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Conclusion:
Church, Culture, and Baptist Higher Education
David P. Gushee, Union University
My reading of the thoughtful papers gathered in this volume suggests the
following organizational plan for this concluding essay:
(a) comments on the participants and their vision;
(b) reflections on the theology of culture and church;
(c) musings on the implications of such a theology for the Christian (and Baptist)
relationship to higher education.
In each section, I will draw upon key themes of the essays in this volume while offering
my own critical engagement.
a. Who are the Young Baptist Scholars?
The occasion for these papers was a conference about the future of Baptist higher
education, or at least, about the future of Baptists who serve in higher education. About a
dozen younger American scholars, all Baptists with southern connections and serving in
southern contexts,1 headed across the Atlantic in summer 2005 to the rarefied air of
literally ivy-covered Regent’s Park College, Oxford University, to meet with Principal
Paul Fiddes and reflect on the scholarly life. And the effort was considered significant
enough that the Lilly Endowment and the Baylor Institute for Faith and Learning thought
The scholars whose work is gathered in this volume could be described in most cases as “southern
Baptists” rather than “Southern Baptists,” and that is how I will label them here. Representing more than
just the ten scholars whose work is gathered here, they are Baptists, usually from the southern United
States, raised in Southern Baptist churches, and serving in the southern United States. But most do not now
readily identify with the denomination called the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC), and none serve
official agencies of the SBC. This complex reality reflects the fractured nature of the SBC and will receive
further comment later in this essay. Note: I speak primarily in this essay as an invited observer rather than a
“young Baptist scholar,” a label that sadly no longer applies to me!
1
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it was worth funding. Somebody must have thought that something important would
happen. And I think that it did.
I want to think first about the persons who were at this event, and then about the
paths they have taken, the intellectual currents in which they are swimming, and what
that says about the future of the Baptist academy.
My first observation: younger southern Baptist scholars are not confining their
education to southern Baptist schools. Not long ago it was quite common for leading
Southern Baptists to have vitas that looked like this: B.A., Samford University; M.Div,
Ph.D, Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. Or: B.A., Hardin Simmons; M.Div., Ph.D,
Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary. Then our proverbial scholars moved directly
onto the faculty at Samford or Baylor, Wake Forest or Mississippi College, Southern or
Southwestern, and the rest of their lives were spent there. These Southern Baptist
scholars published, if they published, in the Review and Expositor, Baptist Sunday
School Board quarterlies, and Broadman Press. The religion teachers preached 40 weeks
a year in the churches. They were considered highly respected intellectuals in Southern
Baptist life, our best and brightest.
The problem was that these men (and they were almost exclusively men) were
usually only considered highly respected intellectuals precisely there, in Southern Baptist
life. Those who highly respected them, and often these men themselves, sometimes did
not seem to know that the great Southern Baptist enclave was not the only or even the
most important religious community in the world, and that an entire world of nonSouthern Baptist scholarly activity awaited their engagement. Some did know about the
rest of the intellectual world and strove mightily to enter the citadels of the American
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Academy of Religion and the Society for Biblical Literature, of Yale and Harvard, but
often they lacked the ability to break through. For that matter, sometimes they had the
ability but lacked the opportunity because of elitist bias against supposedly backwoods
Southern Baptists. The parochialism went both ways.
Today the kinds of men and women who are entering Baptist higher education at
least at the level entertained at this event are receiving their advanced degrees from those
very unassailable citadels. Among the schools represented by the group present at Oxford
were Duke, Notre Dame, Yale, Union Seminary (NY), Vanderbilt, Princeton, and Penn
State. For a variety of reasons, not the least of which is their talent and determination,
younger Baptist scholars have broken through to America’s elite institutions. Many have
returned to serve in Baptist institutions, but they have done so after receiving critical
exposure to, and credentialing in, America’s elite schools.
It is hard to know what the long term effect of this training is going to be for the
younger Baptist scholars. I would project it will mean at least the following:
(1) They will bring the demanding academic standards they learned in elite graduate
schools into their classrooms at places like Campbell, Missouri Baptist, and
Georgetown, raising the intellectual temperature dramatically.
(2) They will bring their wide reading far beyond the Baptist subculture into the
classrooms of their places of service, and require this work of their students.
(3) They will not accept administrative or church pressure to lower either their
intellectual standards or the breadth of their assigned readings.
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(4) They will be impatient with parochial intellectual battles which are far away from
where the major struggles are being fought in contemporary culture and church
life (e.g., the Calvinism/Arminianism debate, which still burns hot in my world).
(5) They will need a context in which there is space for intellectual reflection and
conversation. Schools requiring 27 hours teaching a year will not keep them
happy.
