The Future of Baptist Higher Education

Chapter Two: Integrating Faith and Learning in an Ecumenical Context

Chapter Two Integrating Faith and Learning in an Ecumenical Context David P. Gushee Introduction The ultimate task of this essay is to make a proposal concerning the normative intellectual vision and theological identity of Baptist universities.1 My particular assignment has been to focus on the conversation about Christian higher education that has been occurring outside the Baptist world. Even with this limitation, my task remains daunting. But it is what I have been asked to do, and since fools go where angels fear to tread, here is how I will proceed. First, I offer a brief assessment of what has happened to the identity and vision of most Christian colleges and universities in America, and what this has left us in terms of the landscape of church-related higher education today. While this is familiar ground for those who have read much in the burgeoning literature of Christian higher education, it is increasingly contested ground, and I need to offer my own reading of the evidence. Second, I review and evaluate what I classify as four key types of responses in the world of Christian higher education to the question that is the focus of this paper. We are asking here about the purpose, vision, and identity of Baptist higher education that seeks to be seriously Christian, but many are already asking about such matters in the world of Catholic and Protestant, evangelical and mainline, denominational and “church-related” higher education. By proposing a simple taxonomy of the most significant current models related to the identity and vision of the Christian university, it should be possible to gain greater clarity about the options facing Baptist universities. At each step I briefly comment on ways in which my own Union University has discussed, affirmed, qualified, and/or employed each model. 25 SchmelVita Future.indd 25 SchmelVita Future.indd 25 4/11/2006 1:20:21 PM 4/11/2006 1:20:21 PM 26 Integrating Faith and Learning In the final section of the paper, I offer my own proposal concerning the normative theological identity and intellectual vision of Christian (especially Baptist) colleges and universities. The Soul of the American University The baseline from which all discussions of Christian higher education must begin is this: with few exceptions, institutions of higher education in America began as explicitly Christian endeavors, and yet over time their religious identities and vision have consistently changed in a manner that can best be described as a weakening or erosion. Five significant studies have all traced the same phenomenon. George Marsden describes the religious roots of America’s most influential universities, such as Harvard, Yale, Columbia, Stanford, Chicago , Duke, and Vanderbilt, and their consequent abandonment of religious identity. Philip Gleason examines Catholic higher education in America from its origins in the nineteenth century through its radical transformation and widespread loss of Catholic distinctiveness in the 1960s and thereafter. Douglas Sloan reflects on the liberal Protestant experience in higher education in the twentieth century and how most mainline Protestant schools ultimately failed to find a compelling way to reunite faith and knowledge after it had been sundered, eventually leaving them as vaguely Christian or post-Christian schools. James Burtchaell’s magisterial though deeply pessimistic book examines key colleges and universities associated with numerous denominations , finding that almost all of them have disengaged from the churches that founded them as well as the religious vision on which they were based. Robert Benne summarizes these and other studies, examines the underlying factors contributing to the secularization of Christian colleges, proposes a typology of church-related colleges, and examines six schools that he thinks exemplify successful “quality with soul.”2 With inevitable variations in detail, all tell the same basic story related to what has happened to Christian universities: secularization and disengagement from their Christian churches and/or founding identity. Marsden’s study of the elite American universities establishes that most such schools reflected in their founding and for many years thereafter the culturally established Protestant Christianity that dominated our national life well into the twentieth century. Explicit affirmations of Christian faith and coercive expectations of Christian practice were long required at such elite schools as Harvard, Princeton, Yale, Stanford, and Chicago. As late as 1870, most of these schools were quite explicitly biblical, pietistic, and evangelical . By 1920 they were still explicitly Christian, though they had backed away from what might be recognized today as conservative Christianity...