“Christian Ed all the way up”

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The Christian intellectual tradition is fraught with mixed signals. Notice Paul’s dictim: “knowledge puffs up…” (1Co 8:1) and the Petrine testimony on Paul: “some things in [his epistles] are difficult to understand” (2Pt 3:16). Festus exclaims during Paul’s defense that his “much learning” is driving him mad (Ac 26:24). Paul’s exclamation that the gospel is “foolishness to the gentiles” (1 Co 1:23) is the explanation for why few among the wise and the powerful recognize God’s Son. Jesus’ own literacy and youthful acumen are celebrated in Luke (4:17). Indeed, his cleverness in answering his opponents, scribes and Pharisees, Israel’s most learned of his day – who clearly regarded him as one of them (e.g., Mt 12:38-42; 16:1-4; 19:3-9; Mk 12:13-17; Lk 20:20-26; Jo 3:2). Jesus calls disciples “scribes of the Kingdom of Heaven” (Mt 13:52); saying something basic about the teaching and learning nature of discipleship. Paul’s learning and rhetoric enticed his hearers at Athens (until he mentioned the resurrection!; cf., Ac 17:16-34). The Jewish literacy of the apostles and the traditions of the New Testament are considered quite worthy of the best of Judaism. This is not lost on many of the learned converts of the first five centuries of Christianity and beyond. But the question of teaching and learning discipleship is always about free and considered inquiry, not thought control or indoctrination. Discipleship inseparably combines thought and action; something by which Christianity can become most transformative and most dangerous to those who regard authority only as “lording over” (cf., Mt 20:25) rather achieving the capacities of discernment.

From earliest Christian generations, those who govern have often found themselves at odds with their own best scholars. Great Christian teachers such as Origen and Tertullian, Occam and Abelard, Aquinas and Wycliffe, Hus and Luther, Williams and Amyrault, Schleiermacher and Barth, were all brilliantly controversial disciples: vehemently opposed or devotedly followed. They are conspicuous as highly learned teachers of faith in Jesus. But what of the pagans in the midst? The early churches’ toleration of the Athenian academy was insufficient and the emperor Justinian I closed it in 529CE. In 489 CE, The Nestorian Christian academy in Edessa, was closed by the Byzantine emperor Zeno. Its faculty survived to become the School of Nisibis (or, Nisibīn) within Persian domains located at Gundishapur, Khuzestan which survived long enough for the first translations of ancient Greek and Syriac texts. This academy with its wide range of subjects including medicine and mathematics, along with translators of Indian texts was probably the first university.

The interpretation of the famous Pauline dictum: “in Christ are hid all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge” (Co 2:3) can be taken as a pedagogical paradigm for Christian higher education. All learning should be regarded as ultimately in Christ[1] – he is the Logos incarnate after all. There are incommensurable differences over how to interpret the world and there are procedures for minimizing conflict as any helpful institution can bear witness.  But this is not where many North American evangelical colleges find themselves. In virtually all cases, they are guided by strong traditions of separatism, overwrought apologetics, and parental expectations (in loco parentis). Not only are theistically defined evolutionary theories disappearing from curricular programs, but cultural ideologies are often nurtured shamelessly by these academies.

The great temptation of evangelicals, like all Christians and perhaps human, is separatism. The impulse is warranted of course because our world is very dangerous. Indeed, it is part and parcel of what it means to provide security. The slip up is thinking that separation is possible – only in the mind and even then serious contemplation will reveal how mixed all our thoughts and motives are. We are seriously flawed and seriously involved creatures in the world. The capacities of the human being are for training (pedagogy) the self to be reflective, adaptive and innovative; to achieve some degree of prosperity to make this the habitus of one’s life. In the last Evangelical Theological Society annual meeting, several college presidents were heard as to the centrality of inerrancy in Christian doctrine. Their answers were most revealing as to the hidden centrality of morality in their world views and what their constituencies required of them – or so they believed. Since the fear of the world’s immorality is so powerful, inerrancy is actually an extremely power symbol for a pedagogical program. That is all well and good since that is what Christian discipleship is all about: to create a way of life that is directed by Christ and his mandate. Of Karl Barth’s many legacy’s, one will be the centrality of the risen Christ in his habitus. As a young theologian, utterly disdaining the pietism of his parents and grandparents, but by his mid-life, utterly mystical in the Reformed sense. One might say there was a lot of separatism in that – as decade by decade Barth filled his heavenly “wheelbarrow” with dogmatics. Barth realized that the only way a Christian could have a theology for everything (i.e., theology with a real metaphysical outcome) was to embrace the world, only to understand and convert it, like the self, to its own proper destiny. This is the mind of the educator, the disciple-maker with all the confidence and humility (again Barth’s famous duo) that expands one’s talents for a life-time, however short or long. Thank God that the delight in learning is a twin to its necessity! But in the same way that we are avid users of the world we must be its thinkers and doers too.

The task of Evangelical higher education is not to alter the ancient narratives of the Bible into some kind of paradigm for scientific inquiry. By “defending” the Bible “against” natural science some evangelicals utterly fail their task which is to transform it. All of the paths of science are amenable to their deeper meanings and higher implications. But the transformation cannot be made if they are treated as utterly in error. The alienation of the evangelical academy from the main stream academy is a banal result of a damaging and ultimately insignificant strategy of rejection. Paul’s Aereopagus speech in Acts 17 could never have been conceived, let alone executed if Paul had not had a profound sense of what openness to the paradigms of current science can accomplish. Indeed, this is evident in all the conversational narratives in Paul with the non-Jew and non-Christian.

