Theology? in my University?

I've been teaching theology to Freshman students for about three weeks now, and I'm thankful for it for giving me all kinds of new thoughts, both on the place of theology in the University and on some of the topics we're discussing.

Hopefully I'll have more articulate and theological thoughts soon, but for now I thought it might be useful to share a quote by John Webster, a theologian I'm liking more and more these days, on teaching theology in the University as an "eschatological reality." As part of a larger essay on the place of theology in the University, Webster makes the following statement after a quick run through of critical thinking by Michel Foucault and Pierre Bourdieu on how the “Life of the Mind” in Universities is a “customary” institution, and noting that theology can contribute to this critique:

“theology is a contrary – eschatological – mode of intellectual life, taking its rise in God’s disruption of the world, and pressing the academy to consider a quite discordant anthropology of enquiry.”

Two interesting things from this: (1) Theology in the University, as a discipline that presupposes the work of the Holy Spirit in eliciting faith in the theologian and the sanctification of scripture, can only be understood as an "eschatological" reality, a kind of snuck-in presence of the kingdom of God, among the other disciplines. And (2), this position puts theology on the side of critical theory and other approaches that find presuppositions behind supposedly "objective" academic knowledge or the idea of a "universal reason."

This is a really interesting idea to me, one I might even dare to share with my students. What I'm doing when I teach theology is something that would be, in the eyes of faith anyway, impossible without Jesus Christ's presence. My students' work in reading and participating in class - we're reading Augustine's Confessions next week, for instance - is a proleptic share in Christ's Kingdom. We're teaching and learning under God's time, established in Jesus Christ, right in the midst of the regular time of the University, the time of preparation for careers, of engineering and business schools.