This is the second Lecture from Lectures on the Evidence for the Authenticity of BASIC CHRISTIANITY by Stanley D. Walters, Ph. D., a book we're editing for distribution by Nineveh's Crossing or a more prominent publisher. You can read a brief background of the project at the beginning of the first lecture HERE.
Lecture 2 - What is a Christian Liberal Arts College
I don't know
if this topic really belongs in a course on Basic
Christianity. But, it belongs somewhere very early in your college career
and maybe this is as good a place to trot this out as anywhere else. So,
whether it belongs here or not, here we go.
First of all,
what do we mean by Liberal Arts college? And secondly, what do we mean by the Christian
liberal arts college? So, let's begin first of all to talk about the general
concept what is a liberal arts college.
I. What is a Liberal Arts College?
I want to
frame this in terms of things which we hope will happen to you while you are a
student at this kind of institution. I'm going to suggest three of them. They
are...
qualities of life and thinking which we here at Greenville hope that you will come to embody as a result of having studied in the liberal arts college.
qualities of life and thinking which we here at Greenville hope that you will come to embody as a result of having studied in the liberal arts college.
1. A Breadth of Knowledge
The liberal arts college hopes to turn out persons who
are, in the first place, informed in a variety of fields.
Let me say
that again, the liberal arts college hopes to develop students who are informed
in a variety of fields. Now, you've already discovered having been through at
least two registration lines that there are graduation requirements at
Greenville and that these fall, some of them at least, in areas where you have
no particular interest. You've already discovered that whether you're
interested or not you must take some science, or some history, or some
language, or for that matter some religion.
How does it
happen that the liberal arts college has graduation requirements which spread
out and cover the whole spectrum of knowledge, even though it may be only very superficially?
The answer is that this is one of the aims of the liberal arts college, to give
you a certain breadth in what you know. Breadth as opposed to the narrow
specialization which would be characteristic of other kinds of schools. You
could be in one of several different kinds of colleges or schools than you are
now in. You could have gone into a vocational educational program, for example.
And depending on the vocation, you wouldn't have had to take nearly the breadth
of course as you take here. If you were in automotive engineering. you don't
have to do that much with history, sociology, and psychology, and language. So,
depending on the vocation that you're interested in, the vocational school
gives you a narrow preparation for a particular skill that you can perform and
earn a living.
So, as you
might have been in a secretarial school instead of a liberal arts college and
there you have to learn how to spell and to type and to do office practice and
things like this. But as far as philosophy and psychology and biological
science that's not important to being a good secretary, and often at least, in
the secretarial school you don't have to do that either. You might be in a
technical school of some sort, not the automotive type but engineering of
various sorts or perhaps even dentistry, electrical engineering, or mechanical
engineering. You can enroll as soon as you're out of high school in technical
programs. There the courses that we call the humanities are not really
important. What are important are the technical subjects of math and science.
You might even
be in a Bible school. The Bible school is a kind of specialized program. It's
certainly important for persons who want the specialized program but those of
you who transfer in from a Bible school, most of you have not done that, but we
have a lot of them, will bring in two or three years of study almost all of
which will be related to the Bible. There won't be any English or history or
language or philosophy or science. Why not? Because you go to a Bible school to
get a specialized preparation for a particular branch of Christian service that
you're interested in, and you get the specialty and nothing else. Now the
liberal arts college poses a breadth in contrast to this rather narrow
specialization which is part of many other kinds of institutions. And we do so
because we think that you will be a better person, a more intelligent person,
and a happier person, if you know a little bit about a number of subjects. The
breadth that a liberal arts education offers you will make life more
interesting and more whole. William Lyon Phelps (1865-1943), who was a professor
of English at Yale until his death, wrote in his autobiography that you could
take a class of first rate engineering students taught by the most
extraordinary professor imaginable and they would learn a lot of engineering
but they would not learn very much about life.
In contrast to
this, you'll pardon Phelps, he takes as his example a course in Greek
literature and he says, "You may not learn how to parse all the verbs
perfectly but you can't study Greek literature very long without learning
something about how to live." This
is what we think about the liberal arts college, that the breadth which the
courses offer you will help you learn how to live in a way that the specialized
curriculum of the vocational school will not do. One student whom I had a number
of years ago put it this way. It's kind of awkwardly put, but he said,
"You know, the longer I live there's a broader way of looking at
things." And that's so. We hope here that you can be broadened out to see
a lot of things that you have not seen.