One of the deadliest cultural strategies is “declinism” – vicious obsession with a post-American world[2]. Declinism is one of the key characteristics of these culture-war academies. Even though the evangelical traditions originated in some form of believers’ church tradition Christian declinism weds Christian thought and life entirely to its history as state religion. Secularity becomes apostasy in declinist narratives .The inculcate something like one renowned colleague muttered to me not so long ago: “we used to have the power and I’m hankering to get it back!” All acknowledge that Christians promoted the whole rhetoric of “open Public Square” and this is what secularity is all about.  The open space allows for both holy and profane speech – this is what makes it secular. This is what civilizations and “civility” attempt. Christianity has in its foundation the quixotic errand of being in this world but not of this world.  This open society with civility is tied in the American psyche to citizenship, something which has achieved poignant clarity only in the last half century. Decline, like declinism, is a choice; let’s not make that one.

Evangelicals too easily forget that Christian leaders since the beginning of America’s founding have contributed greatly to the separation of church and state in public life. These founders wished to remove any basis for competition over high status as religion of the state. Hankering for status is also a big problem. The benefit of public theology has been to offer a very latitudinal ethical monotheism that offered itself as pedagogy of civility without violating anybody’s religious principles, including the atheists’. One of the tests of quality evangelical higher education is how well they do public theology for their students and their constituencies, succumbing to fundamentalist separatism. Without passing this cultural test in some fashion they needlessly marginalize themselves. This is just one of the challenges of developing an evangelical philosophy of higher education as they point to requirements of education for the professions.

To study the law or medicine or one of the sciences a student can only be tangentially separatist evangelical. The vast majority of the evangelical students must move on from evangelical institutions to mainstream institutions. The opportunities of the evangelical colleges to develop into major universities were largely avoided – Mark Noll’s vaunted book about evangelical mind-closing is a jeremiad on this recent cultural history. Evangelical leadership, both clergy and laity, are full of narratives of institutional loss as part of their own grand narrative. Claiming credit for founding the great institutions of Harvard, Yale and Princeton, a bitter story is told ad nausea of the rise of modernism and the loss of confessional norms as if evangelicals should still be controlling them. The story is as old and as telling as the “half-way covenant” of the colonial era. Clergy and laity conflict over how to maintain doctrinal governance of the colleges as their constituencies became diverse  is only one aspect that even Roman Catholics have to cope with. In order to do so, they have had to relinquish theological tests for faculty in all areas except for doctrine. The question as to whether graduate education in all the major fields and particularly researched based education is decisive for evangelical and all other religious based institutions of higher learning.

So what about theology in the evangelical academy? Many of the evangelical colleges began as free standing seminaries and Bible academies for ordination and missionary training. These were separatist communities of learning and many of them try to show continuity today with these roots. One should say that theology by definition is separated learning in that it is guided by taking scripture as revelation. Theological continuity is observable at least at the level of ministerial training where the doctrinal traditions have remained quite stable if often tested by new formulations. There have been robust revivals of trinitarian theology that have transformed the theological landscape. In a sense, some version of evangelical theology has come to dominate the global theological academy with its liberal rival in determined decline. What has changed in American evangelical life is the model and consequently the education of ministers.

Christian theology as an academic discipline drastically expanded throughout the 20th century and beyond; extensively studied at advanced degree levels more than ever around the world. The growth of theological departments, journals and publications in the last half century has been exponential. But evangelicals have mixed feelings about all this. In no other area does the tradition of evangelical separatism flowing from the Fundamentalist / Modernist controversy of the early 20th century leave its mark as in higher education. Massive dilution of educational standards and classic requirements such as biblical languages and theological reasoning have become the norm.

The model of the clergy for centuries right up through the mid-20th was preaching the gospel and ministering to the souls of human beings. This gospel-in-life model was also something that many different kinds of people could identify with and dedicate themselves to. As late as 1950, fully 10% of the phi beta kappa graduates of American colleges and universities entered the ministry. Today there is far less than 1% – this would include phi beta kappa graduates of the evangelical colleges as well. In trying to track this phenomenon, many scholars note the entrance of a managerial model of the minister upon the scene. The unity of piety and intellect in the evangelical minister is indeed difficult to identify today. It is a shame that the educational tradition has been so diluted where the requirements of Biblical languages, exegesis, theology and the spiritual training have become so minimal. The life of ministry is discipleship: to become a “scribe of the kingdom of heaven”. Of course the most visible ministers among us must practice such a profession if evangelical theological education is to change. Ministerial leadership has always been decisive for evangelical higher education. That is still true.

There are two aspects to evangelical higher education that have to be dealt with in the long run. The first is that most of the colleges and universities are already inclusive rather than separatistic. Bob Jones University decided a long time ago that it would defend its various policies even in losing their non-profit status. The arch-conservative mass of fundamentalist schools has not chosen this route. Still, there are various benefits accorded to the evangelical colleges that include full non-profit status as well as fully religious confidentiality rights regarding their contributors. Still, but accepting public funding and tax credits, they are saying that they have a relative openness or liberality regarding the public square in their institution. By avoiding separatism “free inquiry” maintaining confessional commitments means that the same sciences and methods of research are employed inside as well as outside the evangelical academy. Although atheism, materialism, relativism, skepticism are in the world and therefore in every learning environment, evangelicals would do well to do two things – open their doors to greater academic freedom while holding on to their confessional documents but also to greater ethnic diversity. The evangelical institutional environment has not become racially and ethnically diverse in any perceivable way. For a movement with a global mission this fact is quite shameful. We should know the lesson of North Africa, that due quite possibly to its mono-culture once it had eradicated the more separatistic Donatist church – and likely other churches along with it. A diverse culture is far more resourceful, innovative and successful in weathering the storms of change – and actually making good on them.

 

[1] The phrase, “true learning” is redundant.

[2] Cf., Samuel Huntington who first coined the term “Declinism” in his ‘The US-Decline or Renewal,'” Foreign Affairs Winter 1988/89.

