PLACE AND HIGHER EDUCATION
IN THE HOLINESS TRADITION[1]
by
Merle D. Strege
We have before us now a large and growing body of literature that examines the phenomenon of the church-related or Christian colleges. Recent works by leading Evangelical scholars Mark Noll and George Marsden have focused attention respectively on the life of the mind and the secularization of the American university.[2] These two volumes, especially Marsden, have helped us considerably to understand the forces at work on American colleges and universities, including church-related or Christian colleges. In a curious way, both Noll and Marsden themselves bear the marks of such influence. After all, one cannot expect to be taken seriously as an academic unless one's work follows academic conventions and standards.
I wish to pursue a line of thought here which considers an idea related to the following somewhat commonplace observation. Beginning with Stephen Toulmin's observations about the Enlightenment, I want to suggest the importance of "place" in the intellectual life of the colleges and universities sponsored by the Wesleyan-Holiness churches.
In his stimulating and provocative analysis of modernity and its agenda, philosopher-physicist Toulmin fastens on the opening paragraph of the entry on philosopher René Descartes found in La Grande Encyclopedie. That entry opens:
For a biography of Descartes, almost all you need is two dates and two place names: his birth, on March 31, 1596 at La Haye, in Touraine, and his death at Stockholm, on February 11, 1650. His life is above all that of an intellect [esprit]; his true life story is the history of his thoughts; the outward events of his existence have interest only for the light they can throw on the inner events of his genius.[3]
Toulmin continues: "In thinking about Descartes, the authors tell us, we can abstract from their historical context not just the philosophical positions he discusses, and the different arguments he presents, but also his entire intellectual development."[4] Toulmin thinks that the encyclopedia's ahistorical description of Descartes is no accident. As he further explains, the Enlightenment's commitments to universal, timeless, general, and written descriptions predisposed the Encylopedie's authors to describe Descartes' work as the product of a disembodied mind. Toulmin challenges this predisposition with his own account of a Cartesian philosophical program profoundly shaped by the tumultuous events of early seventeenth-century France. In his view, one cannot conceive of Descartes' revolutionary philosophy, or the work of any other person, apart from the socio-political location it inhabited.
Below is a tying of Stephen Toulmin's observations on Descartes and the Enlightenment to the theme of place and the university in three ways. (1) I will apply Toulmin's description of Descartes to my own institution, Anderson University, and comparable institutions to say, first, that descriptions of the university abstracted from its social and intellectual location make no more sense than the French encyclopedia's article on Descartes. Colleges and/or universities are not all alike (at least, we should no think them so); they inhabit different cultural, religious, and socio-political locations. Those institutions which pretend to deny the existence and influence of such locations sever the connections which make them intelligible and distinctive. (2) The second connection will be a prescriptive argument correlative to the first point: universities should practice a politics, a way of being together, that embodies the intellectual traditions of their constituent communities. (3) Thirdly, along the lines of the first two connections, I want to suggest a description of the possible politics of Anderson University, a university sponsored by the Church of God (Anderson, Indiana). It is the holiness movement institution with which I am most familiar. This description will entail the notion that at least some part of our intellectual life will draw upon salient theological notions of the Church of God, resulting in their contribution to the shape of the university's politics. As a part of that description I will offer some illustrations of what these important theological notions might be. Finally, I offer a brief exposition of the biblical story of Daniel and the bright young men of Israel to suggest why these topics merit further consideration.
On the Social and Political Locations
of Colleges and Universities
Perhaps it is only in the United States that the standardization of university education is believed to be desirable. Medieval universities differed markedly in subject matter and governance. Bologna, Paris, and Oxford resembled each other hardly at all, each of them giving institutional expression to quite different intellectual and political traditions. In a similar fashion intellectual and political commitments distinguished early twentieth-century European universities from one another. For example, in the 1920s the reigning theology in Göttingen was anathema at Berlin. In the United States, however, and especially among schools that are dominated by undergraduate studies, claims of institutional distinction are based not in intellectual differences, but in assertions of superiority. Does Harvard claim to be different than Yale or Stanford, or is the claim about superiority, one of emphasis on the level of attainment as opposed to difference in tradition or type? Or on another scale, Anderson University claims to be "better" than rather than different from Taylor or Indiana Wesleyan Universities. Unless we are content with this academic version of little boy's comparisons of paternal superiority, we might pause to ask why it is we tend to compare in terms of degree rather than kind.
