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Knowing and Loving God
Toward a Theology of Christian Higher Education
Nathan A. Finn
At one time, almost all higher education could be considered Christian higher education.1 Historians have ably chronicled, and sometimes lamented, the secularization of higher education in the West, and particularly in the United States.2 Many formerlychurch-related universities have abandoned their foundational faith commitments in the pursuit of academic prestige and cultural respectability. Some are now among the most lauded institutions in the USA. Many currentchurch-related schools maintain historic ties with their sponsoring bodies, but the faith and practice of those Christian traditions have little meaningful impact on the ethos of the universities. Some of these nominally Christian universities nurture ambitions to be the next Princeton or Vanderbilt, academically prestigious schools that have mostly “outgrown” their Christian heritage.
As universities have drifted from their faith commitment, they have simultaneously rejected (or at least downplayed) a vision of higher education driven by Christian theology. In renouncing or shelving theology, former and nominally Christian universities have lost their institutional “soul,” replacing it with nontheological alternatives such as their unique institutional traditions, asemi- or nonreligious commitment to the liberal arts or to research, or simply the (understandable) desire to be as large and influential as resources will allow.3 Stanley Hauerwas laments that this loss of theological vision means that fewerone-time and alleged Christian institutions will leave behind “ruins”—future material evidence of a vibrant Christian academic culture that glorified God and whose influence endured for generation after generation.4
In this chapter, I look at the role that the Bible and the Christian intellectual tradition should play in helping to develop (or redevelop) a theology of Christian higher education.5 I write from the vantage point of an evangelical theologian who serves as an academic administrator in achurch-related, comprehensive liberal arts university. I’m firmly convinced that a robust theology should inform every aspect of the life of a Christian university, from the classroom to the chapel to the ball field to the fraternity house to the faculty meeting. A commitment to Christian orthodoxy in the evangelical tradition animates faithful universities, reanimates institutions that have experienced spiritual “mission drift,” and contributes to a vision of holistic human flourishing that simply cannot be replicated in secular orpost-Christian schools.
DefiningTheology
When people hear the termtheology, they often think immediately of either the academic discipline of theology or the deeper sort of preaching one might hear from a pastor. In this vein, Millard Erickson defines theology as “that discipline which strives to give a coherent statement of the doctrines of the Christian faith, based primarily on the Scriptures, placed in the context of culture in general, worded in a contemporary idiom, and relat