The Troubled Insecurity of Evangelical Higher Education

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I entered into the public evangelical conversation about human origins in 1988 with the publication of a short essay titled “Trustees of the Truth,” the first pro-evolution piece to appear in the denominational magazine of the Church of the Nazarene, my religious affiliation at the time. I wrote it in response to an anti-evolution piece that I thought undermined the work of the Nazarene colleges, most of which were quietly teaching evolution.

I was teaching science at Eastern Nazarene College (ENC) at the time. The president of the college reviewed the piece and sent a letter asking me not to publish it, as he thought it would create problems for the college by upsetting fundamentalists. I made only the small concession that my by-line would not identify me as a professor at ENC. The editor of the magazine told me later that my pro-evolution piece held the record for hate mail for over two years and was only eclipsed by a controversial piece related to sex that appeared a few years later. Nothing on the topic has appeared since.

I published my first book—and the denomination’s— on this topic in 1993, with the denominational publisher. It would have appeared earlier but it got caught in a firestorm of controversy, with powerful leaders of the Church of the Nazarene seeking to block its publication, even though a contract had been signed and the manuscript approved by the editorial staff. The chairman of the publisher’s book committee, the Church of the Nazarene’s leading theologian the time, lost his position for his role in the project, which included writing a foreword.

My history in evangelical higher education as a spokesperson for evolution continued this checkered path. Various evangelical leaders attacked me personally for my views and criticized ENC and then Gordon College for employing me. The issue was not so much that I taught evolution in my classes for evolution was the only view taught in the science classes, which was appropriate. The issue was that I became a public figure, writing books and speaking widely on the topic. Evolution was supposed to be taught in secret so people wouldn’t know what was going on.

In remarkable and disturbing contrast, young earth creationism was taught in the teen Sunday school class in the ENC college church by a right wing fundamentalist. When I passed along my daughter’s complaints about this, the pastor—no fan of creationism—was unwilling to do anything to address it.  “Sunday School teachers are hard to find,” he said. This drove my daughter out of the church and into that growing group of “20-something former evangelicals.” 

I became increasingly bothered by the way that it was not possible to be “too conservative” in the Church of the Nazarene, but woe unto him who would be evenly slightly too liberal. 

By the time I left the Church of the Nazarene in 2010, I felt beaten up and pessimistic about this conversation, at least as it occurs within the evangelical world. I had spent countless hours defending well-established science against attacks from people who knew nothing about science, beyond the challenges it posed to a literal reading of the Bible. Although the Church of the Nazarene explicitly rejected biblical literalism and its scholars were almost unanimous in endorsing evolution, the grass roots hostility to evolution was overwhelming—and leadership was simply unwilling to stand up for science. I was constantly subjected to negative attacks from fundamentalists, most of them deeply influenced by biblical literalists like Ken Ham. On many occasions pastors would write me letters demanding I explain my views and insisting that I was a leading students astray. The reaction when I responded that they could find my views in books I had written was that they would certainly not be buying my books and providing me with royalties.  God forbid that they educate themselves on this topic.

I have trouble envisioning progress on evolution in evangelical higher education, given the political climate. The playing field is strongly tilted in the direction of the fundamentalists, and many of them—as donors, trustees, and pastors—wield considerable influence. In contrast, scientifically informed voices are close to non-existent and, where they do exist, are viewed with suspicion.  I am unaware of a single controversy within evangelical higher education precipitated by a faculty member being too conservative but many controversies have erupted by being too liberal in the eyes of some non-academic theological watchdog.

When I left ENC after 27 years—against my will—I moved to Stonehill College, an academically selective Catholic liberal arts institution, where I teach Science & Religion. My experience there has been eye-opening and I now understand why Catholic colleges are so much stronger academically—think Notre Dame, Georgetown, Boston College, Holy Cross—than their evangelical counterparts: Catholic institutions do not appear to be afraid of threatening ideas. They demonstrate a confidence in their tradition that it does not need to be protected from challenges, whether those challenges come from protestants, members of non-Christian religions, atheists, or even disenchanted former Catholics who write negatively about their experience growing up in the church.

Stonehill is unashamedly Catholic. The president and other leaders are priests and clerical collars are everywhere in evidence; there are multiple masses every week; there are Catholic General Education requirements and a strong Catholic influence in the mission statement and strategic plan. A new college logo just unveiled this fall has a cross on it. And yet the faculty includes atheists, Jews, and Buddhists. One of Stonehill’s most beloved emeritus faculty—with a lecture series named after him and frequent appearances in their alumni magazine—is Chet Raymo, a disenchanted Catholic who writes books with titles like When God is Gone, All is Holy.  While at ENC I wrote a much tamer book titled Saving Darwin: How to Be a Christian and Believe in Evolution that won a major recognition as a “Best Book of the Year.” But the news did not make the ENC alumni magazine, since the title would likely upset many influential readers. My public face was considered a liability and ensured that I would never receive “emeritus” status.

My students at Stonehill—mostly Catholic—are much like my former students at Eastern Nazarene College—mostly evangelical. Both groups of students are thoughtful young people on spiritual journeys. But the evangelical students are, in most cases, receiving a pre-packaged set of ideas, with “right answers” already specified on topics like gay marriage, Adam & Eve, the truth of Christianity, the existence of God and so on.  All professors are required to affirm a package of theological ideas and those who expand the conversation beyond the boundaries of the approved package run the risk of losing their jobs. Students whose spiritual journeys take them outside those boundaries end up leaving their faith traditions. The Stonehill conversation is much broader, with room for students to wander in and out of faith, without having to explicitly reject the faith of their childhood.

The evangelical mind remains in crisis, despite the warnings of Mark Noll, in The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind or Randall Stephens and I in The Anointed: Evangelical Truth in a Secular Age. Somehow—in ways that I cannot see clearly—evangelical higher education needs to loosen up and embrace the truths of its mission statements with the sort of confidence that welcomes dissenting views into the conversation and even onto the faculty.

