The Idea of a Christian College

Prophets of doom are saying that the small private college will die out. It is faced with skyrocketing costs, with the competition of large universities for research funds, foundation grants, and qualified faculty, with the public institutions’ subsidy of a student’s education. The doomsayers can point out that of 594 American colleges founded before the Civil War, only 182 still survived in 1927. Perhaps it is good that some did not last and that others yet may not, for a college does not deserve to survive unless it embodies a worthwhile idea of what a college should be. Yet prophets of hope declare that the small college’s day is yet to come—provided it can define its distinctives and carry them out with excellence. The Christian liberal-arts college is in just this situation. Whether it survives or even deserves to depends on the identity it defines for itself.

The idea of a Christian liberal-arts college has no fixed form, eternal in some Platonic heaven. It varies from place to place and changes from time to time. It has found different forms in the face of different needs. In colonial days, the idea was of a classical education to discipline the mind and provide the tools of scholarship deemed essential for the clergy and other leaders of society. During the westward movement, the classical ideal stood in contrast to the more vocational and pragmatic goals of the Land Grant colleges.

Adolescence is the age of independence, and in time the idea of a Christian college found a life for itself that seems independent of classical education. It evolved amid theological controversy into what has been called a “defender of the faith” institution. But though defending the faith was certainly an apostolic responsibility, it is hard to extend this conception to the educational task. Yet this defensive mentality is still common among pastors and parents; many suppose that the Christian college exists to protect young people against sin and heresy in other institutions. The idea therefore is not so much to educate as to indoctrinate, to provide a safe environment plus all the answers to all the problems posed by all the critics of orthodoxy and virtue.

This is an idea, I say—more a caricature than a reality. The trouble with it is that there often are no ready-made answers, new problems arise constantly, and the critics are perplexingly creative. The student who is simply conditioned to respond in certain ways to certain stimuli is at a loss when he confronts novel situations—as he will in a changing society undergoing a knowledge explosion. He needs a disciplined understanding of his heritage plus creativity, logical rigor, and self-critical honesty, far more than he needs prepackaged sets of questions and answers. The trouble with cloistering young people to keep them from sin and heresy, as evangelicals—of all people—should realize, is that these things come not from the environment but out of the heart. And while every parent feels protective towards his youngsters, over-protectiveness can stifle faith and hope and love, and trigger opposite excesses of thought and conduct.

Is the idea of a Christian college, then, simply to offer a good education plus biblical studies, in an atmosphere of piety? These are desirable ingredients, but are they the essence of the idea? After all, through religious adjuncts near a secular campus, students could be offered opportunities for biblical studies and support of personal piety while they were getting a good education, without all the money and manpower and facilities and work involved in maintaining a Christian college. Nor is the idea of a Christian college to prepare people for church-related vocations, desirable as this may be as a byproduct and central as it may be elsewhere in the educational work of the Church. The Christian college, like any other small institution, must decide whether its primary calling lies in the liberal arts or in vocational training.

Then why a Christian college? I suggest that its purpose, its idea, is the creative and active integration of faith and learning, and of faith and culture. This is its unique potential in higher education today and in American life. I say “integration,” for this precludes disjunctions between piety and scholarship, faith and reason, religion and science, Christianity and the arts, theology and philosophy, or whatever the differing points of reference may be. The Christian college will not settle for a militant polemic against secular learning and culture, as if there were a great gulf fixed between the secular and the sacred. All truth is God’s truth, no matter where it is found, and we can thank him for it all.

Integration also transcends awkward conjunctions of faith and learning in some unholy alliance rather than a fruitful union. It will not settle for taking critical pot shots at variant interpretations of material without working out a more satisfactory explanation. Nor will it settle for tacked-on moralizing and applications, for stale, superficial approaches that fail to penetrate the real intellectual issues. It will require a thorough analysis of methods and materials and concepts and theoretical structures, a lively and rigorous interpenetration of liberal learning with the content and the commitment of Christian faith. The Christian college has a constructive task, far more than a defensive one.

The Creation Mandate

A positive mandate of this sort hardly needs justification if we confess that God the Father Almighty is Maker of heaven and earth. To confess God as Creator is to affirm that he is Lord over all life and thought. It is to admit that every part of the created order is sacred, and that the Creator calls us to exhibit his wisdom and power both by exploring the creation and developing its resources and by bringing our own created abilities to fulfillment. For while all nature declares the glory of God, we men uniquely image the Creator in our created creativity. Implicit in the doctrine of creation, then, is its cultural mandate and the call to a creative integration of faith with learning and culture. It is a call, not just to couple piety with intellect, nor just to preserve biblical studies in our schools, but more basically to explore the wisdom of God in every area of thought and life, and to replenish the earth with the creativity of human art and science.

This creation mandate has not been rescinded by either sin or grace. On the contrary, it is reaffirmed. God’s grace comes to men in creation to help us fulfill the creation responsibilities in which we have failed (Heb. 2:6–10). The incarnation of Jesus Christ reaffirms the potential value of what we see and hear and handle in this world, for he came in the flesh, into a family and a community and a nation and a culture, into history. Christianity is not an otherworldly religion on the periphery of life—the doctrine of creation and the incarnation of Jesus Christ see to that.

Education With A Perspective

The idea of a Christian college that creatively integrates faith and learning, then, is an extension of the doctrine of creation. But we need to examine the idea more closely. Christian scholarship is not primarily distinguished by its techniques, nor by some privileged access to esoteric facts hidden from the uninitiated. At the levels of technique and fact, Christian and non-Christian scholars work together in fruitful and irenic cooperation. Rather, Christian scholarship is distinguished by its interpretation of material and by the value-judgments it makes. There is no distinctively Christian history of modern times—but a Christian view of God and man is likely, as Butterfield and others have pointed out, to affect our interpretation of the past and even, in measure, our selection and use of historical materials. There is no Christian physics—but belief in divine creation is likely, as Whitehead and others have said of early modern science, to shape our attitude toward scientific inquiry, and especially toward the kind of interpretation that goes into making a supposedly scientific world-view.