General
Electric made a study of nearly 14,000 college graduate employees of their
institution, asking, "Are you satisfied with your own college experience
now that you're out in the working world?" These are mostly persons
employed in the engineering aspects of G.E., and of special interest to us is
the way the non-engineering grads responded. That is, here are people engaged
in the work of engineering but who did not go to an engineering school. Now, of
those persons, three out of four said they would take the same course of study
over again. That is, they would go to a place like G.C. rather than a technical
engineering program.
The greatest
degree of dissatisfaction was found among those who had attended teachers
colleges and received a degree in education. They believed a broader education
would have been of more general and lasting value. And the person who conducted
the study said this. "The purpose of undergraduate education is not the
acquisition of specialized information and operational techniques. Rather, the
power to think and analyze a wide range of problems successfully is the true
goal of college education."
We need the
breadth that liberal education can give us so that we become liberated from
provincial and narrow viewpoints which really are inhibiting. We need, for
example, an awareness of what has happened in other times and other places in
history. So we know how properly to evaluate what is happening to us in our own
time. This is one of the things which is bad, it seems to me, about the Red
Guard because they are cutting off present Chinese society from all of which is
gone before. And I do not see how a society can really survive unless it has
some perspective on itself. But it's the study of history which gives you
perspective on the present. We need to know, we need to have perspective on the
moral and political ideas which are part of our society.
Several years
ago, in Missouri an interesting case came before the state Supreme Court. It had to do with a medical doctor named
Mischner, a man of fine medical qualifications who was licensed to practice
both in Pennsylvania and in California and was a member of the University of
Pennsylvania Medical School faculty. Dr. Mischner became a visiting professor
for a year or two at Washington University. While he was in St. Louis he
applied to practice medicine in Missouri. Now, in Missouri the agency which
screens applications of this sort is called the State Board for the
Registration of the Healing Arts. They looked over Dr. Mischner's credentials
and they turned him down. The reason they turned him down were these: When
Mischner was in the Army during the Second World War he was a pacifist. And
even though he had been drafted and went in, he wasn't a conscientious
objector. Still he was opposed to the
war effort. On one occasion he went A.W.O.L. and then turned himself in. The
reason he did this was to protest against the war effort. It does sound
completely unacceptable in the present situation [Ed. Note: The Vietnam War as
being waged at the time of the lecture] but it was different during the Second
World War. It turned out he never really was court martialed for it. I don't
know why, but he expected to be because he was ready to take the rap. The board
said to him. "You believe in breaking laws if you don't like them, is that
right?" "Well," he said, "under certain circumstances if
the law violates my conscience I would have to break the law."
And
this is done so often today. It is called "civil disobedience". You
disobey the law if you don't like it. This is what essayist Henry David Thoreau
(1817-1862) is famous for. And when I mention the name Thoreau you see that the
concept of civil disobedience goes a long ways back in American history and
American thought and it's a reputable idea. What's disreputable about it is
that people break the law and expect not to have to pay the penalty but neither
Thoreau nor Dr. Mischner were in this situation.
Well, the
State Board for the Registration of the Healing Arts felt there was something
subversive about this and they said, "We can't register you. We don't know
when you'd go around breaking laws you didn't like." And the way the thing
came out isn't particularly important. I've already got to the part that I was
making the point for. But the way it came out was that Mischner said "You
are turning me down because you don't like my ideas not because I'm not
qualified as a physician." And that was right. And it was wrong. And he
kept at this for several years and finally the St. Louis Post Dispatch
newspaper took up the crusade and the result was that Mischner was finally
approved by the state board. I think some rearrangement in the matter of
licensing took place. Dr. William Henry
Danforth (1926-1995) of the Washington University Medical School said after
this was all over, "The medical profession is the most narrowly educated
profession in America." Why did he say that? Because here were a group of medical men who
had no real concept that civil disobedience and the right of the individual
conscience are respectable and reputable even in America. They had no feeling really for moral ideas
and their value.