I suspect that one answer to this question might be located in the dominance of the academic and professional guilds in American higher education. Accreditation, whether by regional or professional associations, tends to blur institutional distinctiveness as it standardizes the programs offered by its related institutions. To cite but one example, NCATE will have its way, whether at Anderson, Taylor, or Indiana University, which is but another way of saying that as NCATE dictates standards for departments of education, their curricula cannot help but closely resemble each other. The same point obtains concerning virtually all other professional societies and associations. If this is the case, we find ourselves in the rather odd position of saying that, as concerns curriculum-the heart of our universities, need we be reminded - an Anderson education will not differ substantially from what a student might get at Ball State University or Goshen College. Correlatively, the characteristics by which we distinguish ourselves from one another will be secondary matters; at least, they will not pertain to the curriculum. This unfortunate situation forces us to ask whether the primary allegiance is to academic guilds or to the institutions of which we are members.
The present situation of American higher, then, seems a denial of the historical, social, and political particularities of individual colleges and universities. Such a denial is as unfaithful to historical circumstance as it is undesirable. That an ahistorical approach dominates American higher education is, however, not surprising. American culture has deep roots in the Enlightenment, the premium it places on instrumental reason, and its denial of importance to that which "enlightened" thinkers judge to be local, timebound, particular, or oral. For such historical particularities we have substituted a discourse of procedures and means. Such a language may serve industry and business well, although there are growing reservations about its value even there. But thinkers such as Alasdair MacIntyre and Wendell Berry raise very troubling questions about the suitability or even the possibility of a procedural, means-oriented language as the dominant form of university discourse.
In his insightful essay, "The Loss of the University," Berry argues that universities have lost sight of a common goal to which their specific departments might be oriented. Even worse, he contends, is that universities have lost the common language which enabled their members to converse about the ends for which their institutions exist.[5] In his Gifford Lectures of 1988 MacIntyre extends this point, arguing that we can no longer make the assumptions about the encyclopedic nature of knowledge which underwrote such projects as the Gifford Lectures, the ninth edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, or the Enlightenment version of the institution called a university.[6]
The accuracy of Berry's and MacIntyre's analyses is born out when we ask, What then holds universities together in the absence of a common language? The most common American answer to this question is "the university administration." The common language of the American university then becomes "administrationese": GPA, FTE, FAF, major, minor, GRE, outcomes assessment, and the like. Harold McManus, Roberts Professor of Church History at Mercer University, argues that administrations expand as the inverse function of the university's loss of coherence.[7] The only means of holding together universities which have lost their capacity for conversing about their ends is bureaucratic management. It scarcely need be noticed, however, that such a move gives up the language of ends for the language of instrumental reason.
I submit that it makes no historical sense to deny the very real differences that distinguish American colleges and universities from one another. These differences should be understood as extending beyond the quantifiable, unless we believe that the determinative difference between Anderson and Goshen, for example, is that the library at one of them has more holdings than the other. To deny or even ignore institutional particularities simultaneously denies that we have histories and forces us to the false claim that we are self-generating, all of which flies patently in the face of the facts. Furthermore, that powerful cultural forces such as instrumental reason, the industrial economy, and bureaucratic management combine to press American colleges and universities into bland and homogenized similarity is undesirable. Such homogenization devalues the specific historical and social locations of educational institutions which actually are quite diverse and deserve to be so recognized.
