Teaching as Believing: Faith in the University

Notes

205 Notes Introduction 1. Though a number of scholars have explored the history of faith and the university, particularly from the point of view of the religious college—see note 3—I believe that I am the first to focus on these questions from the perspective of the secular university. But as Burtchaell argues in The Dying of the Light: The Disengagement of Colleges and Universities from their Christian Churches, in this respect there really isn’t much difference between religious and secular institutions . Even in most church-sponsored colleges and universities, faith is no longer an integral part of the intellectual life on campus and hasn’t been for a long time. In fact, faith may never have been central in these institutions, Burtchaell suggests, not in any real sense, since in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries their curriculum was merely classical, not theological, a matter of learning Greek and Latin. Certainly now, given the need to compete for students, religious colleges and universities tend to downplay their religious heritage, though Robert Benne discusses several notable exceptions in Quality with Soul. As a result, on many of these campuses the majority of faculty and students are not believers, a factor that in itself changes the character of the institution. Though faith and reason may be more in harmony at such places than at public institutions , day to day—in the classroom, on hiring and tenure committees—my Christian colleagues at Christian colleges and universities say that their situation is much the same as mine at Oregon State. Anderson.Teaching 9/30/04 4:21 PM Page 205 Notes to pp. 2–3 206 And the problem isn’t limited to Christian colleges. In “Jewishness and Judaism at Brandeis University,” Marvin Fox observes that at this ostensibly Jewish institution, “the most urgent questions that face a religiously committed Jew in any American university receive no answers or even any consideration.” As at Christian colleges, too, as at any secular university, faith is something to the side, on the periphery. “We do nothing institutionally to help our students deal with the issues generated for religion by our whole range of academic subject matter. [. . .] Such concerns stand outside the orbit of a nonsectarian university. [. . .] We do not, because we may not, address the deepest religious questions, even those that are specifically generated by the academic setting in which we spend our lives” (469). Richard Hughes notes these same tensions and problems in religious and former religious colleges, like Pepperdine, where he teaches, a college founded by the Churches of Christ. He then goes on, in How Christian Faith Can Sustain the Life of the Mind, to make an argument very similar to the one that I make in the next few paragraphs in the context of the secular university. There’s much of intellectual value in the Christian tradition that first formed these colleges, he says, much that should be reclaimed, however poorly realized in the past. In fact, for Hughes personally faith is the foundation of the intellectual life. “Precisely because I am a Christian scholar, I seek to maintain an open classroom in which my students can raise any questions they wish. Precisely because I am a Christian scholar, I seek to nurture in my students a hunger and thirst for truth. Precisely because I am a Christian scholar, I encourage my students to critically assess not only the perspectives of others, but their own” (9). 2. This theology is often described not just as “postmodern” but also as “post-liberal” and “post-conservative.” The last chapter of Douglas Sloan’s Faith and Reason: Mainstream Protestantism and American Higher Education—“Postmodernism and its Postmodern Prospects”—is a fine survey of both the Protestant and the evangelical versions of this movement (212–37). Stanley Grenz and John Franke’s Beyond Foundationalism: Shaping Theology in a Postmodern Context is a book-length study of the evangelical approach. Conservative and evangelical Christianity has depended on an “epistemological foundationalism,” Grenz and Franke explain, a belief in the “absolute, incontestable certainty” of ideas that can be expressed in the form of propositions. The Bible is understood as the source of these propositions, ready for systematizing and logical arrangement. But a number of conservatives and evangelicals are now attempting Anderson.Teaching 9/30/04 4:21 PM Page 206 Notes to pp. 3–6 207 to develop a method for doing theology in a...