Part one, two, and three of my study of Douglas Sloan’s Faith and Knowledge.

Chapter 4: The Theologians and the Two-Realm Theory of Truth

Previously, Sloan has made the argument that, for the mainline churches’ engagement of higher education to be successful, Christians - and especially Christian theologians - needed to show that faith was integral to the question of “faith and knowledge,” and not merely an optional component depended on personal taste.  In higher education, a concept of knowledge based solely on scientific, quantitative measures had become dominant, and it was up to Christians to show why the academy in general had any reason to care about qualititative truth, value, faith, etc. To give away the ending of this chapter, Sloan does not believe any of the mainline Protestant theologians succeeded in this task.

He first reviews the three major neo-orthodox theologians - Paul Tillich, Reinhold Neibuhr, and H. Richard Neibuhr.  All three, Sloan argues, subscribed to a “two-realm” theory of knowledge which placed “objective” or “scientific” knowledge into one ream, and “subjective” or “religious” knowledge into a completely separate realm, isolating each from the other. Each theologian formulated this distinction slightly differently, and some of their concepts - such as Tillich’s “knowledge of persons” and the Neibuhrs’ emphasis on community, narrative, and symbol - seemed to point toward an integration of the two realms.  Ultimately, however, all three fell into a “nearly complete acceptance of the scientific description of nature,” and this acceptance “posed problems that the theological reformers were often unable even to recognize, much less to deal with” (125).  Knowledge of God tended toward the “ineffable,” making it impossible to truly effect higher education’s view of knowledge.

Next, Sloan analyses the “secular theologians,” who were heavily influenced by Bonhoeffer’s concept of a “religionless Christianity” (129).  These theologians, such as Harvey Cox, William Hamilton, and Paul van Buren,

all agreed in taking the modern mind-set as normative and definitive for all statements about reality, theological statements especially. (129)

They agreed that “Christianity” was a suitable source for moral conviction and saw Jesus as the role model for personal life, but their definition of Christianity and of Jesus himself were so watered-down and so limited by the overal dominance of scientific knowledge, that it soon became questionable why anyone should really care.  For example, while the secular theologians stressed the importance of Jesus, “their ‘Jesus’ was a conscious projection of their own making” (134), not the cosmic redeemer and second person of the Trinity as in historical Christianity. Along with a third group discussed by Sloan (the “radical empricists,” theologians influenced by Whitehead’s process theology, including Charles Hartshrone, Bernard Meland, and John Cobb), this group of theologians went far beyond the “two realm” theory of knowledge and ultimately accepted

only one realm, that of modern scientific and theological truth, effectively eliminat[ing] the theological basis for the church’s engagement with higher education. (144)

Thus, the future does not look promising.  Next up, Chapter 5, “The Campaign Collapses: The Student Movement.”

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Continuing my reading on Douglas Sloan’s Faith and Knowledge: Mainline Protestantism and Higher Education. Check out my coverage of chapter one and chapter two.

Chapter 3: The Church Engages Higher Education

This chapter describes the “on the ground” efforts that church bodies made with students and faculties. Sloan begins by noting the incredible changes in higher education post-World War II: the massive increases in enrollment, which opened up universities to a broader demographic of Americans, and the almost complete dominance of research universities in setting the agenda, tone, and purpose of higher education.

Student Ministries

Among students, the churches reformulated their view of evangelism to “take in the needs of the larger community and of the individual situated within the context of that community” (76). The university was seen as crucial to this “new evangelism” as “the cognitive center of the modern world” (as Sloan quotes Julian Hartt). Sloan continues,

Furthermore, the principal work of the new evangelism would have to be carried by people within the university, not by churchly intruders from without who had no real, integral connection with the university. (76)

As a result, many new student organizations were founded in the late forties through fifties, and many new forms of campus ministry were attempted by mainline Protestant churches. For example, the National Student Christian Federation took a strong stance in “political-social activism” (78) and eventually contributed to the work of the civil rights movement.

On other campuses, students and faculty joined to together in intentional, covenantal communities, such as the Christian Faith and Life Community at the UT-Austin. Similar communities formed at many other campuses across the country - Sloan mentions Brown, MIT, Yale, U. Wisconsin, and U. Iowa. Campus ministries also formed Christian research centers (e.g. at Michigan State) and trendy, largely short-lived “coffee house ministries” that attempted cultural relevance. Sloan also mentions the strong influence of the Methodist student magazine motive, which served to give many Christian students and faculty an artistic, literary perspective on Christian life.

Faculty Ministries

Among faculty, similar innovation was taking place. The Faculty Christian Fellowship, founded in 1952, took as its mission to

uncover the basic presuppositions of the various academic disciplines and to explore the tensions existing between them and those of the Christian faith. (84)

Throughout the fifties, FCF grew rapidly across the country.

Sloan surprised me by connecting the establishment of religion departments to the church’s new engagement of higher education. I had simply assumed (wrongly) that the teaching of religion had long been a part of American higher education - it had, but in a vastly different form. Sloan records that, by the mid-1960’s,

The older views of the student of religion as primarily evangelistic or as pastoral and professional training for religious educators had given way to the conception of religion as a scholarly, academic discipline. (86)

Very quickly, Christians had moved from fighting for theology to be recognized as an academic discipline to seeing “religious studies” become as professionalized as any other social science.

Finally, Sloan spends a good chunk of space covering the newfound interest of theologians (led by Tillich) in the arts, and the impact of these changes on church-related colleges.

Sloan concludes the chapter by noting that all of these changes in the church’s engagement with higher education were ultimately based in the “faith-knowledge” question. The universities had radically redefined “knowledge,” to the detriment of “faith.” It’s worth quoting Sloan at length on this matter:

The conception of knowledge as power and control [in higher education] was thoroughly utilitarian and intrumental. The research university, of course, was committed to the higher utilitarianism of providing theoretical knowledge for the management and advance of a complex, industrial-technological culture. The less prestigious institutions farther down the tail of the academic snake pursued the lower utilitarianism of immediate community service and vocational training. In the overall competition for resources the higher utilitarianism usually prevailed, for it could argue that in the long run all else depended on the high-level, theoretical advances it made possible.

In neither of these emphases, however, was there much concern for what had been called the “basic questions” of life, and very little concern, except in an instrumentalist way, for an education devoted to the deepening and enrichment of personal and cultural existance. That other conceptions of knowledge other than “knowledge is power” might be possible and might reveal dimensions of reality as real and important as the instrumental, quantitative, and technical, was as foreign to the one as to the other.

Thus, the churches’ efforts would depend heavily on whether theologians could put forth a convincing argument for “faith” as integral to “knowledge.” Next up, chapter 4, “The Theologians and the Two-Realm Theory of Truth.”

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