Universities as Embodied Intellectual Traditions
Two years ago my colleague Nancy Fischer offered a lecture to the Anderson University community in which she asked each member of the audience to draw a map of the city of Anderson. She employs this learning exercise in one of her courses, intending to heighten class members' perceptions of and sensitivities to their location. I infer from this exercise that she hopes that students come to a greater appreciation of the role of place in people's lives. If my inference is correct, she shares with Wendell Berry a sense of the importance of local culture.[8] Following Professor Fischer's lead, I have begun recommending to my freshmen students that they eschew the local franchises of MacDonald's and Pizza Hut in favor of such famous Anderson eateries as The Toast, The Lemon Drop, and Art's Pizza No. 1 (even though Art's does not have black olives available as a topping). In this way I want my students to become at least marginally aware of the place where they will live and study for the next several years. I want them to ask questions about the impact of geographic locale upon their education at AU. Even more desirable is that they learn to think about the way place shapes institutions through language and local culture.
Even if one did not know its name, Calvin College's Reformed theological ethos would soon become apparent even to the most insensitive and culturally unaware. Similarly, the Mennonite ethos unmistakably marks Goshen College, even as the intellectual commitments of the Society of Jesus shape Jesuit colleges and universities. It seems to me that such variety in American higher education is highly desirable. To recognize this variety is to acknowledge the historicity of these various institutions and begin to appreciate the real differences by which they are to be distinguished from one another and other institutions as well. If I might be permitted a rhetorical question, who wants to live in an educational culture where all cats are gray? I would like to believe that Calvin, Goshen, and Jesuit colleges and universities are the rule rather than the exception. Unfortunately, it would appear that they are not.
I am not suggesting that we flout the recommendations and standards imposed by our learned societies, professional and regional accrediting associations. But is it not reasonable to ask that the moral, religious, and intellectual traditions of any particular college or university modify or contextualize those external forces, thereby adapting them to particular institutional landscapes. In the case of church-related colleges and universities this means that their work will need to be informed in some way by the theological traditions of the sponsoring church groups. I am not issuing a call for each and every course to have a religious or a spiritual component. Neither is it desirable that religion be the only acceptable discourse on the campus. Mine is no appeal for "Christian Swimming" or "Biblical Business." I appeal, rather, for the necessity of theology and its critique of the intellectual commitments and presuppositions of the university curricula which have such traditions.
In his book The Fragility of Knowledge, Edward Farley argues that theological tradition, along with intuitive imagination and praxis, serve crucial roles as correctives in the modern university. Such universities conform to what Farley terms the "Enlightenment tradition" with its ideals of critically acquired knowledge and empirical demonstration. In the name of intuition, Romantics have criticized such universities' perpetuation of abstraction for the sake of rigor, evidence and precision. On the other hand, praxis critics challenge modern universities for forgetting that ". . . institutions of pure reason. . .hide from themselves their complicity in societal agendas of power."[9]
Theological criticisms of the Enlightenment university, Farley observes, have taken several lines of attack. The more superficial of these lines exposes and asserts the limited worldview of commitments to critical principles, empirical demonstration and instrumental reason. A more fundamental challenge rests in the theological tradition's argument that ". . .the corporate experience of past ages and peoples can produce a wisdom that is illuminating and pertinent beyond the past. If this is true, the task of knowledge is confronted not just by the facts about the present to be explained but by sediments of past culture to be interpreted."[10]
Farley's work underlines the importance of a theological critique of the university curriculum. Such traditions may also contribute to the institution's life in another way. Valparaiso University professor Mark Schwehn argues that certain religious virtues bear a marked similarity to certain academic virtues commonly hoped to be developed in our students.[11] One thinks, for example, of the virtue of humility. I work at helping my students to appreciate St. Augustine's intellectual achievement and his arguments so they will not prematurely dismiss his conclusions about free will and predestination with the sophomoric and arrogant prejudice that "Augustine was stupid." The awareness that we do not and cannot know everything strongly resembles the religious virtue of humility. Since that is so, we are warranted in thinking that the presence of theological traditions which prize the virtue of humility should also have positive intellectual application.