(6) They will want to publish and will require institutions that honor and value such
publishing by providing time and space and support for it.
(7) They will increasingly identify their aspirations with those of the intellectual
leaders who taught them in graduate school: among these are discipline-changing
articles and books, lecture bookings and conference experiences around the nation
and the world, and a place at the table among the leaders of their disciplines.
(8) They will mentor their best students to pursue similar dreams and life-trajectories
and will send more and more of such students out to similar venues, thus
intensifying the trends identified here in the next generation.
Whether or not the needs of scholars such as these will be met by Baptist university
administrators, church constituencies, alumni, and other constituencies is uncertain. It is
hard to envision the relatively small, tuition-driven institutions at which most of us teach
committing the resources to sustain this kind of scholarly life—though, as with any other
issue in life, we put our money where our priorities are, and some Baptist colleges might
choose to put their money into such scholarly development. The outcome of this question
will go a long way toward determining whether or not Baptist universities will continue
to be enriched by such scholars or whether the latter will seek more hospitable climes.
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My second observation: these younger Baptist scholars are tending to choose
elite universities and divinity schools that have not gone over to a total rejection of the
premises of the Christian faith and of the young scholars who still believe it. Instead, they
are being trained in a kind of postmodern traditionalism.
To illustrate this point, I want to focus on the prevalence of Duke, Notre Dame,
and Yale degrees in this group of scholars.
The contemporary elite divinity school scene is divided between schools in which
seriously believing, traditional, Trinitarian Christians face scorn and rejection and others
in which they do not. The former tend to be in the grip of theologically liberal or
politically radical Christian approaches, have moved to a post-Christian “religious
studies” model, or somehow combine elements of all of these approaches. The latter vary,
but in one way or another have remained a hospitable place for believing scholars to
study. Among the elite schools with the best reputation for being willing to welcome
serious Christians are Duke, Notre Dame, and Yale. And these are the schools that so
many of the younger Baptist scholars are attending. I cannot say that I understand all the
reasons for this, but perhaps they include the towering and intoxicating presence of
Stanley Hauerwas at Duke, the sturdy and invigorating Catholic/ecumenical intellectual
tradition at Notre Dame (with Alasdair MacIntyre a major figure in recent decades), and
the theologically oriented postliberalism of H.R. Niebuhr’s, and George Lindbeck’s, Yale
Divinity School.
The overall tenor of the papers here clearly reflects the strong and overlapping
influence of the prevailing moral visions at Duke, Notre Dame, and Yale, with a recent
assist from John Milbank’s radical orthodoxy. The hallmarks of these approaches include
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a methodology reflecting considerable philosophical and theological rigor, a strong trend
toward the retrieval of both classical and historic Christian tradition (and an emphasis on
the nature of tradition itself), at times a near-dissolving of the significance of the
Protestant-Catholic boundary line in favor of the consensus Great Tradition of the Church
(a trend that bewilders and infuriates many southern Baptists, both moderate and
conservative), an emphasis on community and especially ecclesiology, a focus in ethics
on character and the virtues, and at times a strongly and defiantly countercultural spirit.
Also included in this “new traditionalism” is a thoroughgoing rejection of theological,
philosophical, political, and economic liberalism, of state violence, globalized capitalism,
and western/American imperialism.
It is perhaps unsurprising that these “hot” trends in intellectual life would be
apparent among our younger Baptist scholars, and not just because they are “hot” and our
younger scholars have more recently passed through graduate school. They are Baptists,
after all, so they would be naturally inclined both to go to schools where the Christian
faith is still believed and to relate well to scholars who defend a robust version of that
faith from its cultured despisers. They would be even less interested than most young
scholars in a watery post-Christian liberalism/secularism in theological studies. But
interest in the cluster of concerns just outlined extends far beyond the Baptist or even
evangelical world. It has become the dominant trend in theological studies today.
I think that, despite its manifest brilliance and its clear superiority to many current
alternatives on the religious scene, the neo-traditionalist theological vision lacks some of
the ingredients necessary to sustain a healthy and constructive Christian intellectual life
in the 21st century. It therefore offers part of the answer, not all of the answer, for how
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Baptist scholars should engage church, culture, and higher education. My reasons for this
judgment can be found primarily in the next section of this essay, where I will begin to
engage directly the papers in this collection.
b. Theologies of Culture and Church
It turns out to be impossible to think well about Baptist higher education and the
scholarly vocation without some searching theological reflection on the relationship of
church and culture, or more particularly on the societies and churches within which
Christians (including Baptists) undertake higher education. Much of the literature that
focuses on Christian higher education per se lacks such far-reaching reflection. This
volume, however, in its opening two essays by Paul Fiddes and Barry Harvey, joins the
key issues at once. The issues raised there are worth engaging with some care.
