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Holy Week resources and reflections

Higher education and the Church: Reality in the Light of God

Frequently the notion that the church has an important role to play in higher education seems freighted with nostalgia. We are likely to remember the crucial role the church played historically in founding some of the nation’s most influential colleges, some of which have become even more influential universities.

And beyond that, we are likely to bemoan the perceived separation of many such institutions of higher education from their ecclesiastical roots — when viewed from the side of the church. Or we may worry that the church as institution provides an insignificant fraction of the funding for higher education — when viewed from the side of the schools.

While there are important issues and themes in all of this that deserve thoughtful reflection, I wish to take a different look at the church’s relation to higher education, focusing on what substantive benefits the church can and does receive from higher education. My way into these ruminations has been through Jared Diamond’s Pulitzer Prize-winning book, Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies. His by now well-known investigation seeks to fathom such fateful developments in human history as how it came to pass that when the 168 Spaniards confronted the 80,000 Incas in South America in 1532, the Spaniards quickly lived up to their name of conquistadors. The short answer is found in their possession of armor, guns, and horses. But this begs the question of why the Spaniards and not the Incas had all these advantages.

Though not undisputed, Diamond’s breathtaking, intellectually sweeping analysis discovers the core of such material discrepancies between various human populations not in their innate capacities but in environmental factors that allowed the domestication of plants and animals to happen more easily and massively in some regions than others. In turn, these developments led to a concomitant evolution of technology — not least the fabrication of steel. In short, when the Spaniards confronted the Incas in 1532, the outcome was largely predetermined by the cumulative environmental advantages of the one, and the disadvantages of the other.

But what does this have to do with higher education and the church?

For one thing, it represents the church’s need for the kind of intellectual work that develops an account of how history has unfolded. Without the corrective of this kind of investigation, the church might easily be seduced into ethical visions of the encounter between conquered and conquering peoples, ancient and modern, that make unfounded claims about the superior intelligence or virtue (or both) of those who have ended on top of the heap. Diamond’s work functions as an illustration, and thus as a symbol, of what the enterprise of higher education may contribute to a discerning understanding of the world to which we are heir. The church needs to be informed by the best efforts to understand complex features of the world in which it is called to serve. The resources of higher education are fitted to such a task.

A recent book by David Ford, Shaping Theology: Engagements in a Religious and Secular World underscores why this matters to the life of the church. Ford concludes that one important task for the church is “describing reality in the light of God.” But while the “light of God” may be something like the church’s native tongue, it needs a lot of help in “describing reality.” One particularly intriguing example emerges from another part of Guns, Germs, and Steel, Diamond’s account of the dispersion of humans around the globe. Beginning in the heart of Africa in approximately 7 million B.C., human migration reached across the Middle East and Central Asia by 1 million B.C. and into central and western Europe by 500,000 B.C. Thereafter the human dispersion reached through southeast Asia to Australia by 40,000 B.C. Subsequently the path of human movement goes through Siberia by 20,000 B.C. and across the Bering Strait sheet into North America around 12,000 B.C. and to the tip of South American by 10,000 B.C. Thus does he “describe the reality” of the movement of humans throughout the earth.

For a church that seeks to “describe reality in the light of God,” this expands the frame for one of its most fundamental themes — the “promised land.” Whereas the church thinks easily and readily of the theme of promised land in the history of Israel, Diamond’s account leads us to ponder whether Israel’s experience might not be paradigmatic for the human family as a whole. Israel’s vision of a place of security, livelihood, and well-being (promised land) may well represent a vision that God has placed in the heart of humankind. What else than a universal, divine summons to a land in which humans might flourish explains the impulse that would lead them to venture in hope from known places to others unknown — again and again, for millennia?

Whatever one may judge about the foregoing effort to “describe reality in the light of God,” the most important point here is that it could not even be attempted without the resources uniquely available through higher education. Because higher education in both the arts and sciences helps us understand and rightly describe the reality of the world God has made, it opens to us new possibilities for sensing how the light of God might further illuminate the world thus described.

Therefore, I believe that the church has a deep need for partnership with higher education, precisely so it can be attentive to its own proper vocation of “describing reality in the light of God.” At the practical level, this suggests that congregations should be calling on resources from colleges and universities to educate its members just as it calls on seminaries and theological schools for such resources. Everything from natural science to political science, from mathematics to poetry, informs us more fully about the world as the theater of God’s glory. And higher education is the portal to all these probes into the mystery and meaning of God’s world. Thus cherishing and nurturing the partnership between higher education and the church deserves renewing.

 

D. Cameron Murchison is dean of faculty/executive vice president/professor of ministry at Columbia Theological Seminary, Decatur, Ga.]

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