Even as the Reformed and Mennonite theological traditions are resources for the intellectual work of scholars at Calvin and Goshen, respectively, so ought the theological traditions of the Church of God (Anderson) inform the general intellectual life of Anderson University. I say "ought" because, in my judgment, this has not frequently been the case or, if so, in ways marginal to the university's intellectual life. As stated earlier, I suspect that many other church-related and/or Christian colleges fit this description. Somewhat ironically, then, those that have strong relationships to sponsoring churches describe themselves as institutions that are tightly connected to their churches politically, but only marginally as far as intellectual matters are concerned. What might some of these intellectual/theological currents be? Could there be a positive role for them to play in the intellectual life of church-related and/or Christian colleges? As a case study familiar to this writer, I will respond to these questions with reference to Anderson University and the Church of God (Anderson).
Theological Traditions of the Church of God (Anderson)
Notions such as the categories of experience, community, holiness, and vocation have been important elements in the theological tradition of the Church of God. They also have affinities with other colleges and universities of the holiness tradition. I suggest that they also might inform intellectual life and institutional politics at Anderson University.
"Holiness" surely is an idea deserving of informing ethics and moral philosophy, but perhaps also courses in public policy or political science. To be sure, the Church of God (Anderson) along with many other holiness groups has, in the main, conceived the idea of holiness in moralistic and individualist terms. But in Walter Brueggemann's recently published volume, Old Testament Theology, we find an example of how such traditional and conservative notions of holiness might be enlarged to undergird important political, economic, and ethical themes. Brueggemann demonstrates the relationships between Israel's conception of God, its understanding of its own social location "among the nations," and God's evolving commitment to justice and righteousness as expressions of God's holiness.[12] Brueggemann connects this insight to Israel's perception of the importance of the cry of suffering to the life of God. The cry of pain, i.e., the notice Israel takes of the dysfunctional, is its protest against the normative theology of its surrounding world, a theology which it partially embraced and which taught Israel to trust in the system to provide solutions to the people's dilemmas. To follow Brueggemann's lead will mean that the idea of holiness, whether of God or God's people, will inform discussions in areas such as ethics, economics, theories of management, and public policy. Space will not permit further digression into Brueggemann's stimulating and provocative analysis; here it sufficiently serves to illustrate how discussions of theological themes such as the holiness of God have broad applicability in a liberal arts curriculum.
Another illustration of the applicability of the idea of holiness to AU's curriculum lies in the idea of "wellness." Wendell Berry explores the connections between health and various aspects of human being in an essay entitled "Health Is Membership."[13] He touches on the etymological connections of such words as "health," "wholeness," and "holiness" in order to explore the manifold influences which contribute to people's health. Indeed, Berry argues that such connectedness is vital to a person's health. These connections extend, obviously, to other people, but they also include land, culture, and spirit. Moreover, health ultimately is situated in communities of love. In Berry's careful assessment, "health" bears a marked resemblance to the biblical ideal of shalom, peace in the most comprehensive of understandings. Institutions such as Anderson, contemplating wellness programs, might develop their programs out of their historical commitments to the idea of holiness, now broadened to be understood as wholeness, especially when such wholeness rests on the presence of the kind of love which St. Paul said is poured into our hearts by the Holy Spirit.
Berry's sense of health's dependence on vital human relationships leads to another of the Church of God movement's deep theological commitments - the idea of the church as a gathered community. Ideas associated with the notion of community provide very fertile ground for research and reflection in the social sciences. Indeed, the communitarian movement is presently demonstrating the value of such notions to national political life. Had Anderson University taken its own theological traditions seriously at an earlier point in its history, it might have found itself poised to enter more fully into the current national debate about a good society.
Anderson University professors such as Willard Reed (philosophy) have interpreted the Church of God movement's theological idea of experience in a manner which bears directly on the university's intellectual life. Reed observes that the Church of God has long maintained an epistemology that places experience ahead of rationalistic conceptions about knowledge. Furthermore, he contends that, insofar as faith is concerned, members of Anderson University need not be threatened by rationalistically framed propositions since they cannot threaten religious experience. Reed has interpreted a salient theological idea of the Church in a manner which clearly underwrites the freedom essential to academic inquiry and debate. To be quite sure, the Church of God is a conservative Protestant church group, but its emphasis on the category of experience has created at AU a degree of freedom unusual in colleges sponsored by such groups.