A simple way to frame the issue might be to consider four related questions:
(1) what is culture?
(2) what is the church?
(3) what is the relationship between God and culture?
(4) what is the relationship between the church and culture?
Paul Fiddes, writing from a British setting and influenced deeply by the theology
of Karl Barth, suggests that culture is “the whole way of life of a people,” especially “the
meaning-dimension of social practices.” He also makes (critical but respectful) use of
Matthew Arnold’s definition of culture as “the best that has been thought and said in the
world,” with its implicit celebration of the “high culture” of the arts and higher learning,
and its quest to develop “cultured” persons who pursue enlightenment, self-perfection,
nobility, and the elevation of human existence by the wide diffusion of such virtues.
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Fiddes moves on to define the church in classic Baptist terms as a covenant
community drawn together by Christ and living in submission to his rule. In response to
the initiative of the Triune God to reach out to humanity in covenant-making love, the
church lives in “holy covenant” with God (the vertical dimension) and with one another
(the horizontal dimension). The church is a community seeking to live in faithfulness
under the rule of Christ rather than any earthly ruler. The means by which the gathered
community seeks to do this is through conscious and avowed commitment to living under
Christ’s rule, informed by the study of Scripture and by the everyday discernment
processes of the “church meeting” (gathered community) itself as, trusting God and each
other, it faces new challenges.
Fiddes goes on to argue that both culture and church exist in relation to a
covenant-making God. The church is not the world, but neither should it be viewed as an
“alternative social world,” and it especially should not be viewed as the only participant
in human communion with God. Theologically, this is true because both church and
culture stand in relation to God through covenant, both are affected by the universality of
sin, and both experience “the free operation of God’s grace.” Christians are those who
live consciously within the covenant and deliberately within the story told in the Bible, as
through their practices of worship, but culture also can bear revelatory witness to the
promise of God and also can give evidence of God’s mysterious and dynamic
relationship to, and love for, human beings. The church relates to culture knowing that
the latter is not bereft of God’s loving presence; and the goals and achievements of
culture can signify the deeper eschatological purposes of God in the world while always
falling short of fulfilling them.
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This vision of culture shapes how Fiddes describes the church’s relationship to
culture. The church should be open to “cultural elements of all kinds,” and in fact
borrows such cultural materials constantly, making distinctive use of them from within its
own narrative framework and with openness to learning from them more fully “what its
own story means.” It does not “pretend that [it] live[s] in isolation in a self-contained and
self-sufficient culture” of its own. Instead it learns from culture, shares cultural elements
with other cultures around it, and in an open spirit approaches culture with “dialogical
vulnerability”—that is, it listens rather than merely talks to culture. The church is a
community of resident aliens in the world but the resident must be emphasized as much
as the aliens. The church looks for the ways in which God relates covenantally to all
human beings and acknowledges signs of that relationship where it finds them. The
church lives in constant negotiations with other cultures, and its borders are open, not
excluding other cultures. In fact, there are no sure boundaries because “different social
spaces overlap” at all times and “there are no absolute breaks in social interaction
between groups.” The church is described by Fiddes as a sub-culture among other
cultures, “all sharing certain elements and using them in their own style.” The talk of
borders is turned by Fiddes to emphasize the way borders connect contiguous entities
rather than the way they divide them or seal them off from each other. The church relates
in a “relaxed,” open manner to a pluralistic world it is not seeking to control but trusts
God to govern, just as God relates to the world in loving persuasion rather than coercion.
Barry Harvey, writing from the Texas Baptist context of Baylor University and
apparently influenced most deeply by the radical orthodoxy and Christian virtue ethics of
John Milbank and Stanley Hauerwas, respectively, tends to use the term “society” as his
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central label for “culture” or “world.” He then implicitly defines society as the prevailing
configuration of power in a given community, the “social order” that defines reality and
structures economic, political, and familial relations--a social order reinforced constantly
through various mechanisms of socialization, including education, and ultimately
vouchsafed by the violence of the state. Harvey defines our current society or regime as
dominated by “liberal capitalism,” an economic system whose technicians train us to be
“self-interested consumer[s] of goods and services,” with the state playing a role
primarily of “arbitrating between competing interests” in this now globalizing liberal
capitalist regime.
Following a particular reading of Augustine’s City of God, Harvey goes on to
identify society and, presumably, culture, with the “earthly city” which seeks (at best) a
kind of earthly peace as it adjudicates various struggles for mastery and control over
mortal goods such as “what we shall eat, what we shall drink, what we shall wear.”
