I'm excited about your book project, especially (so far) this particular part of it.
Some thoughts, questions, observations:
1. Can Christians agree that there's no monolithic Christian worldview, and that the best we have to work with is the speech and actions of Jesus? The phrase "Christian worldview" smacks of "our American way of life." If Christians can agree on Jesus as the lodestone, then the Christian worldview is found in the gospels--whether one believes that Jesus was the Christ or not, even if one doesn't accept the relationship of the Old to New testaments as "promises made and promises fulfilled."
A secular Jew can have a more articulate and accurate Christian worldview than a myopic Lutheran. We certainly can't craft a cogent Christian worldview out of the behavioral history of the church. Sectarianism shattered it, which is ironic given how Christianity began in the context of the most religiously tolerant empire on the planet. Harvard is better at fulfilling its originally Christian charge now than it was when it started, paradoxically because of how hands-off its curriculum is about Christianity, and it's better at fulfilling that charge than is Liberty University.
2. What were, historically, provably, Jesus's speeches and actions? It seems the church lives in constant denial of how canonization has worked to form the Christian worldview, so how does a Christian college provide an ingenuous curriculum toward a recognizable weltanschauung? I think one healthy step toward a pedagogy of the Christian worldview is to recognize that it's an argument, neither a presupposition nor a destination. What if we made every student enrolled in a Christian college learn exegetical Greek, then told them that was only the lingua franca and not the Coptic and Aramaic and Hebrew they really need before they say Anthony Fauci only has a "worldview" on epidemiology just like they do? An increase in humility over territorialism, perhaps?
Will a Christian university demand of any argument that it be both sound and valid, regardless of whatever side brings it? That's the obligation of higher education to facilitate. Or, will we continue to support tracts of contention and the goal of "winning" over other positions even within the shared faith, as you've rightly pointed out has been too often the message of the ostensible Christian worldview? I mean, whatever we do regarding those "New Age secularists" (an oxymoron Dockery doesn't realize any more than he realizes who E. Hemingway was), let's never give them a seat at the table, because as one of my former pastors once put it, "We don't need to know what they believe. We only need to know what we believe."
The laugh I get when conservative Christian college groomers accuse liberal secularist professors of being groomers is gallows humor. It's not satisfying.
3. As soon as Christian colleges start hiring agnostics, atheists, at the very minimum a few ecumenists and members of denominations not in the direct feed to their schools, I think we'll start making a little faster progress toward a pedagogy representing a/some Christian worldview(s). How often have you seen this happen? Enough to matter? Let's put a Catholic on the board of Point Loma Nazarene, just to keep everyone's historical and liturgical facts straight, and not a rich Catholic, either. Some Franciscan who still eats at a subsistence level and lives in a studio apartment. That'll infuse the baccalaureate in business management (as well as the board meetings) with some Christian worldview.
4. Christopher Hitchens and Bertrand Russell understood the Christian worldview in ways that James Dobson and Paula White do not. By "ways," I mean that Hitchens and Russell actually understood it, given that it's not a church-as-rock anymore but a backpack full of rocks. Teaching Russell and Hitchens honestly is good for the doubt/faith relationship. Teaching against them as savages coming to burn the temple plays right into the hands of higher education's detractors. That's why Hitchens won almost every argument he took up despite his often patronizing, snarky tone.
5. The rocks in a backpack full of rocks wear each other smooth and sometimes mesmerizingly beautiful--we might say in accord--if you carry that backpack for enough miles and let the rocks mingle and work on one another. They get all bloody and broken when you throw them at secularists one at a time, Old Testament style. That backpack analogy comes straight from Taoism. Taoism really gets at the Christian worldview in ways that make non-Emersonian non-Unitarians fidgety.
6. Existentialism is one of the best doors into understanding the Christian worldview through which I have ever walked. To personify it: It doesn't care what Christianity thinks of it (Dockery misreads Nietzsche as adopting a "purposeless" position); consequently, existentialism has no desire to prove religion right or wrong, and to prove it "bad" would contradict at least the Nietzschean ideal; as an epistemology of handling the temporal with the sense that the eternal is horrifyingly unknown, existentialism respects Jesus's life and works more than many Christian epistemologies do; and it teaches us humor against despair. Christians have the hardest time with a sense of humor that isn't at the expense of other belief systems--many of which are at the roots of Christianity. I also prefer Sartre's existentialism, along with Hawkeye Pierce's, to Nietzsche's.
Those Sumerians and Egyptians are every Christian's progenitors, not enemies, along with what happened at the Nicaean councils and in Nag Hammadi. An honest curriculum and pedagogy toward a Christian worldview should teach students how canonization works--not just tell them that canonization worked. It should teach what myth is (i.e. that it does not mean "lie") and the functions of archetypes and forms. I think it should engage with the historical legacy of images toward the formation of spiritual practices, before and sometimes apart from religious institutionalization. I love that passage you quoted from Berger.