 

 

The Elephant in the Room

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As I have reflected further on Jeannine Brown’s thoughtful posting on “Hidden Constraints to Academic Freedom” and the comment that I posted on that piece, I have concluded that there is “an elephant in the room” that we need to acknowledge and start talking about.

Jeannine’s concern, and mine, is the existence at some Christian institutions of higher education of “informal but real constraints [on faculty scholarship and campus conversations] beyond those clearly delineated [in the institution’s statement of Christian beliefs that all faculty and administration have agreed upon].” Jeannine and I provide a few examples on our postings.

The elephant in the room is our failure to address the “why” question. Why do some Christian schools impose “informal but real constraints beyond those clearly delineated?”

I will welcome receiving any answers to this “why” question that reflect the experiences of any contributors to or readers of this web site. I will limit myself to sharing one answer that I have heard too many times in my forty years of service at four Christian liberal arts colleges: “Even if disagreement about this particular controversial issue is not precluded by our school’s statement or beliefs, what will our constituents think (or do) if they knew that we allowed faculty and students to disagree about this particular issue and openly talk about our disagreements in campus venues? Will some of our constituents stop sending us our students and their money?”

In my estimation, such a response reflects a huge lack of the Christian virtues of “courage” and “faith” at the institutional level. If confronted by a constituent who is unhappy about the college or seminary allowing disagreements and open conversation about a given issue concerning which the institution has not taken a stance (in its statement of beliefs), and about which that constituent may firmly believe that he/she has “the Christian answer,” a Christian college or seminary administrator ought to have the courage to say something like: “We intend to remain steadfastly true to our institution’s statement of beliefs, but as an educational institution we also intend to remain steadfastly true to our educational philosophy, which encourages faculty research and campus-wide conversation about issues for which our statement of beliefs allows room for equally committed Christians to disagree.” Lest you think I just made that response up, it is actually a summary of what I once said to a very disgruntled parent of one of our students in my former life as a Chief Academic Officer at a Christian college – I don’t think I changed his mind, but he needed to hear that from me as a representative of the college.

I don’t know if that parent stopped supporting the college, either through the continuing enrollment of his son or his money. But what if he did stop his support? To those who worry about a Christian college or seminary losing constituents and supporters because of an insistence on remaining true to its core theological and educational beliefs, I dare to ask the question: “Cannot God raise up new constituents who will support us precisely because we remained true to our core beliefs?” To believe otherwise reflects a lack of “faith” on the part of the institution’s leadership.

Well, “I said it and I am glad.” As you can tell by now, this is not an abstract academic issue for me. The elephant in the room will not go away. If anything, I see ominous signs of him putting on weight. We need to talk about him.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Hidden Constraints to Academic Freedom

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As one who has taught at a seminary for almost all of her career, this question has a different feel for me. For the most part, seminaries reflect particular confessional stances and locations, so the question is not so much should this wing of higher education do confessional scholarship (for the most part, it does), but how does it do its scholarship? Does it provide explicit and/or implicit constraints on scholarship? And could a scholar’s work bring them into conflict with the confessional stances of their institution in such a way that they would fear bringing their full learning and selves to their scholarship?

The faculty handbook at my institution speaks of the “inevitable tension” arising from the pursuit of knowledge with the value of academic freedom and the confessional parameters of an evangelical institution. This tension is a given in any school that is both confessional and academic. But rather than explore how a faith statement or requirement of doctrinal agreement sits in tension with academic freedom, I’d like to address the implicit constraints that are present and exert very real pressure upon faculty hiring, scholarship, and teaching. And if we turn our sights to implicit constraints, then we might find we have something in common with non-confessional institutions of higher learning. For I’d suggest that all universities, colleges, seminaries, etc. have implicit constraints of various kinds that set the ground rules for and even shape the scholarship they produce.

I’d offer two examples of what these implicit constraints might look like, both from my context of evangelical seminary education. Bethel Seminary, like many seminaries, has a statement of faith in which we affirm a particular view on the nature of Scripture. Whatever the terminology used (e.g., inspired, infallible, inerrant), evangelical seminaries tend to have an explicit statement about the authority of the biblical text. Yet what often happens in faculty hiring, promotion, tenure, and review goes beyond ensuring that faculty have signed on to the institution’s statement of faith. Typically, there are additional and often implicit expectations about specific interpretations that presumably arise from the shared belief in Scripture’s authority (and go beyond the rest of the faith statement, which usually addresses core theological beliefs). In this scenario, assumptions about interpretations arising from an “evangelical hermeneutic” lead to constraints that move beyond the written page of an explicit statement of faith. Yet as Kevin Vanhoozer has argued, the belief in any particular formation of biblical authority (in his argument, inerrancy) is not yet a set of interpretations. A particular view of biblical authority is an “underdetermined hermeneutic” (Vanhoozer, 97). It does not assure the same interpretive conclusions. To assume that the one inevitably leads to the other (e.g., that a high view of Scripture necessitates certain, particular conclusions) is to confuse issues of authority and hermeneutics (Vanhoozer).

So I get nervous when I hear judgments about scholars who hold particular interpretations of biblical texts that judge these scholars to be ‘outside the fold’ or lacking in integrity even as they sign an institution’s faith statement. Evangelicals have done this kind of judging for years around various issues. For example, in debates on the issue of gender and leadership, it is not uncommon to hear the accusation that egalitarians play fast and loose with the text and so must not hold it in high regard.

It is important for evangelical seminaries and universities to come clean about their implicit constraints for hiring and maintaining their faculty. If a confessional stance is communicated in a published statement of faith that is clear upon hiring (as promoted by the American Association of University Professors’ “Statement of Principles on Academic Freedom and Tenure”), then there’s a chance for faculties to walk the fine line between academic freedom and confessional agreement. But when informal but real constraints beyond those clearly delineated are at work, the task of credible scholarship becomes more difficult.

