Vocation and the Liberal Arts‪.‬

EVEN WHILE REMAINING in the university's core curriculum in vestigial form, the liberal arts appear to the average university student, even to the graduate student, as wholly detached from any vocational meaning. They are the stuff of record keeping, of esoteric facts and texts and languages; they are the furnishings of life's attic. The liberal arts concern the university and nothing more, and the older part of the university at that. It is harmless activity for intellectuals and time honored hoops through which the student can prove a certain intellectual agility. But, alas, it has little to do with the life one lives outside the university. This typically modern dissociation of ideas--liberal studies and vocation, ideas strongly related in logic and tradition but uncoupled by the secularizing Enlightenment--begs for repair. Too frequently this attitude is displayed even by the academically trained. Recently, a candidate for dean of our theological seminary was invited to address a group of students. While holding the aim of seminary to be practical and professional, he conceded it might be important for students to study theology, "because," he said, "you might have some smart people in your congregation." Presumably, the fewer smart people you have in your congregation the less you need theology, it being primarily the kind of thing you do for the entertainment of people capable of engaging in that kind of talk. If your ministry, by that reasoning, is among the mentally retarded, the uneducated, or children, then theology is of little or no importance! Of course, one assumes here that the value of any subject has to do with its instrumental use. The idea that it is the learner who needs to be changed is not even on the radar screen.