Continuing my study of Douglas Sloan’s Faith and Knowledge. Read part one.

Chapter 2: The Church and the Crisis in the University

Much of this chapter deals with the origins, analysis, and impact of Sir Walter Moberly’s The Crisis in the University:

This crisis in the university, as Moberly – and the other SCM [student Christian movements] writers – saw it, lay primarily in the dominance within the university and modern culture of science as a worldview that could not deal with questions of human meaning and value, but at the same time had become the source of the notion that a spurious scientific objectivity and value-neutrality should govern the pursuit of all knowledge. (40)

Moberly and other Christian writers sought to show how religion – and Christianity in particular – could resolve this “crisis” and provide a unifying force within the university. Unlike other elements of the student movements, which saw social action and Christian fellowship as their topmost concerns, a group of mainline Protestant theologians and writers (including those influenced by neo-orthodoxy) believed that “the churches’ proper relationship and mission to higher education must be above all in the intellectual realm” (40-41). Moberly, and many following his lead, concluded that the purpose of the Christian in higher education was “to enable the university to be the university.”

Sloan outlines three concerns that led to this intellectual emphasis:

1. The belief that “the university was the most powerful institution in modern culture” (41)
2. The belief that “the university was evading its responsibilities to raise and explore ‘the basis questions of human existence’ and of cultural purpose” (41)
3. A desire “to show that the theological enterprise itself was not only intellectually respectable, but also indispensible to the complete university” (59)

Unfortunately, Sloan notes, two platforms of the churches’ engagement with the university, which began as carefully reasoned analyses, often became mere slogans that inhibited truly “radical” redirection of the universities. First, many writers accepted a faith-knowledge split that set “facts” in the world of objectivity and “values” in the world of subjectivity. To many writers, this split gave religion a “reason for being,” since they argued that only “values” could give objective facts any meaning whatsoever. However, this split often led a sense of arbitrariness to religious belief. It also led to the conclusion that, for example, there was no such thing as a “Christian physics” (55) – that is, that the practice of academic disciplines was identical among Christians and nonChristians alike, and only the interpretation of a discipline could have religious content. This hampered Christians’ abilities to bring about true change in any discipline and, in fact, raised the question of why they were so concerned with Christians in the disciplines in the first place.

The second “slogan” was the phrase “all truth is God’s truth.” Sloan notes that, for Moberly, this statement was true, but required critical discernment to identify truth within secular thought. In less reflective hands, the slogan led Christians to uncritical acceptance of “whatever conceptions of truth and claims to truth happened to hold sway in the university and culture at any particular time” (57).

Sloan concludes the chapter by identifying three tasks necessary if “the hopes for the theological renaissance and its engagement with American higher education were to be fulfilled” (63):

1. University faculty would need to “grapple with the knowledge side of the faith-knowledge relationship.”
2. “Leading American theologians” would need to take up this same task.
3. Finally, the “central epistemological and faith issues” would need to be communicated “clearly and persuasively” to both the “larger educational community” (i.e. nonChristian authorities in higher education) and the broader Christian movements among students and faculty.

Next up, Chapter 3: The Church Engages Higher Education.

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