I’ve also been thinking about a second example of implicit constraints, and this one particularly related to faculty hiring. There’s an all too common word that gets used when particular scholars are being considered for positions at evangelical institutions. It’s the ‘fit’ word. “They don’t fit who we are.” My nervousness with the overuse (in my estimation) of this assessment is that is has, in my experience, been used against women and people of color as they are considered for positions in evangelical institutions and organizations where their presence on faculty has been limited or non-existent until quite recently. In spite of assurances from such candidates that they are fully comfortable signing the statement of faith, somehow they are deemed a poor fit for the institution. “They just don’t seem to fit” becomes not only a path out the door for these otherwise viable candidates but an indictment of our own inability to see how privilege (white and gender) works.

So while I readily acknowledge the difficulties that evangelical scholars and institutions face in terms of balancing the fine line between confessional commitments and academic freedom, I will continue to be concerned about the constraints on academic freedom that are implicit, often unacknowledged, and so more insidious.

 

 

Works Cited

Vanhoozer, Kevin J. “Lost in Interpretation? Truth, Scripture, and Hermeneutics.”

Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society 48 (2005): 89-114.  

 

Recovering Education as Formation

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While concerns about secular drift in Christian colleges and universities are legitimate, the rhetoric of “secularization” masks deeper threats to the health and vitality of evangelical institutions.  This is because “secularism,” either tacitly or explicitly, is primarily understood in cognitive, worldview terms, as constituted by a set of propositions at odds with Christian orthodoxy.  Thus, avoiding the slide into secularism consists in constructing an institutional ethos in which faculty “integrate” Christian orthodoxy (read: propositional truths) into teaching and scholarship. 

Beyond this, concerns about secularization in Christian institutions may also be reflected in expectations for student conduct.  Quite simply, the “secular world” behaves in ways that Christians don’t.  So, Christian colleges and universities discourage “secular” behaviors and encourage “Christian” ones (e.g., chapel attendance). 

All of this is to the good.  But, it’s not good enough.  The downward spiral toward Babylon can’t be avoided by thinking worldviewishly and safe housing alone.  What’s missing is an institutional commitment to forms of life that are rooted in a coherent narrative, one oriented toward the formation of rightly-ordered desires. 

Two great challenges to higher education are these: the omnipresence of digital technology, and the triumph of global consumerism.  Together, these two powerful forces shape human desire and patterns of thought in ways that are significantly at odds with a genuinely Christian vision of higher education and of life.  Specifically, both reinforce the supremacy of the solitary appetitive Self as the moral center of the universe.  What matters (indeed, all that matters) is what I want.  Moreover, the intrinsic aim of digital technology is maximal efficiency in actualizing user desire.  Thus, the catechesis of global consumerism teaches us that the chief end of man is the satisfaction of whatever desires we happen to have, and digital technology is our Deliverer. 

Asceticism (mere desire suppression) is not the answer.  If Augustine is right, we are fundamentally creatures of desire.  Thus, we cannot eradicate our deep longing for the Good.  We can, however, rightly-order that deep longing in and through its expression in desires for those lesser goods that derive from their one, true Source.  But this requires forms of life that are rooted in a coherent narrative that transcends the sovereign consumer Self. 

By themselves, desires have no narrative coherence, either individually or collectively.  They are, to speak in Christian terms, intrinsically disordered.  This is why the ordering of human desire must come from outside.  It is precisely this outside ordering that digital technology promises.  Google and Amazon will find what you want.  Facebook’s timeline will provide the narrative of your life.  Meanwhile, you are free to give your desires free reign.  (How can we neglect so great a salvation?)

The first task of Christian higher education in the 21st century is to expose these two forces – forces at the heart of secularization – for the frauds that they are.  The lie is ancient: “You will be like gods.”  Sadly, Christian institutions are, at times, guilty of peddling the lie – programmatically and technologically reinforcing the idea that higher education is all about what the student-qua-consumer wants. 

The opportunity here for Christian colleges and universities is great.  This is because despite on-going efforts to the contrary, the omnipresence of digital technology cannot ultimately provide a deeply coherent narrative to rightly-order our unfettered desires in ways that lead to meaning and flourishing.  The vanity of such structures is already being felt, manifesting itself in the cultural exhaustion that attends a world awash in information without meaning. 

Courage will be required.  Christian colleges and universities must renew their commitment to the meaning that is afforded in and through the narrative contours of Scripture.  And this must be reflected not only in the structure of the curriculum (especially, the core), it must also make itself manifest in the forms of life embodied by the academic community – how it uses space, and how it thinks of time.

The trajectory of digital technology and global consumerism is essentially one of proliferation: more choices, more options, more goods, more services, more information, more and more and more.  The appetitive soul is insatiable.  Too often (and often too quickly) Christian colleges and universities have unreflectively followed suit: more bandwidth, more courses, more majors, more programs, more facilities.  And while growth itself is never an intrinsic evil, growth apart from deep coherence – as the human body makes plain – is cancerous. 

The challenge for Christian higher education in the 21st century is to learn that less is more.  Meaning must take precedence over quantity.  Formation should be favored over mere information.  Communal narrative unity should be sought before radically individualized plurality.  MOOC’s must take a back seat to incarnate discipleship. 

These things by no means provide full inoculation against secular drift.  But, in their absence, drift seems virtually inevitable.  For the twin forces of global consumerism and digital technology together constitute a direct assault on the narrative of Scripture, an assault that operates (to a certain extent) beneath the intellectual radar. 

In the relatively near future, the health and vitality of Christian colleges and universities will depend upon their awareness of and responsiveness to these trends.  In some instances, survival may require surgery.  However, I’m convinced that the opportunity is worth the cost.  The students that I teach are starving for narrative coherence, for forms of life that orient their desires toward the Good.  The most pressing question for evangelical colleges and universities is whether we, as institutions, will have the courage and spiritual maturity to provide it.  

