An Alumnus’ Indictment
One of the most perceptive analyses of our basic educational problems I have ever seen was made last spring by a Calvin College alumnus, Stephen Krosschell (now in law school), in the March 21, 1980 issue of Calvin’s student newspaper, Chimes. The writer found and called attention to a basic contradiction in the school‘s published statement of philosophy (Christian Liberal Arts Education, Calvin College and W. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., Grand Rapids, Mich. 1970) as well as in the teaching he experienced as a student. On one hand, he observed that the college officially claims to be “disinterested,” and believes that it should engage in education “simply in order to discover how things are and why they are” (p. 48). “Knowledge should . . . be acquired impartially.” On the other hand he found the statement of the school’s philosophy also holding, as we read in the last page of the introduction, that its aim is “to equip the student for living a Christian life in contemporary society or, in other words, to equip the student to become a vital citizen of the kingdom of God as it is manifested in the contemporary world” and that “no education is neutral” but “that education is always of necessity based on some sort of philosophical perspective. or religious outlook, and that this basis is reflected in the whole structure and orientation of education.” This religious orientation and goal as well as concern for practical benefits he found is reaffirmed later in the book (pp. 66, 67). He saw in this a certain “incoherence” or, as we might say, “contradiction.” The school’s practices “both are and are not intended to cause particular benefits.” They “are biased toward the interest of preparing students for life in the world and at the same time are not biased toward any interest.”
The student found this contradiction in the school’s professed aims coming to expression in the teaching of the various departments. “Some professors and departments rightly prefer CLAE’s (the book’s) subordinate theme of preparing students for life in the world. Most professors and departments, however stress CLAE’s dominant theme of disinterest; their classes are taught accordingly.” In the department of philosophy he found an emphasis on philosophical terms and methods with little or no concern for the implications of what was being studied for life and society. “Most Calvin philosophers subscribe to the philosophy of disinterest. They are not interested in causing the benefit of preparing students for Christian life in the world.” Turning to the history department, he found “most historians like most philosophers . . . not biased toward the interest of preparing students for Christian life in the world. They intend instead to investigate disinterestedly the discipline of history.” The same complaint follows against teaching in the English department in which he found an interest in literary works while “the meaning which the whole work has for life in the world is usually unconsidered.” Similarly, in the economics department he found that beginning “students are taught the jargon and methods of the discipline,” but “little effort is made to acquaint students . . . with the modern economic problems,” their bearing on himself or what he ought to do about them. Students in the physics department he found faring no better. They were not being prepared for Christian life in the world, but “the physicists instead disinterestedly focus their students attention on the laboratories, techniques, and results of their scholarly discipline.”
Krosschell was convinced that this whole emphasis was wrong. The school’s usual choice for disinterested academic study and teaching meant that it was neither seeking to reach its own avowed aim nor to meet the students’ most important need of preparing them for responsible Christian living. This basic problem of trying to reach two contradictory objectives calls for more than a bit of tinkering with curriculum if it is to be solved. The school will have to choose one of the two contradictory objectives and repudiate t he other. If the school “wants to study knowledge disinterestedly,” then it “should not claim” that it “intends to prepare students for life in the world”; if it decides that “an education should be biased toward that knowledge which is most relevant to Christian life in the world,” then it “should not espouse disinterested learning.” The writer was strongly convinced that the school should choose the latter course.
To what extent the teaching in the various departments of the school deserve this rather harsh judgment, it might be impossible for an outsider to determine. Students might be in a better position to make such an evaluation. Perhaps some might be disposed to dismiss Mr. Krosschell’s indictment as just another student complaint that he could see no immediate practical value in the necessary deep and broad introduction which any serious acquaintance with a particular area of learning requires—a demand for “vocational” instead of academic study, in other words. I believe, however, that his criticism, not merely of teaching, but of the school’s basic statement of its philosophy, has exposed what is possibly its most important and fundamental problem, the contradiction in what it is trying to do.
