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159 Chapter Ten Can Baptist Institutions of Higher Education Meet the Needs of Youth in a Post-9/11 World? Denton Lotz Introduction As general secretary of the Baptist World Alliance, I am essentially a missionary and evangelist, roaming the world and speaking encouraging words to our Baptist brothers and sisters, most of whom are suffering from inadequate education, lack of resources, and lack of economic and political freedom. So to attempt to address issues concerning the future of Baptist higher education is a daunting task. After all, a Google search calls up 6,550,000 references to Christian higher education, and 1,050,000 references to Baptist higher education. Given such a large and complex task, where am I to begin? I took a respite from the Web and read Ecclesiastes: “The sayings of the wise are like goads, and like nails firmly fixed are the collected sayings that are given by one shepherd. Of anything beyond these, my son, beware. Of making many books there is no end, and much study is a weariness of the flesh. The end of the matter; all has been heard. Fear God, and keep his commandments; for that is the whole duty of everyone. For God will bring every deed into judgment , including every secret thing, whether good or evil.”1 Now that preacher understood academia long before anyone ever heard of a computer! Although I agreed to the title “Post-9/11” for this essay without hestitation , I had not thought much about the events of September 11, 2001, in the context of Christian higher education. But then I read Stanley Hauerwas’s article “September 11, 2001: A Pacifist Response.” In this very wise reflection on the meaning of 9/11 Hauerwas says, “Our response is to continue living in a manner that witnesses to our belief that the world was not changed on SchmelVita Future.indd 159 SchmelVita Future.indd 159 4/11/2006 1:20:40 PM 4/11/2006 1:20:40 PM 160 Can Baptist Institutions Meet the Needs of Youth? September 11, 2001. The world was changed during the celebration of a Passover in 33 A.D.”2 For the Christian understanding of time, the day that changed the world was indeed on a cross and in an empty tomb in Jerusalem two thousand years ago, not in New York City in 2001. With Oscar Cullmann we would affirm that indeed Christ is the center of history and that Christ defines all of our understanding of reality and time. Indeed, 9/11 and the destruction of the World Trade Center will go down in history as one of those significant dates in American history like December 7, 1941, and the attack on Pearl Harbor, but it is not the definitive date for the Christian. Rather, it is in the light of Anno Domini that we can only try to understand 9/11. Samuel Huntington’s The Clash of Civilizations Samuel Huntington’s seminal book The Clash of Civilizations has been analyzed and critiqued many times, but I refer to it again because I believe it offers a very helpful typology for understanding the present situation in which humanity finds itself. The fact is that with the fall of communism we did not suddenly achieve what President George H. W. Bush proclaimed as “a new world order.” Instead, Soviet autocratic and totalitarian power succeeded in suppressing the national aspirations of many and various groups. However, with the fall of the Berlin Wall, all of these repressed aspirations came out, and suddenly we have “tribal-type” conflicts between Armenia and Azerbaijan , Bosnia and Serbia, Chechnya and Russia. Huntington’s thesis is that the twenty-first century will experience a “clash of civilizations,” and what is the basis of those conflicting civilizations but religion? Huntington’s model is helpful because the clashes that we see today are indeed religious conflicts, although there are surely economic and social issues also involved. The clashes in Eastern Europe were essentially conflicts between Orthodox Christianity and Islam. What is the conflict between Israel and Palestine but two different religions? The world, it seems, is being pulled apart because of these religious conflicts: Hinduism versus Islam in India, Buddhism versus Christianity in Burma, Catholicism and Islam in the Philippines, and the like. In addition to religious wars, there are also terrible tribal conflicts such as in Rwanda between...

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