The Middle Way is the High Road in Higher Education

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At first, I planned to skip this topic, since my knowledge of Evangelical educational institutions is so distant and so slight. Wouldn’t readers be annoyed at me for having the gall to write anything? But the contrast between two sources of data I happen to have began to look so huge and so intriguing that I decided to check in after all.

While I was a visiting scholar at Yale Divinity School, Kevin Roose, then still a Brown undergraduate, came to speak about his new book. He had come up with the idea of enrolling at Jerry Falwell’s Liberty University for a semester, as a sort of one-way cultural exchange, and The Unlikely Disciple: A Sinner’s Semester at America’s Holiest University (Grand Central, 2009) records his adventures there.

Since the purpose of this Web site is respectful conversations, I feel I have to stipulate, as a sort of warning, that the first pages of the book don’t give much hope at all for Roose’s sincere engagement with Evangelical culture. He seems to have chosen Liberty on the strength of an impression, drawn from the popular media, that the Evangelical movement, by its nature, is bound up with secular right-wing politics—and this particular school, alas, was not going to disabuse him. For example, Liberty (after Roose’s sojourn) disowned its tiny chapter of the Young Democrats, and Roose decried that choice publicly. 

Furthermore, by taking Liberty’s whole prescribed religious curriculum at one swallow, instead of over four years in tandem with many ordinary courses, Roose got a skewed view of Evangelical intellectual life even at a school like Liberty, and moved less far than he would have otherwise from his initial judgment that, well, all these people are just ridiculous:

If I went to Liberty, it would be to learn with an open mind, not to mock Liberty students or the evangelical world in toto. For starters, that task is far too easy to be interesting. The satirist P. J. O’Rourke once compared making fun of born-again Christians to “hunting dairy cows with a high-powered rifle and scope.” That was a few years ago, before names like Ted Haggard and movies like Jesus Camp came on the scene. Now, it’s more like hunting the ground with your foot. 

The qualifications to the yokel stereotype that Roose did find himself obliged to make, even at Liberty, don’t all come out in the book, which (for instance) plays up classroom Creationist indoctrination. When I asked Roose at Yale how Liberty squared this with the demands of, say, medical school, to which many of the students must aspire, he replied that there was a full range of standard biology courses taught without interference. That’s in fact the case.

Now here’s a funny thing, in the face of Roose’s (at best) condescending evaluation. The following year, my third at Yale Divinity School, I knew a recent Liberty alumnus, who was finishing a YDS degree and about to go to Heidelberg to continue his studies in theology. I knew him because he was working for me part-time, keyboarding my oral translation of Latin from Apuleius and Caesar. I needed help catching up on these two book projects because, though I can read Latin well, I can’t type worth a hoot and was spending minutes entering into my computer a sentence that took only a few seconds to make sense in my head.

High-speed typing from dictation is a tough resource to find these days, and when you’d also like your typist to be able to comment on linguistic nuances when you get stuck, you can almost forget about finding help for less than $200 an hour. I did hire an undergraduate Latin major who could type about 60 words per minute, but I couldn’t count on him to show up on time; nor could I entice him to take any interest in the original texts.

Samuel the YDS student’s Latin and typing were both excellent, and he didn’t make any of those subtractions of attention and respect I had grown used to as a Classics teacher in the Ivy Leagues. This is Latin—I’m never going to use it, but the class is a convenient way to ditch my language requirement; I had three years of Latin in high school, so I’ll be able to pass a couple of Latin courses here without studying, meanwhile putting my energy into econ or organic chem or something else that matters. That teacher’s a dowdy woman, and nobody’s ever heard of her. She’s got no connections to offer me, even in her own field, which of course is nowhere. Worse, she’s demanding that I memorize paradigm after paradigm, week after week—does she have any idea how much my social life and sports take out of me? She’s asking me to give up time and trouble and sleep, just on her say-so?

Samuel, in contrast, reminded me of my all-time best student, Bryce, the graduate of an Evangelical high school who converted to Catholicism and went to study theology at Notre Dame after his Yale B.A. Critically, they could both deal with authority—which doesn’t mean that they believed or did whatever they were told; they were in fact less deferent than other students, not at all inclined to duck their heads and stare tactfully at a page when I made a mistake or said something flakey. They visibly didn’t like literary digressions, a weakness of mine. But nothing could have persuaded them that a scholar wasn’t a useful person who deserved thoughtful interaction.

I surmise that their upbringing had instilled—and their formal education confirmed—in them a good middle way in dealing with intellectual life. On the one hand, tradition and civilization are the means through which religion comes to us, and so deserve our regard. On the other hand, neither of these is God; neither partakes of the Ultimate except in a very limited way. Either of them (let alone whatever is going on outside them) is a fair target for criticism as long as this criticism itself is knowledgeable and synthetic—drawing on recognized logic or ethics, for example.

I think my own undergraduate experience, based in the University of Michigan’s East Quad with its radical residential college, is pretty sad in comparison. Let’s leave aside (I’m begging you, let’s not discuss it) the party scene that our fashionable intellectualism licensed, all the stuff we were allowed or actually encouraged to do to ourselves and each other. My main complaint is that we didn’t get, from that place, any core education, anything we could keep and adapt. A cause was important because “so-and-so’s here to talk about it, and there’s a film!” The slogan “Question authority” meant, “Question the authority that’s scheduled to be questioned tonight, and question it on cue according to the prescribed jargon.”

This is why I suspect that even the person who leaves an evangelical institution in disgust at its prescriptions, his faith shattered, takes away a better all-around education than I took from Michigan.

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

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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. 

Why Does Postmodern Society Need Christian Universities?

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While much of the history of Christian Higher Education has been focused on separation from the larger society and providing a structural alternative to “secular” education, the future of Christian Higher Education depends upon engaging the broader culture without abandoning our core identity.

