Baptist Higher Education and the Kingdom of God
“Tell me, where do we hope all our efforts are going to get us? What are we
looking for? In whose cause are we striving?” St. Augustine, Confessions
Jonathan Edwards once wrote: “Saints do not see things others do not see. On
the contrary. They see just what everyone else sees – but they see it differently.”
The question is, what do we see in our time, and how do we see it?
Joan Chittister, In the Heart of the Temple
Despite the many success of Baptist colleges and universities scholar Daniel Dennett
jokes in Darwin’s Dangerous Idea that we might have to cage Baptists to keep them from
misinforming children, and Richard Rorty diagnoses the current situation in America this
way: “intellectuals of the West have, since the Renaissance, progressed through three
stages: they have hoped for redemption first from God, then from philosophy, and now
from literature.” This progress has shifted the ground of human expectation and created a
new kind of culture, Rorty says, “[that] drops a presupposition common to religion and
philosophy – that redemption must come from one’s relation to something that is not just
one more human creation.”1 It is not that science disproves Christian claims, it’s just that
we no longer seek the redemption a Christian or a Baptist view of the world offers. “We
are so over that,” as my ninth grade daughter might summarize Rorty’s point.
In addition to these voices of academic culture, Baptists also face opposition from antiintellectualism within their house. Faithful men and women worry that education leads to
the erosion of faith. After reading Rorty we can better understand their fear. Despite
external and internal stressors, however, Baptist higher education has not only survived in
the world of higher education, it has thrived. This success is closely connected to the
size, affluence, and cohesive identity of Baptists in America, principally in the South.
Stanley Hauerwas quips that Baptists intended to build a church and instead created a
civilization, and this mass of people and habits has supported a wide range of educational
institutions. But Baptist civilization or not, our institutions of learning are no more
secure than any other. In a recent article in Christianity Today Michael Hamilton
describes the insecurity of the religious identity of Baptist higher education: “In the case
of Southern Baptists, their version of Christianity was intertwined with the distinctive
cultural features of the South. For many, being Southern Baptist was as much about
being Southern as it was about being Baptist.” He continues:
As Southern distinctiveness dries up, the cultural foundations of Southern Baptist
identity are crumbling from beneath the denomination’s schools. The result is
that all Southern Baptist colleges and universities face a stark choice. They must
either build new kinds of Christian foundations for their schools, or watch the
Christian character of their schools fall into disrepair.”2
Richard Rorty, “The Decline of Redemptive Truth and the Rise of a Literary Culture,” Richard Rorty’s
homepage.
2
Michael Hamilton, Christianity Today, June 2005, 31
1
1
I am puzzled by Hamilton’s use of such mechanistic metaphors as a Christian foundation
being built and a Christian character in disrepair. A person walking around a Baptist
college these days would hear language describing the pursuit of educational excellence.
There are signs that Baptist institutions are achieving success beyond the niche market of
established Baptist civilization; hence, some universities have the desire and apparently
the wherewithal to cross the line into first tier research universities. I think the question
in Baptist higher education should be less about how to build or repair the good name of
a Christian institution than it is which way an excellent college or a university turns –
what is the end toward which it should be oriented. What I hear in Hamilton’s article is a
question about the telos governing Baptist higher education. What I hear in Dennett and
Rorty is the mocking suggestion that there is no telos there except a peculiar and genteel
literary genre or an anachronistic world view. Elite academics think Christian higher
education is misleading and hollow. A first rate Baptist university would seem to them
ridiculous.
This is not just the view of outsiders, however. Kirby Godsey, President of Mercer
University, recently said “the university must first be a university” and this may require it
to “suspend ideological principles” of the sponsoring church’s faith commitments.3
Perhaps even those of us committed to Baptist life and institutions have our doubts about
the priorities informing Baptist higher education.
Jesus tells his disciples to “seek first the kingdom of God.” This simple but abrupt
command of priority sheds a challenging light on the task of Baptist higher education.
The issue is not repairing the character of a university, but a question of pursuing a hope
central to the Baptist vision of Christian discipleship, and conceiving higher education as
a part of a disciplined individual and communal life. In the Confessions Augustine
recalls a story told by Ponticainus about two members of the royal court who stumble
upon a book about Saint Anthony. Reading this story they are cut to the heart and one
asks the other, “In whose cause are we striving?” Their aspirations and hopes for
professional success suddenly pale in light of the question of spiritual orientation. In this
essay, I propose that we also need to face this abrupt question: What is our priority as a
Baptist academy? In whose cause are we striving? How are we seeking the kingdom of
God through our participation in higher education? I want to consider two ideas: the
kingdom of God is a reality and inquiry is the practice that particularly concerns Baptist
higher education. These considerations highlight our priority as a Baptist academy.
