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I am glad to have this opportunity to talk to
you about what I would call the most important issue in Christian
Education today. The people who invited me to talk gave me
these words: "Theme: This session could be your opportunity
to challenge CCCU campus leaders regarding the spiritual formation
of faculty, students and staff—What does the Christian college
or university campus need to be doing in order to develop
Christ-like character in all those who work, live and learn
within the academic community? How are we preparing students
for meaningful lives of service, to be moral agents for change?
What does the future hold for this work? What are the challenges
we must face and overcome? What role do we have in relating
our work to the mission and work of the church?"
Now obviously there are many more issues here
than I can take on in this session, even if I knew what to
say about them. So I shall take a few of those I regard as
most central to the whole set of issues and try to do something
with them. Many details of what I think must be said were
covered into two previous sessions at this meeting. If you
wish to have the handouts from all three sessions, please
go to my web page, www.dwillard.org,
and you can download them free of charge.
So what, in my opinion, is the most important
issue Christian schools must deal with if they are to accomplish
what they promise in the way of spiritual formation? It is,
very simply, whether or not they know what they talk about.
Otherwise put, do Christians possess a unique body of
communicable knowledge about reality and life, about what
is the case and what is good and right?
Every teaching and teacher of humankind must
deal with four great questions:
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What is real, and what is not? What is the
case?
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Who is well off? Who "has it made"
or has the good life?
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Who is a really good person or lives a truly
praiseworthy existence?
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How does one become a really good person?
I am compelled to believe that Jesus Christ
and his followers have answers to these questions that qualify
as knowledge. But the question facing Christians in the educational
context today is whether or not that is true. Do we have a
communicable body of knowledge in answer to these questions?
Or is "diversity" our only plea in the intellectual
arena?
In the context of modern life—and especially
in the academic setting, but far beyond—there is an additional
question:
What is knowledge and what kinds of
things can one know?
It is what has happened with this latter question
over the last two centuries that has made the question I have
posed above into the central one. I want to refer you
to the discussion of the disappearance of moral knowledge
from the university curriculum in Julie Reuben’s book, The
Making of the Modern University. As an historian she helps
us see how knowledge has been redefined, primarily
within the universities, over the last century or so, in such
a way that it rules not only theology, but also moral matters,
out of the domain of knowledge.
Knowledge must be "scientific"?
And what is that? Fall within one of the sciences? From Empiricism
to Naturalism.
A "good scientist" cannot believe
in God. (H. A. Hauptman, New York Times, Aug. 23, 2005)
"Godless knowledge." The situation
today: You can be regarded as the best educated or the top
expert in any field today and have not a thought of God.
This also generally hold’s true in Christian
circles. The power of socialization in graduate schools and
professional life. How hard for the Christian individual and
the Christian institution to resist.
The Noah Porter/William Graham Sumner interchange.
Sumner: God is irrelevant to the subject matter of Sociology?
(See George Marsden, The Soul of the American University.
Pp. 22-26)
Decided, not discovered. Likewise for all subject
matters.
How this extended institutionally to Morality,
of which science also—it turns out—has nothing to say. The
odd progression described by Reubens. From Science to Social
Sciences to Humanities—next stop, Student Life.
Non-cognitivism at mid-20th Century
and today.
If one leaves it for the secular mind to define
what counts as knowledge, what would you expect to happen?
Exactly what has happened!
What the Christian Institutions are up against
is not a discovery of the irrelevance of God and morality
to knowledge, nor of knowledge to them. It was a decision,
one that for various reasons was allowed to solidify and take
on the appearance truth. We are up against social force now,
not logic or reason.
Is there a conception of knowledge that fits
the cases and leaves it open, at least, for theology
and morality, as well as Physics and Sociology and Aesthetics,
etc., to be areas of knowledge?
Try this: We have knowledge of a given subject
matter when we are able to represent it as it is on an appropriate
basis of thought and experience.
This draws the distinction between what is known
and what is not know in all areas of life. Common practice.
Does not guarantee knowledge in any area. Does not automatically
rule any area out. The traditional understanding of "science"
as a logically organized and evidentially grounded body of
thought. The standardly undertaken effort to make ethics a
"science" up through G. E. Moore.
