Continuing to explore the question of what it means to be a Presbyterian-related college, a commission at Presbyterian College in Clinton, South Carolina has recommended some changes in policy for the school — changes that the commission hopes will strike a balance between educating students in the Christian tradition and preparing them to live and work in a multicultural world.
The proposed changes follow a controversy last year about whether Presbyterian College should drop a longstanding requirement that students must take at least two Bible classes — one in Old Testament and one in New Testament. That prompted a flurry of discussion about what it means to be a distinctively Christian college and one that’s related to the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.). A 30-member commission was created to study the matter further.
Now the commission has made its report, although the college’s Board of Trustees is not expected to act on it until next February.
The commission’s report speaks of the “ecology of church-relatedness” — saying it’s more an organic way of being than a specific checklist, with elements of that ethos playing out in what’s taught in the classroom, in service programs for students, and in encouraging students to consider the idea of Christian vocation as they make choices about life and work.
It also speaks of the importance of Presbyterian College maintaining “the vital relationship between faith and reason — between its core convictions and the challenges of a world in flux.”
And the implications of being a school with an historically Christian identity are not limited just to this particular liberal arts college — a 1,200-student school that mostly draws Christian students from the Southeast. Davidson College in North Carolina, for example, made headlines a few months ago when its board of trustees approved an amendment to its by-laws, to permit the election of some trustees who are not active members of a Christian church.
At some of the 66 colleges related to the PC(USA), a majority of the students are not Presbyterian — at Macalester College in St. Paul, for example, only 3 percent of the students identify themselves as Presbyterian and 64 percent list “no religious preference.”
“It is an understatement to say that church-related institutions of higher education are going through a time of significant transition,” the commission stated in its report.
It also said that during a series of public hearings, “we frequently heard reference to a ‘slippery slope’ down which a number of once strongly church-affiliated colleges and universities have slid.”
But the commission concluded that the issue “is considerably more complex than merely ‘slipping into secularism.’ Colleges and universities have moved toward greater autonomy from their supporting churches for a wide variety of reasons. For some it has been a matter of maintaining proper academic freedom or to be more competitive in the recruitment of students and the development of financial resources.”
And “the pressures of the academy often do not support and can be quite critical of the faith commitments that are an essential part of the identity of a church-related school,” the report continues. “It takes a significant amount of academic courage (and intellectual freedom in today’s academic environment) to embrace a religious tradition as a vital aspect of an institution’s core identity.”
The commission report also went on to explore the question of where a school such as Presbyterian College — a traditional liberal arts school, as opposed to a Bible college — fits into the spectrum. And it spoke of the difficulty of maintaining both a commitment to nurturing the Christian faith of many of its students and a commitment to academic freedom and rigor.
“If there are pressures towards secularism, there are also pressures in the opposite direction — towards religious dogmatism, narrow sectarianism and the constraint of intellectual freedom to which Presbyterian College is rightfully committed,” the commission’s report states.
It adds later: “Presbyterian College is a mainstream church-related school whose identity is not that of an institution which seeks to indoctrinate students in a narrow confessional identity. As we on the Commission are well aware, there are pressures in the church and in American society that would push the college toward a more narrow and rigid expression of its core convictions and towards a constraint of the academic freedom so vital to the intellectual integrity of the college. Those pressures must also be resisted.”
On the question of students taking Bible classes, the commission did not lay out a specific blueprint of what courses should be required, but did “affirm strongly the importance of academic study of Scripture” at Presbyterian College. Allen McSween, pastor of Fourth Church in Greenville, S.C., who served as the commission’s chair, said in an interview that the commission wanted to give the faculty some flexibility in deciding how to structure the academic offerings, rather than simply requiring students to take two specific courses, one each in Old and New Testament.
“We don’t want to close the door on creative thinking,” McSween said. But “we really believe that all students need to be engaged in the study” of the entire Bible.
Another question the commission considered was whether the college’s faculty members should be required to be active members of Christian churches, or whether there should be room on the faculty for teachers from other faith traditions.
The commission is recommending that the general expectation be that faculty members will be members of a Christian church, but that exceptions can be made “to include, in a limited and appropriate fashion, those who are members of other faith traditions,” the report states.
“Presbyterian College has to be training students who will be dealing with a religiously pluralistic world,” McSween said, pointing out that one businessman who’s a trustee told him it wouldn’t be unusual in his company for a Christian to work with a Jew on one side and a Muslim on the other.
McSween said the businessman stressed to him the importance of Presbyterian College students understanding both the Christian faith tradition and the basic teachings of other major religions.
“It is increasingly clear that one of the great challenges our whole society and the global community will face in the years ahead is how to deal with conflicts fueled by religious identity,” the commission’s report states. “In the world that is emerging, there will be a great need for people who are skilled in critical reflection on religious issues.”
By opening the door to hiring non- Christian faculty members who can provide students more understanding of other religious traditions, “we felt this was a strengthening, not a weakening, of the Christian mission of the college,” said McSween, whose grandfather, John McSween, was president of Presbyterian College during part of the 1930s. “I’m sure there will be others who will see it differently.”
Some of the more controversial issues — whether to require Bible classes or insist that faculty members be active members of Christian churches — drew a lot of attention in the discussions, McSween said. But he contends that looking at things more broadly, at the “ecology of church-relatedness,” shows that Presbyterian College does a lot in many different areas to foster a sense of Christian identity at the school, and “the big picture in spite of conflictedness is remarkably healthy.”