Baptist higher education provides a compelling and sustainable platform in the economy
of higher education and, by doing so, fulfills our prophetic obligation within the kingdom
of God.
The Kingdom of God
“To Whom are Baptist Colleges and Universities Accountable?” presented at Baylor University, April
2005.
3
2
Wendell Berry, the Kentucky writer and agrarian, tells of a conversation with his friend
Wes Jackson. They were casting around for the broadest sense of economy possible.
Jackson rejected Berry’s suggestion of an energy economy. “Well, [Berry] said, ‘then
what kind of economy would be comprehensive enough?’ [Jackson] hesitated a moment,
and then, grinning, said, ‘the Kingdom of God.’” Berry embraces this suggestion and
describes the Kingdom of god in terms of several principles:
The first principle of the Kingdom of God is that it includes everything; in it, the
fall of every sparrow is a significant event. We are in it whether we know it or
not and whether we wish to be or not. Another principle, both ecological and
traditional, is that everything in the Kingdom of God is joined both to it and to
everything else that is in it; that is to say, the Kingdom of God is orderly. A third
principle is that humans do not and can never know either all the creatures that the
Kingdom of God contains or the whole pattern or order by which it contains them.
. . . [T]he difficulty of our predicament, then, is made clear if we add a fourth
principle: Though we cannot produce a complete or even adequate description of
this order, severe penalties are in store for us if we presume upon it or violate it.4
Berry contrasts a little human economy that would fit harmoniously within the Great
Economy of God’s kingdom with the violence and destruction of our present industrial
economy. Industrial economy discounts everything it does not use as “waste” and
approaches natural resources with the perspective of mining – things are used until they
are used up. There is no thought for either a sustainable use of resources or the intimate
interconnection between our actions and things we don’t see or don’t know. The
industrialist defines the world by what can be immediately manipulated, but that
“control” is a simply a myth that disguises the vast uncontrollable reality of the Great
Economy.
I want to lay Berry’s ecological and economic account of the kingdom of God next to H.
Richard Niebuhr’s classic treatment of the kingdom of God in America. Niebuhr’s
account of the peculiar force behind the development of American thought, religion, and
culture in the revivals of the 18th and 19th centuries has no equal. Although the language
of the kingdom of God (or of Christ, as Niebuhr also turns the phrase) seems
anachronistic, the spirit enlivening contemporary debates over religion, education, and
politics is quite similar. Reading Niebuhr alongside today’s newspaper accounts of
public discourse gives the feeling of a time warp. Our concerns, and unfortunately our
ability to articulate these concerns, have not changed much in the last 150 years.
Niebuhr excels in his description of the theological aspirations that propelled American
culture from its colonial origins to its peculiarly progressive character. No other nation
has had its habits of self-conception formed with this theological tinge. Niebuhr is
fascinated by the power and the variety of efforts that extend from this theological core.
“The kingdom of God to which these men and the movements they initiated were loyal,”
he says, “and was not simply American culture or political or economic interest exalted
4
Home Economics. North Point Press, 1987. Pg 54,55
3
and idealized; it was rather a kingdom which was prior to America and to which this
nation, in its politics and economics, was required to conform.”5
The creative impulse behind loyalty to the kingdom of God funded the Puritan project of
establishing a divinely ordered polis. Though this project failed its original goal, the
effects of this orientation reached further than imagined through the spirit of revivalism
that spread from New England down the seaboard and west, leaving Baptist, Methodist,
Presbyterian and other congregations and societies sprinkled across the countryside.
Apart from the creative sense of expressing right civil order in accord with orthodox
belief, the expansion of Christian culture ran on the steam of holy fear. Niebuhr repeats
the refrain that the kingdom “was hastening toward them; and now it was no longer
simply the great happiness men might miss but also the great threat which they could not
escape.”6 The kingdom of God became a moral burden, a recurring sense of obligation
and evaluation translated into a ready sense of being held to account in an approaching
judgment. In light of this burgeoning reality lives were to be shaped in conformity with
God’s expectations, and leaders had to produce the conditions where this conformity
would be supported by social power and encouragement. But these tasks depended on a
clear sense of understanding of just what the kingdom of God meant for individuals and
communities.
