Nels Ferre

Beyond this expansion of his standpoint he should have gone on to see that from within this perspective man has the competence, by reason on its own plane, to check and to challenge candidates for revelation and even to be creative in the interpretation of truth. Unless this is so, the cord between revelation and all other truth is cut, and we are left with completely arbitrary faith-judgments or with a Spirit of Partiality who gives revelation to some and withholds it from others. Man’s reason then cannot either create or establish revelation. But reason can help “test the spirits” whether or not they be of God. Similarly, by means of experience, history, and nature, man cannot prove God, but God’s revelation can be self-authenticating in terms of these, providing for us the only true light of what ultimately is, what ought to be, and providing the road between them. God’s revelation through events can therefore provide a meaningful total context for interpreting our existence, values, and aims not only intellectually but especially in terms of judgment and salvation.

Similarly, neo-Calvinism is wrong in its denial of God’s presence and revelatory work on the level of creation. Its transcendence does not allow for God’s both being himself in a peculiar way and coming into history in his unique Presence while also being present in man and history in a preparatory and pedagogical way. This all-or-none view has too little understanding of the nature of Spirit to remain one unit and yet be capable of different modes of adaptation by means of which God creates and preserves inviolate the conditions for man’s self-being and freedom.

The main contribution of this group to higher education is the existentialist grasp that truth in terms of ultimates or of over-all contexts is more decisional than informational. It cuts to shreds the pretexts of an objectivist, rationalistic metaphysics or of any system of ethics that fails to see and to heed the fact that there is no presuppositionless thinking and that in matters of total contexts, configurations, and dimensions of knowledge we live more by faith than by knowledge. This genuine and vital contribution we accept gratefully. All-or-none transcendence, however, pulls

down the curtain of irrelevance between the Christian faith and higher education. Higher education cannot by field or function deal with revelatory realities within a merely redemptive context. It deals with a world of actualities and problems which it must interpret and on which it must throw specific light. There must be a real measure of continuity between revelation and education or else they are unrelated. Complete or even basic continuity between them, however, is not necessary. It is not even possible if revelation is on a different plane from reason.

Neo-Calvinism lacks contextual relevance (in terms of explanation) as well as a relevant standard of judgment. There is no organic relation between revelation, redemption, and creation or between faith and reason that allows for a fruitful exchange between the Christian faith thus interpreted and higher education. Brunner’s Christianity and Civilization comes the closest to providing a meaningful focus for looking at the problems of civilization and to offering concrete help. But even here Brunner fails to make available a central Christian pattern and to depict over-all organic relations. With his comparatively recent acceptance of agape as the distinctive and determinative motif of the Christian faith, he is in position to move into such relevance, but if he does, he will also leave with finality a position to which he is even now only ambiguously related.

The leading theological tendency of today has sacrificed far too much relational truth to social and religious relativism. ‘When reason is repudiated, the result is relativity among claimed authorities. Therefore there is no basic hope for higher education from neo-Calvinism. There is much activity within this position and many vital things are being said by its adherents about higher education. But at its heart neo-Calvinism stands with fundamentalism in creating an unbridgeable gulf of irrelevance between the Christian faith and higher education.

III

Another movement that has been gaining ground in recent years is the Lund school, the kind of Swedish theology advocated especially by men like Gustaf Aulen and Anders Nygren. This theological position is best known in America through Aulen’s The Faith of the Christian Church and Nygren’s Agape and Eros.

Nygren shows us how Kant’s Copernican revolution of critical philosophy was decisive for consequent thought. Critical philosophy after Kant was seen to deal not with realms of ultimate reality but with principles of validity; not with the region of the transcendent but with the reality of the transcendental; not with a supernatural world beyond this one but with necessities and universalities within experience and for experience. Critical philosophy deals with the preconditions for experience, those necessities without which experience itself is unthinkable. As unconditional necessities, they are not beyond our realm of experience because they do not exist, nor can they be in experience and remain unconditional; they are rather the presuppositions unconditionally of and for experience. Immanuel Kant found three such realms of experience: the theoretical, the practical, and the aesthetic, each with its own kind of transcendental forms. Not all normativeness for experience in his thought, therefore, was rational, but there were different types of unconditional categories of and for experience. Nygren accepts Kant’s position and builds on it. He goes back of Kant’s analysis critically to a category of categories, to an ultimate unity of logical necessity, “the category of eternity.” The all-inclusive, ultimate presupposition of experience is, therefore, the religious category of eternity.

This category of the absolute presupposition for experience, however, is forever inaccessible to rational metaphysics. Reason cannot deal with ultimate reality, only with principles of validity; not with any transcendent realm, but only with transcendental necessity. Therefore, according to Nygren’s analysis, choice of ultimates must be made from within experience, from the stuff of history. In history, choice must be made among religions that are seen to be organic wholes, with centers from which each religion must be understood. Each religion has a regulative pattern, an organic wholeness from a center, a foundational pattern, or Grundmotiv in terms of which alone its distinctive and determinative nature can be understood. The center of Judaism is nomos, or law; of Hinduism, karma, or deed (and consequence); of the Christian faith, agape, or God’s unconditional, spontaneous, uncalculating, groundless love creative of fellowship, centered not in the worth of the object but in the unceasingly forgiving nature of the Subject, pictured most vividly in the forgiveness of and redemptive love for enemies.

The task of Christian theology according to this method is not to build a system of search for God from experience, not to construct a metaphysics nor an apologetics but to find in history, by a faith-judgment which is invulnerable to reason, the Grundmotiv of the Christian faith which actually is agape, and to describe the implications of this motif as they have been developed concretely by the faith of the Church throughout its history. Theology according to the Lund school is as objective, scientific, and intellectually acceptable as physics or biology. The theologian never judges what is ultimate truth or reality, nor does he ever defend the faith rationally, but merely describes it as competently as possible. No concrete confession of faith as such can be proved necessary to history, but faith itself is inescapable. Therefore, faith should choose true revelation by the eyes of faith, but it should never make the mistake of thinking it can or ought to be proved by reason. Can any method be more scholarly and congenial to higher education?

The strength of this position is obvious. Kant rightly pointed out that the traditional arguments for God rested ultimately on the ontological in some form, which simply assumed the identity of thought and being in line with classical thinking.^[2] The evidence, however, does not support conclusively such an assumption. Therefore, rational metaphysies in the traditional sense, especially theological metaphysics, is impossible. At this point the Lund school stands on firm ground. It also maintains correctly that faith selects its religious content from history. Decision among historic faith-judgments is determinative for faith. Practically always, however, except in the case of the founders of new religions, the contents of faith are found in concrete historical religions. The Lund school contends convincingly that religions are organic in nature, having concrete centers from which they must be viewed, and that therefore theology in a decisive sense is the description of historic faiths from within their own distinctive and determinative natures.

The faults or shortcomings of this method are grave. As in the case of neo-Calvinism, the method severs all rational relation between the transcendent and the transcendental. The filling of “the category of eternity” by content from history becomes entirely an arbitrary affair. We are once again left with complete religious relativity in the realm of knowledge. The living cord between religion and truth is cut. Consequently, higher education is left with a choice for or against a religion that has no rational claim on education and provides no empirical foundation for it.

Then again, although the distinctiveness of faith is valuable for the contextual ordering of knowledge and communication, the distinctiveness of the Christian faith according to the Lund theologians consists in God’s revelation of agape. This is a heavenly reality come into history. But no account is taken of the realms of eros or philia (seeking and mutual love respectively), the realms of our actual problems, and no way is opened to account for these realms or to relate the heavenly to the historic. The relation is cut between the realm of redemption and that of creation. The whole aim of the Lund school is to distinguish the Christian faith at its own genuine center from all other religions and human thinking, not to relate the faith by providing a context of explanation, judgment, or renewal. Therefore, this method does not lend itself naturally to become the framework of meaning for Christian higher education, but it could if the aim of the method were to become relational, contextual, and renewing.

It should be added, moreover, that the new generation of scholars, with Gustaf Wingren as their leader, are cutting off the philosophical preamble to Lundensian method.^[3] Dew-fresh creations, moreover, are still possible from within this movement. It has much to offer contemporary theology, but apart from its radical reconception it is hard to see in it a real hope for a full and organic relation to Christian higher education.