The contemporary world is characterized by growing patterns of diversity on issues of faith, morality, values, politics, entertainment, and on and on. We’re seeing the kinds of balkanization in society that Bill Bishop writes about in The Big Sort. I can “like” Facebook pages that affirm my positions and those of “my people”. I can listen to media reports from my cable channel (the one that tells me the Real Truth).

In a world where people are free to dismiss those who disagree, declaring them irrelevant at best and evil at worst, there is a danger of prioritizing the protection of a particular position over the search for Truth. That search for Truth is the central conviction of Christian Higher Education. Notice that I didn’t say “the proclamation of Truth” but “the search for Truth”.

Here’s my answer to the question posed in the title. Because Christian Universities believe that there is Truth at the end of dialogue, we engage the difficult and complex questions that will allow our graduates to participate in the postmodern world as reconcilers. Our graduates will be adept at hearing different positions, understanding how others make value claims, and be comfortable engaging in dialogue intended to allow the Holy Spirit to “lead us into all Truth”. We aren’t trying to win arguments and demonstrate that our way is superior but are trying to faithfully represent Christ and the Gospel.

I’ve argued elsewhere that today’s students represent the first truly postmodern generation (see here, here, and here for examples). The first of the week, I’ll ship to my publisher my book for freshmen entering Christian univerisities. The book attempts to begin where these students are and explore the promise of Christian Higher Ed in new ways (see here and here).

Several of the links in the previous paragraph cite David Kinnaman’s work in You Lost Me. The Barna group gathered data on twenty-somethings who had been formerly active in church but were now estranged. They identify six problems in the contemporary Christian church in America: 1) overprotective, 2) shallow, 3) anti-science, 4) repressive, 5) exclusive, and 6) doubtless.

Clearly, not all of the folks interviewed by Barna would be characterized as evangelicals. And yet, I would argue that today’s evangelical students largely share the concerns raised by Kinnaman’s sample. They may not feel the concerns strongly enough to leave the evangelical fold, but I believe those tensions are present even if it’s not popular to talk about in our colleges and churches.

That tension is not a source of concern but a potential for great impact. Around the time of the birth of the Moral Majority, Robert Wuthnow wrote The Struggle for America’s Soul documenting the separations between the mainline and conservative churches. Wuthnow expressed deep concern about the impact of the chasm he described but ended the book on an optimistic note. He suggested that evangelical college faculty who understand both the faith commitments of the conservatives and the methodology of the mainliners could play the role of translator and begin to bridge the gap, especially by engaging in professional scholarship.

I take Wuthnow’s conclusion a step further: it is the graduates of Christian universities who will bridge chasms, not just within the church, but between various segments of the broader society. They will not do that through formal scholarship but through the informal hearing and telling of stories. By truly engaging those who are other than themselves, they can bring healing where there is strife and wholeness where there is partition and distrust.

At this point, I’d reverse my argument. Christian universities need postmodern students because they will help us address the central questions these students have. This is not to provide them with easy answers but to enable them to engage the questions with the complexity the world sees. This means that Christian universities will have to wrestle with all of the difficult questions the broader society is wrestling with, maybe even wrestling harder and earlier than the rest of culture. Questions about sexuality, inequality, militarism, narcissism, evolution, bullying, slavery, biotechnology, surveillance, security, and even government must be our stock in trade. We must be better at those convesations than our secular counterparts because the stakes are so high.

It’s at about this point in my argument that someone brings up Harvard.  Harvard, they quickly point out, was founded on Christian princples to train Christian ministers but became secularized over subsequent generations. The capital V Veritas (Truth) in their seal became a small-v veritas. Because they didn’t stay true to their distinctive identity, they’ve become what they are today (one of the most respected and richest universities in the world, but that’s not usually the point made). But a quick review of Harvard’s history on Wikipedia shows that this transition began very early and was made intentionally by leaders and trustees. It didn’t reflect a losing of their way because they didn’t hold a hard line on key priciples.

Futhernore, while Harvard was struggling with idenitity from early in its history, Christiain universities have had many years to solidify their missional identity. Of the five institutions I’ve served, four have already celebrated their centennial and the fifth hit the 75 year mark. They’ve had decades to clarify the centrality of their Christian commitments.

The expression of those commitments may shift over time but the core remained solid. As the universities pursued regional accreditation, there was a re-articulation of mission. For a period of time, the “integration of faith and learning” phrase gave expression to that misison in ways consistent with late modernity. Christian universities are completely capable of engaging their postmodern students with honest searching around difficult questions because we believe the Holy Spirit is still leading us to capital-T Truth.

Early in my career, I asked a retired faculty member, “what made a Christian College Christian?” he told me that he didn’t know what that meant because only individuals could become Christian. So his answer was that Christian Colleges were populated by Christian faculty members (and staff and administration). t’s an answer than is less than satisfactory sociologically.

For the last decade, I’ve been unpacking my own answer: what makes a Christian univeristy Christian is that we audaciously believe that the Holy Spirit is in the center of our teaching and learning enterprises. We are atentive to His leading as we navigate differences, grapple with hard questions, tell our stories, and wrestle with our uncertainties. I have come to see the Christian univeristy as an outpost and an exemplar of the Kingdom of God.

If Christian Universities don’t step forward and address the issues of postmodern society, we run the risk of becoming increasingly marginalized and isolated. In some ways, that’s a fate worse than Harvard’s.

Postmodern society needs Christian Universities becasue there are few other sociological entities so positioned to address the complexity of today’s world. There are few other institutions as committed to bridging differences in the face of balkanization.

We in Christian Higher Education can engage today’s issues in an academically grounded manner while avoiding hubris. We can hear others and affirm their struggles and questions. We can keep our Christian commitments without breaking fellowship with others.

In short, we can be the Body of Christ in the World coming alongside others in the search for Truth.

