Christian colleges

Dreaming Dreams of Christian Higher Education, David S. Guthrie (Foreword by Bradshaw Fry; Afterword by Eric Miller). Beaver Falls, PA: Falls City Press, 2020.

Summary: A collection of presentations given over a twenty year period on realizing the dream of Christian higher education by a leader in Christian higher ed.

I’ve worked for more than four decades in collegiate ministry in public university settings. My colleagues and I have wrestled with the task of seeing students formed in Christ: in character, formational practices, witness and service, in intellect, and the pursuit of their callings. Often, one has the sense of working across the grain of the social, institutional, and intellectual context of the public university. I’ve sometimes dreamed of what it might be like to attempt this work in the Christian college context, one that I think would embrace our aspirations with a context aligned with those aspirations.

David S. Guthrie has dreamed similar dreams over several decades of ministry and academic leadership in the Christian college context. He’s served as a professor, student life director, and an academic dean. This book collects presentations given over this period in which he sets forth his own thinking articulating both what is mean by “Christian higher education” and how that might be pursued as an academic institution. Many of these were given during Guthrie’s time at Geneva College in Beaver Falls, Pennsylvania, a small college in the Reformed tradition located northwest of Pittsburgh.

The opening presentation is on the idea of a Christian college, acknowledging the disenchantment with efforts at student transformation, at intellectual integration, and the shortcomings of the ideals of a liberal arts education as a vehicle for this student transformation. Guthrie explores the barriers of the wider academic context, the institutional structures of a school including departments and majors, and the wider context of anti-intellectualism in evangelicalism.

The second presentation articulates critical tasks for the project of Christian higher education. He puts forth three:

Helping students to see more and see more clearly, more clearly. This is about Christian perspective and the continuities and discontinuities of that perspective with wider cultural perspectives.
Helping students discern the times and know what to do. In another presentation, Guthrie writes about educating for godly wisdom.
Helping students to understand calling and vocation. In contrasts to societal careerism, Christian education grounds students in a vision of their own lives and service in the light of God’s kingdom.

These two presentations ground the remaining essays in this volume. He argues for a much more integrated curriculum than simply a collection of gen-ed requirements connecting Christian thought with the different academic disciplines. Elsewhere he leans into the issue of student context and argues for grounding codes of conduct with a priority on student learning and on the Christian convictions at the core of the institution. He addresses student life and the need for those working in this area to prioritize their own professional development.

Perhaps one of his most prophetic talks was on academic leadership, particularly amid the pandemic. Drawing on the work of Ernest Boyer, he articulates the crises of presidential succession, wrong-headed leadership, lack of leadership, and confusion about the goals of higher education. He commends prioritizing good communication, keeping problems in perspective, staying well-informed, taking time to be creative, and having an inspired vision. For institutions he calls for curricular coherence, educating for the common good, teaching excellence, strong campus community, and equality of opportunity.

I found myself wondering as I came to the close of the book, what progress Guthrie had seen from his own efforts. I wish there had been an essay on his Geneva years, what they accomplished or failed to accomplish, what they learned. Perhaps that time is still too close. While he does not explicitly answer that question, he contends that he keeps dreaming, while also lamenting the lack of a theology of culture among many faculty, the embrace of silver bullets rather than substantive curricular change, the persistence of standard disciplinary and departmental structures, among others. He concludes with Nicholas Wolterstorff’s description moving beyond the historic isolation from culture in the early Christian college movement and more recent emphasis on Christian scholarship to a focus on what it means to be Christians in society.

Guthrie’s presentation offers an overview of the writing on and discussion of higher ed issues of the last thirty years. Reading between the lines, I suspect that Guthrie has seen the vision of higher education realized among many students and colleagues while the wider institutions of Christian higher education remain relatively unchanged or even in greater peril. I think that is both why Guthrie has not stopped dreaming and why he laments. Institutions need to look at the results they are achieving and ask how those reflect their structures, and as Guthrie discusses in one essay, the lack of a compelling institutional “saga.” This is an important book for all of us who dream of a new day of Christian scholarship and recovery of faithful Christian presence in the world of higher education.

Fundamentalist U: Keeping Faith in American Higher Education, Adam Laats. New York: Oxford University Press, 2018.

Summary: Traces the ways eight institutions that developed with the rise of fundamentalism in the 1920’s responded to the changing fundamentalist/evangelical movement and wider trends in higher education and American society up to the present time.

Adam Laats attended public universities and teaches in one, and does not share fundamentalist/evangelical beliefs. Neither does he share any animus toward these this movement nor the schools that arose during the rise of fundamentalism in the 1920’s. What he does is give us a fascinating and even-handed account of eight flagship fundamentalist/evangelical institutions and how they negotiated the pressures exerted by this complicated and diverse movement and the wider landscape of American higher education and culture.

