I was asked to summarize a few ideas for an ongoing “Future of Higher Education” forum at Whitworth. I may have overdone it. The core thought below is just this: At a Christian university, our teaching of the liberal arts tradition is led by our belief in Christianity. For that reason, even as we teach students to be smart analysts of particular moments in history, we must also, to fulfill our mission, convey the Christian tradition and encourage students to put down roots there, where honoring God and following Christ will shape every experience of service to humanity. Below, I try to open up those ideas a little.
At February’s “Forum on the Future of Higher Ed” meetup, I talked about what I think of as the necessary interaction between the long, connected up history of Judeo-Christian thinking and the kinds of targeted cultural analysis and critique that tend to dominate contemporary scholarship and teaching. I’m over-generalizing here, but not outrageously, I don’t think. We’re inheritors of Woodstock, punk rock, Nietzsche, and Rousseau (not probably in that order), and so we tend to think of critiquing and “problematizing” all culture, first and foremost. These are ironic days when challenging all traditions at all times feels like a very conventional move. We’re on the hunt for the unlovely roots and branches of every cultural practice and procedure, and Rousseau’s notion that culture itself cuts us off from access to our truest selves doesn’t sound all that radical, at least when college profs are talking to each other. And so we often deconstruct first and ask questions later. Something like that. But at Christian schools we can’t really go all in on deconstruction and the unmaking of culture, even when we engage in necessary cultural critiques and creative culture making; we teach analysis and engagement in light of a particular, powerful tradition, and by no means against all tradition. Christ (in all his goodness) and the Christian tradition (warts and all) lead and give meaning to the work we do.
I like very much how Jessica Hooten Wilson talks about Christian education as “apprenticeship to a tradition, toward a contemplative life.” She argues (and I buy it) that the Christian tradition gives meaning and beauty to a liberal arts education that otherwise is always on the verge of becoming little more than a powerful set of competencies designed for worldly success. Whitworth’s mission statement suggests something like this. We say we want to equip our students (and ourselves) to honor the God of the Bible, follow the risen Christ, and humbly serve humanity, not in different moods or in sequence, but all at once. The service part, something you might find inside the mission statement of any school, is significantly transformed, we believe, by its constant connection to the honoring and the following, which are rooted in the Christian tradition. Christianity, we propose, suffuses our work and turns it into something more than it would otherwise be. The contemplative life of one apprenticed to Christ and Christianity will be, we propose, something better and more coherent than some other contemplative life.
By way of analogy, consider “Love your neighbor as yourself,” which still has secular resonance in our culture, as a maxim. I doubt its meaningfulness as a standalone philosophy, though (as I have doubts about the meaningfulness of a liberal arts education that is not led by Christianity). Jesus named “love your neighbor” as the second most important commandment—coming after “Love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind, and with all your strength.” That is: Jesus gives the golden rule its meaning only in light of the Judeo-Christian God and the tradition that leads us to to worship that same God. Because what does the second command give us without the first to shape and anchor it? What is love, and what is self, and who is my neighbor, and what if I don’t love myself, or what if I love myself in horrible ways? Notice how the faith tradition is privileged and gives vision, shape, and significance to what follows. In much the same way, I’m suggesting, Christian education proposes that our notions of love, self, service, neighbor, and success ought to be known, rooted, and cultivated in light of our love for the revealed God of the Bible—pursued heart, soul, mind, and strength through all available sources of revelation, including fellowship, scripture, and a tradition of Christian contemplation handed down over centuries.
We cannot simply deconstruct and criticize, then. We must be mindful that culture is not, in the Judeo-Christian tradition, a bondage to be escaped but a complex means by and through which God has formed us and our world across millennia. Schools that don’t affix “Christian” to “Liberal Arts Education” might operate as if human traditions and truths are wholly or generally arbitrary, ephemeral, and human-made, but the “Christian” in “Christian Liberal Arts” means we cannot do that. Instead, we boldly hold up the Judeo-Christian tradition not only as worth studying but also as an important window onto the one real and true truth—a means by which the perfect God of the universe has communicated with and formed humanity over millennia. And not only a window (that’s one inadequate metaphor) but a structure (a second inadequate metaphor) in which we live and learn, and in which our lives and learning are made better.