Society in its current configuration, then, devotes itself to “the maintenance and
refinement of those customs, laws, and institutions that order life within the regime of
liberal capitalism.” This includes the use of higher education to produce skilled young
cogs that can fit comfortably into the “slots” of this regime as it pursues “the earthly
city’s idolatrous configuration of the common good: security, wealth, and the opportunity
to generate more of both.”
For Harvey, what the church is and what it too often becomes must be clearly
differentiated. All too often, the church becomes a mere “function of society,” with
society understood as just defined. This means that the church merely comes to serve the
“practices, institutions, and goals that determine the possibilities for everyday life” within
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liberal capitalism. It is a “sub-system” of the society, “fully and inextricably invested in
the process of making ‘normal citizens’ fit for the present order of things.” This is a
domesticated church, house pet to the liberal capitalist regime and the states that support
it as these now dominate life in the civitas terrena.
What the church is, however, is “a kind of society in its own right.” It is that
community that believes that God has intruded into the world in the messianic reign of
Jesus Christ. This reign disrupts all regimes and reorganizes human existence around a
new set of loyalties and loves. The church is indeed an alternative community, one whose
attention is fixed on the goods (and the Good) prescribed for it in Jesus Christ, most
fundamentally “the perfectly ordered and perfectly harmonious fellowship in the
enjoyment of God and of one another in God.” The church is an “alternative regime of
life and language” whose life centers in worship and whose politics is embodied in its
liturgical practices.
It is hard to see any significant way in which society as defined by Harvey stands
in any relation to God other than that of judgment. Pursuing as it does different goods,
operating as it does on the basis of a different faith, different hope, and different love, and
currently under the domination of a morally devastating liberal capitalist regime that
exploits poor nations and individuals, society stands in stark tension both with God and
with that community of people who seek (constitute? embody?) the “heavenly city” and
the reign of God. “On pilgrimage in this world,” the most the church can do in relation to
culture is to offer limited cooperation in “obtaining those things that belong to the mortal
nature of human beings”—insofar as such cooperation does not threaten our obedience to
God. Given the particular nature of liberal capitalism, with its rapacious consumerism,
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and the modern nation-state, with its violent underwriting of such consumerism, the
church can only understand itself in relation to such a culture as a radical oppositional
community with an alternative politics. The church stands “against the nations” as a
community of protest and resistance.2
As I turn to critical engagement I must acknowledge my instinctive tendency to
favor the conception of culture, church, and their interrelationship offered by Paul Fiddes
rather than Barry Harvey, though both are cogently articulated, both contain significant
insights, and though at a different stage of my career I was much more attracted to the
vision Harvey articulates. Which of us fully understands the ultimate sources of our
intellectual inclinations, or how they develop over time? Undoubtedly personal
experiences are relevant, in my case the situation of growing up in northern Virginia
under the tutelage of a father who worked in environmental policy analysis for the federal
government and brought home stories of his involvement in meaningful struggles related
to public policy formation. I learned at his feet that policy choices on such issues as
poverty or the environment matter greatly, that thoughtful women and men engage such
issues with their best efforts, and that many do so from an explicitly moral, and even
religio-moral, foundation. One might say that I learned to be for, rather than against, the
nation in which I lived.
I was also trained in the Christian social ethics tradition of Reinhold Niebuhr, and
was strongly influenced by such American social thinkers as Walter Rauschenbusch,
Martin Luther King, Jr., and my own teacher Glen H. Stassen. I read each of these
authors as articulating and embodying a form of cultural engagement driven by Christian
2
The reference is to Stanley Hauerwas, Against the Nations: War and Survival in a Liberal Society (South
Bend: Univ. of Notre Dame Press, 1992).
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principles (as they understood them) but committed to concrete participation in the affairs
of the earthly city. Rauschenbusch’s Social Gospel movement (despite its confused
eschatology) contributed to amelioration of the injustices of laissez-faire capitalism in the
early 20th century, Niebuhr helped to shape the self-critical exercise of American power
during and after World War II, King, of course, led a movement that changed the legal
and social relationship between white and black Americans in the 1950s and 1960s, and
Stassen has forged a just peacemaking theory that has contributed to the nonviolent
resolution of civil and international conflicts. These men, all heroes for me, understood
the Christian task in the world to be social engagement with, or, better, social
transformation of, their cultures through the resources offered by the Christian faith. They
were all churchmen, but they mainly looked outward from the church to the culture rather
than turning inward, against the culture to the church. They were angered by what was
unjust in the culture but they engaged in strenuous efforts to correct such injustices, in the
name of Christ—and they were convinced that such change was possible. I guess this
means that, to draw on but adapt Barry Harvey’s categorization, my moral teachers tend
to be, not conservatives who happily reify the structures of an unjust society, and not
(separatist) radicals who attempt to carve out an alternative counter-society in the church,
but transformationists (what Harvey calls liberals) who are “governed by an irresistible
impulse to tinker” with a society they view as flawed but reformable. And yet I would
have to consider the reforms initiated by such activist groups as were found in the Social
Gospel Movement and the Civil Rights Movement and the Just Peacemaking Movement
as far more than tinkering, and never to be dismissed as merely “liberal.”