Now if we
steer you here at the liberal arts college into a variety of courses it is in
part because we hope you will become a person with breadth who sees things and
gets perspective on the present because of that breadth.
2. Values Ideas for Their Own Sake
The liberal arts college hopes to turn out persons who
are interested in ideas for their own sake.
Secondly, we
hope to turn out students who are interested in ideas for their own sake. Now many of us find it very hard not to
evaluate what we do in terms of how it benefits us...and benefit usually means
financial benefit. We have a very utilitarian turn of mind. We want to know
what good it will do us. And if it won't do us some good, especially,
preferably, make us a buck, then we're not really interested in doing it. There
is here a kind of narrow pragmatism in the American character which the liberal
arts college hopes to work against and to counteract. William Temple
(1881-1944), late Archbishop of Canterbury, was involved at one time in his
career in public education in Great Britain. Of course the British educational
system is very different from our own. He was involved in a situation that is
quoted in his biography. One morning a little boy brought to school a note to
the teacher, which was Temple. Scrawled on a grocery bag, the note said,
"Don't teach my boy poetry, he is going to be a grocer." William
Temple said that when that happened he tried to get across to the class, and
then later on he tried to get across to the parents, the idea that there were
some treasures of learning which were of no conceivable importance in the
struggle for material gain, but which still had a great deal of importance to
the way people think and live.
Now the
liberal arts college hopes to get you interested in ideas for their own sake.
Whether the idea will help you make more money or not, you should become a sort
of person who is interested in ideas for their own sake. You will have to work
very hard to keep this ideal before you. It is the difference between getting
an education and getting a degree. Some of you will go through Greenville
College, get a degree, and come out an educated person. It is the difference
between taking a course to get it out of the way and taking a course to learn
something. It is the difference between studying to meet requirements and
studying to learn. It is the difference between reading collateral to get the
pages done and reading collateral to see what that book is all about. A vast
difference. And I admit that there are some things about the way American
education is structured that make it very hard for you to think in these
terms. I hope that you will work at it.
It is my own ideal, always, to try to set things up so that the student who
cares about learning things and does, has at least equal advantage with a
student who only does the requirements as busy work without caring what the
thing is really about.
A number of
years ago I taught a summer school course on the Epistles of St. Paul. In my
class were three ladies who were public school teachers. They were older
ladies, older than anybody present here, today. One of them would retire from
public school teaching within five years and the other one would have retired
within three years. They both now have long since retired. This was really a
marvelous experience. Here are these ladies almost on the verge of retirement
pursuing their thirst for learning and knowledge right down to the very end of
their professional career. And of all things, useless to them in public education,
they are enrolled in a class in Paul's Epistles. What a wonderful illustration
of caring about ideas. Alas, I wish it had been so. As it turned out the course
in Paul's Epistles was the last three-hour requirement they had to take before
getting their degree. And they cared about that degree because if they got
their degree in time, their retirement pay would be a thousand dollars a year
more than if they didn't. I don't begrudge those dear ladies their thousand
dollars a year. But I have to say, this is not education. Something is wrong
here. And I guess it's probably wrong
with the American system as a whole. But when it comes to stating the ideals,
anyway, the liberal arts college doesn't care so much about the degree; it does
care what you know.
A friend of
mine told me that when he was a senior in seminary, that means his third year
after college. He was a very, very bright student. He'd made A's here at
Greenville and A's all through seminary. He'd planned to go to the mission
field and something happened and he went to graduate school instead. He said
that in his third year of seminary when he began to think about going to
graduate school he had revolutionized his approach to study. Why? Because he
began to see that in graduate school they didn't care how many courses you had
had, they cared what you knew. That's the difference. People who care about
ideas for their own sake.
Several years
ago, when I was pastor of a church in an eastern state, one of the members in
that particular parish had a son who had a great big football physique, sort of
the kind who just barely made it through high school. Great big good hearted
lovable Swede. His mother was so glad he got through high school, she didn't
even breathe a word about going to college. And he didn't go. He got himself a
job working as a welder and he became a good welder. He acquired the skill
necessary. He worked his way up a little bit in the shop that he was in. All that happened several years ago. Summer
before last I was back in that particular community and I met this guy again
and we got together and had some conversations. I discovered that something had
happened to this guy since I knew him before. I still don't know exactly how it
happened, but he had experienced a kind of intellectual awakening. For once, he
didn't care about talking about the low level things. He was very excited
about, and he wanted to talk about the kind of work that I was doing and this
sort of thing.
