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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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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In this chapter, Noll provides a sketch of theology in the American colonies up to 1750. He contrasts this period with later, post-Revolution theology:

Christian believers in colonial America, though overwhelmingly Protestant, still assumed that God had structured society like a pyramid and that contentment with one’s created place was a godly virtue. The respect owed to pastors was an instance of the deference due to all whom God had placed in their superior stations. (19)

Noll reviews the major theologians and theological traditions in colonial American, beginning with the Puritans and their well-developed Calvinism. New England Puritans “took for granted that the central religious task was to orient the self to the prerogatives of God” as revealed in Scripture (21). Noll notes the “landmarks” of Samual Willard’s Compleat Body of Divinity (1726) and the considerable works of Cotton Mather (1663-1728). Jonathan Edwards (1703-1758) is the final and preeminent example of Puritan Calvinism. Noll then examines briefly Presbyterianism outside of New England, Anglicanism in Virginia, and other groups (like Quakers) throughout the colonies. All of these, even the sectarian groups, tended toward a traditional understanding of God’s covenant with the people of God.

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The AP recently ran this story.

DAYTONA BEACH - No hymnals. No pews. No steeple. No stained glass windows. And no women.

This ain’t your grandma’s church.

Organizers of the Church For Men say that guys are “bored stiff” in many churches today. “We try to make it interesting for them. We meet in a gym and we talk about issues that mess men up,” said Mike Ellis, 46, the church’s founder. The Church For Men meets one Saturday evening a month, drawing about 70 guys dressed in everything but straight-laced shirts and neckties. The service features a rock band, a shot clock to time the preacher’s message and a one-hour in-and-out guarantee.

The article goes on to talk about hot rod events, fishing outreach, and one preacher’s idea that men have “the attention span of a flea.”

It is important, even Biblical, for Christian men to build relationships with other Christian men, to the glory of Christ. Our Lord himself modeled this for us by gathering the Twelve, and Paul’s cohort of Barnabas, Timothy, Titus, Silas, etc., shows the mighty deeds that men working together can do for the Kingdom.

But is the church’s problem that it asks too much from men and needs to cater their services so that men don’t know whether they’re at church or at home watching ESPN? I don’t think so. First, the popularity of movements like Promise Keepers and writers like John Eldredge suggests to me that too many churches ask too little of their men. There’s a great deal of work to be done in the Kingdom, and professional ministers can only do so much. God’s call is for all of his people to do works of service, and the skills that men have in business, with their hands, in planning and entrepreneurship, in risk taking and boldness, are integral for much of that work. I have seen that with my own eyes.

Secondly, however, I worry that something is lost when we don’t listen to God’s call to humble ourselves like little children when we come to him. Men are prideful, and we don’t like to leave our comfort zones. The problem, of course, is that the gospel is often uncomfortable. It’s easy to dismiss something we don’t want to do by saying it’s “not for us.” Our consumerist culture has taught us that our desires and our needs should be the most important thing to us. Many of these types of ministry try to put the gospel into a friendly, nonthreatening context, like fly fishing or sports cars. I know that these ministries have worked in many lives, and far be it from me to stand between God and another human being. At what point, though, does the context swallow up the gospel?

There have been many popular Christian men held up as examples for Christians. Many of them lived exemplary lives, while others “talked the talk” without “walking the walk.” Only one person ever showed us how a true man lives, a true man made in God’s image and obedient in every respect to God’s will: Jesus of Nazareth, the Christ, the Son of God. May all Christian men look to him for their example and endeavor to conform to his image.

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In London, a debate was held yesterday in which the motion put forth was “We’d Be Better Off Without Religion.” Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens each took part on the “pro” side of the argument.

Unfortunately, no one bothered to define “religion,” which frequently happens in these types of debates. No one bothered to differentiate one religion from another, either. This invariably leads to someone attacking “religion” on the grounds that it has caused horrible things to happen (the Crusades, 9/11), which leads someone else to defend “religion” on the basis that it has given us great works of art and philanthropy.