Burden may be the wrong word for this sense of moral expectation. The hope of the
revivalists of the first and second awakenings emanated from the keenly felt “wonder of
this possibility of life and, by the same token,” Niebuhr continues, “the unsatisfactoriness
of their present existence. They pressed therefore into the kingdom of God, as they
understood the kingdom.”7
I want to focus briefly on the “unsatifactoriness” that affected the shapers of American
culture. I think one aspect of this unsatisfactoriness is a sense of a disconnection between
themselves, others, and God, and a desire to alter material circumstances to improve
physical life so that it reflects the order of creation that contains them and their
communities. I think Wendell Berry’s principles of the kingdom of God respond to much
the same sense of unsatifactoriness, a contemporary unsatisfactoriness. And Nicholas
Wolterstorff confirms the persistence of this desire in his answering description of
shalom for which we are searching for in education: “To dwell in shalom is to find
delight in living rightly before God, to find delight in one’s physical surroundings, to find
delight in living rightly with one’s fellow human beings, to find delight even in living
rightly with oneself.”8
In the next section I will return to the sense of unsatifactoriness of present experience as a
way of introducing inquiry, particularly the form of inquiry associated with American
pragmatism. But the story Niebuhr tells about the kingdom of God has one more step to
follow: the formation of institutions, including colleges. The revivals focused on the
5
H.R. Niebuhr, The Kingdom of God in America, Wesleyan University Press, 1988, Pg 10.
Ibid. 123.
7
Ibid. 130.
8
Nicholar Wolterstorff, Educating for Shalom, Eerdmans, 2004, Pg 23.
6
4
work of grace that produced redeemed individuals, rather than satisfying the needs of an
institution. Edwards rejected the Puritan Half-way covenant because its aim was to
support the continuation of the church. He favored a model where applicants described
their conversion in order to gain entrance to the fellowship of the church. Likewise, the
revivalists and their followers tended to withdraw from politics and devote themselves to
an intraworldy loyalty to the kingdom of God. This movement, Niebuhr says, “did not
believe a perfectly pure Christian organization was possible. It did not identify the visible
with the invisible church, but it was determined that the visible should try to image the
invisible.”9 This attempt to image the invisible sponsored a wide range of humanitarian
efforts, such as freeing slaves and providing them training and support. It also sponsored
educational enterprises. “Colleges and secondary schools, which sprang up all over the
land like mushrooms after a summer rain, were sponsored in large part by Christian
individuals and societies, and in the battle for public schools the revival groups fought on
the popular side against institutional churches, who defended their vested interest in
education. The Sunday school movement, conceived at first as a humanitarian enterprise,
not as an aid to the institutional church, began to flourish.”10
I want to notice two points here. First, the desire to treat the unsatifactoriness of life led
to developing educational institutions grounded in loyalty to the kingdom of God.
Second, from their inception religiously founded colleges and universities have lived in
tension with institutional church life. This is a role they were created to fill, and the
continuing saga of conflict between church-affiliated schools, their church constituencies,
and their public counterparts is nothing more than a maturation of the tension invested in
these institutions from their inception. Still, it is clear that many colleges and universities
began on the impulse of the kingdom of God have lost the drive Niebuhr describes here
so passionately:
They knew the fallacies present in the dogmas of natural liberty and human
goodness, but they also knew that man was not destined to live in ignorance and
under restraint. They had confidence in the promise that God would write his
laws upon the inward parts and make men fit for liberty, and they knew he was
doing it now. . . They pursued the ultimate and permanent revolution, the
complete liberty of man in a community of love.11
When I am most distracted by the boiling and roiling tensions of Christian higher
education I find myself reflecting on Niebuhr’s confident words. I think he captures
something essential about our communal sense of what higher education means for
America. There is a powerful religious and moral expectation coursing through our
academic efforts that draws us forward, that threatens to condemn us for our failures, but
persistently makes its presence felt. It is the character of our religious origins in the
revivals, and, although it may be ignored or despised, it cannot be forgotten. At least this
is Niebuhr’s conviction:
9
Ibid. 120.
Ibid. 120.
11
Ibid. 124.
