My PhD supervisor and I email back and forth this week about my conclusion. I am on the final stretch of my dissertation and now my question to address is this: how do I want to conclude my conclusion?
I read an article by George Grant this week that seems like a fitting addition to my conclusion. Writing about the scientific method of research and its propensity for objectifying everything, Grant suggests that love is no longer welcomed into the halls of the university (what he calls the "multiversity"):
Indeed it is clear that the modern project of reason as projected towards objects summoned before us to answer our questions is not an activity which depends on the love of the objects studied. Objects can be summoned before us without love for the things summoned. This is true, whether the object summoned is a tree, a beast, a human being, a society or the past; that is, whether our researches fall under the natural sciences, the social sciences or the humanities. Therefore as this paradigm of knowledge becomes increasingly all pervasive, faith as the experience that the intelligence is illuminated by love, must have less and less significance in the central work of the multiversity. Indeed, what has happened in modern society as a whole is that knowledge qua knowledge is detached from love qua love. (Grant, "Faith and the Multiversity", 392-393).
If Grant's assessment is true about the university, and I believe it is, I wonder how true it is of seminaries and theological schools? Could the modern search for knowledge according to scientific methods downplay love in those institutions? If so, there are implications for Christian theology. After all, God is love (1 Jn. 4:8 & 16). Therefore, to know God is to know love. If a quest for knowledge in theological schools focuses on "objects summoned before us" rather than an intimate embrace of God and His creation, love may not be as welcome as we might have hoped.
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