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Dockery: I think one of the key challenges we face in trying to advance the cause of Christian higher education is locating and developing faculty who believe in the importance of the vision I have attempted to articulate in the first three questions. This understanding of faith (the faith that we believe) provides a unifying framework that helps avoid the error of a spiritualized Gnosticism on the one hand, or a purely materialistic metaphysic on the other. It is this confessional starting point that forms the foundation for our affirmation that all truth is God's truth, whether revealed or discovered. Thus, on the one hand we respond with grateful wonder at what has been made known to us, and on the other, with exerted effort to discover what has not been clearly manifested.

As to your question about the differences between Baptists, Presbyterians, and Catholics, I am not sure I know the answer. I would guess, speaking as a Baptist, that Baptists have perhaps focused more on the heart than the head. Our Catholic friends have emphasized serious philosophical inquiry and Presbyterians have wrestled with the intricacies of theology, while Baptists have put their energies into missions and evangelism. Of course these are generalizations, but I do think there is a long-standing suspicion of education in certain aspects of our Baptist history, particularly the revivalistic wing of Baptist life.

But probably more than anything, Catholics and Presbyterians have had a greater appreciation for tradition, and particularly the best of the Christian intellectual tradition. Baptists probably need to go back and read the 1678 Orthodox Creed (a seventeenth-century confessional statement adopted by General Baptists), which affirmed the importance of confessing with all true Christians everywhere the importance of the Apostle's Creed, the Nicene Creed, and the Athanasian Creed.

In that light, I would suggest that our choice is not between choosing to be faithful to our Christian heritage (or our Baptist, Evangelical, Presbyterian, or Catholic heritage) or being participants in the academy. It is not an unquestioning acceptance of the Christian tradition or open-ended inquiry. Jaroslav Pelikan was fond of claiming that if tradition is the living faith of the dead, then traditionalism is the dead faith of the living. Such traditionalism is often characterized by inflexible and at times anti-intellectual dogma at every point and in every discipline. This approach fails to engage our society or influence our culture.

On the other hand, free inquiry untethered to faith and tradition often results in unbelieving skepticism, advancing the directionless state that characterizes so much of higher education today. Such an approach cannot sustain the Christian tradition and its truth claims.

Neither of these approaches represents the best of Christian higher education.

Our unique calling is not to be forced into inappropriate "either/or" choices, but to be appropriately "both/and" as represented in a motto like religio et eruditio. We reject those who call for us to create false dichotomies or join together unrelated ideas in an irrational, pluralistic fashion. Instead we call for a commitment to faith and learning grounded in Jesus Christ, who is both fully God and fully human, and who is both life and light.

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August (Web-only) 2007, Vol. 51