10
5
For America, however – the land of Edwards, Whitfield, the Tennets, Backus,
Hopkins, Asbury, Alexander, Woolman, Finney and all their company – such an
attempt is impossible. It cannot eradicate if it would the marks left upon its social
memory, upon its institutions and habits, by an awakening to God that was
simultaneous with its awakening to national self-consciousness.12
I am unsure if Niebuhr would write these lines after World War II and the massive retooling of the American psyche toward the “kingdom of Mars” as opposed to the
kingdom of God. He points out, somewhat ironically, that achieving the great
humanitarian goal of ending slavery finally depended on the war making power of the
nation – achieving the ends of divine love depended on the use of unparalleled violence.
Since the 1950s the development of more unparalleled tools of violence has radically
reoriented higher education. Whereas the public interest in education at the beginning of
the 20th century was served by mandating primary and secondary schools, college
instruction fell mainly to institutions with Christian and kingdom interests. The advent of
technical weapons, industrial sophistication, and medical research led to heavy public
investment in research universities. In a few decades the center of higher education
shifted from religiously-based colleges to research universities and “nonsectarian”
colleges. The identification of colleges that held some vision of the kingdom of God as
“sectarian” (as opposed to those that had interests paralleling public and state
universities) altered the landscape of higher education. What had been the core interests
of higher education, the kingdom of God, and the desire to express this good order
through a variety of humanitarian efforts was relegated to peripheral status in relation to
the focus of the institutions that now comprised the core. Natural and social sciences and
their related technologies, supported by the demands of industry, commerce, and war,
now take precedence in American higher education.
The terms “core” and “periphery” are borrowed from Wolterstorff’s account of the global
economic system in Till Justice and Peace Embrace. In this book he disabuses the reader
of the “modernism” theory of economics that claims global capitalism will lift all
economies and all nations to “developed” status. Rather, he points out that global
capitalism relies on peripheral economies where labor and material can be purchased
cheaply enough to fund the imbalance of wealth in the core economies. The system
depends on maintaining this imbalance of power and wealth. I am using this economic
metaphor in relation to higher education for this reason. The struggle of Christian higher
education is often portrayed as the attempt to become a “first rate” college or university.
This is the periphery struggling to become the core, a fact that our present system of
politics and wealth works against. Institutions in the core will not yield up their place or
gladly invite competition. But the core will gladly identify the best scholars and practices
of the periphery and draw them away for their own use. Christian and Baptist colleges
and universities are peripheral to this core, and the core demands that they remain so -not just because of the imbalance of wealth (their billions in endowment to our millions)
but because of a difference in orientation. If we cannot name that difference, they can.
Our inquiry is oriented toward realizing a different reality and goal, toward creating a
different human community, and in fact, the reality we serve is antithetical in many
12
Ibid. 125-6.
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respects to the motivation and products found within the core institutions. We are a
threat to the coherence of the worldview established in the core educational institutions.
This analysis of the core and periphery of higher education, with Christian and Baptist
universities firmly on the periphery, might appear like a case of sour grapes or a
defeatist’s glory. Neither is the case. Rather, I believe, with Wolterstorff, that if we are
to find a way to address the failures of our system in the hope of effectively transforming
higher education, we have to see the situation for what it is. I do not think that the future
of Baptist higher education is connected to moving our colleges and universities from the
periphery into the core of American higher education. I think this is a misguided effort
that will end in draining away the significance of Baptist contributions to the larger
economy of higher education and the kingdom of God. Instead, this analysis suggests
that the model of inquiry peculiar to kingdom-oriented education is real; that is, it is a
characteristic form of inquiry that represents a challenge to the core. I argue that this
difference ought to be the focus of our attention if we intend to serve the expansion of the
kingdom of God and at the same time describe the sustaining relevance of Baptist higher
education.
Inquiry and the kingdom of God
At the end of a seminar on the vocation of church-related higher education, a colleague
commented that he was “disheartened by the general attitude expressed by the writers,
and by some in the seminar, that any non-Christian educational institution was of little
value, or that the church-related schools that have taken a broader perspective on
education have somehow ‘sinned.’”13 He is correct, I think, to point out that the
conversation of Christian and Baptist higher education almost completely ignores the
value of the education that is the product of what I have called the core. I considered this
the other day as I sat with two highly specialized surgeons and talked about the operation
my daughter will have this year. I am glad, as I think we all are, that our education
system produces the training, technology, and understanding that makes surgeries and
other things like this possible. He is correct also that we often lapse, as William James
said, into “pontificating like infallible popes” about the form of education we think is
properly Christian or properly Baptist. This leads me to wonder if instead of a form of
institution there is a sense of inquiry that bears a peculiar relation to the kingdom of God,
one that affirms education and inquiry in its broadest sense, one that avoids the hubris of
self-proclaimed righteousness, an inquiry that can incorporate our deepest human
aspirations and our convictions concerning the kingdom of God?
