Cruciform Education
Peter J. Leithart on College & the Gospel
Not surprisingly, challenges to Christian education often come from secularists, who believe that requiring a statement of faith inhibits academic freedom and who cannot imagine a biology class that does not affirm the dogma of evolution. They have their reward.
Challenges to Christian higher education also often come from Christians, and these are, for Christians, more weighty because they come clothed in the gospel. Many Christians sense that Christian scholarship is incompatible with the simplicity of the New Testament message and is a threat to the centrality of Christ and of faith. Why, it is asked, do we need philosophy if all wisdom and knowledge are found in Christ? Why study the canon of Western literature when we have a canon of our own? Why do we need an argument when we have a gospel, an academy when we have a church?
It is easy to dismiss these objections as fundamentalist; too easy, in fact. And it is also possible to respond to these challenges on the wrong grounds. It is tempting to justify Christian scholarship by saying that the world is bigger than the gospel. There are plenty of things to study, and they do not all have to be “evangelical.” In some traditions, the gospel has to do with a sphere of “grace,” while Christian education and scholarship is in the bailiwick of “nature.”
Among Evangelicals, the defense of Christian scholarship often goes like this: The gospel of Jesus is central, but Christianity is also a worldview that embraces all areas of life and is not just about salvation. The proper activity of the church is the proclamation of the gospel, and although the Christian school’s work is not completely separated from the gospel, it is devoted to other dimensions of Christian faith, to the intellectual or academic or scientific “spheres” of human existence.
The Provocative Gospel
But Paul said that he had determined to know nothing but Christ crucified, and that determination was not confined to “religious matters.” Paul was an apostle, of course, but the same obsession is demanded of all Christians, in the laboratory and the library as much as during worship or when preaching. When we are asked to measure Christian education by the gospel, we should not ask to be measured by some other standard. We should not dodge the “fundamentalist” challenge to Christian education by hiding behind “nature” or “worldview.” Instead, we should meet Christian challenges by insisting that Christian education is demanded by the gospel and arises from the gospel. If we are going to justify our existence, we must be justified by faith.
The question thus is not whether Christian colleges must be evangelical; of course they must. The question is, what is the evangel? When we pose this question, it is apparent that the Christian challenges to Christian higher education distort or misconstrue the gospel in at least two ways.
First, they underestimate the contentiousness of the gospel. As the American theologian Robert Jenson has put it, “The Gospel is a message, and its reflection therefore an argument. . . . The university was founded by believers, to have a place to exegete their Book and argue interpretations of their message. Just so, no book and no argument could be foreign to it.” And again, “Christians’ calling to nurture argument can be very bluntly and quickly stated. Since the message we have for the world contradicts everything the world could possibly suppose, argument is guaranteed whenever we show up—unless we have forgotten ourselves.”
The gospel demands Christian education and Christian scholarship because the gospel, when preached without compromise, provokes dissent, and that dissent must be addressed.
Second, these challenges are usually based on a limited and therefore false grasp of the gospel. Instead of saying that Christianity is bigger than the gospel, we should say that the gospel is bigger than is often imagined. The gospel is not a message of individual salvation, which can then be applied to the “worldly” concerns of literature and politics, of economics and art. Rather, it announces the world’s redemption, and “worldly” concerns are inherent to it.
Peter J. Leithart is an ordained minister in the Presbyterian Church in America and the president of Trinity House Institute for Biblical, Liturgical & Cultural Studies in Birmingham, Alabama. His many books include Defending Constantine (InterVarsity), Between Babel and Beast (Cascade), and, most recently, Gratitude: An Intellectual History (Baylor University Press). His weblog can be found at www.leithart.com. He is a contributing editor of Touchstone.
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