He told me an
interesting story or two about how he was now getting along with the guys in
the shop. It turns out that one day they said to him, "Carlson, we don't
hear you talking much anymore." Well, he explained to me why he wasn't
talking much anymore. It seems that among the things that he had done was to
subscribe to the Wall Street Journal. He wasn't speculating [in stocks] or
anything, he just wanted to read. And in the Wall Street Journal he saw a
picture printed of one of these half dollars that's one of these sandwich
coins. The picture showed that this particular sandwich coin had come apart
into pieces. The picture was there and there was a caption, but there was no
article. He had read the caption and looked at the picture and thought that was
very interesting. When he got to the shop the next day he told the boys about
this and they hooted at him. They said, "What do you do just read stuff
like that so you can tell it when you get here?" So, he quit talking. And he now sees that
there's a difference between him and those guys because he cares about things
they don't care about.
Let me give
another example. It's kind of the other end of things. A high school student in
Greenville High School, and you may be able identify this guy, it doesn't
really matter, got to go on tour with the Greenville College band. He was very
scared when he got to go on this tour but he came back very excited and he said
to me, "College students are a lot different than I thought they'd be.
They are a lot different than high school students. College students will
listen to you when you talk. They will take you seriously. High school
students? They're afraid to think. They don't want to think about ideas. But
college students will listen when you talk."
I hope he's
right on that. At least I hope he's right about the college students he met. He
told me that once he was in the class out at the high school and they are
listening to a report from somebody on some esoteric subject, like Michelangelo
or something like that. So, he asked a question, "What were the artist
guilds like in the time of Michelangelo?" And the class all hooted at him.
And he said, "Aw, com'on. Don't be so stuffy."
Ok this
illustrated to him that there are people who don't care about ideas or there
are people who do care. Now we're working on the other end of things. We hope
that you will learn to think about important things not because it will make
more money for you, but because this is the kind of person you want to be.
3. Develop Critical Thinkers
The liberal arts college hopes to develop persons who
are able to evaluate.
All right.
Third, we hope to turn out persons who are able to evaluate. Can you tell a good argument from a bad one?
Can you tell when a man hasn't given you enough evidence to support what he
says? Can you detect false reasoning from true reasoning? Do you have serious
opinions about important things? Can you
tell when something is relevant and when it isn't? Can you tell the difference
between a leading idea and supporting data? Now all of this becomes very, very
important not just in religion but in politics and in almost anything that you
do. The American people are expected to form judgments on things that are of
very great importance in world affairs and in domestic affairs. Do they know? Can the average American tell
when a politician is feeding him a lot of guff and when he is giving good
cogent arguments?
A year or so
ago when Reagan was running for governor of California and was already coming
into national attention [Reagan was elected Governor of California a year
before this lecture. It would be 12 years after this lecture before Reagan
would be elected to the U.S. presidency], one of the commentators noted the
techniques that Reagan was using to get himself elected. I don't know if this
is true or not, but this is what the commentator said with tongue in cheek. "Reagan is the
ideal candidate. He avoids the issues. He isn't going to make the mistake Goldwater
made." Is that the kind of people we are? Where a man who avoids the
issues can get himself elected. Whether it's true of Reagan or not, is beside
the point the illustration serves. The liberal arts college hopes to turn out
people who have developed a critical capacity for thinking for evaluating ideas
and what they read.
