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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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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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.”

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