A Journal for The Contemporary Church

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Intercommunion of One and All – Theology and its Future

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The terms ‘theology’ and ‘university’ have a common origin and in that sense belong together.
They go back to a beginning that is the foundation of modern third level education and to an
academic arena in which theology was the major discipline. To a greater or lesser degree many of our contemporary university disciplines have something of their origin in Theology. The facultas theologica (faculty of theology) turns up at the university of Paris in the thirteenth century, and theology as a specific discipline has pretty much survived to the twentieth century (which is quite extraordinary when you consider all that has changed in the interim, notably the renaissance, the reformation, and the enlightenment). It continues to thrive, remarkably well, in some of the world’s leading universities.  Theology was at the heart of the universitas magistrorum et  scholarium (the community of masters and scholars) from which we get the modern word  ‘university.’  Really a ‘university’ was, in its original sense, a community of teachers and students (a place of learning, teaching, and research). I’ll come back to this idea of community on a number of occasions.

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