The Problem in the Seminary
Mr. Krosschell’s criticism of the educational philosophy of the college is paralleled quite closely by a similar observation made about a year ago concerning what is happening to the educational philosophy of the seminary. According to Article 19 of our (Christian Reformed) Church Order, “The churches shall maintain a theological seminary at which men are trained for the ministry of the Word.” Accordingly, the purpose for which our churches established and maintain a theological school is to train men for their official ministry. As that school has developed, however, it has come under increasing pressure and shows an increasing inclination to become an academic institution to train students in the widely recognized specialized field of theology. Across the country such schools are organized to establish certain common standards and achieve recognition and accreditation by other specialists in t his academic field. Out of this situation two contradictory aims emerge. One of them is the original purpose to prepare men to believe, preach and teach the gospel of Christ; the other is the contrary aim to engage in impartial and uncommitted study of the various beliefs and movements that are found in the area of religion and philosophy. The greater the pressure and lure to engage in disinterested, nonjudgmental study, the less room there is for developing Christian convictions. Accordingly, it is an old complaint that seminary training often undermines loyalty to the Christian faith instead of encouraging men to believe and preach it.
The Problem in Other Schools
These critical observations can be made not only about present developments in our own college and seminary. What we see and hear happening in our schools is paralleled by the same kind of development in many others. CHALCEDON* called attention to Wilson L. Thompson’s important doctoral dissertation, Small Colleges and Goal Displacement (268 pp; $9.50; available from the author, 423 N. Moffet, Joplin, MO 64801) which deals with this subject. “Bible–believing groups establish new churches and then new Bible schools, colleges, and seminaries, and, before long, are feeding the forces of liberalism.” “Thompson traces the reason for this fact, the goal displacement whereby institutions created to strengthen one cause, fundamentalism, feed instead another, liberal or modernist religion.” He finds, according to the Chalcedon review, that, “A first and primary factor in the goal displacement of Christian colleges and seminaries is the desire for academic dignity and standing, accreditation. Accreditation places the institution in a community very different from that which created it, and the college or school now responds to standards other than the faith which created it. Accreditation leads the school to train its students for a very different market or constituency, so that the school now responds to a different standard, while professing to be Bible–centered. Sadder still, resistance to this process of accommodation to the world of unbelief, i.e. accreditation, is exceptional, and yet these very churches and colleges were started on the principle of separation from false faith or from unbelief! Indeed, many of these separating groups boast when they are given accreditation.” “Such institutions,” Thompson points out, “begin by proclaiming their freedom . . . and their total submission to the faith, and then very soon submit readily and joyfully to the enemy’s slave collar of accreditation.”
The Triumph of Secularism
We may see this in a still broader framework as just part of the movement of secularization (or irreligious worldliness) that has taken over our modern civilization and captured our culture. Harry Blamires in his fascinating little book, The Christian Mind, focused attention on this fact. “By allowing the Christian mind to be destroyed, we have imposed an intolerable burden upon ourselves as individual Christians.” “We have accepted secularism’s challenge to fight on secularist ground, with secularist weapons and secularist umpire, before a secularist audience and according to t he secularist book of rules. Having done so, we look around in dismay at the discovery that our followers are few , our predicament misunderstood, our cause misrepresented.” He called for “reconstituting the Christian mind,” beginning by “taking for granted the authoritative, God-given nature of the Christian Faith, and reestablishing in ourselves an unfaltering sense of the objectivity of Christian truth” (p. 117).
At a meeting of an organization of Christian teachers and scholars in the sciences some years ago in Seattle I recall one speaker remarking that although he was a Christian, in the laboratory he operated as an atheist. This prompted the excited rejoinder of another participant in the discussion that he feared that that was the trouble with most of us.
The Lord’s Sovereign Claim
The long career of Dr. Cornelius Van Til (as well as the beginning emphasis of the Dutch philosopher Dooyeweerd2) has been directed to showing that one cannot graft the Christian faith on the prevailing secular, really atheistic way of thinking and living and thereby produce a Christian philosophy—and a Christian education.
2Dr. Van Til’s essay in response to Dooyeweerd in the book, Jerusalem and Athens pp. 89ff calls attention to the apparent shift in the latter’s thinking, away from his earlier approach to these matters.
*Chalcedon, P.O. Box 158, Vallecito, CA 95251.