Several years
ago, I had an opportunity to spend some time talking to a couple of students
from a technical university, two or three states away from here. It was just
kind of by accident that I had a chance to talk to them, but I did. I was
talking to them about religious things among other things. I had a terrible
time talking to those guys. They were so wrapped up in the metrical dimension
of things. They could do long equations in their heads, and they could measure
things, and weigh things. They spent their whole live long day working in this
particular dimension of things. And when I tried to deal with them in terms of
ideas it seemed to me they were helpless. I felt so sorry for them. I felt so
frustrated. How do you talk to people who don't have any facility with ideas,
who don't know how to evaluate an argument, who aren't accustomed to deduction,
and making conclusions of this sort. One of those guys wrote me a letter. It
wasn't any great shakes of a letter. It wasn't ten pages long, single spaced,
typed. It was about 5 1/2 size pages scrawl. He said it took him all morning. I
don't know why it would have taken him all morning. Maybe it takes you all
morning, too. I don't know. Maybe he thought a lot in between times. But I had
the feeling that here was a guy who doesn't know what to do with an idea. He
doesn't know how to talk, except in quantitative terms. All right. That may
have not happened to you. May you develop skill in evaluation. I think you'll
find that a lot of the things I asked you to do in the course are set up to
help accomplish these three aims to broaden you, and to make you interested in
ideas, and to develop a critical capacity as far as ideas are concerned.
I define the Liberal Arts College in terms of what we hope
will happen …primarily what we hope will happen to the life of the mind. The things that you know something about, the
things you’re aware of, that’s a certain breadth, an interest in ideas for
their own sake, not just because you have to perform an assignment. I think there’s quite a lot of contempt for
the intellectual in American life. And
I’m not quite sure why. Henry Steele
Commager (1902-1998) in his book, "The American Mind," calls attention
to this. He points out that, in America,
and America alone—he’s contrasting America with the European continent—“In
America, and America alone, the professor who is invariably long haired and
absent minded, is an object of humor.”
And Commager wants to know why we should make jokes at the expense of
the professor. It’s not done, he says in
the continent. There, the professor is a
respected person. He may be long haired
and absent minded, but they don’t make jokes about him. And one wonders if there’s a little bit of
suspicion in the American character for intellectual achievement. You look, for example, at the success Adlai
Stevenson II had, or did not have, depending at how you look at him. Stevenson ran for president. What defeated him? Well, I don’t know, but he got the label
“Egghead” for one thing. Egghead is a
pejorative name. It’s a down
labeling. It’s an uncomplimentary way of
referring to an intellectual. Why should
an intellectual be referred to in uncomplimentary ways?
When I was a student at Princeton, it was during the time of
the Eisenhower and Stevenson campaign, and one of the debating clubs on the
University campus set up a topic of debate like this: “Resolved: What this
country needs is less ham and more eggheads!”
Now you can figure that one out.
And of course, the University community generally appreciates
intellectual achievements. Maybe the
average American doesn’t. I’m just
trying to say, “We need to get rid of this prejudice against knowing
something. We need to rid our minds of
the idea that if we know something which we can’t use, we’re an Egghead, and
therefore somehow not very bright after all.
We want you to be interested in ideas for their own sake, able to evaluate
arguments and the things that you read.
II. What is a CHRISTIAN Liberal Arts College?
All right now
let me turn to the second half of things. What do we mean by a Christian liberal arts college? Well, to
start with, the educational aims here, in the first part of the development,
are presupposed. That is to say, I don't see any justification for a Christian
college if it isn't a good college. I don't think we should take an inferior
educational procedure, sanctify up by associating it with the church, and
expect people to think they've been dealt with fairly. The Christian liberal
arts college must first of all, be doing a good job of being a college at
least. It has to know what a good college is and be trying to be so. Thus, the purpose
of a Liberal Arts education institution.
I'm
well-enough aware that we've got loopholes in what we're trying to do here. I
sometimes think there are loopholes in our understanding of our job. But that
may not be so. There certainly are loopholes in what we are actually doing. So,
to start with, a Christian liberal arts college has got to be a good college or
there's no point in going on. I'm not interested in an institution only because
it's religious. It's got to be more than that.
Now let me
take a negative approach and say a couple of things about what it's not.
1. Not an Escape
A Christian liberal arts college is not primarily a
retreat from the world.
You may think
you've heard enough about this lately. Just let me hit it and I'll go on
by. We do sometimes get the idea that
the reason a place like Greenville exists is so that we may be sheltered from
the swirling currents of the world of unbelief. And I admit that there is some
sense in which this is so. I don't think it's nearly as much so as some people
think that it is or to say that it is.
I agree that
any time you have a chance to assume responsibility you're in real life. And
when it comes to just plain scummiest, if that's what makes real life...as I've
lived in the dormitory and I know something about it, I think you are in touch
with real life, even here on campus. Though, I grant that the mood and the
spirit and the tone of things is different than it would be on the state
campus. So the college may function in some way to create an atmosphere which
is not quite as strident and as hostile as the world of unbelief may be. But
that's not the primary reason for the existence of the Christian college.