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Perhaps it is this experiential and educational pilgrimage that makes it intuitively
difficult for me to accept the unremittingly grim view of culture posited in the essay by
Barry Harvey, and in what Jeffrey Stout has called the “new traditionalism” of John
Milbank, Alasdair MacIntyre, and Stanley Hauerwas that lies behind it. But I think there
are substantive theological and ethical reasons for rejecting such a view. Perhaps most
significant is Fiddes’ basic claim that Scripture clearly teaches a God who relates
covenantally to all human beings, indeed, all flesh, and the entire created order (Gen. 9).
Society, under any regime, is clearly fallen, deeply flawed, and destructive; but it is not
bereft of God and cannot be defined simply as idolatrous. The neo-traditionalist theology
of culture seems to see only the fallenness of the world and the absence of God, whereas
a covenantal theology sees the world-being-redeemed and the presence of God. Our goal
should be balance at this point, both/and rather than either/or.
The dark picture of culture/society/world offered by neo-traditionalists is matched
by an equally vivid depiction of the grandeur of the obedient church, busy about its
distinctive worship and other aspects of its alternative existence in radical opposition to
society. It is hard to know where one might find such a church today, though perhaps it
exists in pockets; but it is not surprising that the neo-traditionalists consciously hearken
back to premodern traditions and religious communities, as Stout points out. Sometimes
it is the earliest, pre-Nicene, martyred church that seems the model, and neo-traditionalist
authors seem ready for a new round of martyrdoms. Other times it is located in the
Middle Ages, with neo-traditionalist authors yearning for the golden age of a triumphant
Christendom. It is not hard to see in this valorization of the past a tendency toward the
nostalgic romanticization of an era, or eras, that would not perhaps look so good on
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closer inspection. At a more practical level, it also reflects, and contributes to, despair
about 99.9% of the actual churches that one can find in any community in the western
world today. In this light, the more modest vision Fiddes suggests--the church as a
covenant community seeking to serve the Lord Jesus Christ faithfully through an ongoing
improvisational process of negotiation and study--seems both fully biblical and also
much more realistic about the actual experience of church life in any recognizable
contemporary setting. And both visions could be enriched by an emphasis on the concrete
engagement of the church with social change efforts in the culture.
These comments inevitably prefigure my position on the issue of the relation
between culture and church. I concur with Fiddes in his reading of Augustine that the
City of God and the Earthly City constantly mingle and interact, that they share the same
social space, that they interpenetrate each other—and that “the heavenly city” cannot be
equated with the church. I also find much more congenial and biblical the greater
openness to signs of God’s presence in the affairs of the world rather than the tendency to
ascribe idolatry and the lust for domination to all that goes on there and leave it at that.
Fiddes’ stance produces a greater humility about the church and a greater receptivity to
the traces of God’s grace that can be seen in the world, both of which, I think, are
important Christian virtues—while also fitting better with the reality of both world and
church as we experience them.
Neo-traditionalism, with its relentless criticism of modernity, liberalism,
capitalism, and even democracy itself, can sap the motivation to engage in constructive
and concrete ethical engagement with these significant elements of contemporary society.
It sounds as if Christian people must simply write off contemporary society and withdraw
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into their enclave. If, as Harvey suggests, there is no meaningful difference between the
social vision of Jim Dobson and Jim Wallis (just to identify the poles of evangelical
public debate), or of Republicans and Democrats, of George W. and Al Gore, why vote?
Why read the newspaper? Why bother to press for legislation of a certain type rather than
another type (pro-business or pro-environment, pro-rich 1% or pro-poor 25%, promilitarism or pro-multilateral peacemaking, pro-torture or anti-torture, more money for
agriculture subsidies or more for AIDS relief in Africa), or seek political leaders of one
type of vision rather than another (consensus-builders or demagogues, statesmen or
partisan hacks, thoughtful or incurious, corrupt or honest)? While action in the world
based on this kind of reflection certainly does not exhaust Christian moral responsibility,
surely it is part of it. And yet one could read the neo-traditionalists to say that this kind of
engagement is ruled out for citizens of the heavenly city, “which is not to concern itself
with the laws, customs, and institutions of the earthly city.” Stout is correct that such a
stance tends to “actively foster alienation from the citizenry’s public discussion of ethical
issues,”3 which is both bad for the culture and, in my view, irresponsible on the part of
the church.
