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 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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