That's a byproduct, if it is a byproduct. If it's the product or the byproduct,
that's not the primary reason.
2. Not a Church
The Christian liberal arts college is not primarily a
church.
Now the
functions of the church are evangelism and Christian nurture, and we do perform
those functions here. Our chapels, our
church services, our Bible studies, all are working at this general aim. Once
again, I think these are a byproduct. The Christian college does not exist to
do the work of the church. The church exists through the work of the church.
And if the
church isn't doing the work of the church then it ought to be reformed, rather
than starting some subsidiary institution to take over its functions. The
college doesn't exist to replace the church. Let the church do its own work.
And if we perform some of the functions of the church here, like evangelism and
Christian nurture, fine. But that's not primarily why the school is here. The
school doesn't exist to get people saved. It may do this, but it exists for
something for more than that.
All right.
Specific aims, then supplementing the aims of the liberal arts college.
A. Learning Around Jesus Christ
First of all,
to unify life and learning around Jesus Christ.
The Christian liberal arts college, as I want to
define it, is an institution where the educational process takes seriously the
truths, of biblical revelation.
Again, the
educational process implied by the term "liberal arts," is carried
out in an environment which takes seriously the truths of biblical revelation.
We have this
slogan around Greenville: "Education in a Distinctive Christian
Environment." Would we have a Christian college if we, say, transported
from the State campus to our own campus the educational program which exists
there? That is, what if we transferred it as it is from there to here and then
sanctified it by the addition of required chapel and vespers attendance, add to
it late hour and late minutes penalties, add drinking regulations in the
dormitory and so forth? Would we have a Christian college if we took the
program at state and added on the distinctive religious features of the
Greenville program?
No, of course,
we wouldn't. We would have what is essentially a naturalistic educational
approach to things with religious requirements added on. It's not the adding on
of a distinctive environment which makes the Christian college. It is that
somehow everything which is done is touched, by the religious commitments of
that particular institution. Everything which is done has got somehow to be a
little different because it's done by people who are looking at life a little
differently than it may be looked at elsewhere. And this is something I talked
about in a beginning way, on Friday—the different concepts of reality.
B. Materialism vs. Theism
The Christian liberal arts college explores the
difference between the naturalistic world view and the theistic world view.
One is the
naturalistic concept that what is real is limited to the processes of nature
and which can be observed and measured by science. That is, what is real is
limited to the processes of nature and which can be observed and measured by
science. And, two, what I may call the theistic outlook on life. Besides
nature, there is God, who is seeking to realize or achieve good in the world.
Again, besides nature, there is God—a divine Mind, to put it philosophically.
There is God who is seeking to achieve good in the world.
Already, on
Friday, I pointed out the basic difference between these two ways of looking at
life. If your pre-suppositions fall with the naturalistic approach, then
nothing is real which cannot be measured by the methods of science. If your
approach to life is theistic, then there are some realities which lie beyond
scientific measurement, beyond empiricism. And it makes a big difference which
outlook on life you take.
Now, they may
not make much difference in the sciences. I think in physics it's hard to see
how the differences exist. You may be able to find some ways in which the
Christian biologist looks at things different from the naturalistic biologist.
Though I don't think it's true that when you get up in the laboratory here at
Greenville, that we have Christian frogs and Christian worms which you dissect.
That is, in science, I don't think there's any real difference in what you do.
But when you move over into the realm of the Humanities, where we are beginning
to deal with ideas, then the kind of approach to life which you take makes a
very great deal of difference.
When you get
into the realm of psychology, sociology, there the approach which the teacher
takes really determines where he comes out because psychology and sociology are
full of judgments on the nature of man.
And if you
think man is just an animal with no dimension beyond himself at all, that is,
no dimension beyond the scientifically verifiable, then you will pose one
solution to the problems of man and society. If you think that man has
dimensions which cannot be measured by science, then you will pose another
solution to the problems of man and society.