If human worlds are made of words, fine. But God, the Word from the beginning, spoke the first words into this human system, so we say. God made and then cultivated the ground for the conversation. God built the raw material of our metaphors. And God intervenes, sometimes spectacularly, in our world, a place we often harm through our individual and collective actions. That’s what we say. From the beginning, we believe, language, relationship, and community have been part of how God shapes us and communicates truth to us. We are not told to cast off all culture and tradition in order to unleash our truest selves, but rather that inspired scripture should guide us and that fellowship with other Christians—a communion of all the saints—is crucial to our formation in faith as we become not independent uber-humans but dependent servants of a perfect, living, loving God, yielding our selves to God’s guiding hand, waiting morning by morning for manna. There are consequences when we root our liberal arts education in beliefs this big.
To be clear, what I’m meaning to write about here is not “Western Civ”; I’m thinking that reducing this thing to Western Civ means missing the point. It is not the product or property of one racial group or one monolithic culture; it is—don’t we say?—the inheritance of us all. It is a multifaceted and messy record of theologians and historians and writers, farmers and mechanics, thinking it through, working it out, falling into sin and falling to their knees in confession and prayer. It runs through the Genesis stories, through Abram and the rise and fall of ancient Israel, through the undeniably world historical life of Jesus Christ, and into all of history, through many cultures, hand to hand, mind to mind, and heart to heart, like a good infection. (That’s a C.S. Lewis metaphor, the good infection thing. I just stole it.) It transforms our encounters with everything, and, again, we propose that it will form and transform the hearts and minds of our students for the better.
Any successfully educated thinker gains the ability to look hard at any moment in history or any artifact of human culture, to think about how it is and was constructed, to speak insightfully about what’s there, good and ill. We teach students to contemplate the present and the past; we learn to analyze and critique and contextualize. A Christian liberal arts education, though, must value those skills first and by far foremost in light of whether and how the exercise of those skills carries the learner closer to fellowship with the living God of the Bible—the only real God, the source of all goodness and meaning, the ground of all truth.
If what I’m suggesting above is right, or even close to right, then—-within a culture fixated on deconstruction, unmaking, self-making, and escape from boundaries—we at Christian universities believe heart and soul in a complex countercultural tradition of thought, devotion, and obedience that we claim is an actual gift from the actual God of the universe. If I am right, then Christian universities, to live up to the name, need to be sure our work is likely to carry our students into meaningful encounters with Christ, in no small part via meaningful encounters with the Christian tradition—a spiritual and intellectual inheritance that we believe is cross-cultural, culture crossing, powerfully formative, and infinitely worth preserving and passing on. Way leads to way from Abram to eternity, and the journey has often been ugly, so we teach students to assess the horrors of past and present, including those that involve terrible missteps by people who claim Christianity but seem to know little of Christ. We target the moments, contextualize them, sort the particulars, and draw conclusions. But can we also show how the tradition of Christian action and doctrine and debate and faith is a gift from God? Can we also unpack the moments where things go right, or where God triumphs in ways the world might count as loss? Can we show the good influence of Christ? The tradition conveyed, the moments analyzed, Christ at the center of all things? Are we doing that, or something like it? Should we be? Where does our shared curriculum provide opportunities for that work? Where does our student life structure provide opportunities for that work? Are we being systematic enough? Are we talking about it all in clear ways? Are we sure? How do we know, and how might we measure? How might we do it better?
Whitworth University
March 2023
This essay was discussed by Whitworth faculty as part of the Provost’s Forum on the Future of Higher Education.