I would like to invert this question before I answer it. The question becomes: Is there
intellectual or scientific content which a devotion to God’s kingdom obscures, a reality
that cannot be accessed from a mind imbued with this conviction? Framed this way I
believe the answer is clearly ‘no.’ There is nothing in the world a person cannot know
because of a conviction concerning the kingdom of God. One more variation is required:
Is there content which can only be accessed by virtue of a conviction concerning the
13
Dr. Jon Dalager, quoted with permission.
7
reality of the kingdom of God? I think the consensus within the Christian periphery
would say ‘yes,’ while the core would shout a resounding ‘no.’ So here is the rub.
The epigram at the beginning of this essay from Joan Chittister applies to this point.
Jonathan Edwards is one of those rare synthetic minds who holds together a novel system
of articulating biblical Christianity with the latest products of human discovery in
science, psychology, and philosophy. What is most noteworthy is his perceptive analysis
of what these endeavors were missing, where they failed on their own account. He does
so with Locke on the notion of personal identity and with Isaac Watts on the freedom of
the will. In this way he affirms both the inquiry by “natural” intelligence and the inquiry
possible only through grace. Rather than disparage the products of human wisdom,
Edwards points out the supernatural character of discovery gifted by grace.
In his sermon “A Divine and Supernatural Light” Edwards describes stages of inquiry
peculiar to the saint. What is discovered, he says, “’tis more excellent than any human
learning; ‘tis far more excellent, than all the knowledge of the greatest philosophers, or
statesmen. Yea, the least glimpse of the glory of God in the face of Christ doth more
exalt and ennoble the soul, than all the knowledge of those that have the greatest
speculative understanding in divinity, without grace.” Edwards uses a key word for this
truth that is “dis-covered” to the individual. It is “the most noble object, the excellency of
God, and Christ.”14 His term “excellency” refers to the characteristic that gives an object
its substance and resistance. An idea is not a figment of imagination if it resists thought;
it is real whether anyone thinks it or not. The substance of God’s excellency as
something to be discovered is the foundation that enables saints to “see what everyone
else sees – but see it differently.” All things, every idea, relates to the excellency of God,
and this alters the inquiry of saints. In the Religious Affections this spiritual sense opens
the saint to inquiry into the moral fabric of the universe, leading to “a view of those
things that are immensely the most exquisitely beautiful, and capable of delighting the
eye of the understanding,” which for Edwards is God’s moral perfection. Inquiry leads
beyond this delight of understanding, however, to the discovery of a content that
“effectually changes the inclination and changes the nature of the soul.” Conversion is a
result of the discovery of God’s moral perfection made personal in Christ which is
opened to view by the spiritual sense, but it also leads forward toward a perfection of the
practice of holy living. This discovery is “no merely notional or speculative
understanding of the doctrines of religion. But this light, as it reaches the bottom of the
heart, and changes the nature, so it will effectually dispose to an universal obedience.”15
Edwards always strikes an abrasive chord among my philosophical colleagues. He
speaks of obedience, conversion, and the noble object of Christ. Indeed, it is fascinating
how antithetical these words appear to our present understanding of academic inquiry.
And yet what could be a higher goal for our discovery than to ascertain, albeit through
grace, the satisfying discovery of this most beautiful object, the Christ, the principle of
Jonathan Edwards, “A Divine and Supernatural Light,” A Jonathan Edwards Reader,Yale University
Press, 1994, Pg 123. my emphasis.
15
ibid., 124.
14
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God’s effort in reconciling all things and all people to himself. All of our inquiry, it
seems, could find its place within this reality.
If Edwards describes a theological sense of inquiry that leads to personal transformation
and that potentially includes all forms of learning, Charles Sanders Peirce, the scientist,
logician and philosopher describes inquiry beginning with science and ending in the
reality of God.
Peirce’s understanding of inquiry begins where the laboratory logic of his training left
off. Rather than seeking the truest or most resilient opinion of constants and processes
Peirce realized that the science he was taught most often simply reproduced received
opinion. His extraordinary essay, “The Fixation of Belief,” faces the challenge of
following inquiry into the territory of new discovery. The object of inquiry is the final
opinion, the settled belief toward which truly scientific discovery tends. Refining our
habits of thought according to this method of inquiry is, in Peirce’s argument, the only
philosophically sound process of approaching the truth of “what is.” Such inquiry would
respond to my colleague’s concern above for a “broader conception” of education.