Analytical linguistic philosophy or verificational analysis is not theology! Even so, it should be included because of its immense importance for both modern theology and higher education. It has challenged us to a radical rethinking of Christian language, method, and the relation of Christian faith to other subjects in the curriculum. Incidentally, it has kept countless good students from entering the ministry or has undermined the vigor of their faith. The preministerial students have seen no way around its claims that theological language, if not the whole enterprise, is meaningless.

Nevertheless, we must understand this movement sympathetically. It seems to have arisen primarily because the special sciences took over all the fields of knowledge. In giving birth to and bringing up these children, philosophy made itself a superannuated mother with nothing to do. For these thinkers, Kant’s cntical philosophy debarred it from metaphysics; and plain humility (or loss of nerve) kept it from tackling the job of synthesizing all the data from all the sciences. Analytical linguistic philosophy that actually started as logical positivism accepted as its premises that philosophy is empirically uninformative, that it deals with meaning as its sole province, and that meaning is not to be dealt with psychologically as the denotation of particular words as such but logically within propositions. The task of philosophy became the analysis of the meaning of language, for language was its field and analysis its method. Meaningful truth, this position claimed, must be either certain, that is, totally analytical or tautology, or probable in terms of experienced sense data. Verification by sense data became a basic principle, even a criterion, of true philosophy. The ideals of mathematics in analysis and of inventory in the realm of experience underlay the whole movement. It is nominalism carried to its full extreme. A. J. Ayer’s Language, Truth and Logic, especially in the first edition, and Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Phiosophicus illustrate generally the earlier stage of this point of view.

In the second edition of his book (1946), Ayer has come out for a different kind of verification principle. He now admits a permissible inference from sense experience, such as the study of the past from manuscripts and all the necessary inferences of modern physics. “Tough” verification has given way to “weak” or “soft” forms of it. Wittgenstein, again, has shifted from verification to “usage” philosophy in his posthumously published Philosophical Investigations (1953). In this view, language is not so much a convention to be cleansed by analysis as an organic growth which must be considered for legitimate use. Verification is only one test and kind of usage. The disciplines of analysis and verification, in other words, have taken on wider contexts.

The appraisal of this point of view in relation to Christian higher education is not easy. It has done us all a service by cutting the ground from under a rationalistic, objectivistic metaphysics which illegitimately assumed the role of theology. It has also focused philosophy on its main task: the study of meaning. But above all, it ought to help us cut down much unfounded and foolish theological speculation. A flabby faith uses much slippery thinking. Most Christian apologetics is too weak-minded and softhearted to pass the bar of competent, fair-minded thinking. We should be well and lastingly rid of it.

On the other hand, linguistic analysis provided a convenient refuge from the kind of faith that is properly related to reason. Men seek concealment both against and through their own knowledge. They found it in logical positivism and its successors. One way of reasoning God away, for instance, was the following: Certainty has to do with logical propositions or with analytical truth only; all existential truth is contingent; therefore the claim that God exists, that a necessary being exists, confounds logical categories and is literally meaningless. Some even tried to prove the nonexistence of God by such logic! Philosophical analysis, in the second place, also removed faith from truth, religion from knowledge, and led to the full extreme, the split between the realm of form or thought and the realm of fact or experience. This bifurcation is perhaps the gravest cause today of our lack of religious and social leadership in intellectual realms. Christian higher education with its need for synoptic vision and contextual wholeness is therefore definitely threatened by this severing of faith from truth and by this depicting of religion as entirely arbitrary and not subject to knowledge and legitimate education.

What can we do about this position with reference to theology and higher education? The answer is partly that it is itself changing, and becoming self-critical. Its advocates need only keep on extending the realm of experience to be explained far enough, and they will find themselves right in the midst of theological problems and methods. The experience out of which the analysis comes in the first place is contingent. Therefore the all-or-none split between logical certainty and empirical probability is itself impossible for human beings. With that insight, the brittle bifurcation withers at its heart. Or we can show not only that we cannot experience “the whole,” the world, God, or any other such category completely (one of the main contentions against theology on the part of verificational analysis), but that no scientific theory is ever experienced completely. The position has the appeal of the cleanliness of limited data and of a preconceived and confined method, but after its first, intoxicated blindness to the fuller problems of truth, it is already beginning to sober up and will doubtless gradually return to the central concerns of the relation of man’s meanings to his existential problems. Christian educators can learn much from linguistic analysis without being either floored by it as the destroyer of theology or fooled by it as a revolutionary reorientation of man’s total knowledge.

Liberal theology is presently under a cloud. It should not be so, more than others. Its advocates were great in faith and scholarship. Little apology needs to be made for old-line liberals like Walter Rauschenbusch, William Newton Clark, William Adams Brown, and Edgar S. Brightman or for new-line liberals like John C. Bennett, Robert Calhoun, and Walter Horton. Liberalism is characterized by an openness of spirit that is urgently needed. My former colleagues, Roger Shinn and Langdon Gilkey, have pointed out how dangerous can be the people who pass from fundamentalism into neo-orthodoxy without the mellowing influence of liberalism..

Liberalism stands for fairness, for understanding and appreciation of positions other than one’s own. Liberals at least profess to believe that we are to learn from others, not just to oppose them. Liberalism stands also for unity of truth both within and between all levels of it, as, for instance, between faith and reason and between confession and conduct. Liberalism has also evinced an emulative social concern. Men like Rauschenbusch, Washington Gladden, and the Niebuhrs in their early years illustrate this natural combination between the liberal emphasis on truth, reason, experience, love, and social responsibility. Evangelicals of the middle of the nineteenth century evinced both social vision and concern, but the overwhelming credit for the acceptance of, the organic relation between Christian faith and social ethics must be given to the liberals. For them social improvement, especially through education, became second nature. ‘What are more important to higher education than an open spirit, respect for truth, and concern? Christian higher education owes a debt of gratitude beyond estimate to its liberal spirits, even its radically nontheological liberal spirits like John Dewey and Alexander Meiklejohn..

Liberalism failed, all the same, because of its omissions and mistakes. Idealistic in attitude, the liberals for the most part never took keenly enough to heart man’s actual sinfulness. Therefore, they developed a theory of objectivity of knowledge that fails to take into account the fact that, as far as ultimate and personal involvements go, men tend to rationalize rather than to reason, that is, to use reason primarily as a means of self-justification, defense, and attack. “The cult of objectivity,” as we now see, was largely an ideal. Men will not readily see the saving truth when it is also the demanding judge. There was also a false continuity of method in liberalism where the ultimate nature of faith (of there being, for instance, no presuppositionless thinking in ultimate matters, of selective truth being more real than aggregative truth, of decision often being more important than information to education) was not clearly perceived and applied.

Nor was there a vivid, positive zeal among most liberals. They were more interested in fighting backwardness and narrowness than in paying the costly price of positive zeal, particularly when this meant resolute opposition to partial and killing causes. Liberals were too willing to please. They lacked an effective principle of exclusion. To oppose, to refuse, to deny, to take the persecution for the commitment to absolute causes—such decisive action seems, to easygoing good will, to be intolerance. But at many of these points the neoliberals have changed while also preserving some of the best features of liberalism. We can hardly be thankful enough for its good points, but, educationally, we never dare to forget that an absolute demands decision for the pursuit of a certain course, no matter what. Educationally, too, growth is mostly the persistent following of such a course.

One of the most important theological movements for Christian higher education is neonaturalism. In one form or another this drive in theology is best represented by men like Alfred North Whitehead, Daniel Day Williams, Henry Nelson Wieman, Paul Tillich, and Rudolf Bultmann. These men accept the best in science, and aim for adequacy of thinking through philosophy, acknowledging besides the need for mystery as the penetrating counterpart and the constant companion of knowledge. Whitehead, Wieman, and Williams believe that religious thinking must wait on scientific data and philosophic interpretation for intellectual adequacy. Tillich and Bultmann also insist that religious knowledge must not be prescientific. For all, of them, the organic and relational stress of knowledge is of critical importance. Religion as an evaluative response to reality is part of personal, social, and cosmic experience. The stress of the first three thinkers on the organic nature of reality and of knowledge, on the fact that no subject can find its fullest truth apart from the consideration of its relation to other subjects and to the whole, on the togetherness of reality and of value, and on the synoptic approach in general, have made their thought of inestimable importance to higher education, while their stress on integrity of knowledge, life, values, truth, and the religious life has resulted in the creation of a very high form of religious thought.