And so, when
we talk about the Christian liberal arts college we are thinking that somehow,
in every aspect of the college's work the theistic way of looking at reality is
taken seriously, and the Biblical outlook on life is taken seriously. This
doesn't mean that you're protected from knowing how the naturalist thinks.
Mostly you're not protected from that. You bring it with you from high school,
for one thing. And for another thing, on the whole, here I think you're
presented with other points of view. It does mean that there's a serious effort
made in all that the college does to see what life means if Jesus Christ is the
center. And so, the Christian liberal arts college is a whole educational
process somehow touched by commitment to the things which seem most
fundamentally real.
Let me try one
more way to get at this here. If the naturalist is right then we're foolish to
pretend that he's not. If we think the naturalist is wrong then it would be
equally stupid for us to teach as though he were right. So, why shouldn't we
teach in line with what we think is most truly real.
Everybody does
this. They do it as a State campus. The difference often is that they don't
tell you what they are doing, and we do try to tell you what we're doing here.
But it's no use pretending that you can teach as though naturalism is true when
you don't believe it. You can't and it would be stupid if you could.
So, I'm
talking now about the Christian liberal arts college in terms of something
which happens to the whole program and not just the add on of a few superficial
requirements.
The Wholeness of Christian Education
Now I've tried to give you some general angles on what I
think is a Christian Liberal Arts College by discussing its educational aims,
by telling what it is clearly not, and how it is Christ centered.
But, I’m afraid that this is hard to get hold of. It’s hard to get hold of, because we are not used
to thinking about learning as a whole. We’re used to thinking about doing this specific
assignment We don’t even think about the course as a whole, not to mention
education as a whole. And we aren’t used
to thinking about our courses and subject matter as having to do with any particular
point of view, worldview, or philosophy of life.
What I’m trying to say is that one of the reasons for having
a Christian Liberal Arts College is so that we can see all of life and all of
learning as a unified whole from the standpoint of the
incarnation of Jesus Christ. A Christian Liberal Arts College is not just
trying to get people converted, or off the streets at 11:00. It is Christian insofar as the whole
educational program takes seriously the truths of Biblical revelation.
I never thought about this very much until about 3 or 4
years ago. John F Kennedy was running for president I came across a statement
by a Roman Catholic educator to the effect that, the parochial school -- (this
educator, who also happened to be a Catholic priest, is thinking of the Roman
Catholic School but I read it in the context of Greenville College, which also
is a parochial school) -- the parochial school does not really prepare people
to take their place in American life as a whole. Here’s what the man said:
I think John F. Kennedy would not have become president had
he received his formal education in Catholic schools, precisely because
Catholic schools are what they are.
Catholic schools do not train men and women to be leaders in our
society. They tend to separate, to
divorce men and women from our society.
Studies have shown that Catholic schools produce more loyal Catholics,
but not necessarily leaders in the society. I can readily believe that the
product of Catholic schools are better practicing Catholics. But this does not
seem to me to be the ultimate norm by which we should judge our church schools.
The degree to which they carry their religion into the world does seem closer
to the norm, and this is precisely where we fail. By segregating Catholic
youngsters from the rest of the world throughout the long years of their formal
education we are severely restricting the possibility of their effective
engagement in that world as Christian adults.[1]
Now that’s a very astonishing thing for a Roman Catholic
educator and priest to say. “Kennedy
wouldn’t have been elected president if he’d gone to a parochial school.” And, “the test by which we ought to judge our
church schools is the extent to which they prepare young people to carry their
faith into the world.” I like that
phrase very much and I’ve kind of borrowed it from this particular educator.
One of the things we hope the Christian Liberal Arts College
does is to help you carry your faith into
the world, help you take your place as a meaningful and useful member of
society, without giving up your faith, but rather because you know on what
grounds your faith rests, with some ability to carry your faith into the world
of unbelief. So, that may tie together
just a little bit what I’m trying to get across about the Christian Liberal
Arts College.
That's all for
this morning.
[1] Rev. Father J. Joyce, Editor of the “Oklahoma
Courier," official newspaper of the R.C. diocese of Oklahoma City-Tulsa.
Date unknown. Cited in transcript of Parliament of Australia, House of
Representatives Debate on Education, May 18, 1965.
http://historichansard.net/hofreps/1965/19650518_reps_25_hor46/
No comments:
Post a Comment