A good archaeologist would probably say there's no "worldview" to archeology except the one the archaeology as a profession inherits from its collective findings and vets as a community of scholars. The Hippocratic oath exists in medicine because patient care doesn't work so well when it's based on contention and opportunism. Christian colleges ought to have a "do no harm" clause in their mission statements, and they ought to share it in some attempt to universalize their worldview, at least for the purpose of higher education.
7. As far a curriculum goes, I learned as much about the Christian worldview in my quite secular graduate studies and through my own reading than I did from the formalized bachelor's curriculum of a Christian college. Maybe instead of lamenting that or blaming life-long learners for it, Christian colleges should embrace the contexts of their texts. That's how gestalts form healthily, even zeitgeists, but certainly worldviews. The groups that isolate themselves from the world, the ones that fail to reconcile faith with claim-to-evidence positions, those are just cults.
If a Christian college could set aside its ideological presuppositions and not sequester empiricism in the sciences, that would be remarkable. Students can usually tell which professors have already done this, so I think the more significant institutional impediments are the upper administration, board, and church. Who forms the Christian worldview" is, I think, as relevant a question as "What is it?"
A truly liberal curriculum and pedagogy of openness to ideas and compassion for others' experiences would set it apart from the elitism in secular institutions that conservatives often cite, an elitism that is, ironically and often, far more conservative than it is liberal. Think of teaching economics as a faith text (because it is!) and then demanding a prima facie case for the presence of the Epistle to the Colossians in the New Testament. Then we could explain the interdisciplinary, inclusionary nature of higher education by reminding everyone that Middleton gave Shakespeare (maybe even the Earl of Oxford) the witches for Macbeth.
The collegiate articulation of a Christian worldview should be better than the land-grant institutional articulation of it. At least the members of a secular land-grant school should have gathered any supportable articulation of the Christian worldview from their theological peer institutions. Do you think that's the current situation?
I think the same things about the poststructuralist cult in academia, which ironically faces the same problem you're tackling--trying to fit a problematic set of faith premises into a framework of knowledge. Postructuralism is in my view a near total failure, mainly because humanities academics who have embraced poststructuralist critical "theory" as "what we do" have also, as a friend put it, "written themselves into irrelevance."
Christian colleges have long been enabled by the anti-intellectual faction of the nation that wants to see its decidedly non/anti-Christian ideology accepted as Christian. It seems to me that a Christian college's attempts at articulating a Christian worldview isn't up against the argument of its possibility. It's up against the manipulation of the Christian worldview into irrelevance by fundamentalists and opportunists, who will sabotage any premise that would establish a pedagogy their club would deny admission. Is it possible to do for the Christian worldview what John Dewey did for progressive pragmatism in education?
I'm excited about your book project, especially (so far) this particular part of it.
Some thoughts, questions, observations:
1. Can Christians agree that there's no monolithic Christian worldview, and that the best we have to work with is the speech and actions of Jesus? The phrase "Christian worldview" smacks of "our American way of life." If Christians can agree on Jesus as the lodestone, then the Christian worldview is found in the gospels--whether one believes that Jesus was the Christ or not, even if one doesn't accept the relationship of the Old to New testaments as "promises made and promises fulfilled."
A secular Jew can have a more articulate and accurate Christian worldview than a myopic Lutheran. We certainly can't craft a cogent Christian worldview out of the behavioral history of the church. Sectarianism shattered it, which is ironic given how Christianity began in the context of the most religiously tolerant empire on the planet. Harvard is better at fulfilling its originally Christian charge now than it was when it started, paradoxically because of how hands-off its curriculum is about Christianity, and it's better at fulfilling that charge than is Liberty University.
2. What were, historically, provably, Jesus's speeches and actions? It seems the church lives in constant denial of how canonization has worked to form the Christian worldview, so how does a Christian college provide an ingenuous curriculum toward a recognizable weltanschauung? I think one healthy step toward a pedagogy of the Christian worldview is to recognize that it's an argument, neither a presupposition nor a destination. What if we made every student enrolled in a Christian college learn exegetical Greek, then told them that was only the lingua franca and not the Coptic and Aramaic and Hebrew they really need before they say Anthony Fauci only has a "worldview" on epidemiology just like they do? An increase in humility over territorialism, perhaps?
Will a Christian university demand of any argument that it be both sound and valid, regardless of whatever side brings it? That's the obligation of higher education to facilitate. Or, will we continue to support tracts of contention and the goal of "winning" over other positions even within the shared faith, as you've rightly pointed out has been too often the message of the ostensible Christian worldview? I mean, whatever we do regarding those "New Age secularists" (an oxymoron Dockery doesn't realize any more than he realizes who E. Hemingway was), let's never give them a seat at the table, because as one of my former pastors once put it, "We don't need to know what they believe. We only need to know what we believe."
The laugh I get when conservative Christian college groomers accuse liberal secularist professors of being groomers is gallows humor. It's not satisfying.
3. As soon as Christian colleges start hiring agnostics, atheists, at the very minimum a few ecumenists and members of denominations not in the direct feed to their schools, I think we'll start making a little faster progress toward a pedagogy representing a/some Christian worldview(s). How often have you seen this happen? Enough to matter? Let's put a Catholic on the board of Point Loma Nazarene, just to keep everyone's historical and liturgical facts straight, and not a rich Catholic, either. Some Franciscan who still eats at a subsistence level and lives in a studio apartment. That'll infuse the baccalaureate in business management (as well as the board meetings) with some Christian worldview.
