"Let students, in various disciplines, through research and teaching, be taught to truly become authoritative in a specific area in which they will devote themselves to serving society and the Church, but at the same time let them be trained to witness their faith before the world." (Ex corde Ecclesiae, 20)
"Theology plays a particularly important role in the search for the synthesis of knowledge, as well as in the dialogue between faith and reason. In addition, it contributes to all other disciplines in their search for meaning by helping them not only to examine how the discoveries in question will affect individuals and society, but also by providing perspective and orientations that are not contained in their methodologies."
And this is precisely the specificum of theology at the university: to synthesize knowledge and provide an adequate connection of what has been discovered with concrete life. This is emphasized even more clearly by the Congregation for Catholic Education in the working document (Instrumentum laboris) Educare oggi e domani (2014), when it extends this task to all university professors:
"Catholic university professors are called to make an original contribution to overcoming the fragmentation of specialized knowledge, favoring dialogue between different disciplines, seeking a unique reconciliation of knowledge, which is never fixed, but constantly growing; in this task, they should be guided by the awareness of the one basic meaning of all things. Within that dialogue, theology provides an essential contribution." (p. no. 20)
Theology at the university provides students with the opportunity to integrate their own knowledge into a wider context in which fundamental existential questions are raised and in which a continuous dialogue between faith and reason takes place. The student - "gentleman" places his own knowledge in a wider intellectual context, recognizing its practical nature within the theological discourse itself. The Department of Theology has the task of developing in students a critical reflection of their own faith battle within the framework of new knowledge that they arrive at based on scientific research and study. In this way, deepening one's own scientific field does not distance the student from himself, from the questions that every person asks himself, but connects and integrates him into the community of believers, making him a witness of faith.
In addition, by synthesizing his own knowledge and integrating it into a larger whole that concerns his religious existence, the student is trained to serve the Church and society. It helps the Church and society by supporting them with its own scientific discoveries and research. It also helps the Church by "distinguishing the positive and negative aspects of culture, accepting the truly human contributions of culture and developing the means by which faith can be made more understandable to people of a certain culture" (Ex corde Ecclesiae, 44).
Theology can be revealed to the student as the beauty of the pluralism of the texts within the Tradition (even the Gospel reports themselves abound in the pluralism of interpretation of the events of Jesus Christ) which was transmitted in a living and dynamic way, as a source of experiences of those who before us in different and not always harmonious ways dealt with with the same or similar problems as we do today, as a reality that should not remain somewhere on the sidelines, on the margins of our own lives, but a reality that finds answers to questions about meaning in the dynamics of belief and understanding of faith and a reality that first of all, it includes practical religious life - caring for the weak and powerless and changing unjust conditions in society.
In this sense, theology is a life interpretation of biblical texts, as well as other texts that are of crucial importance for the understanding of theology, because it is revealed to the student as an inexhaustible wealth of ideas, conclusions, questions, problems that correlate directly with everyday life experience. Theology, therefore, is not a dry interpretation of biblical texts, nor a summary of dogmatic teachings of the Church, but a living testimony, by no means homogeneous, of tense conflicts in the first Church, open confrontations of bishops at the first church councils, lucid and profound clarifications of fundamental existential questions. Furthermore, in this way, dogma is a succus of the lived and considered experiences of faith of those who dealt with such questions before us. And after all that, theological research cannot be exhausted. Hermeneutics of the Holy Scriptures is an inexhaustible source of new truths for every person. Scripture, the Word of God, even though it has been read dozens of times, always speaks in a new way precisely because it is a living Word, precisely because it is not a text on paper, but a Word spoken by God.
Full text "The Importance and Place of the Department of Theology at the Croatian Catholic University" prof. Ph.D. Željko Tanjić and Assoc. Ph.D. Zoran Turza is available at the link.