The number of theology and religious studies departments in the United Kingdom has halved over the past two decades, with the University of Exeter the latest Russell Group institution to weigh deep cuts to its humanities faculty — including theology. The think tank Theos has described the situation plainly: theology and religious studies face imminent collapse in the country. From more than forty departments twenty years ago, fewer than half remain, a decline driven in part by raised tuition fees and a narrowing cultural conviction that a degree is only worth what it later earns.
Yet the arrival of artificial intelligence has, paradoxically, reopened an old question with new urgency: what was theology ever for? The instinctive defence — that AI raises enormous questions about meaning, agency, and responsibility, and that we need theology to answer them — is true, but it may also concede too much. It frames theology as a service department for other people's dilemmas, useful in the way a reference library is useful. If that were the whole case, AI really could replace it, because AI is an extraordinary reference library. But as the author Michael Tang argues, the more fluent our tools become at sounding wise, the more we risk mistaking fluency for wisdom — and answers for formation.
Drawing on the work of philosopher James K. A. Smith, Tang contends that 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, and to know the difference between God and the smaller things we ask to stand in his place. "We are shaped far less by what we know than by what we desire," Smith writes, "and our desires are trained by worship, habit and practice rather than downloaded as facts." AI can retrieve every doctrine and proof text in seconds, but it cannot make a person who forgives. Tang points to a generation hungry for a spirituality that reaches past the propositional — into silence, lament, and encounter — and warns that a culture that cannot tell wisdom from information will not miss theology when it goes. It will only wonder, later, why it feels so unformed.
Source: Premier Christianity — premierchristianity.com