Along with Whitehead, Tillich is at ‘the very front of constructive thinking. Tillich’s elucidation of the Christian faith, his expounding of philosophy, his grasp of historical thought, his understanding of non-Christian religions, his at-homeness in art and culture generally, his immersion in depth psychology, and his capacity to communicate with even hostile spirits in a secular university set him apart as a minister to higher education. Nathan Pusey, president of Harvard, has related how completely Tillich won over a group of Harvard professors who met him with pronounced skepticism with regard to his religious position. Tillich is more than a profound thinker, however; he is both a prophet and a systematic pioneer.

At a time of confusion or regression in constructive thinking Tillich has forged ahead with both deliberate care and accelerating speed. The center of his position is the relation between the unconditional and the conditioned. Religious reality is the dimension of the unconditional. God does not exist as a Being among beings, but is the unconditional reality, nowhere existing as such, yet everywhere available as the power to resist nonbeing and to make for harmony of being. The central scene for Tillich is history, where meaning is translated into concrete experience through freedom. Christ is the center of history as the picture in history of the unconditional. Thus, essence and existence meet in him, not in such a way that the unconditional becomes conditioned but so that the conditioned becomes completely transparent to the unconditional by the full acceptance of the right relationship between the unconditional and the conditioned. The Cross is the symbol and power of this relation; and the resurrection is the declaration in history of the victory in life of eternity. Eternal life is the releasing and creative participation in this reality. Love is the symbol that most fully explains and makes available true power and justice.

Protestantism is the realistic power for self-criticism and creative renewal.. The Church is community in the full, inclusive sense revealed in Jesus as the Christ, but all community, whether secular or non-Christian, exists and has its reality in the true community of the Church as the representative of the Kingdom of God. The theologian must live and think within the circle of a concrete religion, but he lives also in the total life around him. Therefore, he mediates between religious and secular thought. The secular world has enough moral and spiritual sense even to be the conscience of the empirical Church which is always tempted by idolatry and self-adulation. Between theology and the secular world, therefore, there can be creative co-operation.

Tillich’s theology relates itself exceptionally’ well, by its very nature, to higher education. His exposition of the faith is centrally Christian in a descriptive and creative sense. It has a piercing quality of firsthand insight. His faith in the general presence of the logos provides us with unitive meaning and synoptic vision without reduction of differences, and yet, even so, all meaning is subject to the infinite mystery of the unconditioned. Few theologians have fuller or truer appreciation of secular learning and culture than Tillich.^[4]

Bultmaun represents the existentialist kind of neonaturalism. Ontologically he is basically at one, he claims, with existentialist philosophers like Karl Jaspers and Martin Heidegger. The real difference between them consists in the fact that, whereas the philosophers believe man can make a free, positive decision, Bultmann understands that man must accept passively “by grace” the working of God in human life. God is the power available to man in the ultimate mystery of being who through man’s acceptance of grace can relieve him of anxiety and give him a free decision for the future. Christ exhibited this reality in the Cross and in the resurrection. These are not objective events in the sense of bare, historic occurrences but are, rather, meaningful events that can and should be re-enacted in the present in response to the proclamation of the Gospel.

Christ saves insofar as we know for ourselves the present reality of the losing and finding of self by the overcoming of anxiety and the reception of faith freely open to the future. Insofar as they are meaningful, past and future are both part of the present tense, of the moment for acceptance. Those who have found this reality of overcoming anxiety by a power not of themselves are “in Christ,” “in faith”; what counts is the original reality of the experience of Jesus and of his disciples. They interpreted these experiences, to be sure, in objective, supernatural terms of a God beyond this world who literally came to earth and paid for man’s sin by the shedding of his own blood and by literally rising from death. Modern man trained in science, Bultmann holds, rejects such primitive thinking, but the original rather than the objective reality of the New Testament Gospel remains: “to offer man an understanding of himself which will challenge him to a genuine existential decision.”^[5]

The early Church succumbed, however, to Stoicism and made a world-view out of the Christian faith. This intellectualizing of the faith was a basic mistake. The New Testament speaks genuinely of a Gospel of Christ’s death and resurrection as the power of a new kind of life and community “in Christ” or “in faith.” Weltanschauung is no part of the Gospel. Bultmann’s theology, therefore, has no contextual capacity for higher education; its power, rather, is to break down static structures of interpretation imposed on experience in the past that hinder the creative activity of the spirit in its constant need to appraise happenings, to decide concerning their significance, and to provide freedom from anxiety and the motivational connection with “the stream” of reality of which Bultmann speaks in his Essays, Philosophical and Theological.

What should be said of neonaturalism in its relation to Christian higher education? Already we have stressed its high and significant relevance. We have also emphasized how profoundly and seminally Christian it is on its descriptive side, especially in the case of Tillich, and Bultmaun. Why, then, can we not come to rest in the neonaturalist position? The real problem is created by Christian theology and concerns the nature of transcendence. This term or its obvious equivalents can be found in the writings of the men just mentioned. None of these men is a humanist. Saving reality, God, is radically more than human experience or effort. Nor are they reductionistic naturalists in the sense of employing a limiting scientific method. The closest to such a view of science is Bultmaun’s, but he goes beyond scientific naturalism in the narrow sense even in his ontology. They all reject unequivocally, however, the supernaturalism of Christian classical theology. God, for none of them, is the supernatural creator, the self-sufficient ruler of plants and planets who is other and more than the best we know both in human experience and in cosmic description, the One who from beyond the world became incarnate in it, who died for man’s sin in his full identification with man and who rose victorious over sin, law, and actual death by the deathless power of his supernatural love. Classical Christianity with its objective supernaturalism can be treated as symbol or myth but never as factual history or as true ontology. Tillich and Bultmaun are most emphatic on this point.

Is this shedding of supernaturalism, however, not a riddance and relief for honest faith and competent education? Does it not remove from the Christian theology of today the largest false obstacle separating it from higher education? Has not the demythologizing of the Bible been our biggest task for several generations, now at length recognized and effected? Is it not also true that many who confess to belong to other theological tendencies in fact belong here ontologically? Modernity of assumption is more pervasive of the inner man of education than appears on the surface of confession.

VII

Admittedly, the real problem is not whether neonaturalism is genuinely biblical or Christian in the historical sense. If it is true, we should all come to it. Radical translation of terms is then justified and we have no right to accuse these men of dishonesty in their use of them. Has not Kant, furthermore, made it impossible ever again to show critically that supernaturalism is true? Kant himself, of course, is a complex problem at this point, considering the whole history of his writings, and to try to refute him easily is foolish, but the following line of reasoning makes me believe that at its heart classical Christian supernaturalism is not only biblical and historical but actually true. At least, I find no equally convincing alternative for faith.

I grant that along the usual lines of thinking, naturalism has a right to say that any thought, experience, or fact, human or cosmic, may be defined as natural. Aside from these facts, we can know nothing. What is revealed, naturalists say, is only the fuller dimensions of human nature and of the cosmos in which we live. In terms of human experience or thought as such, therefore, there is no proving of a world beyond this one or of a being beyond natural beings. Naturalists also have a right to say that trust in unexamined revelation is completely arbitrary and eventuates in intellectual relativism, a choosing of ultimates at will, without check or challenge from evidence or reason. Along such lines of procedure the Kant of the first Critique remains unanswered; and supernaturalisr~ is mere primitive thinking or, at most, precritical philosophy.

There are objective facts, however, that Kant was in no position to consider. We are not left with the choice of either disavowing the cosmological proof entirely or of assuming the ontological along with it. This Kantian cornerstone of modernity is not hewn out of the granite of fact nor is it built on the marble of reasonin~. The facts, according to science itself, are that we live in a cosmic process that has come to be in the course of unimaginably long ages, by means of new levels of development which, as they become added to previous process, are found not only to fit into it organically but to fulfill it. To believe that such an accumulative series of appearances that have added up to an organic unity of the universe and of the universes has come to be and has come together without cause and without reason is to believe in miracle with unrestrained credulity. When there is added the astounding fact that from the point of view of life, personality, and creative community (our relevant data for the criterion of meaningfulness) this process is almost brand-new, the abruptness of the process be-comes overwhelming.