It is up to Christians to understand knowledge
in such a way that it does justice to real life, and not just
to the prejudices of an age in flight for God and from good.
If there is indeed no moral knowledge, then
the claims of Christian colleges and universities about their
contribution to moral development is humbug. Such a project
can only be carried out on the basis of knowledge, just as
in any other area of activity. What is the knowledge required?
It is specified by the four major questions—now five—that
we mentioned above.
The first question, What is reality?,
always takes priority. This is the domain of all our fields
in the humanities, social sciences and sciences. Christian
intellectuals have the responsibility and opportunity of presenting
their subject matter and doing their research in honest intellectual
contiquity with the "Apostle’s Creed" or something
like it:
"I believe in God the Father Almighty,
Maker of heaven and earth:
And in Jesus Christ his only Son our Lord:
Who was conceived by the Holy Ghost, Born of the Virgin
Mary:
Suffered under Pontius Pilate, Was crucified, dead, and
buried:
The third day he rose again from the dead:
He ascended into heaven, And sitteth on the right hand of
God the Father Almighty:
From thence he shall come to judge the quick and the dead.
I believe in the Holy Ghost: The holy Catholic Church:
The Communion of Saints: The Forgiveness of sins:
The Resurrection of the body: and the Life everlasting."
Not to preach, nor do anything except with utter
intellectual and scholarly honesty and thoroughness. We are
talking of knowledge and of its discovery, certification and
presentation.
Our students come to us basically professing
a lot of stuff they do not believe or even, in many cases,
know the meaning of. They have profound doubts about the nature
and existence of God, the presence of God with them here and
now, about the goodness of rightness, about their safety in
doing what is good, about the sources of their religion and
guidance. We cannot help them if we present them with the
fields of learning as if they had nothing to do with God nor
God with them. Their spiritual formation rests upon a vision
of the reality of God and of the goodness of their life in
God’s hands. That involves Chemistry and French Literature,
etc. What do we have to say on such matters? How does our
institution support us in efforts to have something significant
to say about them? Is our treatment adequate without relating
it to God?
Adequacy of our teaching and research to our
subject matter? This must not be assessed simply by what our
professional colleagues approve of or call "adequate."
Adequacy to human need? How to judge that? Surely: Adequacy
to the subject matter: covering its essential nature
and relationship?
Richard Rorty: "Truth is what your colleagues
allow you to get away with." That’s the postmodern take,
but clearly false. Reason is a weak though crucial human power.
It is subject to social corruption. Reason has to be redeemed.
("Redemption of Reason.")
And what of the other questions? Do Christian
Institutions have knowledge with regard to them? Very specifically,
do we really understand the spiritual life in Christ and
how one grows in it? Are we applying that knowledge
in our institutional arrangements? Do we exemplify it before
our students? Of course if we don’t they will do what we do,
not what we say. What does "faculty development"
as an institutional arrangement mean with reference to the
spiritual life? Or does a Ph. D. mean your are done with your
spiritual growing?
Our students also come to us struggling with
bad habits of all kinds, and failures and wounds from their
past. They are struggling with their physical appearance,
fear of disapproval and rejection, uncertainly about their
abilities, loneliness, dependencies of all kinds, and addictions
(not just the disrespectable ones) Do we have knowledge
that can be used to direct them into the fullness of the Christ
life as a simple course of existence, no hype? Can we
answer the questions: Who is Blessed? Who is a really good
person? And how does one become a really good person? And
answer them with knowledge as above described? Do our campus
arrangements, including our course work, lead by sensible
steps into strong and confident participation in eternal life
now and to a moral character that does not have to stop and
think about whether we will do wrong?
Can we do this? To not do it is
a gross failure of intellect, among other things. It will
have to be intellect and Spirit of the highest order. Nothing
else can integrate faith and learning. No bluffing or pooh-poohing.
It will have to be institutional, creating an alternative
social wave in the intellectual/professional world. And it
can only rest on confidence in the greatness of Jesus Christ.
The answer to the question is an emphatic "Yes!"
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