It is tempting to speculate on why neo-traditionalism has become such a powerful
intellectual force in our time. Surely it has to do with the charisma and articulateness of
its proponents. It also flows from very legitimate concerns related to the numerous
casualties of global capitalism, the constant resort to force by the United States
government over the past few decades, the comfortable marriage of conservative religion
and conservative politics in our nation, the miserable state of our political discourse, the
obvious domestication of many Christians and Christian institutions to the way of life
3
Jeffrey Stout, Democracy and Tradition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), p. 12.
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offered by liberal capitalism. It is clearly a reaction to the versions of liberalism and
secularism put forward by such influential philosophers as John Rawls and Richard
Rorty, which so marginalize the perspectives of people of faith. One wonders if it has
also been generated by the strange whiplash effect created by and in a culture that is
simultaneously formerly Christian (WASP Establishment America), aggressively antiChristian (secular university America), culturally bathed in Christianity (megachurch
America), and seductively alluring to Christians (consumerist/sexualized America).
In any case, under these conditions it is perhaps not surprising that such a cultural
and religious context would produce trenchant critique from a stringent, even radical,
Christian perspective. This radical perspective has done much to retrieve classic
Christianity, restore the church to the center of Christian ethics, attend to the moral
significance of character, virtue, and practices, and free up the church from a wimpy
capitulation to modernity and mass culture. But the evolution of such critique into an
angry, even contemptuous rejection of liberal political theory, democracy, and capitalism
seems to me to be a profound overreaction, and the theological basis offered for it to
involve significant distortions of biblical faith. It ends up asking serious Christians to take
the same stance toward liberal democratic society as is taken by (nonviolent)
fundamentalist Muslims—to assume irreconcilability and peaceably withdraw into one’s
religious enclave.
The way in which one comes down on this cluster of questions related to culture,
church, and their relationship will prove significant for all Christian engagement with the
world, including higher education. The implications of the “covenantal” (Fiddes),
reformist/transformationist (Christian social ethics), and neo-traditionalist (Harvey)
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positions for higher education are not spelled out in these essays in detail. Paul Fiddes
does indicate that the British model of a Baptist college sharing institutional space and
educational engagement with non-Christian colleges, faculty, students, and ideas fits the
covenantal approach that he commends. Harvey’s stance suggests the need for a radical
transformation of Christian higher education in a profoundly countercultural direction. It
seems a legitimate inference to conclude that this vision would logically require the need
to close down business schools (training centers for capitalism), political science or at
least pre-government programs (training centers for the liberal nation-state), international
relations, criminal justice, and military or ROTC programs (training centers for state
violence), and perhaps a large number of other pre-professional and research-oriented
programs viewed as irreconcilable with Christian faith My own view is that the core
insights of the robust ecclesiology suggested by the neo-traditionalist stance can be
combined with the transformationist vision of the Christian social ethics tradition (and
several strands of the Christian theological tradition more generally) to undergird a muchimproved but still realistic and culturally relevant vision for the renewal of Christian
higher education. Some elements of that renewed Christian/Baptist higher education are
suggested in the other essays in this volume, though our focus now shifts to matters
particularly relevant to the Baptist tradition and to a faith-in-higher-education
conversation that has generally not been informed by debate over the kinds of issues we
have just engaged.
(c) The Christian/Baptist Relationship to Higher Education
The always lucid work of Doug Henry reminds us that Baptist universities
somehow exist, and somehow have long existed, without in most cases having a clear
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idea of why they exist, or any developed theology of higher education. One might hope
that, as Roger Ward suggests, most Baptist colleges were started “on the impulse of the
kingdom of God.” Perhaps so--but if so, that impulse was often inchoate and inarticulate.
In most cases what really happened was that there were Baptists somewhere in small
town/rural (southern) America, and they needed an academy, school, or college to
educate their young people once they finished high school, so they founded one in their
local version of the Baptist tradition--which, of course, they understood to simply be the
Christian faith in its unmediated primitive form. Now here they are decades or centuries
later, the circumstances of their founding long forgotten, and the cultural consensus that
once undergirded their enterprises fading fast, and in many cases they still have no idea
why they exist other than to keep on existing and to keep on educating Baptist young
people and (increasingly) whoever else they can get in the doors. Meanwhile, most
Baptists go to public universities, which are both less expensive and have better football
teams.
