Hypocrites! for you are as graves which cannot be seen, and the people who walk over them are not aware of them. (Luke 11:44) 'Hypocrites': a favourite word in the mouth of Jesus, at least as the Synoptic evangelists represent him. In the case of Gerd LΓΌdemann, the issue that concerns me especially here is the state of the discipline of theology and of theologians. LΓΌdemann is only one of the victims in this.
There is no doubt in my mind, or in the mind, I would think, of any scholarly person outside the system itself, that the status of theology within German universities is ambiguous (to put it gently). On the one hand it functions within an institution of higher education and research that supports free enquiry as the basis for understanding; on the other hand it serves and sustains a particular theory (Christian theology) as a prerequisite for such teaching and research, and its students are destined to take up professional positions within the Church.
Contradictions breed contradictions. Hence: if theology is an academic subject, what may a non-believer, or a believer in another religious system, expect to learn from teaching or research in a German faculty of theology? How may it contribute to one's academic formation? That this 'academic' discipline operates within a confessional code and that without subscribing to that code one cannot be properly trained in the discipline? Seen in this way, theology has nothing to offer a university at all: it cannot educate properly those who do not accept its doctrinal premises. Theology might well have such a role, were it a critical discipline concerned with articulating, analysing, comparing and critiquing the bases upon which theologies rest. But this is not the case in Germany; indeed, theology in this sense is virtually unknown anywhere in the world. We have to turn to the study of religion to find a properly academic discipline in this area. Yet theology and the study of religion are not the same, despite the efforts of many university departments in the U.K., for example, to yoke the two together.
But this issue is not about institutions, or disciplines. We are talking about individual people, people who vote, people who teach and research, who define the practice. I have no doubt that all of those responsible for LΓΌdemann's predicament regard themselves as scholars. Indeed, as LΓΌdemann himself points out, they are for the most part critical to the point of rejecting the notion of a parousia and probably the resurrection. I remember the famous statement of the erstwhile Bishop of Durham, David Lewis, who called it 'juggling with bones'. And these scholars convey their academic heresies to their students. Good for them, we may say: they show that they are after all not doctrinally bound at all. There is room for critical thought here.
But not too much room, it seems. Most unresolved contradictions are lubricated by hypocrisy. The Church is aware that its future priests are being introduced to academic orthodoxies that deny what the Christian Church upholds as true doctrine. Yet the Church expects its priests to be academically trained, including a knowledge of Hebrew and Greek. This learning does not as a rule find its way into German pulpits, though I have heard one German sermon that explained the story of the Garden of Eden as a product of the 'Solomonic enlightenment' once beloved of Gerhard von Rad. Priests are equipped with knowledge that they cannot really pass on, even though they