However many ways there are of approaching or of explaining these facts, they are pivotal for any thinking concerning ultimates. They break all reductionistic naturalisms except as these are accepted either as ignorant assumptions or as credulous faiths. These facts also forbid all easy assumptions that the description of present process best indicates the nature of reality. Such a freezing of the process goes contrary to the overwhelming indication of process as on the move, awaiting further development. There are, therefore, solid facts which bridge the gap between the cosmological reasoning and the ontological..

Where, however, does this insight leave us? There is no returning to a rationalistic inductive or deductive reasoning that “proves” God. Kant is right that all reasoning from experience to ultimate ~reality does in the end in some way use the ontological “proof.” Kierkegaard also correctly contended that nothing relative (historical, ethical, or metaphysical) can ever prove God. That the less certain should prove the more certain is obviously logically false. Dorothy Emmet, therefore, in The Nature of Metaphysical Thinking has properly dismissed deductive and hypothetical analogies, retaining only those that are existential and co-ordinating. However, she dismissed projective analogies too quickly. In case the projective analogies are merely the absolutizing of something in history which is obviously relative, Kant and Kierkegaard stand guard against such projective thinking. When the actual bridge between cosmological and ontological reasoning stands forth strong, then projective thinking changes its intent, status, and effectiveness.

In such a case, the entire problem is altered. To make no deliberate choice of ultimates if a person is mature enough to make such choice, is to retreat from reality and from responsible intellectual and religious leadership. But all thinkers have assumed presuppositions, some posture toward reality, some configuration of experience that indicates what they actually consider to be most important and most real. The right response to reality is consequently to have as true and effective an interpretation of ultimate reality and meaning as possible.^[6]All must live by faith, the only question is by what kind of faith they live. William James is right that there are live, forced, and momentous options among which we must actually take our choice.

Brand Blanshard in his presidential address before the American Theological Society in 1956, made a strong reply to William James, however, to the effect that it is unethical ever to go beyond the facts or to make any leap of faith at all not warranted by the facts, for such choice is actually the confusion of faith with, or the substitution of faith for, knowledge. At this point, we all have to be utterly scrupulous and critical. No leap into ultimates gives us new knowledge, but such a leap may put us into position to receive new knowledge from beyond present process. After all, new knowledge has come into process in the past, and we are in no position to deny that new facts do appear or that new insights might throw fuller or different light on ultimate questions. Since no leap gives us knowledge, however, we can say no more than that we must have some co-ordinating presupposition or presuppositions for thinking, for the total configuration of life, and that therefore we should choose the one that seems least arbitrary.

We are then led back again to our facts concerning the origins of the world we know. Not to acknowledge a creative ground of cause and reason behind, before, or inexplicably within process which is more than present process and which accounts the least arbitrarily for it, is to be facing the past by infinite reduction or to be parochially frozen within the present. When our faith stands on whatever best accounts in process for its development, its unity, its meaning, and its fulfillment, it is the least arbitrary. Not that we have therefore cleared up the mystery of~the new or of creation. But transcendence^[7]becomes the least arbitrary content of our faith if it can be shown to have organic relations to the other levels and if it can be seen to explain inclusively the meaning of the total process with the richest explanatory adequacy we can find.

Translated into theological terms, this means that incarnation and eschatology are primary to thinking. Knowledge of ultimates must be had from within experience and process. God becomes man, enters human experience and process to reveal himself. It means also that knowledge is eschatological in the sense that incarnation points forward toward the consummation of creation. The redemption of creation by means of incarnation takes place in time directed toward the future. Such theology springs out of our actual knowledge situation. We as Christians believe in the Incarnation, that God came in Christ as the fullness of time. In such a case, eschatology becomes the fulfillment inclusively of what has come once for all conclusively in Jesus as the Christ. God is the personal Spirit who is holy love. We do not know him in his eternal glory, but we do know him as such love from within our bounds of time and space. Furthermore, it is important for education that the Holy Spirit is biblically defined as the Spirit of truth. When God came in Jesus Christ as the personal Spirit who is holy love, he came as the personal event that is also the center of meaning. The living Christ then becomes the context, judge, and transformer of all knowledge. If this is correct theology, how does our analysis refer to all the contemporary tendencies we have described and evaluated?

VIII

In the light of our analysis we can see that it is possible to keep the fundamentalists’ emphasis on “evangelical supernaturalism” without their obscurantist literalism of biblical inspiration and of propositional revelation that shuts them off from the open inquiry of higher education. We should also rejoice in the neo-Calvinist stress on the transcendence of God and on his revelation in event, particularly in the history of salvation and in the Christ, without accepting its pitting of redemption over against creation, and event over against meaning. As a protest movement to establish the primacy of the transcendence of God and of his self-revelation in the Word, we have needed this movement, but now it is time to see how transcendence and incarnation are related to God’s ubiquity and to his work in creation and history. The Lund school of theology can teach us about the distinctiveness of the Christian faith by means of its dominant and determinative motif, agape, and the need for patience and critical care in the description of what is truly Christian, but we need not with them deny to reason its proper place of interpreting and of relating the faith. If we release the full power of the Christian faith, however, we shall in all three of these movements find a classical Christianity which, while remaining itself, can be related both contextually and motivationally to the needs of Christian higher education.

In the case of the last three movements discussed – linguistic analysis, neoliberalism, and neonaturalism – the problem has been a forfeiting of the transcendence, or the distinctiveness of the Christian faith. We have seen, however, how it is possible competently and honestly to go beyond the strictures on faith inherited from Kant. We share with the linguistic analysts their revulsion toward slippery Christian apologetics, and we covet their drive for cleanliness of thought. We believe, too, that the day of an ohjective, rationalistic metaphysics as a legitimate approach to ultimate questions is over, but we know that the position of linguistic analysis is the extreme illustration of a false bifurcation between thought and fact and that fact cannot be tied down to sensationalism. We are therefore hopeful that beyond their function as a cleansing fire, the linguistic analysts will become creatively constructive within the bounds of their genuinely critical insights.

The liberals need to encourage us to openness of spirit, breadth of view, and unity of truth both in thought and in life. Their accommodation of spirit makes for co-operative inquiry with those in higher education, but we need not on that account lose decisiveness of truth or distinctiveness of theological method.

The naturalists we have already appraised by means of our own constructive analysis. What they lack is an effective method for understanding of, and pointing to, adequate and effective transcendence. They, above all others, are offering higher education relevant stimuli and contextual suggestions. Whitehead’s influence should grow in the field of higher education, and there are some indications that it is growing. Tillich’s The Dynamics of Faith shows how much a dynamic and creative religious thinker can offer motivationally as well as intellectually to Christian higher education. We share with these thinkers their horror for an arbitrary revelationism, unsupported by genuine data or by reasoning from within the processes of our modern educationa} activities. These processes can be opened up to the truth of classical Christianity precisely by the use of legitimate reasoning about the facts already established by modern educators. We need primary thinkers for this task..

Creative Christian higher education is a noble challenge during these days of rapid intellectual and cultural transition.. No facile solution will do and no fixed formula will ever satisfy the constantly dynamic enterprise of education. I am convinced, however, that a new age of constructive leadership for civilization can come if we appropriate the universal truth of the Christian revelation in Christ and apply this with both experimental caution and bold creative courage to the ever expanding and deepening problems of higher education. Only such a constructive undertaking can entitle us to use the term Christian higher education.

Nels Ferre. 1961. “Higher Education and Values,” Chapter 19, In Searchlights on Contemporary Theology, New York: Harper and Brothers. Used by permission.

THE crisis of our times is the crisis of values. The Harvard anthropologist Clyde Kluckhohn is only one strong voice in a mighty chorus thundering this truth. Values indicate how we try to meet our needs. Human needs are what human nature requires. Our basic needs are universal to human nature. Human needs, as Rignano observed long ago, are also the expression of the necessity for human beings to be in the right relationship to their environment. They are, in fact, elicited by that environment. Therefore human needs reflect, beyond their own nature, the nature of the reality that produced them. The understanding of what human values are, consequently, involves the interpretation and the evaluation of what is beyond man. Inasmuch as religion is man s evaluative response to reality, the right religious response offers the answer to our crisis of values. What chance is there, however, that the nature of such a response can be established, and, if established, made?

