Virginia Baptists aren't the only ones struggling with the nature of Baptist colleges and universities. The question is bedeviling the Baptist landscape, as institutions and state conventions across the nation look for new ways to relate in the midst of changing dynamics.
By Ken Camp
Should Baptist universities create an identity that is distinctively Baptist or one rooted in orthodox Christian beliefs shared by many traditions?
Speaking to a national conference, two prominent educators agreed the future of Baptist higher education depends on schools developing a clear theological identity and vision, but they differed on how broadly that should be defined.
Bill Hull, provost emeritus of Samford University in Birmingham, Ala., pointed to the need for a guiding vision that grows out of the “denominational DNA” of deeply held Baptist principles.
David Gushee, professor of moral philosophy at Union University in Jackson, Tenn., said Baptist schools need to be “critically aware of the particularities of Baptist identity” but embrace an “orthodox ecumenical vision.”
Both spoke to Baptist educators and administrators at an April 18-19 conference hosted by Baylor University's Truett Theological Seminary.
“The genius of Baptist higher education,” Hull said, “has always been its close connection to the life of our churches.” Those ties must be greater than just having Baptist trustees who elect a Baptist president to secure funding from a Baptist convention, he said.
“Instead, if there is to be a future for Baptist higher education, it must be grounded in a shared vision of what it means to be a Baptist that is embraced both by our schools and by a critical mass of our churches,” Hull said. Institutional identity should emerge from the nature of what makes Baptists distinctive, such as their commitment to responsible dissent, revolutionary democracy and relational discipleship, he said.
Baptists should claim their right of dissent in how they view curriculum, he noted. Many Baptist schools have followed the integration of faith and learning model set by evangelical schools such as Wheaton College and Calvin College. That model stresses understanding each academic discipline from the perspective of a Christian worldview. “Certainly both faith and learning are essential to a holistic education, each having a valuable contribution to make to the other, but to ‘integrate' them is, in my view, both a theoretical and practical impossibility,” Hull said.
“Instead, my suggestion is that Baptists belong at the opposite end of the spectrum with a model that seeks not to integrate but to interrogate the curriculum with the Christian faith. … The best thing we can teach our students now, when an unprecedented knowledge explosion threatens to overwhelm the human mind, is not how to give the right answers but how to ask the right questions.”
At its best, Baptist dissent historically has been inspired by the belief that protests could bring about a new age of spiritual freedom, he noted. Baptist commitment to religious freedom from state domination has particular relevance in the 21st century, he added.
“In the present world crisis, a great deal of serious intellectual work needs to be done to ensure that Christianity not be perceived as an American religion or even as a Western religion but as a global religion without allegiance to any country or culture,” Hull said.
“If our religious interests are no broader than our national interests, then they serve only to deepen the divisions that condemn the world to perpetual strife. … The historic Baptist understanding of religious liberty is not some denominational oddity-a mere hiccup on the side of history. Rather, it offers an essential contribution to the post-9/11 geo-politic by enshrining the insight that the awesome spiritual power of religion must never again be linked to the equally awesome temporal power of the state if any semblance of democracy is to survive.”
Because Baptists chose voluntary religion over the props of the state, it had to be rooted in relational discipleship, he added. Hull asserted that “a wholesome sense of identity and integrity is best nurtured through the development of responsible relationships in small, close-knit communities of character.”
Gushee presented four models for Christian higher education-the integration of faith and learning, education for social transformation, creation of a pious ethos and transmission of church tradition. He offered the transmission of tradition model as the most comprehensive approach and as a synthesis of the other models, but he asked whether it is being done well by any Baptist schools.
“It is not at all clear that our tradition is sufficiently coherent to be transmitted by anybody, whether the university or any other agency,' he said. “It is also not clear whether our student bodies constitute a sufficiently coherent community that a tradition can be transmitted to them.”
Baptist schools cannot serve Baptists the same way Catholic schools serve the Catholic Church because there is no single Baptist Church, but rather many autonomous and diverse Baptist churches, he noted.
Baptist universities can transmit tradition effectively to the next generation only if they are committed to a reform that will require them to “throw their windows open to some fresh winds blowing our way from the broader tradition of the Christian church.”
The broader perspective of classical, orthodox, ecumenical Christianity, as expressed in ancient confessions such as the Apostles' Creed, might have spared Southern Baptists much of the turmoil that ripped apart the national convention in recent decades, Gushee asserted.
“Especially beginning in the 1960s, theological and, to some extent, ethical slippage away from classical Christian orthodox beliefs in our colleges and seminaries was detected by concerned participants and observers,” he said.
“Criticism of this slippage often evoked the freedom defense on the part of those criticized. The response to this eventually became a hard-line ‘conservative resurgence' that sought to arrest it by employment of an often very narrowly interpreted Bible. Precisely because they/we were all Southern Baptists, neither the conservatives nor the moderates were well informed or deeply rooted in the broader tradition of the church, a tradition which might have shown us how to draw the right kinds of boundaries.
“Thus the conservatives, in the name of the Bible, sometimes attacked what did not deserve to be attacked, while the moderates, in the name of freedom, sometimes defended what did not deserve to be defended. How desperately we needed at that time the perspective that could have been offered by the wisdom of the Christian tradition in its broadest and richest formulations. How desperately we still do need that wisdom.”
An approach embracing the Apostles' Creed as a theological boundary for schools would create a tent big enough to cover classic Catholicism, Eastern Orthodoxy and Protestant traditions but small enough to exclude modernist or postmodern revisions of Christian theology, he said.
“We must humbly identify our tradition as one expression of the Christian tradition, and we must bring our understanding of our tradition into submission to that broader tradition,” he insisted.
“All efforts to promote Baptist distinctives must be made within the context of ecumenical orthodoxy, including the rethinking of those distinctives where necessary. … Baptist universities rooted in an orthodox ecumenical vision, critically aware of the particularities of Baptist identity and effective in intelligently bringing this kind of Christian faith to bear on all aspects of contemporary life and thought can be successful in 21st century education.”
Associated Baptist Press
Ken Camp is managing editor of the Baptist Standard, newsjournal of the Baptist General Convention of Texas.