In (non)defense of religion
Christians should not attempt to defend “religion” unless the word is given meaning within a context. Often, “religion” is used to mean something like “a specific set of doctrinal statements and rituals observed by a specific group of people.” In those cases, why should a Christian be required to speak on behalf of Buddhism or Islam? It’s akin to asking a New Democrat to defend the divine right of kings simply because they are both “politics.” Discussions of religion without boundaries, where a discussion about the dual nature of Christ suddenly veers off into a debate about Middle Eastern terrorism, as is typical of web forums, are worse than useless. Christians and nonChristians alike are guilty of these context-wrenching “drive-by comments.”

We all have got religion
But that’s only one definition of “religion.” Another definition, which I prefer, is “one’s view of ultimate reality.” I strongly dislike attempts to separate “religious” beliefs from the rest of life, because our “religious” beliefs and presuppositions shape everything else we do, on a fundamental level. Atheism may not have specific rituals associated with it, but it assuredly affects life decisions just as much as traditional Catholicism.

One of the best recent comments along these lines came from, ironically enough, an atheist on a religion and philosophy web forum. She pointed out that, until the Enlightenment, the whole of life was considered part of “religion,” making it impossible to distinguish “religious” motives from nonreligious. Criticizing events of the past because of “religion” therefore makes no sense, because everything in the past was based on “religion.” I would extend this to current events as well. How can you glibly attribute something as complicated as, say, the troubles of Northern Ireland or the situation in the Middle East to “religion?” You might as well say that “politics,” “geography,” or “history” are to blame - such a statement says nothing.

I wish that the organizers of last night’s debate had been so thoughtful about defining their topic.

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In future posts, I will be explaining why I feel that community is so vital for Christians, particularly in America, and exploring important aspects of community life. It occurs to me, however, that most Americans, even most American Christians, do not view community - whether religious or secular - as central to their lives. Why not?

1) “Religion is a private affair.” It is an American axiom that one does not discuss religion or politics in polite company. The mix of the First Amendment, freedom of religion, and our culture’s view of tolerance as an important virtue have created a climate in which one’s personal religious beliefs are literally no one else’s business. Compulsary church attendance, which was common in Europe and in colonial America, seems radical and almost totalitarian to contemporary Americans. I doubt our Founding Fathers would have envisioned that their goal of religious freedom would have one day resulted in a culture in which individuals create “salad bar” religions, combining favorable bits from Christianity, Buddhism, and whatever other spiritual tradition happens to be available.

For people not actively involved in a religious community, their deepest held beliefs are often formed in isolation from other people. The common language, common context, and even common biases of any human community are difficult for the individual to enter, even more so when religion is viewed as private and therefore is not openly discussed. The beliefs of a community must first be passed through our private lens before we can trust those other individuals, and our individual beliefs pass judgment over communal beliefs. By viewing religion as private, a wall is built between our individual selves and any community we come into contact with.

2) Religion as an op-ed position. The irony of America’s view of religion as private is that religion is also viewed as an op-ed position: a series of positions or arguments which can be promoted, opposed, agreed upon, or disagreed with. Some people possess a literal list of theological positions with which one must agree in order to be a “true believer.” Religion, rather than being the worship of God or even some sort of personal development, is an exercise of opinion and argument.

Communities, in this mindset, are puzzles to be deciphered. Do their beliefs align with mine? How many points do they get right? How many do they get wrong? This is not a process that ends easily. At first contact with a community, and with each subsequent contact, the individual stands ready to oppose the community’s position. For some individuals, this may even be seen as a “holy” role, such as that of Elijah or John the Baptist, holding up the light of truth in a world of darkness. Like those saints of old, these individuals are lonely prophets, who wonder why the blind laugh so much and feast.

Next, the priority of the individual and the priority of the family.

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