Indeed, Peirce’s inquiry seeks to overrun all our habitual holdings and ideas enforced by
“authority.”
The engine of this inquiry is not a desire for certainty that displaces “doubt,” as in a
Cartesian model, but inquiry that engages existential doubt as a constant companion in
seeking better habits of action. Inquiry properly begins with an experience that unsettles
our settled habit. And once an appearing doubt is resolved, further doubt leads on to
further inquiry. This matrix of doubt, belief and inquiry funds Peirce’s notion of
fallibilism, his claim that the scientific inquirer must always be open to the possibility
that even the most settled beliefs are in error. Fallibilism is not a dodge of responsibility
in the sense that beliefs are simply held as approximations. Rather, fallibilism marks the
character of inquiry that is open to continual refinement and progress, recognizing the
fact that every action we take is a demonstration of certainty at that moment. Like the
surgeons in my daughter’s case, they act on the certainty of the best procedure now. But
this procedure is only a resting place, not the final word. So, with Peirce, all of our
conceptions are held as certain platforms for present action that may, and most certainly
will, be superseded by better and more accurate conceptions that will arise in the removal
of more and more instances of doubt.
The sense of unsatisfactoriness that Niebuhr found motivating the revivalists is quite like
Peircean doubt. It calls for a change of practice and thinking, and the progress that
emerges from it is directly linked to this experience of doubt. In this way inquiry is open
to non-material influences, which Peirce identifies as a peculiar kind of inference,
abduction. Abduction, or retroduction as he sometimes refers to it, is the puzzling
appearance of an explanatory hypothesis in the mind of the inquirer faced with a sticky
problem. Somehow the right solution very often happens to come to mind. In a late
essay titled “Evolutionary Love,” Peirce evaluates Darwinian evolution negatively
because it does not make room for the change of habit that arises from these in-breaking
hypotheses that punctuate the history of scientific advancement. He says, “I believe that
9
all the greatest achievements of mind have been beyond the powers of unaided
individuals; and I find, apart from the support this opinion receives from synechistic
considerations, and from the purposive character of many great movements, direct reason
for so thinking in the sublimity of the ideas and in their occurring simultaneously and
independently to a number of individuals of no extraordinary general powers.”16 To
translate: Extraordinary accomplishments of human inquiry are not due to peculiarly
gifted individuals, but communities of inquirers who respond to the leading of the spirit
of agapasm, the spirit of love informing the universe and thought.
This much of Peirce’s metaphysics brings me to my point concerning inquiry and the
kingdom of God. The critical logician in Peirce not only seeks to understand the process
of inquiry that subtends all of our intellectual endeavors, but the end toward which
inquiry itself is tending. At the end of his logical analysis he claims that all minds, high
and low alike, are likely to be warmed into the belief of the reality of God, unless their
skepticism and materialism prevent it. But this is not just a late conviction of a scientist
gone soft. In 1863, when he was twenty-four and just beginning his logical studies,
Peirce spoke about “The Place of Our Age in History” to a reunion of his high school
class. He assessed the great movements of history, culture, and science, concluding that
the test is whether the “present age of reason” will overcome its materialistic orientation.
He proposes the thread of civilization is Christianity conceived as movement toward an
actualized “ordinated harmony, in which the creature should be so completely in unison
with the creator that all his notions should be brought under law.”17 This view of
Christian civilization will think that,
[t]rue religion . . . consists in more than a mere dogma, in visiting the fatherless
and the widows and keeping ourselves unspotted from the world. It will say that
Christianity reaches beyond even that, reaches beyond the good conscience,
beyond the individual life; must transfuse itself through all human law –
throughout the social organization, the nation, the relationships of the peoples and
races. It will demand that not only where man’s determinate action goes on, but
even where he is a mere tool of providence and in the realm of inanimate nature
Christ’s kingdom shall be seen.18
Those readers familiar with Peirce will recognize the surprising character of this vision.