Higher education is itself in a state of crisis. It is, at least, undergoing drastic reexamination. Many of those responsible for charting its course are in a flexible mood. They are ready for change. Development requires reappraisal, the discarding. of unfortunate features of present practice and the discovery and incorporation of new methods and contents. For such constructive change, there is great pressure. One force for change is the inescapable fact of failure on the part of the present kind of democratic way of life in America to meet the demands of a new era, within and without. In a television series, for instance, in which outstanding Americans weighed the strength of their national life in its major areas, there was a frightening consensus that Americans are falling short of the requirements of the present day. Such searching judgment, however, can also be the proper prelude to a new fulfillment. A second force for the renewal of higher education is the focus of attention and of effort which is now put upon it all the way from the federal government and secular agencies to the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the U.S.A. and separate denominations. Our present topic, “Higher Education and Values,” therefore combines two main areas of concern.

In order to furnish a constructive approach to the subject, I shall focus our attention on three areas of need: the trusting of truth; the freedom of fulfillment; and the creation of community.

The thrust of Western civilization originated in the trusting of truth. For the Hebrews, such faith meant obeying the source of. trust, the living God. He was the author of dependable order. “Shall not the judge of all the earth do right?” Is not his judgment the plumb line of righteousness? The authors of the Books of Kings were the first historians of note; and for them history exhibited the faithfulness of God in punishing the wicked rulers and their nations and in rewarding the righteous. For the Greeks, also, the trusting of truth underlay their rise to creative civilization from Parmenides’ equating of thought and being through various approaches to the trustworthiness of reason, such as Anaxagoras’ identification of mind and reality, up to the magnificent systems of Plato and Aristotle. With the Greeks, it was reason and natural knowledge that delivered them from bondage to fate or from the fickleness of the gods. For the Hebrews, the trusting of truth was mainly obedience to a faithful God; for the Greeks, such trusting was largely the acceptance of the regularities in thought and nature disclosed by reason.

The strength of the Hebrew and Greek heritages combined to provide the proper precondition for the rise of art, culture, and science in the Middle Ages. Both history and nature were dependable orders under God and according to the laws of nature. Augustine’s City of God gave main focus to Western man’s thought concerning the meaning of history up through the Middle Ages, and Roger Bacon formulated one of the early statements to the effect that man trusted God’s faithfulness in nature. Within such an outlook, intellectual, aesthetic, and scientific creativity burst forth.

Such faith in truth, however, was soon assailed. In effect, Isaac Newton reduced the historical order to the natural, thus helping to destroy faith in the God of history. David Hume separated both orders from the truth of pure reason, reserving truth for logic and pure mathematics, and introducing a radical skepticism as to any dependable and significant knowledge in the other realms. Instead of the knowledge of history and of nature belonging together under God and according to reason, there was for him no certain knowledge of either, especially not as wholes. More and more, thereafter, knowledge began to disintegrate into fragments of special sciences to the point where, as in modern linguistic philosophy, only abstract analytical meaning carried certainty, while this realm itself became totally divorced from the realm of fact, and all facts relegated by rigid, methodological rules to the special sciences. In other cases, the unity underlying history and nature was stated in terms of myths and symbols so loosely and thinly related to reality that they beclouded the mind and lamed the will.

We need, indeed, to return to a trusting of truth in both areas of history and nature. But such a return seems nearly impossible. We cannot will it. Mere reason is impotent to provide basic faith. What hope is there, then, for a new creative era to match the unprecedented demand of our day?

Our deepest need, we recall, indicates the nature of reality. Our evaluative response should therefore be in line with our deepest need as men. Clemens E. Benda, in his significant work, Der Mensch im Zeitalter der Lieblosigkeit, has pointed out that from within a false evolutionary presupposition we have defined need in the direction of what lies below man. Man’s animal needs, so to speak, for physical survival and satisfaction have been made central: food, sex, and shelter, whereas man capuot be understood except on his own level, as a person and as a society in need most centrally of love. The Harvard Research Center in Altruistic Integration and Creativity, under Pitirim A. Sorokin, has amassed evidence to support this contention, and some social scientists are convinced that love is the context for the investigation of human behavior.

However significant such inquiry and such statements may be for theory, indicating evaluative responses to reality to be centrally love, the Hebrew Christian approach to love through acceptance and obedience is nevertheless the only way to know love as the power to transform life and to make possible the trusting of truth in history. If God is love and if love to be known must be obeyed, a century of lawlessness, crime, and wanton destruction in war should make it almost impossible for its generations to know him, at least not apart from genuine repentance and a change of ways. Only by the doing of the truth and even by the being of it can truth be known enough to be trusted; otherwise, it has to be known mainly by the breach of it as sterility, futility, and sense of guilt and meaninglessness.

Such obedience in history, however, can never take the place of trusting the truths of reasoned experiment in nature. The faithfulness of God in nature underlies the unity of the universe, which is the basic presupposition of science. The method of science is a sign of the trusting of truth. Higher education, to make possible full focus on the truths of history and of nature that can support and produce basic values, must rediscover a way to place our culture under obedience to God and under respect for reason, until combining and developing our Christian and our Greek heritages, we shall receive that sensitiveness to what is vital that shall let the values arising from our deepest needs spring once again to creative and robust life.

In addition to the trusting of truth a syndetic value is the freedom of fulfillment. No higher education can succeed if it fails to release the kind of freedom that is the foundation of a large cluster of secondary values like responsibility, initiative, and creativity. Our American culture has been cradled in liberty, nurtured in initiative, and it should mature in creative responsibility.

The denial of man’s freedom is by now an old story. But our attention has usually been focused on the institutional and social denial of freedom. We have become increasingly aware of political totalitarianism and cultural conformism. Higher education, however, has contributed its share to the denial of freedom. By its absorption with the objective fields in the curriculum, whether in the natural or in the social sciences, higher education has turned man himself into an object. The natural sciences, of course, should study man as an object. But as a subject in the curriculum, the social sciences placed man under the control of predictable conditions, purporting to study the whole man but actually reducing him to an object. Thus was “the subject” made “subject to.” Then philosophy (in large sections of its domain), as Paul Tillich pointed out in his Lowell Lectures (Boston, 1958), reduced the subject of man’s thinking to a matter of linguistic analysis, and man himself to a sheer object for scientific verification.

Existentialism came as a revolt against this objectification of man. Soren Kierkegaard choked under the suffocating systems that made man an object. For him, subjectivity was truth, and choice was the only road to reality. Existentialism has now become a movement of revolt in literature and drama as well as in philosophy and theology. Central to this movement is its demand that man recognize his inescapable freedom. Such stress is one step on the return to reality, but most of the movement is guilty of the perversion or the belittling of freedom. The freedom advocated by existentialism is for the most part man’s immature freedom of self-expression. Such freedom is rooted in man, not in his evaluative response to reality. Because it has no recourse to the conditions of the freedom of fulfillment, modern existentialism nearly always fails to find God, through whom truth can be trusted both for history and for nature. Freedom therefore becomes largely the despairing responsibility of a faithless generation.

The only adequate answer to existentialism is the fulfillment of its demand for the centrality of choice by the discovery of the kind of reality where choice not only is real and responsible but is capable of individual and social fulfillment. If freedom itself is not optional, as the existentialists rightly observe, the road to reality must lie through freedom. When freedom is conceived of as primarily for the self, there is no realm of reality in terms of which the freedom of the self can be fulfilled. Freedom becomes meaningless and frustrating. The reason existentialists like Jean Paul Sartre find all roads leading nowhere is that the goal toward which they start is already the self. They have nowhere to go with their freedom.

The freedom of self, at the least, must lie in our common humanity. Man must be an object of allegiance. Instead of other people “being hell,” as Sartre dramatizes in No Exit, a fact for those who make their own freedom both ground and goal, other people should be understood and experienced ~is essential to self-fulfillment. Christianity and Hinduism join in affirming that other people, rightly understood and accepted, are part of our own body, not to be hated but to be loved. Martin Heidegger, we have seen, has expanded existentiell, or individual human nature, into existential, or common human nature. This way lies the truth of right existentialism. Freedom is real and decision is central both to knowledge and to reality, not as the freedom of the limited, isolated self, but as the freedom of the inclusive, social self. The glory of man is the glory of his common humanity; the responsibility of man is the inescapable freedom of man, the human community.

