College and the Christian Vision

FOR CENTURIES, students graduating from Christian-based colleges saw the workforce they were joining as far more than employment and income. Besides mastering professional skills and learning Christian doctrines, they had absorbed a view of life dominated by an expectation of self-sacrifice, symbolized by a sacramental aesthetics, and lived out in a discipline of humility and compliance. But it's a different world today. In the past twenty-five years, because of the proliferation of specialized professional courses and the decline of required courses in theology and philosophy, students inherit by default a business and professional vision of the world. What Christian vision is available comes more from personal contact with faculty and pastoral caregivers than from course lectures and discussions. Students can be profoundly influenced by personal contact, of course, but insofar as their courses are a-Christian, that personal contact will have little influence on their assessments of the economy, the ongoing discoveries of science, and world affairs generally.

Religious sponsors of these colleges watched helplessly as professional concerns moved to the center while they were left circling the outside, as it were, through pastoral ministry programs. Great flocks of students migrated through the campus having met a few deeply religious men and women, and having learned something about the Bible and ethics, but what they picked up about physics, psychology, economics, sociology, English literature, history, and current affairs has been no different than what their peers in secular universities learned. Secularly mature but religiously adolescent, they no longer receive the integration of learning and religious living that Christian colleges were founded to give.

This is a pity, since Christian tradition is actually rich with doctrines that bear an immediate impact on scholarly and scientific worldviews. Our heritage already possesses an academically sound vision of the universe that deals with sin and grace, with the mystery of the person, with the spiritual character of the cosmos, and with the evolutionary process that brings forth the likes of us. The question is how to address religious doctrines within a perspective designed to educate culturally aware professionals.

The answer to that question will take ongoing academic discussions, but for an illustration of some key topics here are three Christian doctrines that possess the intellectual depth suitable for inclusion in academic study:

• Human progress and decline is a religious issue. From ancient Israel to the present day, we have developed theologies of history that give a theological explanation of how a social order grows and how it falls apart. They have the power to help students understand redemption in social and historical terms.

• The real includes the spiritual. A philosophy of science that takes meaning and value seriously can account for how the spiritual is just as real as the physical. This can give students an empirical framework for understanding the arrival of God's Word and Spirit in the world.

• Everyone has a vocation. All students should feel a connection between their personal calling and the "mission" of the college.

  This enables the college to embody the apostolic mission of the Church.

Let us look more closely at these three doctrines.

Human Progress and Decline Is a Religious Issue

Since the late 1960s, the focus of Christian faith has shifted from personal prayer and liturgy to social awareness and doing justice. In this new perspective, we can expect that the theology of history will play as central a role in Christian self-awareness as religious psychology did formerly. Where, formerly, stages of our personal intellectual, emotional, and religious growth enjoyed the limelight, now dysfunctional families, the inherited character of psychological diseases, and great tragedies of nationalism and racism are moving to center stage. A theology of history can provide an explanation of these historical phenomena in a way that takes evil and God seriously.

This concern is nothing new to Christianity. The Christian churches have always explored the serpentine ways that...