In fact, Peirce seems to have made this statement and then turned exclusively to rigorous
logical and scientific studies for the next twenty years of his life. Many commentators
disconnect Peirce’s theological vision and his argument for the reality of God from his
philosophical work because strict inquiry does not seem to permit such conclusions. I
disagree with this. Peirce explores inquiry and its ultimate products precisely because of
its potential meaning for “the place of our age in history,” and his logical work is simply
the backing for his argument that action, and even thought influenced by instinctive
impulses, will eventuate in the revelation of Christ’s kingdom in the fulfillment of the
“gospel of love.”
16
The Collected Papers of C.S. Peirce, Harvard University Press, 1934, 6.315.
Writings of C.S. Peirce: A Chronological Edition, Vol.1, Indiana University Press, Pg 110.
18
Ibid, 112.
17
10
Peirce and Edwards, perhaps America’s two greatest systematic philosophical minds,
specifically connect the gracious affect of God with successful inquiry, and the result of
human inquiry at its best with the discovery of the reality of God’s kingdom. Such a
vision challenges the modern spirit of scientific materialism as well as the notion that
Christian inquiry can be ensured simply by instituting tests of orthodoxy. Edwards and
Peirce would agree, I believe, that experience rather than orthodoxy is the principle issue
of developing effective inquiry. If the kingdom of God is real, it will be the settled
conclusion of our best and most rigorous inquiry. If the truth of Christ is indeed the truth
we claim it is, then we have a platform for continuing inquiry – in science and in human
arts – that offers an infinite horizon of discovery.
Developing the capacity for men and women to embark on this inquiry is the proper task
for higher education. What, you may ask, do this inquiry look like in practice, in
mathematics, biology, or philosophy? Examples may help. Elton Trueblood, long-time
professor of philosophy at Earlham demonstrated the sort of inquiry I have in view,
turning his thought to issues he anticipated Christian communities would face in the
moral landscape of post-World War II America. An example of mathematical inquiry
shaped by the kingdom of God is my colleague who is learning Sanskrit in order to
translate Indian mathematical texts, where illustrations of the gods are used for numbers
and relations. Respect for this form of inquiry in long ignored texts provides an
analogical lens for understanding how a Western religious view has influenced our
mathematical thought. For biologists kingdom inquiry may gravitate less toward
researching new methods of manipulation and more toward investigating the increasing
burden of human activity on the carrying capacity of nature, realized in the loss of species
and long-term changes in organic structure and productivity. Each of these examples
rests on a realization of the limits of human thought and activity, but with this a clearer
understanding of the potential for thought develops. Such inquiry instantiates the deeply
held human desire for self-transcendence, for discovering a meaning beyond ourselves
that merges with our daily work, and this transforms it into a whole new world, the kind
Aldous Huxely dreams about from which “beneficent influence can flow out . . . into a
world of darkened selves, chronically dying for the lack of it.”19
Baptist Higher Education and Inquiry
My purpose in this essay has been to demonstrate that the question of Baptist higher
education compels us to consider the meaning and complexity of inquiry. The peculiar
virtue of Baptist higher education is that for many years it has expressed the desire for
inquiry among a community of faithful men and women. The communal experience of
‘unsatifactoriness’ in this community cannot be produced in any other context, and so
neither can the inquiry that flows in response to this experience. Such a communal
expectation and form of life constitute the kingdom of God in this time and place, and
any inquiry that is worthy of the name must respect this lived experience. Results of
inquiry gain significance to the degree that they constitute a lived difference in the
19
Aldous Huxley, The Doors of Perception, Perennial Classics, Pg 44.
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community. Carl Vaught, a metaphysician in his own right, calls this work of bringing
inquiry to bear on practice “concrete reflection,” where the questions of an originating
myth, patterns of faith, and the realization of doubt finally focus our thought on issues at
hand20. But this kind of inquiry requires commitment before the results can be counted.
A proleptic faith is required in order to conduct this sort of inquiry, faith on the part of
the community, and faith on the part of the inquirers. This makes higher education
something like “an errand into the wilderness,” that wonderful phrase Perry Miller used
so effectively to describe the communal hope of the Puritans. The question is whether
Baptist higher education and its community has the faith to engage in this kind of inquiry,
and whether it can find people of character and experience capable of conducting it. But
what does this inquiry look like in practice, and what does it lead to for our colleges?
These are the right questions to ask of this necessarily vague notion of inquiry.
I began this essay with the assertion that Baptist higher education is a thriving enterprise.
I believe it is, but I also believe with many others that it is presently in a period of crisis,
of doubt. We have come up to an experience where our communal habits are unsettled.