Moreover, as self-fufillment comes only through the acceptance of others, in the grace of both common receiving and responsible doing, so the freedom of fulfillment comes only through the reaching of reality. Man’s freedom is inescapably bound up with God’s freedom, whose freedom is that of creative concern for the common good. Man is not alone even in the frightful choices of this day, except as he repudiates his Maker. Our own freedom is authentic, for it is the gift of a faithful God, but it need not become the freedom of frustration except as we ignore or defy the common good. We may have, for the receiving and the living of it, the freedom of fulfillment where freedom for self-fulfillment is liberated within co-operative community and where man’s basic need for love is lifted up into the reaches of the ultimate reality of the freedom of God. A basic task for higher education, especially in our day of frustrating and dehumanizing conformism is to discover as well as to defend, to enlarge as well as to perpetuate, to sensitize as well as to make available, the total range of freedoms in all areas of life, without which man neither knows nor attains authentic existence.

III

The trusting of truth should lead to the fulfillment of freedom both by a larger view of God and by the acceptance of his universal will, and also by the fuller exploration and use of the natural order for the common good. For these values, as our evaluative response to reality at the center of our common need, are themselves consummated by the concern for community. It is unnecessary for our purposes to paint in large the conflict of our age between the surviving drives of a profane individualism and an obscene collectivism. Both are sins against God, for whatever else the Christian doctrine of the Trinity may mean, at its center it proclaims the truth of God’s identifying himself conclusively with the individual in the Son, and with the community in the Spirit. In the biblical teaching, one cannot be had apart from the other. Man is neither free nor full apart from the self-acceptance which involves altogether the acceptance of the total human community under God.

To be sure, such community must begin at home. The wise know that the world will be changed in the family and that a new age must begin in the local community. There are those who grow eloquent concerning the breaking down of barriers and the building of bridges on a world-wide scale because they cannot govern themselves, because they have failed in their own family life, and because they are irresponsible in the concrete instances of social need. Beyond this obvious requirement of authentic life at home, however, there are three areas of critical demand calling for the creation of community: race, nation, and religion.

Whether in South Africa or in the United States, whether in London or in Fort Wayne, race comes as a curse because it expresses as well as symbolizes man’s revolt against God. God created us with the glory of diversity; we fear what is different and defame God’s glory. For the problem of race there is no easy solution because it is not only rooted in our primitive passions but also intertwined with our relation to God. The only adequate solution for it is the power of God who created, contagious with the richness of our common humanity. Once when I was invited to address a law school in the southern United States, as I opened my Bible my eye happened to fall on two verses across the page from each other: “The courts are open” and “They were filled with the Holy Spirit.” The values of God’s diversity in creation by racial variety can become understood and appropriated only when the meaning and purpose of both law and love become effective in a new level of humanity. Higher education fails both God and man unless it can produce the power for the living of a new age in racial relations.

As our response to race indicates our fear of creative diversity, so our response to the urgent need for supernational loyalties and arrangements witnesses to our limiting of God to national regions.

We have failed of the maturation that is now needed to keep pace with God’s present summons. Nations have had their necessary day as the largest practical unity of human organization, possessive of effective sanctions. Some kind of world federation, keeping intact such regional and national freedoms as are consistent with, and enriching of, the common good, will have to come if the world is not to perish by its own hand, or at least not to bleed itself into ignoble and blasphemous impotence. Norman Cousins has prophesied the probable ending of our course of history unless man can rise with necessary speed from the age of barbarism, symbolized by war, to the age of civilization, symbolized by a new level of co-operative living. No education is high, let alone higher, unless it include as a contagious passion and a sober responsibility the values of one world in international relations.

Furthermore, as our negative response to race rejects God’s riches in diversity and as our isolating or insolent response to nation indicates our limiting in our loyalties the effective reign of God, even so, our encountering of other religions is all too often an escape from the universality of God. Symmachus long ago, in discussing the relation of religion, informed Ambrose that so great a mystery cannot ever be reached by following one road only, and recently Dean Inge reminded us that there are many paths leading to the hill of the Lord and that the paths converge only at the top. Modern humanity has no choice except to face the fact that the world’s religions will confront each other either for conflict or for fulfillment. If Christ is, as Christians claim, the symbol and the substance of God’s universal love, Christians should surely understand and accept all religions at their best, working out with them, humbly and patiently, the common destiny of the many roads which men have started toward the hill of the Lord. There need be no guess that as they do so they will discern much new beauty and learn not a little of God’s way in history and in nature. Higher education dare not accept any longer, on the penalty of sin against humanity as well as against God, what Ruth Benedict considers the absolutes of anthropological in-groupism rather than the true universal of a common humanity under God, united by its common need for universal love and creative community.

Higher education today confronts, at the center of its task of reconstruction, the nature and place of value. The crises of both civilization and of higher education converge here. If our analysis is right, the solution for both areas can come only as we learn to trust the truth, to find the freedom of fulfillment, and to release the creation of community. The trusting of truth requires the doing of truth. The will of God for the common good must be obeyed if it is to be convincingly known. Upon such doing of truth, the reliability of reason as a total context for the study of nature will once again begin to be restored to us. Upon such doing of truth depends also the finding of the freedom of fulfillment which makes the self whole, and releases the deeper freedom of our common humanity within the overarching reaches of God’s concern for the total good. And the crowning glory of such trusting of truth and of such freedom of fulfillment will be the creation of community from the family circle of the local home to the whole family of God, in race, in world order, and in the richly diversified reaches of religion for one world.

The attention of America today is on her leaders of higher education as they not only inquire into the nature of value but labor to release the most authentic values both to satisfy the common need and to whet the appetite for that fuller craving for what is good, which lies at the center of what is best called the truly human.

Nels Ferre. 1961. “The Church-Related College and a Mature Faith,” Chapter 20, In Searchlights on Contemporary Theology, New York: Harper and Brothers. Used by permission.

THE Church-related college is of primary importance both for the Church and for education. For the Church, it can be pointed out that a main reason for the vigor of the American Church in contradistinction to the British and the Swedish, for instance, is the fact that, in both of these latter, leaders of thought in the Church have been generally overawed by the paralyzing power of secular thinkers. Both Britain and Sweden give their theological degrees through state-controlled institutions of higher learning. These secular institutions determine almost sovereignly what are to be regarded as criteria for truth as well as the patterns for what is properly accepted as legitimate knowledge.

In both instances, the leaders of science and philosophy, with few exceptions, have espoused theories of knowledge not only dampening to the faith but destructive of it. I have personally observed the blighting force of secular university influence. The point of view held by the secular university is regarded almost with religious reverence. It is final truth! In America, however, institutions of learning independent of such secular ones keep calling the bluff of these secular scholars, whose theories often spring out of their presuppositions and their presuppositions all too often out of their basic approach to life. Depth of learning and vigor of thought have helped the Church tq accept the truth of its faith without the constant internal bleeding that results when it is secretly, at least halfway, assumed by the Church leaders that their faith, although good and high, is not in fact true.

For education, on the other hand, the Church-related college has helped the secular university. Surveys made of the background of scientists and of scholars generally in leading American institutions of higher education have indicated surprisingly that these come out of all proportion from the small Church-related colleges, if that term is taken to mean colleges with a general Christian background of contemporary concern. There is a motivation present in the Church-related colleges that gives the drive of senousness to young scholars. Faith generates creativity. These scholars may later disavow the form of their erstwhile faith, but all the same they owe to their background much of the drive which has put them in the position of leadership. This situation with regard to the small liberal-arts colleges, giving birth to prominent scholars who then generally stay in the secular institutions, parallels the raising up of the majority of the Christian ministry by the conservative churches. These persons then go on to become educated Christian leaders who generally hold a more intellectually mature faith than the communities which reared them.

To the fact of the demonstrated importance of the Church-related college must be added that now on a nationwide scale in America, even in secular education, there is an intensive focus of thinking and support directed to higher education. Along with this general undertaking to strengthen materially higher education, there is also right now intensive denominational and interdenominational emphasis on Christian higher education.

The role of the Church-related college is obviously twofold: It is an agent of the Church; it is a servant of higher education.

