The Fearless Christian University: How Should We Then Learn?

On Building a Robust and Holistic Faith

One of my projects this spring is serving as a “disciplinary mentor” for Seattle Pacific sociologist Jennifer McKinney¹ as she works through a capstone course on theology and academic disciplines at the SPU seminary. We’re reading some books in common and talking every couple of weeks. I’ll probably wind up providing comments on her paper “integrating” theology and sociology (air quotes because it’s the wrong verb — more below).

Our call this week² followed a pretty meandering path, from sharing background stories to discussing books (including my previous one), to the struggles of Christian Higher Education. Even though I’m supposed to be the mentor, I shared my frustration with my on-going Fearless Christian University book project. I pondered whether anyone would care or if it’s still possible to adjust the current trajectory of Christian Universities. Not to get too spiritual here, but it felt like Jennifer “spoke a word” about my project and why it was important.

As soon as I got home, I finished the third chapter I’d been sitting on for a couple of months.

I’ve been using this newsletter to workshop the ideas in this chapter (the title of this newsletter is the chapter title). The first part of the chapter critiques the limitations of Christian Worldview language as the pedagogical goal for a Christian University. I wrote about this late last year. In contrast to the Worldview language, I turned to Peter Berger’s idea of “plausibility structures” and argue that Christian college students need a more robust cognitive system that will serve them long beyond their time in college. I shorthand this goal as “anticipatory deconstruction”, allowing students to become somewhat inoculated about the deconstructive crises that have hobbled many Christian university alums a decade after graduation. In February, I played around with different ways of reconceptualizing the “integration of faith and learning” phrase made so popular by the Council for Christian Colleges and Universities. While I wasn’t happy with my formulation, I suggested :

So we need a better way to think about the connection. Neither of these ideas are great, but my current working options include “faith-infused learning” or “academically informed spiritual development”. I prefer the latter but I’m the first to admit that it’s very clunky. But it will do for now.

Reader reactions were not enthusiastic about either of these options. Neither was I.

Faith and Learning are not two things that need to be brought together. They are only one thing when seen from the perspective of the student’s plausibility structure or cognitive schema. If the Christian University has the goal of students being Christian voices in the larger world, to act as Ambassadors, then those students need a complex holistic faith that is build from the totality of their life experiences. Here’s how I put it in the chapter:

Each conversation with a new roommate, every job internship, a new class outside one’s normal studies, family life changes through divorce or death of loved one, graduation, finding oneself in a new city at a brand new job, getting married, and having children will cause the faith to be re-formed in significant fashion. The Christian University is hewing to its mission when these changes deepen the faith of its students.

I recently read Pete Enns’ Curveball: When Your Faith Takes Turns You Never Saw Coming (or, How I Stumbled andTripped My Way to Finding a Bigger God). In this excellent and personal book, Pete shares how various things he’s learned have forced him to re-examine his faith. One of his chapters deals with how the vastness of the universe required him to rethink his person-and-earth centered ideas about God.

This image from the Webb Telescope is called SMAC 0723.³ Four billion light years away, it shows five different galaxies with countless stars that make them up.

How does such an image call for a change in faith? Some might opt to bifurcate their reality⁴ but a mature and deep faith cannot do that. Enns writes:

In our time, our understanding of the world and the universe has changed more dramatically and more quickly than at any other time in human history. Such rapid changes can understandably make us feel nervous and want to cling more tightly to familiar ways of thinking about God. But it is precisely because of these rapid and fundamental changes to our understanding of reality that I feel I need to adjust my understanding of God to keep pace.

Pete not only considers the vast incomprehensibility of the galaxies. He has a chapter exploring the Ant Man-like world⁵ of quantum mechanics. Considering both orbiting heavenly bodies and the relationship between protons, he concludes:

A God who encompasses the infinitely large and infinitely small must truly be Spirit – though even that image might suggest an “entity” floating about. As Spirit, it seems to me, God is not simply a big “thing” that is everywhere at once, but woven in and through all of reality – all matter. The best way for me to think about God at the moment is as vibrantly, energetically present in creation, from the inside out.

What results is a faith built upon the first chapter of Colossians, where we are reminded that all that there is was created by God in Jesus, made for him (and therefore for us) and all of it is held together by the Holy Trinity.

I don’t expect an 18-22 year old student to manage the kind of reconceptualization that Pete Enns does. He’s had a longer time to work on this. But I do expect that Christian Universities should focus all of their energies on creating an environment where the students will work out their own solutions. Here is how I end the chapter:

From the time a student is being recruited, she should be aware that her faith will be tested, refined, and developed. Chapel addresses will expose students to thinkers that push their current limits rather than affirm their priors. Guest lectures will invite notable alumni, not just to talk about their current work or to reminisce about their happy college days, but to give testimony to their real faith struggles as they moved beyond the university. Faculty members will share their own journeys of the challenges presented by their subject material and how they reconciled those challenges in a deepened faith. Administrators will celebrate the uncertainties of the contemporary culture and show how faith can incorporate those uncertainties rather than simply denouncing them. Trustees will celebrate the journeys students are on and provide funding for the new experiences that will test the students’ faith to make it stronger. Graduation will literally be a pause in the journey, celebrating the faith that has been nurtured so far and affirming the presence of the skills and aptitudes that will carry the graduates into an unknown future.

This is the central task of the Christian University – to allow students to nurture a holistic faith that uses all of life’s experiences – in the classroom, in the dorm room, in chapel, at the internship, when studying abroad – to build a relational model where “everything is held together”.

So thanks to Jennifer and all those who have reacted to the earlier newsletters. I’m so encouraged that I’ve begun drafting submission documents for potential publishers!

1. I wrote last month about Jennifer’s excellent book on Mark Driscoll and what happened at Mars Hill.

2. Done while I was picking up my granddaughter from school.

3. Fun fact — an earlier, less sharp, view of this set of galaxies shows up in the beginning of It’s a Wonderful Life and the celestial bodies are deciding to send Clarence to stop George Bailey from committing suicide.

4. Which seems like a standard hazard for the ‘integration of faith and learning” method

5. Okay, he doesn’t reference Ant Man in his chapter, but he should have.