It has been voguish in recent years among some English-speaking theologians, not least John Milbank, to condemn the secular western university as a location for theological activity. Where faculties survive, they argue, they have been compelled to make ignominious compromises with secular disciplines. It is ‘compromise’, however, which Mark Chapman takes as his theme as he reflects upon the academic institutionalisation of theology since the Enlightenment. In Augustine's corpus permixtum of the Church, ‘there was never a time when there was no secular’, and this, Chapman suggests, has been no less true for the practice of university theology. He offers a fascinating analysis of theology's relentlessly creative interaction with its surrounding society in three case studies, originally presented as the Hensley Henson lectures in Oxford in 2013: Berlin in the aftermath of Napoleonic invasion; Oxford during its painful renegotiation of its relationship with the Church of England in the mid-nineteenth century; and boom-town Chicago at the turn of the twentieth century. Each context reveals theologians offering ambitious ideas for how education might serve the purposes of God and how theology might serve society. From the clericalisation of theology as a discipline in Schleiermacher's Berlin, Chapman goes on to explore how Anglican Oxford persisted in its treatment of theology as integral to all education. The practical theology of the Tractarians, deeply suspicious of the German model of university theology, functionalised ‘all aspects of education including theology around a set of Christian practices and virtues’ (p. 57). In the years following the ‘crisis’ of Essays and Reviews, however, this educational ethos was increasingly assumed by others with far weaker allegiances to the Church of England. Far from undergirding all other educational activity as a ‘necessary science’, theology now became a discrete discipline in the research university. In his third case study, Chapman shows how in the University of Chicago (established 1890) theology itself became reconfigured by a new ‘necessary science’, namely sociology. In the fast-expanding metropolis of Chicago, the Divinity School considered training in the empirical analysis of social conditions and practical placements as valuable as learning Greek prepositions; the ‘prevention of tuberculosis and syphilis’, wrote Shailer Matthews (dean of the Divinity School, 1908–33), ‘is quite as much an element of duty as the maintenance of church-going’ (p. 96). Was theology thus swallowed up by the social sciences? Employing the thought of David Martin, Chapman is not so pessimistic. Recognising the corpus permixtum, social history does not have to eradicate the distinctive hopes of the Christian community. It will question, certainly, but it also fruitfully teases out the motivations of theologians in their compromised habitats. Rooted in hope, however, Chapman suggests that theologians can none the less still be committed to ‘calling the university to its highest good … to keep alive a vision of hope in a world that seems to have given up dreaming’ (p. 106). Theology and society in three cities gives strong reasons, with wit and historical depth, to continue challenging those who nostalgically long for an age of pure theology. It deserves wide readership, not least among those calling for the foundation of new Christian universities.