The schools he studies are Biola, Bob Jones University, Gordon College, Liberty University, Wheaton College, Moody Bible Institute, Dallas Theological Seminary, and Westminster Seminary. Each of these were chosen as non-denominational institutions that were aligned with the fundamentalist movement during it rise.

He begins with a brief history of American higher education and the disenchantment of those associated with the fundamentalist movement who increasingly recognized the need for their “own” schools who would adhere to strict interpretations of scripture and prepare young men and women for Christian service. Much of this was a reaction to a perceived Darwinism and theological and cultural liberalism that many felt increasingly characterized not only public institutions but even the church affiliated schools founded in earlier generations.

Succeeding chapters chronicle how administrations, often in authoritarian fashion in early days, attempted to forge institutions that reflected these concerns, and persuaded parents and donors that they were not going soft on biblical fundamentals. This was a challenge as the fundamentalist movement struggled with its own identity and the development of neo-evangelicalism post World War II. Because of the lack of a coherent theological or ethical core, these schools ended up having to negotiate their way between conflicting factions, some more conservative, some more progressive, and some more concerned by the quality of education, or even toward what end these institutions were preparing young people. Were they missionary and ministry training institutions, a place to meet one’s mate, or simply a Christian alternative preparing students for careers in competition with their peers at secular institutions? In truth, they have functioned in all these roles, often with both academic and moral excellence.

Laats describes the different courses schools took. Bob Jones University remained rigorously fundamentalist, separatist, and segregationist. Liberty University also trumpeted the fundamentals, but was on the vanguard of conservative political engagement. Schools like Moody wrestled with their original purpose of simply training Christian workers, offering certificates of completion rather than degrees. Wheaton, Gordon, and Biola had more interesting journeys, trying to satisfy both more fundamentalist and more evangelical constituencies, often being attacked as “soft” by their peers, and more importantly, by an onlooking religious community obsessed with signs of “softness.” There was less said about Dallas and Westminster, although the portrait of J. G. Machen as both sympathetic with fundamentalist concerns, and yet distinctive in his Calvinist confessional stance makes him an intriguing outlier in his time.

Meanwhile cultural forces like the G.I. Bill and accrediting agencies were imposing pressures. Schools had to raise curricular standards so that their degrees were competitive with those of other institutions. Yet they had to do so while maintaining theological purity, particularly on the litmus test issue of their stance on evolution. Some doubled-down on young earth, six day creation stances. Others endorsed creationist stances while conceding the growing evidence for evolution in some form, what was called “progressive creation.”

On race, schools like Wheaton had begun as radically abolitionist, only to adopt a de facto segregationism. Others like Bob Jones, were belligerently segregationist and anti-miscegenationist. With the rise of the civil rights movements and student activism schools had to face their complicity with racist practices while facing pressures not to change.

These pressures extended to the social revolution of the Sixties. Students had always to some extent pressed against behavior codes and the legalism around practices like smoking, dress, and movies that reigned on these campuses. Laats does a good job showing how administrators successfully or unsuccessfully negotiated these pressures and the tug of war between students, funders, and parents.

Not all was controversy. Laats recounts the narratives of students like Betty Howard who met Jim Eliot at Wheaton, and found the ideals of evangelical romantic love “nothing short of a ‘revelation!’ ” Eliot and many did not rebel against but embraced the behavioral strictures of their schools and found them freeing in the formation of their character and faith and missionary calling.

Two things struck me about this account. One is the incredible “fishbowl” within which these institutions have operated. Laats chronicles how various groups thought of these schools as “our” schools and looked for signs of “softness” — deviations from their particular groups definition of orthodox belief and practice. This not only reveals the faultlines of varying and conflicting interpretations of what was “biblical” but what has always felt to me gossip run rampant. I cancelled my subscription to Christianity Today for many years because of what I sensed was an over-preoccupation with this “sanctified” form of gossip (you can see that I’m probably far less dispassionate about this than the author!). Administrators at these schools had an unenviable task in this regard.

The other is the incredible staying power that the creation-evolution struggle has had in its sway over these institutions. Even as science faculty have sought ways to affirm the findings of science and not present them at war with faith, external pressures often have required them to confess adherence to particular creationist interpretations on threat of termination. Laats seems to intimate that there often is a kind of double-speak going on, where what is discussed in the classroom may be at variance with what is promoted among certain constituencies. It raises the question of what academic freedom means on these campuses, a question Laats observed when doing research at Wheaton during the controversy that resulted in the termination of Larycia Hawkins, a tenured faculty member.

These schools and others like them that have emerged in more recent years have had an out-sized influence on the American landscape–in politics, in the media, and other areas. It is fascinating to see how despite the various pressures these schools have faced, the excellent and passionate graduates they have produced. It might be tempting to marginalize these schools on the higher ed landscape. Adam Laats helps us understand both their distinctive history, the subculture within which they have operated, and their significance within our wider culture.

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Disclosure of Material Connection: I received a complimentary review copy of this book from the publisher. The opinions I have expressed are my own.