The Church-related college is nothing less than the Church in education. The Church-related college is the Church at work educationally. It is the Church learning; it is the Church expressing its faith in terms of knowledge and in relation to knowledge; it is the Church communicating its faith.

In the first place, the Church must find its faith. In one sense, to be sure, the faith of the Church is given once for all. In Jesus Christ, the Church has the abiding anchor of its faith. The Church that does not confess centrally that Jesus Christ is Lord is not Christian. Christ defines the Church and gives it reality. But in another sense, the faith must ever be discovered afresh. Gustaf Wingren, a weighty Swedish theologian, has said that the permanent task of the Church is to relate the Bible to the world, or as he puts it, the constant work of the Church in education is to carry on a dialectic between hermeneutics and anthropology. Hermeneutics, as he uses the term, expresses the constant requirement to look afresh at the basic interpretation of the Bible in the light of the needs of a concrete age; while anthropology, in his terminology, stands for the constant need to view man’s understanding of himself in the light of the Bible. Thus, both the Bible and each age have need of continual confrontation of each other by the believer who participates both in the Christian community and in the thought patterns of his age. In this profound sense the Church is continually finding its faith, and the best place for so doing is within its own institutions of higher education.

But the Church needs also to confess its faith within the thought patterns which are most real to it; and within the forms that most clearly and forcefully express its faith. No believer or community of faith can be at its best until the reality by which it lives can be put into such natural expression and used so meaningfully in worship that the faith itself becomes its own best recommendation. In one sense, the faith should become such a sound background for study that it forms a context for thought, a context that is taken for granted.

Our highest faith is our presupposition; no presupposition, moreover, activates vigorous thought until it gives a steady perspective to our universe of knowledge. Faith should co-ordinate as well as motivate inquiry. Well has Goethe said that the believing ages are the creative ages. Even when Alfred North Whitehead maintains that, on the whole, it is the unstable ages that are the epochs most productive of high faith, he means not that such high-grade experience results from uncertainty or from confusion, but rather, that it results from the searing need to rethink what is assumed in the light of the welter of new evidence and new thinking. The task of the Church-related college is to facilitate the confession of faith. It is ever to reformulate the faith in terms of its foundation, with constant reference to the experience of the believing community. When this is done effectively, the foundation itself is understood afresh and the experience of the community of faith is cleansed and strengthened.

Besides finding and confessing its faith, the Church-related college must learn how to communicate it. No faith is mature until it knows how to live in its environment, however secular, without either hostility or conformity. Such maturity comes from the kind of security people have who know not only what they believe and why, but also how to communicate it to nonbelievers. Such communication depends upon an integrity of community experience within which it is possible to feel oneself into the very lives of those who reject the faith. The community must be able to become involved with the world, to enter into its inmost feelings of anxiety and self-assertion, without forfeit of its own confession. To do so, the Church-related college should learn how to make use of the signs and symbols that express the wider and the more basic faith of the outside world and to create symbols of communication of its own that will reach the nonbelieving community, whether this be the secular university or the more amorphous field of the general public.

To carry on this work of finding, confessing, and communicating a mature faith the Church-related college must be, to use Clarence Cranford’s phrase, a fellowship of the unashamed. It must be a community of commitment to the Christian faith. The ideal, of course, is to have the whole of the administration and the whole faculty continuously aware of the commitment involved in being a Church-related college. The Church-related college is in purpose a community of Christian administrators and teachers. In any case, it is failing its distinctive task unless it has an administration definitely aware of its nature and committed firmly to its task, and unless a large group of the instructors are actively and intelligently concerned with the primary purpose of the college. A Church-related college without a Christian faculty fel,lowship is a misnomer.

But the Church-related college is not only the agent of the Church, the Church at work in education; it is also, on the other hand, the representative of higher education. Neither task can be subordinated to the other. The Church-related college must, by circumstance, serve two masters. Each master has full right over its servant. The Church-related college assumes inescapably this twofold task.

With reference to higher education, the college should have unswerving allegiance to truth. Its intellectual integrity needs to be beyond question. The task of higher education is to find, to formulate, and to communicate truth in general. It is to find truth for the sake of life. Knowledge must be sought with inviolable honesty; yet knowledge is also pursued with concern for life. Man is not in the educational enterprise for the sake of some unrelated, abstract ideal of knowledge; he is in education to solve his problems in the light of dependable knowledge. For this reason, in legitimate education, no bias can be presupposed that determines the conclusions beforehand. Whatever faith lays binding hands on truth is false. It is no use at all to say that all thinkers have presuppositions and that, therefore, the Christian has a right to his own. Mature faith is rooted and grounded in truth. Unless man has the capacity for some real measure of finding and bowing to truth not of his own believing or making, faith is the arbitrary shouting of seekers lost in the dark.

This integrity of service to higher education involves the requirement that the Church-related college enjoy freedom of inquiry, of thought, and of expression. No Church body or Church-appointed trustees should dictate the intellectual conclusions of faculty members. No faith is real that must live at the expense of truth. No creed is worth holding that can live only by the suppression or the distortion of facts. No confssion is worth teaching that cannot endure hard reasoning. Even pressure, however subtle or indirect, on the faculty to conform to the Church’s faith rather than to whatever truth it finds precludes a genuinely open inquiry.

The faculty must dare to criticize freely its own faith. At the same time it must be committed to the Church it serves. The Church-related college serves these two masters. Each is’ sovereign in its own sphere. There is a direct relation of the college as an educational institution to God. It does not need to serve God only as a part of the Church. It need not come to its finding within the presuppositions of its Church’s theology. God has created the world and works in it. The Church-related college, as college, stands in a direct relation to God within the order of creation.

The Church, however, sees everything first of all in the light of Christ. Its temptation is therefore to telescope truth into a means of salvation. It tends to contract the order of creation into the order of redemption. But the college as an institution of higher learning deals with vast fields of knowledge, like chemistry and astronomy, where Christ and the Church have no direct relevance. Whatever ultimate relevance these fields may have is a task for theology to work out and is not the direct responsibility of the college. It finds and teaches the facts. When the facts of the order of creation, however, seem to do away with faith, the faculty must wrestle honestly with such a situation, with no compulsion from those who employ them, provided the faculty members recognize genuinely the primary purpose of the Church-related college to be the Church at work in education.

High religion and high education are basic needs for any creative culture. In the work of the Church-related college the two are wed. Marriage of independently influential partners offers occasion for strong tensions. Such tensions are altogether likely within the work of the Church-related college. They are, in fact, salutary, provided that the tension be constructive. Such crosscurrents should be the occasion for the growth of a zestful, creative community.

The role of the Christian college in its aim to produce a mature faith is therefore, basically, to be both a community with the Christian faith as its presupposition and a community of learning with a completely open method of inquiry. Such a commitment to two masters is impossible unless the Christian faith is also true. If it is not, there can be no authentic Christian colleges. My own conviction is that the Christian faith centers in the reality of Christ as God’s universal love and in the Holy Spirit of truth. If Christ and the Holy Spirit are made central to the Church-related college, what results is a community of concern and integrity. The Christian faith stands or falls with the faithfulness of God for all and with the dependability of the Holy Spirit as the guarantor of freedom in the truth. My own experience is increasingly that discipleship and scholarship need not conflict but can give that background of constructive tension that makes it ever necessary to re-examine the faith and to keep it alive and fresh. The more the Church-related college becomes the community of integrity and concern, the more it will serve well both of its primary functions.

To be sure, this will involve a constant dialogue with the Church at large as to the nature of a mature faith. The Church-related college should serve as the mind of the Church. It should be the intellectual conscience of the Church. The mind by its very nature is restive. The feelings, on the other hand, flow in accustomed channels of satisfaction. They are basically conservative, while the mind transcends the present. It sees what can be and what ought to be. It sees different possibilities. It keeps the self unsatisfied, ever solving problems, ever adjusting itself to new situations. The mind of a community should stir that community out of its false self-satisfactions and self-securities. The mind of the Church stirs up the Church creatively and constructively. For those who live on the accumulation of the past, new ideas often come as the threat of the new and the untried. The Church generates much thought based on a false attachment to past ways of doing or of thinking. Much of its thinking is due to an uninformed devotional attitude that is not always wise. The Church therefore creates or constructs much thought that cannot stand the light of vigorous criticism. For this reason it needs the critical work of its mind, the Church-related college. The mind, if free to do so, insists upon a self-consistency that eliminates intellectual discrepancy or moral inconsistency, but, in fact, hurts as it helps. Then the Church-related college has a most important function to perform, however unpleasant its work may be for many in the Church..