The surest illustration of my point is that no Anderson faculty appointment is conditional on a signature of confession or creed. That faculty members are not required to sign a belief statement is not due to the Enlightenment-based notion that one's religious commitments are private. Rather, it is precisely because Anderson University is shaped by the ethos of the Church of God that the university says that one's religious experience cannot be reduced to a set of propositions and, therefore, faculty members will not be required to sign a creed. The same could not be said at all member institutions of the Coalition for Christian Colleges and Universities. My point here is not to claim some superiority for my own institution. Rather, it is to illustrate the manner in which specific characteristics rise out of the particularities of institutional historical locations.
One last theme important to the theological life of the Church of God has been the tradition of vocation. It is, of course, the case that the idea of calling has been important throughout Christianity. I am not claiming that the concept is unique to the Church of God. But the idea has nevertheless received considerable stress and broad interpretation among us. The Church of God has thought of people's vocations largely in terms of the ministry; men and women receive a "call to full-time Christian service," as we often have said. But vocation could also be extended beyond the sacred to the secular, and in its earlier years AU played an important role in broadening the meaning of vocation to include gainful employment in service to a particular place. It would not be difficult to make a case for certain professors' understanding of their work at Anderson University as a calling, professors of accounting, economics, art, or physical education. One need not teach in the Seminary or the Department of Religious Studies to be said to have a vocation. In the past the idea of practicing one's work as a vocation extended throughout the institution to include all its members. Two custodians, for example, Charlie Kissel and Leonard Warren, are examples of people who understood themselves to have been called to their work of cleaning the buildings of Anderson College (University).[14] They may have been janitors, but they worshipped and entered into the life of the college as fully as any professor. Why? Because Kissel and Warren understood themselves to have a vocation here, and the institution recognized their self-understanding. We must consider the possibility that the university flourished in part through their faithful service as these two men taught generations of Anderson students the idea of work as a calling rather than a utilitarian means to pursue the transient goods of this earth.
This last reference to the theological tradition of vocation illustrates further the possibility that such traditions contribute to the shape of an institution's polity, i.e., its way of ordering the life together of its members. Language, after all, possesses the power to shape - if not create - the social realities we inhabit. Theological discourse, then, like any other, then will have such power if it is included as a conversation partner. Because language possesses this kind of reality-making power, it is very troubling to observe the increased use of market, corporate, and advertising metaphors as descriptions of colleges and universities in general, and especially those which claim a religious center. Metaphors and forms of discourse certainly have legitimacy in their own social spheres. However, metaphors of one sphere rarely translate well to other spheres of life. Instead, one sphere colonizes another as its language transforms the basic relationships of the latter. Consider, for example, the unfortunate consequences of the application of the market metaphor to marriage partners. Similarly, reference to the university as a corporate machine will eventually transform colleagues into cogs.
These reflections on language call to mind Donald Thorsen's stimulating attempt to recover the word "scholarship." Thorsen means to use this word to bridge the customary distinction between research and religion.[15] "Research" commonly refers to the kind of knowledge we produce under Enlightenment rubrics, that which can be demonstrated scientifically and objectively. Paul Giurlanda effectively demonstrates the extent to which such knowledge, as every other form of knowledge, depends on faith.[16] If that is the case, then Thorsen's suggestion is significant. The scholarship of holiness colleges and universities can and should embrace the theological and moral considerations of teaching as well as the pursuit of knowledge in specialized ("scientific") fields of inquiry. Our knowledge, our faith, and our communities interpenetrate. "Scholarship" names our efforts to introduce others into that life.