I do not think that in most cases the motivation for founding schools like
Campbell (NC), Baylor (TX), Union (TN), Georgetown (KY), Louisiana College, or
Mercer (GA) was cultural respectability, as it was for what became Brown University, in
the fascinating story Thomas Kidd tells. The religious history and dynamics of the
American South and American North make a critically important difference here. In the
North, Baptists have never been the majority, and were once actively persecuted by the
political/religious establishment, as in Massachusetts. In the South, Baptists became the
political/religious establishment. (Pro Ecclesia, Pro Texana indeed!) It makes sense that
some northern Baptists would be motivated in the founding of their schools by a thirst for
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cultural respectability in a hostile environment, whereas that was not a factor for southern
Baptists until much later. Still, as Kidd suggests, today the thirst for respectability is a
powerful factor among at least the leading Baptist schools, including Baylor and
definitely including my own Union University. It manifests itself in a variety of ways,
from academics to athletics and beyond. That’s one reason why such schools and their
representatives seek and sometimes receive grants like the one that funds YSBA, and
why they like to see their scholars add an Oxford conference to their resume. I think that
the most prophetic word warning us about this thirst to move from the periphery to the
core of academic power is offered by Roger Ward in his paper. We risk selling out what
is most important about our enterprise—the quest for the kingdom—as we “hand over”
our institutions to people who do not share an interest in that quest but promise us
respectability.
The lack of a coherent theological vision, and the temptations occasioned by the
quest for cultural respectability, leaves Baptist colleges and universities extremely
vulnerable to conflict over, and eventually the collapse of, their religious mission. This is
especially true because neither the ecclesial, nor the cultural, nor the moral consensus that
implicitly provided the historic Christian ethos for such schools any longer exists; at
least, it is fading, and fast. (I do think it remains pretty strong in west Tennessee, so I
cannot accept the claim that the old southern Baptist world is gone forever; it is fading,
not gone.) But in the increasingly likely, and increasingly acute, absence of that
consensus and shared ethos, a wide variety of competing visions vie for supremacy in
Baptist college life—including the vision that says that dissent and disagreement has
always been the Baptist way. What makes it all the more confusing is that almost all of
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these visions claim fidelity to Christian identity and the historic religious mission of
Baptist colleges and universities. Notice that everything I have just said about Baptist
universities and their contexts applies to Baptist churches as well. It helps to explain the
origins of the denominational controversy that, as Scott Moore says, still casts its shadow
over Baptist higher education.
So our younger Baptist scholars have weighed in with a variety of suggestions
about what the Baptist university is for, and what it should do. For Roger Ward, the
vision motivating Christian higher education can be nothing less than the kingdom of
God. Though he uses a Puritan understanding of the kingdom (via H.R. Niebuhr) rather
than a biblically focused treatment, I think Ward is right in situating the Baptist
university’s task precisely here. This is the master narrative of the message of Jesus, and I
think it should be our master narrative as well.
Scott Moore makes a variety of suggestions related to envisioning the nature and
purpose of Baptist higher education, many echoed by other papers. We need to be
acounter-Enlightenment, counter-cultural Christian intellectual community, rooted in our
faith in Christ and in the great Christian tradition and its practices. We need to know who
we are and whose we are quite clearly, even while practicing a culture of hospitality to
the stranger (a theme echoed by Newman and Moore). We need to be a deeply,
intelligently, and canonically biblical (Chapman) community of worship (Harvey), of
intellectual inquiry (Ward), of theological/confessional reflection (Eggleston, Moore),
and virtue (Harvey), always rooted in the faith community/ies which we serve. We need
to carefully guard the boundaries of our hiring practices in order to ensure that those
charged with leading our students actually believe the same faith that they are supposed
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to be teaching and modeling. I would concur with such suggestions, adding that the
transformationist model I am proposing for the church’s relation to culture requires a
church of sufficient clarity about its identity that it has the capacity to bring something
distinctive to the culture rather than being swallowed up by it. And especially given what
might be called the identity-vulnerability of 18-24 year olds, the Christian college is right
to be quite careful in guarding its boundaries as it seeks to contribute to the robustly
Christian formation of its students.
