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Excerpt from

The Christian Pursuit of Higher Education

by Carl F. H. Henry

"In the intellectual history of the West the affirmation of Theism prevailed for almost twenty-five centuries until the recent modern era’s infatuation with naturalism. The cultural death-of-God has led on to postmodernist theory that is plummeting contemporary life into an abyss of meaninglessness. Academic eclipse of the conviction that significant intellectual life requires a comprehensive worldview embracing the essentials of science and religion leaves contemporary society stalemated in coping with both enterprises. Science is faced by horrendous moral, environmental, and political problems while religion loosed from the self-revealing God leads to the loss of ethical imperatives.

The contest for the future of the academic mind turns today on the educational elite’s aggressive promotion of an essentially naturalistic view. Naturalism is prevalent on most state and private secular university campuses. This emphasis provides a stark contrast to theistic affirmations championed by approximately one hundred evangelical universities and colleges represented in the Christian College Coalition and the Christian College Consortium that enroll some 100,000 students, and by 226 Roman Catholic universities and colleges that enroll about 638,000 students. The theistic option is affirmed by the Society of Christian Philosophers and reinforced by books, articles, and lectures. It has support also from an influential cadre of scholars teaching in secular institutions and on many campuses where evangelical student enterprises like InterVarsity Christian Fellow-ship, Campus Crusade for Christ, and Navigators maintain active programs.

There is also a segment of broadly orthodox denominational colleges where biblical loyal-ties vary in depth from campus to campus and in individual faculty commitments. Many reasons can be given why the Christian community needs actively to relate itself, both positively and critically, to the cultural mentality of the age. Since the presuppositions that govern modernity shape the contemporary cultural context and the secular mindset permeates the atmosphere definitive of current thought, some interaction is inescapable. Not to be conscious of the prevailing assumptions is to be victimized by them.  Even parental education of children requires some awareness of contrary lifeviews which confront the younger generation inevitably as children venture into a larger community and face social institutions and their spokesmen. Such enlarging contact is today as simple as turning on the television or radio. On every hand inherited values are challenged by modern conceptions of the self, the family, and society. From dress and diet to preferred virtues and value, conceptual pressures are exerted by public schools, by the media, and by the political arena.

Nowhere is such adverse intellectual and moral impact more evident and demanding than in the current evaluation of religion and of the transcendent world. The radical Marxist view of absolute separation of church and state stripped religion of public significance and tolerated its private relevance only. But even religion’s private significance is now often demeaned, the implication being that religion is for nerds. The long regnant biblical view of God along with its moral demand is caricatured not alone by some educators but at times even by some frontier churchmen. Many of the academic elite assume that religious expression is not only sub-rational and but also more hazardous than other cultural forces.

Stephen L. Carter protests that, 'In contemporary American culture the religions are more and more treated as just passing beliefs – almost as fads, older, stuffier, less liberal versions of so-called New Age rather than as the fundamentals upon which the devout build their lives.' This devaluation of religion as a serious human activity is reflected in the secular belittling of spiritual devotion and satirizing of believers. An intellectual elite and the popular culture as well detour around the inherited Judeo-Christian worldview and insinuate alien life-outlooks into influential institutions.

The advocacy of Naturalism, Post-modernism, New Age philosophy, the psychology of self-esteem or of positive thinking readily takes place in ever more culturally-diverse contexts. In these circumstances relativism easily becomes a synonym for tolerance. Relativists contend that no truth-claims are universally valid except, of course, their own and that one’s view is merely a matter of personal prejudice. This notion – that truth claims are culturally conditioned and historically located – is increasingly rampant on American campuses today. One is granted liberty to cherish one’s beliefs as long as one does not imply that the contrary beliefs of one’s neighbors are wrong.

Such notions readily accommodate Postmodernism, which avers that there is no objective truth or meaning, and no objective self either. In reading a text the interpreter allegedly creates his or her own meaning. To hold that there is objective truth to which all minds are answerable is not only politically inadvisable, it is considered politically incorrect and philosophically arrogant.

To be sure, relativists exempt their own views from this insistence that any particular claim to be inherently superior is unacceptable. On the surface this denial of absolutes extends a ready welcome to plural outlooks, and implies tolerance of all conflicting and competing views. But all the while it secretly ascribes objective meaning and makes objectively valid claims for deconstructionism and postmodernism. Relativists want to redistribute logic in order to promote their own perceptions of truth and right. They champion a notion of truth without sharp borders, one that accommodates contrariness  and contradiction, and that easily glides into merely an emotive response to felt needs. Feeling counts for more than logic; the invitation is extended to 'come out of the Middle Ages' or be reckoned an exclusivist or bigot.

Yet one distorts the American condition – in fact the human situation – to imply that in the United States nobody takes religion seriously, since for many tens of millions religion remains the shaping life force. Christian interaction with the mindset of modernity is essential. The Christian system of truth must be expounded and clarified not just to distinguish it form alien worldviews and to prevent its groundless distortion and pseudo-refraction. It must offer its adversaries a superior rationale and durable hope. The Christian task is not exclusively or mainly counteractive and nullifying. It takes the initiative as an apologetic for truth. The apostle Peter accordingly exhorts God’s people to be always ready to give to everyone who asks 'the reason for the hope that you have,' and to do so with gentleness and respect (1 Peter 3:15).

The Christian is therefore not only a bearer of truth but a carrier also of hope. Loosed from its transcendent anchor, the world is at a loss for both truth and hope. The Bible portrays Christians as aware not alone of the singularity of the Christian truth-claim, but of a distinctive hope as well.

Correlation or contrast of the Christian option with the regnant secular philosophy has yet another and equally profound concern. Not only must Christianity address the governing cultural assumptions, and publicly articulate the rationale that undergirds enduring hope, but it is called upon also to exhibit the humanities and sciences in grand coordination with the Christian ontological axiom, viz., the existence of the creator, preserver, redeemer and judge of life. If, as scholars have said many times since Augustine, that all truth is God’s truth and that in God’s light we see light, the whole arena of the liberal arts must reflect the cohesive centrality of Christ. For He is the eternal Logos, the primeval creator of every created thing, the head of the church, and the final judge of men and nations, the one in whom all reality finds its consummatory climax.

Beyond doubt, many Christian colleges now neglect their duty to exhibit a Christian world-life view on a curriculum-wide basis. But the imperative of interrelating all arenas of learning, and of exhibiting the epistemic significance of all aspects of higher education, must not be forever evaded. It is compatible with the God of historical surprises that some secular campus, being chastened and nauseated by the perturbing instability and intellectual nihilism to which Postmodernism leads, might through re-exploration of the history of thought, venture once again, through its evangelical remnant, to reconsider the Judeo-Christian theistic option and through earnest intellectual activity theoretically acknowledge again its compelling logic and experimental power. To have some modest part in such a conceptual recovery is the opportunity that now overhangs the life of the Christian at the turn of the centuries."

From THE SOUTHERN BAPTIST JOURNAL

OF THEOLOGY, Vol. 1, No. 3, Fall 1997