Bringing Edwards and Peirce into this conversation may seem a far cry from treating the
uncertainties facing our colleges and universities – both were idealists and neither were
Baptist! But we are great borrowers. In fact our Baptist beginnings are the result of
borrowing English separatist and Mennonite practices. What we are good at is forming a
community around practices that work. My suggestion is that we in Baptist higher
education turn our focus toward our role as the heart of inquiry for our communities. I
think this will lead us in three general directions. First, it will lead us to see our work in
education as a part of the larger economy of learning and inquiry. We are in it with
everyone else, and they with us. We are mutually dependent and none subordinate; the
core and periphery model cannot account for the interrelation of all educational efforts.
This will require a good bit of rethinking about our status as scholars in the Baptist
academy, and a good bit of rethinking about our status as scholars in the broader
academy. I want to say that we should take Berry’s suggestion of creating a little human
educational economy that works in harmony with the Great Economy. In this place
everyone who pledges the kingdom should be welcomed, and those who are unfamiliar
with it should be instructed and invited to join. But a farmer doesn’t hand the plow over
to a business man who happens to walk into the field, yet for many of our Baptist
institutions this is precisely what has happened. The vision of the kingdom and the
inquiry that instantiates it must be the priority of the college or university, therefore the
academic vision must predominate. Kingdom inquiry does not happen by accident. It
will not be produced by scholars whose hearts lie elsewhere. Developing, finding, and
employing scholars whose vocation is developing the inquiry related to the kingdom of
God is the single most important task for the administration of a Baptist college or
university. Only in this way can the kingdom expand. And it is an infinitely elastic
kingdom, large enough for all and “worthy of full acceptation” as Andrew Fuller says.
Second, we must see our role in terms of influencing the inquiry in the communities of
Baptists we find ourselves in connection with and also in terms of influencing the inquiry
in the broader academy. Our goal is not to match their inquiry with ours, but to
20
Carl Vaught, Metaphor, Analogy and the Place of Places, Baylor University Press, 2004. Pg 6.
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demonstrate the beauty of inquiry from the perspective of the kingdom of God we have
been blessed to receive. Rather than a limitation to our scholarly work, the gift of our
place in the kingdom opens up a vast range of possibilities available most clearly to us.
We can ask ourselves the question: how does this research reveal or explore the kingdom
of God? What does my teaching mean for the kingdom? Demonstrating the critical
difference between our teaching and inquiry and that done according to models that do
not respect God’s kingdom may require us to be bold, even defiant. We must expose the
emptiness of inquiry based on greed by running forward with ours based on love, and
bend our minds and backs to transforming our habits. For all that can be said about
Baptist life, perhaps the most exhilarating is our long dependence on the power of God to
transform our broken, partial lives into spiritually whole selves and communities. A
focus on transformation mitigates our hubris, since we know ourselves as broken and
needing the transformation of love. From this platform we can reach out to divergent
communities around us, not in the spirit of triumph or as possessors of the hidden key,
but as fellow travelers.
Third, and last, we must find a better way to tell the story of the kingdom of God as
academics and scholars. We practice speaking in the language of our disciplines, but
seldom do we devote much interest in speaking the language of our constituents. I fear
that the current division in Baptist life has much to do with our failure to express our
work in terms of the kingdom as much as it does with the desires of those outside our
institutions to impose a theological redirection on us. The political turmoil in Baptist
higher education reflects a perspective that we might not understand, and yet it, like the
fall of every sparrow, is a significant event in the kingdom of God. When faithful
Baptists lose confidence in our academic work, the kingdom of God suffers. On the
contrary, the strength of our community expands tremendously when we aid our students
and other constituents in developing a more articulate conception of the world from this
kingdom perspective. This is a peculiar task for academics, one that will clearly
demonstrate the difference in our orientation compared to the broader academy.
My conclusion returns responsibility for the direction of Baptist higher education to us,
you and me, scholars in the Baptist academy. And so it should be. What do we hope our
efforts are going to get us? What are we striving for? And most significantly, in whose
cause are we striving? No one can answer these questions for us, and this service cannot
be imposed or limited by rules. We should approach this task with confidence: “Take
joy little flock,” Jesus says, “for it is the father’s good pleasure to give you the kingdom.”
Baptist higher education will thrive, I believe and hope, as long as it seeks to appreciate
and understand this gift through our practice of inquiry.
Roger Ward
Georgetown College, June, 2005
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