To stress the intellectual and political significance of the theological traditions of sponsoring churches should not be taken as underwriting a policy that requires all faculty members to deny time to their research in order to ponder only such matters as those outlined here. Nevertheless, we should expect to find these fibers woven through the intellectual fabric of our colleges and universities. Important institutional courses hinge on our decision to accept or ignore the theological traditions which are woven into that fabric. In the final analysis, such traditions, and others drawing from the ideas of service and liberal education, vitally inform our discourse about the ends for which the university exists and which we encourage our students to pursue throughout the course of their lives. It is the moral and theological shape of this discourse which gives Anderson, and comparable colleges and universities, its unique character. The alternative to such uniqueness is the attempt to be a university without a context, and that is the academic version of USA Today - news from nowhere. To follow such a nowhere alternative will also be to give ourselves over to a politics of means, a politics alien to the life and spirit of universities constituted as intellectual communities.
Daniel and the Bright Young Men of Israel
As one final means of making my point and also considering a possible fate if we ignore the traditions which are our historical and political contexts, let me offer a reading of the story of Daniel and his fellow Israelites as told in Daniel 1. After all, this text comes from a book which is determinative for our scholarly life together in Donald Thorsen's sense of that term.
The story is familiar. The children of Israel have been invaded, defeated, their capital laid waste, and many of them deported to Babylon. There they exist only at the sufferance of their masters, on the very fringes of an alien society where they have been made to eat the tasteless bread of exile. But King Nebuchadnezzar has a plan for this people. He wishes to bring the best and the brightest of the Israelite young men into the palace and train them in the ways of the Babylonians. After their training these "best and brightest" will enter the royal bureaucracy.
The focal point of the story, interestingly enough, is food. The king insists that these young men eat the food served at court, but they refuse. The royal table is laden with food seasoned with socio-political expectations. To be sure, it is wonderful, tasty beyond the wildest dreams of impoverished, hopelessly dependent exiles. But this food may be eaten only by Israelites willing to pay a terrible price. That is precisely why this food sticks in the throats of Daniel and his friends. It is rich food prepared for the rich and powerful, and its price is forgetfulness. This rich Babylonian food will blur Israelite memories of exile and their brothers and sisters still dwelling in the camps and shanty-towns on the outskirts of the city. The loss of this kinship of memory inevitably will carry with it the loss of identity of Daniel and his friends, for we can answer the question "Who am I?" only by answering the prior question, "Of what stories am I a part?"
One may read Nebuchadnezzar's invitation as a wonderful opportunity. The king has offered these young men a chance to move to the right side of the tracks where power, privilege, and respectability abound. It is an invitation to "upward social mobility," a chance for some displaced Israelite captives actually to become movers and shakers in Babylonian society. The king has invited Israel's best and brightest to learn the system which keeps society in order and rewards its powerful members. The young Israelites might be tempted to accept such an invitation selfishly and use it as a means of their own advancement. They might prize the invitation as an opportunity to ameliorate Israel's plight as strangers in a strange land.
But the king's invitation is laden with potential for disaster. One cannot expect to employ, even for a good cause, the king's wealth and power without compromising attachments. Sooner or later, the language of means must be circumscribed and controlled by the language of ends. Daniel and his three friends understand that they cannot eat the king's food without becoming the king's possessions. If these best and brightest of Israel would remain members of the people of God, they must eat the simple food of Israelites. They must remember the traditions which enable them to answer fundamental questions of identity and ethics.
Like Daniel and his friends, we appear to face a choice between two modes of being: either we will ground ourselves in the traditions and politics of our larger church communities or we will speak the discourses of systems which claim to provide the solution to our problems. Daniel and his friends had to choose whether to eat the bread of exiles, a food which empowered them to live out of their identity as Israelites, or eat the rich food of a royal bureaucracy which promised "success." In the final analysis, Daniel and his friends were confronted with a situation that required them to own their people and the socio-political location which gave them their identity. Out of that identity they were able to answer the question, "What are we to do?"
Today institutions of higher education should be answering the same vital question. For those colleges and universities whose historic identities lie in the Wesleyan/Holiness tradition, there is richness to be recovered, an important location to be reclaimed, stories out of which institutions can and should be living.
Endnotes:
