Campus Ministry That’s Not for Every One

I’m just back from several days on the University of Ottawa campus in our nation’s capital. I had a blast working with David Robinson (a recent alumnus of Regent College) and his team, who work out of St. Alban’s Anglican Church to serve students and professors at U of O.

David is an unusually capable person: superb academic record, extraordinary organizational ability, articulate speaker, and fine networker. But what I liked the most about working with him in producing several events on campus is that he is trying to reach the people most campus groups don’t: the thoughtful, and perhaps even threatening, inquirer, the smart student or professor who has been asking hard questions of Christianity perhaps for years and hasn’t found even a safe place in which to ask them, let alone a place to encounter satisfying answers to them.

What Good Are Theologians?

Richard Dawkins has been quoted to me recently as such (without a citation, alas: Can anyone supply it?):

“What has theology ever said that is of the smallest use to anybody? When has theology ever said anything that is demonstrably true and is not obvious? I have listened to theologians, read them, debated against them. I have never heard any of them ever say anything of the smallest use, anything that was not either platitudinously obvious or downright false. If all the achievements of scientists were wiped out tomorrow, there would be no doctors but witch doctors, no transport faster than horses, no computers, no printed books, no agriculture beyond subsistence peasant farming. If all the achievements of theologians were wiped out tomorrow, would anyone notice the smallest difference? Even the bad achievements of scientists, the bombs, and sonar-guided whaling vessels, work! The achievements of theologians don’t do anything, don’t affect anything, don’t mean anything. What makes anyone think that ‘theology’ is a subject at all?”

Now, the very last question is different than the point made in the bulk of the quotation. Whether theology is a “science,” whether it is indeed a body of knowledge about aspects of reality, is a good question. But let’s suppose for now (since one blog post ought to be about one thing, no?) that it is at least possible that theology does what it says it does. What good would it be?