Leslie Scanlon has explored the matter by talking to faculty and students at Presbyterian, Centre, Whitworth and Maryville Colleges, and to Gary Luhr, the executive director of the Association of Presbyterian Colleges and Universities. Richard Baker’s guest viewpoint is an articulate challenge, growing out of a faculty decision to drop required courses in Old and New Testament from the curriculum at Presbyterian College.
I argued more than a decade ago in these pages that such an action constitutes the sale of one’s heritage for a mess of pottage. There is a consistent pattern here, a path taken by other church-related colleges: Bible requirements are dropped, the fear of being known as sectarian is indulged, and the lust after higher rankings in the Newsweek College Hit Parade is off and running.
I welcome this opportunity to “sound off” again, not out of disdain for any institution’s struggle with these matters, even those that have already dropped the Bible requirement. Rather, unlike a decade ago, such a decision has different consequences for the nation we are becoming, where many religions now play an essential role in public life. Wouldn’t it be helpful if this debate at Presbyterian College set off a debate in the PC(USA) about the nature and purpose of Christian higher education that went beyond the boring clichés of diversity and inclusiveness? We all strive for inclusiveness; what are we going to do with it when it comes?
The elimination of a Bible requirement abandons students’ understanding of Scripture to voluntary religious groups on campus. Its absence is an unspoken declaration that the college has no position regarding the importance of the Scriptures in the church which founded the institution. Yet you can count on the fact that there are required courses in science, English, history and a foreign language, and even physical education. None of these is essential to the life of the church or to the life of faith. Yet all these subjects and their interdisciplinary counterparts, as they are presently understood and taught, have their origin in universities and colleges whose founders were unashamed of Christian faith, and of the relation of Scripture to education.
Is it sectarian to believe and teach that our tradition is worth knowing, and that there are right and wrong ways to read the Bible? Thoughtful professors at a church-related college who value the humanistic principles embedded in Calvinist education surely want an opportunity to shape the ways in which students learn and understand Scripture. In courses on the Old and New Testaments faculty may challenge, if not transform, the religious fundamentalism, biblical illiteracy, dispensationalism and emotion-laden religious narcissism that permeates American culture. Without required Bible there is not the same opportunity to teach a fundamentalist or dispensationalist the truth about God’s word, or to set boundaries around its faithful interpretation. Instead the college leaves it to voluntary Christian associations (with praise music the only Christian hymnody) to teach students to love the Lord with their minds. Is that what is desired in an age when fanatical, ignorant religion has proven itself both dangerous and cruel?
Furthermore, demographics point toward waves of immigrants who are religious conservatives. In reaching for diversity on campus, how will a college integrate the best such students have to offer with the convictions and assumptions of the Reformed tradition, especially if that central core of the college is diluted? Around what center and with what institutional convictions will religious conversations take place?
Finally, to whom does a college belong, and to whom does it answer for its stewardship? To the students, their parents and the donors who pay the bills? What obligations does it have to the free society whose legislature charters it, and whose laws and institutions are nurtured by its graduates? Beyond that, does a church-related college answer to the living God for the meaning and practice of its institutional life? Or is it simply part of the American education market, offering its wares to a particular niche for their individual consumption?
I ask these questions to provoke conversations at church-related colleges and in the church itself. Do we actually believe that we can maintain the character of a free, religiously tolerant society, when we no longer pay sustained attention to the very documents (Scripture and Reformed confession) that, as much as any other philosophical or religious traditions, made it possible? After all, among us, the pursuit of truth is “in order to goodness,” not to the elevation of the individual or the college in a competitive marketplace of ideas. Where have our church-related colleges come from and where are they going? It’s way past time to “think on these things.”
O. Benjamin Sparks is interim editor of The Outlook and pastor, Second church, Richmond, Va.
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