The Faculty Ministry Leadership Team is reading together Douglas Sloan’s book Faith and Knowledge: Mainline Protestantism and American Higher Education. Sloan himself gives a terse description of his purpose:

This book tells the story of this last, major attempt by mainline Protestantism to have a significant influence on American higher education. (vii)

This attempt began in the 1930’s, alongside the Protestant “theological renaissance” brought about by the writings of Barth, Buber, Tillich, the Neibuhrs, et al., and ended in the 1960’s.

[Note: my journal of Mark Noll’s America’s God is briefly on hold. I was reading a library copy for the first few chapters, and I am now waiting for my personal copy that I ordered from abebooks.com to arrive.]

Chapter 1: The Church, the University, and the Faith-Knowledge Issue: Background

Sloan sees the “faith and knowledge” question as central to the relationship of Protestant churches to universities. From the preface:

In the prevailing modern view of how and what we can know, the quantitative, the mechanical, and the instrumental [i.e. the primary content of higher education] are accorded full standing. All those things, however, that involve - as Huston Smith has put it - values, meaning, purpose, and qualities [i.e. the content of religion] are regarded as essentially having little to do with knowledge… (viii)

According to Sloan, the majority of intellectuals during the Victorian era regarded the “conflict” between science and religion as having been fully resolved. Evolution and religion were seen as having the same goal - the improvement of man (the famous Victorian faith in “progress”). As a result, many liberal Protestants welcomed the secularization of private colleges and the establishment of secular public universities as a sign of the “progress of civilization and the coming of the kingdom of God on earth” (22). Meanwhile, conservative, pietistic Protestants welcomed secular education because their children could learn professions without “the hazards of classical [i.e. pagan] learning” (23). In the midst of this, other forces also contributed to the reduction of Protestant influence. One example that Sloan gives is the Carnegie Foundation’s retirement plan for college faculty.

A major stipulation of the plan was that participating institutions had to be free of all denominational control [since this control inhibited the development of “true science”]. A number of colleges, such as Brown, Centre, Coe, Drake, Rochester, Rutgers, Wesleyan, and others severed their denominational ties and became eligible to receive the proffered retirement funds. (20).

As universities and churches were systematically disengaging from one another, theology was preparing for a re-engagement. The Victorian “synthesis” of science and religion had proven to be imaginary as both scientists and clergy had come to realize that the “value-free” principles of Darwinism were hardly compatible with a Christian world view. Any morality of this “progressive” movement had been imported wholesale from the Judeo-Christian tradition, without justification from within the mechanistic world view of Darwinishm and scientism. The horrors of the First World War shattered intellectual belief in the inevitable moral progress of man. Meanwhile, the “neo-orthodox” movement was gaining steam in North America through new translations of Barth, Brunner, Kierkegaard, and Buber, and the new American-based work of Reinhold Niebuhr, his brother H. Richard Niebuhr, and the German immigrant Paul Tillich. Sloan notes,

In many respects the emphases of the theological renaissance were tailor-made for engagement with higher education. Most importantly, the theological renaissance was preeminantly an intellectual movement…[The theologians] were capable as few before them of mobilizing an awareness of the religious origins of Western, and especially of American, higher education. Moreover, most of the leading theologians of the new movement were faculty at so-called university divinity schools [Union, Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Chicago, Vanderbilt] and well situated to speak to the university…

Thus, Sloan sets the stage for “Chapter 2: The Church and the Crisis in the University.”

Posted in American Education, American Religion, The Church in America | 3 Comments »