Theological education is facing imminent collapse, just when society needs it the most

Last week the University of Exeter, a Russell Group institution, announced that it was weighing deep staff cuts, with the humanities taking the heaviest blow - and theology and religious studies among the most exposed subjects.

Francesca Stavrakopoulou, one of Britain’s best-known scholars of religion, is among those calling for the subject to be saved. The think tank Theos has named the moment plainly: the imminent collapse of theology and religious studies in this country. Their figure is the one that stays with me. Two decades ago, there were more than 40 departments teaching the subject across the UK. Today that number has roughly halved.

This decline runs back to the early 2010s, to raised tuition fees and a narrowing sense that a degree is worth only what it later earns. And yet the arrival of Artificial Intelligence has done something that the long, slow decline never quite managed. It has forced an old question into the open: What was theology ever for?

The search for meaning and knowledge

The instinctive defence, the one Theos itself reaches for, is that AI raises enormous questions about meaning, agency and responsibility, and that we need the humanities – and theology in particular - to help us answer them.

That is true, but perhaps it also concedes too much. It leaves theology looking like a service department for other people’s dilemmas; useful in the way a good reference library is. If that were the whole case, AI really could replace it, because AI is an extraordinary reference library.

The more fluent our tools become at sounding wise, the more we risk mistaking fluency for wisdom and answers for formation

If a machine can retrieve every doctrine, proof text and argument for and against the existence of God in less time than it takes to uncap a pen, then the worth of theology was never in the information. It was the thing the information was always meant to serve. This is wisdom.

Theology, at its best, has never simply told people what is true. It has formed them: to love what is good, to tell virtue from its counterfeit, to know the difference between God and the smaller things we ask to stand in his place.

James KA Smith makes the point well in You Are What You Love (Brazos). We are shaped far less by what we know than by what we desire - and our desires are trained by worship, habit and practice rather than downloaded as facts. AI can tell you everything the Church has ever taught about forgiveness. It cannot make a person who forgives.

Valuing what is true

This is why the losses at Exeter should trouble more than the professionals whose jobs are on the line. The generation now coming of age is not, for the most part, hostile to God. It is hungry for a spirituality that reaches past the literal and the propositional, past the tidy answer, into silence, lament and encounter.

It is the hunger I saw in a room in Hong Kong, where a pop song and a psalm did what no argument had managed to. People are not asking for more information about God. They are asking to be met. That is a work of formation not information, and it is exactly the work the university is now dismantling the means to teach.

We are shaped far less by what we know than by what we desire

A machine that hands out theological answers for free will make this harder to see, not easier. The more fluent our tools become at sounding wise, the more we risk mistaking fluency for wisdom and answers for formation.

A culture that cannot tell the two apart will not miss theology when it goes. It will only wonder, later, why it feels so unformed.

Perhaps we have let theology be mistaken for information for too long and are finally paying the price. Perhaps the machine, of all things, is handing the question back to us in its oldest form. Not: What do you know? But: What do you love? The classrooms may be closing. The question they were built to ask has never been more open.