4. Christopher Hitchens and Bertrand Russell understood the Christian worldview in ways that James Dobson and Paula White do not. By "ways," I mean that Hitchens and Russell actually understood it, given that it's not a church-as-rock anymore but a backpack full of rocks. Teaching Russell and Hitchens honestly is good for the doubt/faith relationship. Teaching against them as savages coming to burn the temple plays right into the hands of higher education's detractors. That's why Hitchens won almost every argument he took up despite his often patronizing, snarky tone.
5. The rocks in a backpack full of rocks wear each other smooth and sometimes mesmerizingly beautiful--we might say in accord--if you carry that backpack for enough miles and let the rocks mingle and work on one another. They get all bloody and broken when you throw them at secularists one at a time, Old Testament style. That backpack analogy comes straight from Taoism. Taoism really gets at the Christian worldview in ways that make non-Emersonian non-Unitarians fidgety.
6. Existentialism is one of the best doors into understanding the Christian worldview through which I have ever walked. To personify it: It doesn't care what Christianity thinks of it (Dockery misreads Nietzsche as adopting a "purposeless" position); consequently, existentialism has no desire to prove religion right or wrong, and to prove it "bad" would contradict at least the Nietzschean ideal; as an epistemology of handling the temporal with the sense that the eternal is horrifyingly unknown, existentialism respects Jesus's life and works more than many Christian epistemologies do; and it teaches us humor against despair. Christians have the hardest time with a sense of humor that isn't at the expense of other belief systems--many of which are at the roots of Christianity. I also prefer Sartre's existentialism, along with Hawkeye Pierce's, to Nietzsche's.
Those Sumerians and Egyptians are every Christian's progenitors, not enemies, along with what happened at the Nicaean councils and in Nag Hammadi. An honest curriculum and pedagogy toward a Christian worldview should teach students how canonization works--not just tell them that canonization worked. It should teach what myth is (i.e. that it does not mean "lie") and the functions of archetypes and forms. I think it should engage with the historical legacy of images toward the formation of spiritual practices, before and sometimes apart from religious institutionalization. I love that passage you quoted from Berger.
A good archaeologist would probably say there's no "worldview" to archeology except the one the archaeology as a profession inherits from its collective findings and vets as a community of scholars. The Hippocratic oath exists in medicine because patient care doesn't work so well when it's based on contention and opportunism. Christian colleges ought to have a "do no harm" clause in their mission statements, and they ought to share it in some attempt to universalize their worldview, at least for the purpose of higher education.
7. As far a curriculum goes, I learned as much about the Christian worldview in my quite secular graduate studies and through my own reading than I did from the formalized bachelor's curriculum of a Christian college. Maybe instead of lamenting that or blaming life-long learners for it, Christian colleges should embrace the contexts of their texts. That's how gestalts form healthily, even zeitgeists, but certainly worldviews. The groups that isolate themselves from the world, the ones that fail to reconcile faith with claim-to-evidence positions, those are just cults.
If a Christian college could set aside its ideological presuppositions and not sequester empiricism in the sciences, that would be remarkable. Students can usually tell which professors have already done this, so I think the more significant institutional impediments are the upper administration, board, and church. Who forms the Christian worldview" is, I think, as relevant a question as "What is it?"
A truly liberal curriculum and pedagogy of openness to ideas and compassion for others' experiences would set it apart from the elitism in secular institutions that conservatives often cite, an elitism that is, ironically and often, far more conservative than it is liberal. Think of teaching economics as a faith text (because it is!) and then demanding a prima facie case for the presence of the Epistle to the Colossians in the New Testament. Then we could explain the interdisciplinary, inclusionary nature of higher education by reminding everyone that Middleton gave Shakespeare (maybe even the Earl of Oxford) the witches for Macbeth.
The collegiate articulation of a Christian worldview should be better than the land-grant institutional articulation of it. At least the members of a secular land-grant school should have gathered any supportable articulation of the Christian worldview from their theological peer institutions. Do you think that's the current situation?
I think the same things about the poststructuralist cult in academia, which ironically faces the same problem you're tackling--trying to fit a problematic set of faith premises into a framework of knowledge. Postructuralism is in my view a near total failure, mainly because humanities academics who have embraced poststructuralist critical "theory" as "what we do" have also, as a friend put it, "written themselves into irrelevance."
Christian colleges have long been enabled by the anti-intellectual faction of the nation that wants to see its decidedly non/anti-Christian ideology accepted as Christian. It seems to me that a Christian college's attempts at articulating a Christian worldview isn't up against the argument of its possibility. It's up against the manipulation of the Christian worldview into irrelevance by fundamentalists and opportunists, who will sabotage any premise that would establish a pedagogy their club would deny admission. Is it possible to do for the Christian worldview what John Dewey did for progressive pragmatism in education?