and excluding to the average African believer. Academic theology has tended to focus on international competition and influence over local impact. Some commentators have stated that the #FeesMustFall campaigns stemmed out of discontent for the Eurocentric nature of African universities (see Dismelo 2015; The Daily Vox 2017). In response to these protests, all course contents at faculties of theology have gone under review. Yet, if this review will be yet another veneer or epistemic change is something that will be revealed in time.

Another major contributor to the exclusivist nature of academic theology is its commodification. The value of a subject is no longer held in its societal worth, but in its financial value; in it being an item capable and desirable for trade (Hadebe 2017:2). ‘Universities are portrayed as businesses offering knowledge packaged and branded in the form of teaching programs for sale to interested clients’ (Naidoo 2017:2).

The focus is on creating profit, not on creating a locally viable outcome which could aid the believing community (Beyers 2016:4). In this regard, education is turned into a commodity available to those who can afford it, and shaped by the interest of the buyer. ‘Universities are portrayed as businesses offering knowledge packaged and branded in the form of teaching programs for sale to interested clients’ (Naidoo 2017:2). The first excluding effect of this commodification is that the poor (those without sufficient financial means) can no longer access theological education. ‘Commodification denies many students access to higher education and opportunities to improve their lives’ (Hadebe 2017:2). Without adequate financial resources, a higher education in theology is denied. The second isolating effect is that the specific interest of the benefactor and the marketability of a product, not the general challenges of a certain locality, are the key determining factors in knowledge production. Academics and researchers are not encouraged to research their own themes and interests. Rather, they are expected to research that which is a buzz in the moment and contribute articles to pre-determined faculty themes.

What the above analysis has shown is the detrimental impact academic theology’s participation in the public universities has had. Academic theology is failing to transcend its immediate context. It has become caught up in the challenges of the public university, tending to overlook or inadequately deal with the problems of the local church. As such, the discipline is locking itself up more and more in the ivory tower of academia, which in turn is producing more and more exclusive theology. Van Wyk (2017:255–261) has linked this style of theology to the Hunger Games trilogy. It is a theology ‘fighting’ for glory in the academic arena, seriously weakening the authentic contribution institutions could make outside of that arena (Van Wyk 2017:276). From the field research highlighted above, it was shown how many scholars are aware of the need for theology to transcend this approach, yet finding the institutional environment of academia leaves no space but to keep on playing the academic game they know so well. Theology has been caught up in the rat-race of economic gain production and survival, which has overshadowed the needs and interests of local communities, preventing them from being taken seriously.

A public university is at the forefront of knowledge. This simple observation should make anyone think twice before calling for the removal of theology from academic circles. As the above history showed, specialists in theology are necessary and a specialised training for these individuals is most beneficial. If a minister or theological leader does not have adequate training, this does not prevent them from producing theological statement. Rather, it simply means they produce inadequate, or worse, spurious theology (cf. Hiestand & Wilson 2015:57). If one takes the theological leadership of the church seriously, then this should result in these leaders being trained at the highest level, at the forefront of knowledge. In short, academic theology is needed for robust ecclesiological and theological practices.

Furthermore, the critical space which a public university provides allows development within theological thought to take place. Theology should absorb a certain degree of ‘secular reasoning’ so that it can practice a healthy form of self-criticism and thereby strengthen both its own internal self-understanding and its comparative relationship to other secular disciplines. (Macdonald 2010:1006)

The university provides a critical space in which ideas can be challenged. Sometimes, this criticism can be taken too far, but without it, the church would stagnate and fail to appropriate itself anew in each age. Faith and religion must be exposed to scrutiny, and the public university is a worthy setting for this scrutiny (see Phiri & Nadar 2011).

Another benefit of the public university is the multi-faith environment it presents. No longer can Christianity, or Christian theology, continue as if it were the only faith in South Africa. To do so would result in a limited reflection, understanding and engagement of and with realities in the world (Pillay 2017:5). Dialogue with other religions needs to take place. This would be to the benefit of the Christian faith in broadening its horizons as well as in avoiding fundamentalist religious conflict. In the view of Pillay, ‘closing down the study of religion and faith at universities will cause an increase in religious fundamentalism and promote life-denying instead of life-enhancing practices in religion’ (Pillay 2017:7).

Moving on from a multi-faith environment, the public university also provides an environment in which multiple disciplines can interact. The rift between science and theology is a thing of the past (Macdonald 2010):

In other words, to study life without faith is not really to study life at all. Those who try to maintain a rift between science and religion (Ford 2017a):

‘Practically speaking, the university cannot fulfil its task to teach “universal knowledge” without the church’s assistance’ (Hauerwas 2007:29). Theology and science now can and need to move from a time of competition to cooperation, and the public university provides the crucible in which this can happen.

Away from the argument around the benefits of the university is the realisation that withdrawing from this environment may not produce a better situation. Hiestand, an author from a seminary background, has written many works critiquing the current break in the connection between theology and the local church (see Hiestand 2008; Hiestand & Wilson 2015). His work has been inspirational in drawing awareness for theology at a public university to also address this issue. Yet, the background of his work should not be forgotten. Removing theology from a public university to a seminary context does not guarantee it will correlate with local needs overcoming the challenges mentioned above.