Professing in the Postmodern Academy: Faculty and the Future of Church-Related Colleges

Beyond the Faith-Knowledge Dichotomy: Teaching as Vocation

Beyond the Faith-Knowledge Dichotomy 131 How does the language of “vocation” illuminate our understanding of Christian identity and higher education? In this essay, I wish to explore teaching as a vocation in order to shed light on a key issue that has often haunted Christian higher education: the separation between faith and knowledge. Such a separation has often led academics to assume that the classroom is the place to examine and pass on knowledge, while matters of faith belong in the extracurricular spheres of the institution, i.e., campus ministry, service projects, voluntary chapel, or liturgy. From this perspective, the teacher’s role (vocation ) is not to indoctrinate or impose his or her beliefs on students, but to examine all beliefs with a critical and open mind. Several years ago, Nannerl Keohane, the president of Duke University, nicely reflected these common assumptions at her inauguration when she expressed uneasiness at the university’s motto, “Eruditio et Religio.” “[T]he emphasis on religion,” she stated, “seemed hard to square with the restless yearning for discovery, the staunch and fearless commitment to seek for truth wherever truth may be found that is the hallmark of a great university.”1 It did not seem to her that religious convictions could mix with the critical spirit of higher education. Beyond the Faith-Knowledge Dichotomy: Teaching as Vocation ELIZABETH NEWMAN 132 ELIZABETH NEWMAN Such assumptions about knowledge and faith reflect the now notorious modern split between knowledge and values, a split that sees knowledge as objective and public, while values are subjective matters of private choice. Yet, as has been extensively documented in the twentieth century, this framework has some glaring flaws. For one, the subject simply cannot achieve the independence from context that this model seems to require. Recent attention to our knowledge as nonfoundational , communal, and narrative-based indicates how deeply self-involving our convictions and commitments are. As Charles Scriven, President of Columbia Union College, puts it, “how and what we think at all times reflects a storied past.”2 Thus, those understandings of teaching that imagine we can separate faith convictions from knowledge claims reflect the story of modernity, a story which holds that valid knowledge evolves from “the onlooker consciousness”3 of a detached spectator . According to this modern mythos, knowledge is reliable insofar as it is universal and freed from particularity. Such knowledge belongs, appropriately, in the public realm (the classroom). Modernity locates faith, on the other hand, in the expressive, ethical, or even irrational sphere. So understood, faith seems quite naturally to belong in the private or subjective realm. In many ways, it is understandable how this modern story gained such a stronghold over our imaginations. As historian Robert Wilken notes, one of the reasons why faith has been divorced fromreason is that by laying stress on the attitude of the believer rather than on the truth of the thing believed, it is easier for people to negotiate our diverse and heterogeneous society. That attitude also discourages religious warfare. If faith is an affair of the believing subject and is self-authenticating, then it is easier for us to tolerate differences and live together in peace and harmony.4 Avoidance of religious conflict and openness to pluralism seem to require that we keep our faith convictions private. What is the alternative? Most of us are by now familiar with postmodern criticisms of the modern story. Chief among these is the observation that Beyond the Faith-Knowledge Dichotomy 133 any “reason,” abstracted from particularity and context, can itself easily become oppressive. What we assume is a universal rationality that everyone shares turns out to be deeply informed by our particular cultures and contexts. Some strands of postmodernism have thus attempted to resolve the problem of difference (and thus conflict) not by upholding objectivistic knowledge, as the modern mythos does, but by endorsing an aesthetic appreciation of otherness. Since knowledge , so this position holds, is inevitably a mode of domination , the resolution lies in aesthetically embracing the plurality of knowledges and the relativity of all truth. Douglas Sloan describes this kind of postmodernism as “putative” or deconstructive: “Extreme expressions of subjectivism, radical relativism, and the deconstruction of everything have often replaced objectivism and hence have been characterized as postpositivist and postmodern.”5 Such postmodern thinking, however, as I will discuss more fully, remains parasitic on the faith/knowledge dichotomy in that the only alternative to objectivism seems...