We Should Be Concerned With Losing Our Distinctive Identity—But Not Too Much

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I had the privilege of attending Notre Dame as a graduate student in the early 1990s and studying with historian George Marsden.  George was working on his seminal book at the time, The Soul of the American University, and he would share rough drafts with his graduate students for us to review.  This was kind of like eating at a five-star restaurant and being invited to tour the kitchen to see the meals being cooked.  The “secularization of the academy” was much discussed at the time.  Along with George’s book, Catholic historian James Burtchaell’s The Dying of the Light was published at roughly the same time.

This nagging fear of inevitable secularization, buttressed as it is by prominent examples throughout American history, stills pervades the culture of evangelical higher education.  I was reminded of that last week at a panel session for parents of prospective students, when one parent asked me what my university was doing to stand its ground in the face of the tides of secularization.  I am reminded too of my fellow Notre Dame graduate student Michael Hamilton’s lament when he was writing the history of Wheaton College, that some evangelicals seemingly view any change as inevitably leading to secularization.

Those of us who make our living as Christian college leaders like to take a more positive view of the situation.  After all, we’re passionate about ramping up academic quality through faculty hiring, increased support for faculty scholarship, recruiting better students, etc.  And we can cite contemporary examples of schools such as Pepperdine and Baylor that have strengthened their Christian identity in recent years.

Yet as a historian, I am keenly aware that well-intentioned efforts can have unexpected consequences, and that we don’t control the long-term effects of our actions.  The leaders of Dartmouth or Oberlin never intended for their institutions to lose their distinctive Christian identity, and we may not be any wiser than they were.

In sum, then, I do believe that evangelicals in higher education should be concerned with losing our distinctive Christian identity.  We need to balance our ambition for positive change with a sense of humility and caution learned through the lessons of history and the laws of unintended consequences.  At the same time, we must not let examples of changes gone bad keep us from proposing visionary plans ourselves.  In recent months, an excessive fear of secularization at a prominent Christian university has created significant turnover of the university’s leadership and damaged the lives and careers of many sincerely Christian educators.

So how do we avoid secularization in our quest for positive change and growth?  Here are a few modest and rather unoriginal suggestions.  First, we need a clearly-articulated statement of our core beliefs and values.  Especially at a non-denominational university such as mine, it’s crucial that we do the difficult work of formulating a simple, clear statement of theological convictions which members of the community can understand and affirm, and do so without a wink and a nod.

Second, there is a small and crucial group of individuals which universities overlook at their peril:  the membership committee of the Board of Trustees.  Ultimately, at most of our universities, it’s the Board of Trustees that sets the vision of the university and that will sustain the vision, primarily through the hiring of the president.  So who sits on that board will ultimately determine the university’s direction, perhaps not in the short term but definitely in the long term.  Thus, the membership committee, which is typically elected by the board itself, performs the key function of the university by seeking out and vetting future board members.  Those who want to maintain a university’s Christian identity must pay close attention to this committee.

Finally, to paraphrase Bill Clinton, “it’s the faculty, stupid.”  Professors are the heart and soul of a university.  They will outlast students and probably most administrators.  Their sincere support can make an initiative successful, and their cynicism—either overt or covert—can doom any well-intentioned vision statement.  If we want to remain distinctively Christian, therefore, we must be clear in our hiring expectations and scrutinize candidates carefully.  “When in doubt, don’t hire” is an old and reliable principle.  If we are vigilant in hiring professors who share the institution’s core beliefs and values, then we can confidently give those whom we hire the freedom to do their jobs in a way that affirms the mission of the institution.

Of course, as an administrator, I’m focusing on structural and procedural matters.  Beyond that, there’s the need to create a campus ethos that reflects a distinctively Christian identity in the classroom, in the dormitory, on the athletic field, and elsewhere.  While that’s important, I would argue that such a Christian ethos, no matter how strong, will fade in time if the Christian commitment of the faculty and board is not maintained.  And so I end up back in the less glamorous areas of faculty hiring and board membership.

Educators often describe education as risky.  Since we’re forming persons, not making widgets, there is an inherent risk to the educational process.  We can’t guarantee the outcome.

Perhaps there’s an inherent risk to growing universities as well, which are, after all, comprised of those same messy, unpredictable persons.  We seek to clarify boundaries, hire well, and cast our vision of the future, but ultimately we must trust that God will bless—and sustain for future generations—our efforts to build academically excellent and distinctively Christian institutions.

 

Rick Ostrander, Provost, Cornerstone University

Topic #7: Evangelicalism and Higher Education

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Launch Date for the Conversation: November 1, 2013


In response to the secularization of American higher education, explicitly evangelical schools, colleges, and universities have arisen to provide education within a distinctly evangelical framework. By educating students in a wide range of fields, and not just distinctly Christian disciplines such as biblical studies and theology, these evangelical institutions maintain that all education is shaped significantly by theological commitments. At the same time, graduates of these institutions are being prepared for careers outside the church where these theological commitments are not held. In light of this, some “leading questions” are

  1. For American evangelicals, in what ways does Christian education differ from non-Christian education?
  2. What is the distinctive role of separate evangelical institutions of higher education? What are the implications for evangelical students and scholars who want scholarly interaction with non-evangelicals?
  3. What sort of explicit doctrinal commitments should evangelical institutions of higher education have and what role should these play for administrators, scholars, teachers, and students? 
  4. For many, the essence of a university is the pursuit of truth, no matter where it leads. How should evangelical institutions respond when this pursuit appears to come into tension with doctrinal commitments?
  5. Should evangelical higher education be understood by its supporters and participants as a “safe place” where traditional understandings and practices will be maintained? Or as a “safe place” where the pursuit of truth will not lead to disenfranchisement based on where the pursuit leads?
  6. Is “academic freedom” an appropriate category for evangelical higher education? Are doctrinal commitments only constraints on academic freedom or do they also play a constructive role in the life of the mind?
  7. Should institutions of evangelical higher education be concerned with losing their distinctive identity through processes of secularization? If so, how should their identities be maintained?