Theological Education in Australia 1964–2020: Intellectual Authority in a Changing Socio-Political Landscape*

Abstract

This paper examines the intellectual authority of theological education in modern Australia by tracing its provision from one set of arrangements (the first settlement) inherited from the nineteenth century to another (the second settlement) in the half century from the mid-1960s to ca. 2020. The paper investigates what happened when the exclusion of Theology from the public higher education system was reversed by the Martin Report of 1964, with particular reference to the legitimacy and authority of Theology as public knowledge. A survey of the landmark developments in this transformation, the paper is divided into two parts. Relations of the theological education sector with the structures of the regulatory environment of higher education are examined in the first. Developments within the sector itself are considered in the second. It is argued that the confluence of these two streams has transformed the nature and public standing of Australian theological education. Paradoxically this dramatic improvement coincided with decline in the social salience of Christianity itself, a development which posed afresh the question of the legitimacy of theological knowledge in a way that raises the perennial issue of the relation between Christianity and culture.