In other words, Christian scholarship is perspectival. The Christian revelation provides a vantage point—not just a set of presuppositions stated in propositional form from which to deduce a closed system, but a whole outlook on life replete with values and attitudes as well as beliefs. And it is from this perspective that we proceed. It motivates us, gives sanctity to our work, and provides an interpretative framework. We confess our faith in our work. This means repudiating the idea of ideological neutrality and detached objectivity; the teacher and scholar and student are whole persons, and their faith and their values inevitably influence their work.

The perspectival nature of thought is by no means unique to the Christian. All human thought and life is perspectival: consciously or unconsciously, what we are speaks loudly in what we say; what we believe and value shows itself in how we think. The more closely our thinking touches on matters of world-viewish concern, the more overtly our guiding perspective shows through.

The Christian college, then, should clarify its guiding image, so that the Christian perspective its students encounter is one that they understand, one also that they can make their very own. For while neutrality is impossible, the alternative is not blind prejudice—it is a self-conscious and self-critical commitment, an honesty that need not be ashamed. Christian thought is legitimately perspectival when the scholar is authentically Christian.

Second, it is pluralistic. A variety of perspectival traditions is at work in Western thought, and each of these is itself diversified. Naturalism, for instance, is a tradition that has taken many different forms, each one true to a common basic perspective. So too with theism, and within theism with Christian thought. To many things there is no one Christian approach, and Christian thinkers differ among themselves while affirming the truth of their common perspective. Some of our differences arise from our theological diversity, but not all. For Christian theology, effective as it is in providing an overall direction for our thinking, does not of itself resolve every theoretical and practical question that may arise. Our differences are due as well to differences in training and experience, in personal emphasis and interest, in the breadth and depth of our scientific and humanistic knowledge. In these matters, Christian learning, like Christian living, requires Christian liberty—hence the importance of academic freedom. There is no all-embracing “party line” dictated by biblical revelation. Ours is not a closed, complete “system to end all systems” but a richly variegated heritage of thought from the perspective of a biblical faith. It requires an honesty that is irenic, not contentious, an honesty that humbly admits our humanity. We see through a glass darkly. We know in part. The finiteness, the fallibility, the fragmentariness of human understanding require that we grant others the liberty we desire for ourselves; that we be willing to learn from others and remain open to correction, to new angles, to invigorating insights. The pluralistic character of Christian thought is a blessing, for it safeguards us against premature dogmatism and monolithic structures. It will keep us humble and keep us human; it will keep us working creatively and self-critically in all our endeavors.

This leads to a third characteristic; if Christian education is both perspectival and pluralistic, it must also be exploratory, an open-ended adventure in learning and living. As long as we fall short of omniscience it will be this way, as it is for those in non-Christian traditions. They have to explore the implications of the viewpoints they take, and so do we. We have barely begun to chart the worlds of science and of ideas, to relate faith and learning and life, and so to explore the insight afforded by the meaning-giving Logos of God. This is an exciting prospect for the believer, whether student or professional scholar, and it demands of us both creativity and discipline. After all, education should be exacting and exciting.

We have spoken of Christian scholarship in ethical terms, like faith and love and honesty and liberty. Some writers have suggested that it involves hope, and I think they are right: the virtue of hope should mark the Christian in this world. We believe that life is not absurd but that it makes sense, that the world of nature and history are intelligible from the perspective of faith. We may therefore add a fourth characteristic of Christian thought—it is redemptive. The Christian perspective enables us to see things whole, to recapture the meaning and worth of human existence, to reinvest secular life with its God-given sanctity. We bring this hope to our work in a secular world, to the interpretation of our learning, and to the application of learning to life. We live and think with a redeeming hope. The truth is not yet complete; it is not yet all in. To use Paul Ricoeur’s phrase, truth-for-man is an “eschatological ideal” toward which we strive, an ideal we glimpse in broad outline and in part but have not yet fully attained. Yet we work at it in the confident hope of truth’s full disclosure and of the ultimate redemption of human thought. This hope begets imaginative endeavor and hard work. We confess our hope in our work, and thereby bear witness in a secularized world that is fast losing hope as it already lost faith.

A Mandate For Today

This idea of a Christian college is strategic at the present juncture in history. We hear a great deal about the secularization of society, the compartmentalization and seeming irrelevance of religion, the loss of ultimate concerns in the routines of daily life, the fact that the Hebrew-Christian world-view, which once gave meaning and value to Western life and thought, has disintegrated. God is said to be dead, the Church is caught in a suburban captivity, and modern man, eviscerated in this way, is left groping for meaning and grasping at whatever straw blows by.

Involved in this crisis is the secularization of learning. The medieval university was governed by a unifying religious world-view—theology was at the center of the curriculum, just as the church spire was at the center of the city. But all this has changed. Education today is largely rootless, or at best governed by a heterogeneity of goals. The university has become a multiversity, and its orderly operation is threatened, in part, because it lacks a unifying world-view that can unite the heritage of the past with the realities of the present, and that can infuse meaning into learning and hope into life in a bent world.

Hence the idea of a Christian college where learning is honest about its perspective, dialogical in its pluralism, exciting and exploratory, yet still able to see things whole. It is the idea of a faith that inspires learning, gives sanctity and value to culture and scholarship, and casts light on the perennial concerns of men and society. The truth still has its meaning-giving power, and knowing the truth will still make men free.

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