To be sure, the Church-related college should also be willing to listen. Often, thought is advanced more lightly by those not in direct responsibility for the life of the institution. Often, the conservative feelings are right and need to be heeded. Thus, with regard to the need for arriving at a mature faith, the Church-related college and the Church need to carry on a constant dialogue. Because of the divergence of function there arises all too often a strong, if not bitter, anti-intellectualism in the Church and a determined anti-ecclesiasticism in the college. These are the false by-products of a necessary process of mutual co-operation within divergent functions.

The Church-related college must also, on the other hand, carry on a determined dialectic with the secular university. This dialectic is particularly needed with regard to religious data and religious interpretations. The secular university has its function within the general providence of God. The secular institutions of higher learning are of immeasurable help to the Church-related colleges because of their constant challenge of the theological bias on. the part of those committed to the Christian faith. The world is better off for having secular universities, or at least for having public institutions of higher education not under any kind of Church control or dominating influence. But no subject is without presuppositions, and often the subjects taught in the universities have as their. presupposition assumptions prejudicial to the Christion faith. Science, for instance, can be turned from a method into a metaphysics. When this is done covertly, the danger is great.

A naturalistic metaphysics often becomes a dominant theology, an idol, simply on some such false ground as that science is the only road to truth. Even when such a claim is made openly, it is dangerous, both to the faith of the faculty and to that of the students. When, however, it is simply assumed, the hurt is incalculable. The Church-related college in such a case needs to have representatives who, with utmost competence and integrity, will show the limits of efficacy on the part of the scientific method, without in any way appealing to arguments of ignorance in favor of religion.

Similarly, the social sciences may become messianic and pseudoreligious, claiming to be the main road to effective truth. Such claims put forward by able professors of university graduate schools who teach the instructors of the Church-related colleges and its graduate students, or who write the textbooks, may put the stamp of an ineffective religion on instructors or students for life. The Church-related colleges should then have the voice of the deeper wisdom, which appreciates and accepts all truth in science and social science, but which sees both the proper limits of their fields and the limited nature of their pronouncements. Psychology, for instance, may put forward a theory of determinism which is true for limited data and for definite purposes, but which becomes destructive of moral and social responsibility if really acted upon, and which contradicts the very meaning of the Christian faith, not because the claim of such a limited psychological pronouncement is the full truth but because it has become falsely universalized either by the instructors themselves or by the students who fail to differentiate between limited operational efficacy and truth in general. Niels Bohr’s advocacy of complimentariness is to the point in this case.

Or philosophy, by a false separation of life and logic, may rule that man’s basic questions are meaningless, whereas it has pronounced most certain the metaphysical assumptions which underlie its whole approach. It is particularly important to remember that no knowledge of ultimates is neutral. Man either accepts or rejects God, through whatever circuitous routes. A large part of so-called secular knowledge is₅in fact, the result of man’s sinfulness and tho rationalization of his disobedience. Such depth-conscious fighting of God takes place through the creation of false religions, by whatever name. Therefore, the Church-related college has a task staggering the imagination: to take every thought captive for Christ in the high places of man’s secular learning.

In the Church-related college there should come together mature faith and mature learning, the synthesis of man’s basic needs for a creative society. Such union of faith and of learning, however, cannot be had without much effort and pain. For the marriage of faith and learning to take place, the Church needs to raise up and to support its most competent representatives to man the Church-related colleges. Apart from such training and staffing, the difficult job of constant dialectic by the Church-related college with both the Church and the secular university is impossible. Needed, too, is the kind of Christian community of learning and communication which gives the support of a family warmth and a capacity for creative criticism.

III

In the case of a mature faith, however, we have to deal primarily with people. When this is done, usually most of the emphasis is put on the students. The Christian college should help the students find a mature faith. But if such mature faith is to be produced in the students, it must first be possessed and demonstrated by those more mature in years. Seldom is a mature Christian faith even understood, much less had, among those who man the Christian college; and therefore we start with them, where start we must.

A new movement, however, is already beginning to train trustees in their high and holy calling. Perhaps we must go back even further in responsibility to those who choose the trustees. The trustees should study to understand the dual role of the Church-related college, at least to the point where they become aware of the main issues on both sides and can put their influence behind every wind that blows toward a mature faith. In their selection of administrative personnel, the most careful and wise Christian judgment is required.

The administration ought to select faculty with the double function of the Church-related college in mind. Competence and integrity in one’s subject are definitely not enough to qualify for such teaching; nor is it enough to add to these requirements a good character. Faith is of the essence, not only of the bene ease, of the Christian college. This fact makes staffing a most troublesome task. It cannot be shirked with immunity. Perhaps our Church-related colleges must select their own best products and persuade, yes, constrain, these students to prepare themselves for Christian college teaching, giving them all needed support. Such groups as the Danforth Foundation and the National Council on Religion in Higher Education stand anxious to help. The raising up of such Christian teachers should become a determined passion.

Possibly a truly great ecumenical Christian university of the highest competence and integrity would do more than anything else to change the scope and help provide top-level Christian teachers. We need such universities as well as the state-supported and privately operated ones. Besides, the administration can do wonders for a college by making available the right kind of outside resources that will more and more stand ready to help. Unless such Christian speakers of scholarly standing are found, increasingly, the administration will be handicapped. It should also, I believe, require unapologetically, Christian worship and Christian instruction. Certainly, regular worship by the whole college is part and parcel of the reason for the college’s existence, and to be apologetic about required chapel services, required convocations, and required courses in religion is to call into question the very ground on which the college is built. These are required in the same sense in which any course requires attendance: if the students are not interested in pursuing such a line, they ought not to be in such a college. A strong administration, supported by a united faculty, and producing a sustained high level of worship and religious instruction is the key to a genuinely effective Church-related college. The answer is not a false freedom from religion but a fuller effectiveness of Christian worship and Christian instruction.

It goes without saying that the faculty members should know their subjects and maintain their professional competence. Usually, however, the need to teach and to do many other things puts a heavy drain on the time and energy of the faculty and impedes such achievement. But it should be an aim honestly accepted by the administration and faculty alike. Besides opportunity for such scholarly competence, time should be allowed for the continuous growth in the understanding and application of the Christian faith. A Christian Faculty Fellowship that is vigorous can help the faculty become mature in faith. Outstanding theological leaders can be called in, as available, to stimulate and to direct further growth. Some faculties take a long weekend and make a real job of finding such maturity, centered in some retreat led by graduate teachers of religion. Nothing, however, can take the place of discussions of contemporary theology by small groups of faculty members. In some places, such groups meet also for worship, even for prayer. This is good; but the danger exists that there may be a substitution of piety for intellectual vigor. Nothing of course, can be forced in the case of faith, but progress can be made whenever the strong few in the faculty who set the pattern for the rest acquire the vision and the drive to combine as fully as possible man’s two great needs of intelligent education and intelligent religion.

I have written more about the administration and the faculty than about the students because I believe that the former are almost entirely the keys to a top-level Church-related college. Student generations come and go quickly. If students meet a staff Christian in faith and example as well as competent in teaching, they will usually take on the prevailing pattern. I know from experience that often those who teach the faith most powerfully actually teach a subject seemingly unrelated to the faith. The whole staff is therefore of top-flight importance. But the students are, of course, our central aim in producing a mature Christian faith.

^[1]The issue of March, 1956. Illustrative of the best offering of this group for higher education is Christian Education in a Democracy by Frank E. Gaebelein, and, on a more popular level, his The Pattern of God’s Truth. Both books should be taken seriously by open-minded educators.

^[2]See Arthur Lovejoy’s excellent discussion of this assumption in The Great Chain of Being, (Harvard University Press, 1936.)

^[3]Cf. his Theology in Conflict.

^[4]Surprisingly, Karl Barth also has such appreciation, but it does not come as the natural outgrowth of his central theological position.

^[5]H. W. Bartach (ed.), Kerygma and Myth, p. 16.

^[6]This argument is worked out at length in my Faith and Reason.

^[7]Obviously, transcendence need not be conceived of directionally, only dimensionally, or even in nonspatial terms altogether.