Renewing Higher Education? The Holy Spirit and the Life of the Mind

In a real sense, evangelicals are still either reeling from or responding to Mark Noll’s Scandal of the American Mind almost two decades ago. Those within the Reformed orbit, Noll’s own most immediate circle, have certainly led the charge in evangelical higher education. Inspired in part by a robust doctrine of common grace, by a Kuyperian apologetic for how various “spheres of sovereignty” invite different disciplinary and methodological analyses and forms of inquiry, or by the emphasis on integrating Christian faith and worldview with secular learning, evangelical colleges and universities especially in the Reformed tradition have worked hard to overcome the scandal. All of this is certainly welcome and lifted the standard of discourse across the evangelical world.

The challenge is exacerbated for those of us within the Holiness-Pentecostal world since these segments of the Christian tradition were particularly noted as leavening the evangelical subculture with an anti-intellectualist pietism. I grant that plenty of evidence for such can be gathered, and Noll’s own account marshaled some of the most incriminating nuggets. On the other hand, understanding the whys and hows of such developments, as historians the caliber of Noll clearly know, is always difficult since historical causality never flows in straight lines. Rather than attempt a counter-narrative in order to defend Holiness and renewalist folk from these longstanding charges, let me sketch a constructive way forward along two lines, building on two prior articles: “Whence and Whither in Evangelical Higher Education? Dispatches from a Shifting Frontier,” Christian Scholar’s Review 42:2 (2013): 179-92, and “The Holy Spirit and the Christian University: The Renewal of Evangelical Higher Education,” in Gregg ten Elshoff, Thomas Crisp, and Steve L. Porter, eds., Christian Scholarship in the Twenty-First Century: Prospects and Perils (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2013).

First, demographically, I invite readers who have followed this “respectful conversation” for the last seven months to return to my original post wherein I talked about the evangelicalization of Pentecostalism and the pentecostalization-charismatization of Evangelicalism. My point there was to emphasize how, in the contemporary context, the vanguard of world Christianity has shifted to the global South with its renewalist features, character, and accents. In this climate, Christian higher education in general, not to mention evangelical higher education in particular, will be increasingly global and less Western. This is not to minimize the great traditions of Western learning or to ignore the legacy of the Western intellectual tradition. But the global conversation will increasingly demand fluency across East-West lines. Renewalism’s openness to the vernacular will open up new pathways for discussing perennial topics, corridors that invite the multiplicity of languages, cultures, and perspectives into the mix. This can only invigorate higher education, even as it will also surely pose challenges related to the coherence of Christian faith for those who are less mature and ready to engage the issues.

Second, and pedagogically, without denying that education in the modern world has taken form in primarily intellectual terms, there is a growing realization that there are moral, affective, embodied, social/communal, and spiritual dimensions of learning that are no less intrinsic to the formation of whole and holy persons in the service of Christ. Greater awareness of and attentiveness to these elements will result in “worldview formation” being increasingly subservient to holistic formation and transformation. Again, this is not to undermine higher education as the pursuit of the life of the mind; it is to emphasize that the intellectual life is reducible to the cognitive register to our peril. Knowledge is not merely a matter of the head but also of hearts (whole persons) and hands (the pragmatic or, in evangelical terms, missional aspect). Evangelical higher education is now more than ever before sensitive to the full scope of Christian higher education as involving these various registers.

I propose the bold suggestion that renewalists ought to be at the forefront of thinking through how this alignment of head-heart-hands enables formation of learners able to bridge academy-church-world for the glory of God. What this means is that the historic evangelical mantras of being biblically-based and Christ-centered are incomplete in as much as that the renewing and transforming work of the Holy Spirit remains neglected. If expanded in this direction, evangelical and renewal higher education is biblically-based, Christ-centered, and Spirit-filled/inspired/empowered.

Such a “pentecostal” and “pneumatological” vision of Christian higher education will thus marshal the resources available in the many tongues, many cultures, and many disciplines (see the posts of the last few months) together in order to orchestrate an educational process in which such diversity births a life-long learner who is not merely a talking head, nor only a pietistic lover of Jesus, nor exclusively a missionary pragmatist, but, in varying degrees, three-in-one. Learning will not neglect engagement with texts but will also include habituating practices, social interactions, and teleological orientation, the last especially amenable to correlation with the role of the Spirit to herald the coming reign of God in Christ in these “last days” (Acts 2:17).

If such is even remotely envisionable, then the renewalist contribution is not just incidental to the present and future of evangelical higher education, but perhaps central for its revitalization. This explodes the historic antipathies that have characterized both sides of the discussion. The Holiness and renewalist anti-intellectualism of the past will be superseded by the conviction that the Spirit poured out on all flesh also inspires love of God with all one’s mind (peculiar to St. Luke [10:27], author of the first volume preceding Acts), and this ought to arouse Holiness and renewalist pietists to embrace rather than disdain the intellectual life. On the other hand, the mainstream of the evangelical tradition which during the modern period has bifurcated the “objectivity” of the Word from the “subjectivity” of the Spirit will also be challenged to revisit and revise this binary construct. If the scandal of the evangelical mind is truly to be overcome, then both sides will need to make adjustments. More precisely what will emerge is not merely two sides reformed of their prejudices but a renewed evangelicalism, one fit for engaging higher education in the complex and globalizing world of the twenty-first century in the full power of the Spirit of Christ.