In this regard the contemporary significance of the Baptist “distinctive” of
“freedom” is very much up for negotiation, as suggested especially by Adam English,
Scott Moore, and Doug Henry in their excellent papers. English’s paper is enormously
helpful in distinguishing academic liberty from academic freedom. To get there he makes
a move increasingly common in a scholarly world affected by the retrieval of Aristotle
and Aquinas (and very much in evidence in this collection of essays, as in most neotraditionalist thought); he reads freedom teleologically, in light of the “good” sought by
Christian higher education. As Henry also argues, true freedom is a constrained freedom
for the good sought by the (Christian academic) community, rather than an unfettered
liberty from the constraints imposed by the community. This is a clear implication of
current thought related to character, community, and identity, and will probably prevail in
academic institutions that create or retain any meaningful sense of shared mission,
religious or otherwise. A modern paraphrase of “without a vision the people perish”
might be “without a shared understanding of the good a community dies.” (It may live on
in name, while dying to its founding vision. Consider the YMCA.) Freedom rightly
understood is freedom to covenant together to pursue a common aim in a Christian
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community of trusting inquiry, rather than a merely juridical liberty that protects the
individual rights of the academic-as-private-contractor within a context of mistrust and
fragmentation related to the purpose and identity of the university.
In the emphasis on a nonfundamentalist and yet very clear guarding of the
boundaries of an academic community committed to generous doctrinal orthodoxy, I find
unanimity in these papers and in the discussions that occurred at Oxford. The popular
slogan, “being Baptist means freedom,” will not persuade this group of thinkers. Their
commitment to the Great Tradition of the church, and to scriptural authority (of the whole
canon, thoughtfully interpreted), confessional boundaries, and voluntary but real
accountability, sets them off from many in the “moderate” post-Southern Baptist
establishment and the universities they lead. Younger Baptist scholars in the American
setting know what it means to have colleagues or elder leaders who have defined the
Christian faith so arbitrarily, privatistically, subjectively, or even gnostically as to render
it essentially meaningless. They are not interested in serving, in Moore’s words, “a
kinder, gentler state university” in faux Christian guise. And yet they are not attracted to
the constantly narrowing boundaries of some doctrinaire Southern Baptist leaders.
These comments lead to the tentative conclusion that among these younger
southern Baptist scholars we may be witnessing early signs of what post-denominationalcontroversy southern Baptist intellectual life will look like. In fact, one might make bold
to say that this volume can be seen as a manifesto of post-controversy southern Baptist
academia. Not a single author in this collection seems to identify strongly with either the
pre-1979 “moderate SBC” or the post-1979 “conservative SBC.” The controversy
reflected in these labels casts its shadow here but these scholars do not operate within the
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framework created either before or during that controversy. The “younger Baptist
scholars” represented here identify primarily as serious Christians, operating within the
Great Tradition of the Christian Church in its Baptist branch, and influenced by a variety
of thinkers and voices from across the Christian communions. Those who would seek to
label them either “moderates” or “conservatives” have completely missed the paradigm
shift that their vision represents. Henry would likely view these labels and those who
identify with them as examples of the “ideologies left or right that will steal, kill, and
destroy the theological riches” of the Baptist intellectual tradition if it is not better
articulated. And this leads to a prediction: if southern Baptists insist on trying to force
these younger scholars into either the “moderate” or “conservative” camp, or continue
to define their universities in such terms, they will lose some of their most promising
younger scholars—who, on grounds of conscience, will move to denominations and
universities that welcome academicians adhering to the generous ecumenical orthodoxy
of the Great Tradition.
Conclusion: Stubbornly Baptist, Stubbornly Hopeful
This mention of the possible future path of younger Baptist scholars leads me to
one final observation—and a word of commendation for a virtue variously called
persistence, loyalty, or stubbornness.
In light of the miseries and difficulties many of us have experienced with, and as,
Southern Baptists—as just discussed--it is easy to fall prey to cynicism about this
particular branch of the body of Christ or to give up on it entirely. Yet these papers reveal
a stubbornly resolute commitment to ongoing Baptist identity and affiliation.
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Not a single scholar represented in this collection expresses in print here a strong
sense of affiliation with the broader evangelical movement as a possible competitor to, or
supplement of, their primary Baptist identity. I do not sense hostility to that evangelical
world but neither do I sense any great connectedness to it. Loyalty to Baptist identity, not
just Christian identity and not evangelical identity, seems quite strong. This is true
despite the enormous struggles some of these scholars have personally experienced in
Baptist settings. I find this striking because for some years I have gravitated to an primary
evangelical identity and secondary Baptist identity, and there are many in “the
evangelical world” who would say the same.
If younger Baptist scholars of this quality can move ahead with a resolute Baptist
identity and serve in Baptist colleges and universities while remaining rooted in Christcentered biblical faith, committed to Great Tradition Christian orthodoxy, informed by
the best contemporary scholarship, and transformationally engaged with a suffering
world, the future of the Baptist people in the southern United States could be bright
indeed.