Tag: liberal education

Comparing Christian Liberal Arts Colleges (part one)

Published on by D. G. Hart1 Comment

Professor Jay Green’s thoughts about Covenant College and Hillsdale College have come and gone but his two articles do raise a couple of questions that may be worthy of further comment. The first has to do with the curriculum of a Christian college. The second has to do with that vexing question of Christ and culture, which runs to notions about transforming culture or integrating faith and learning. This post is about the former — curriculum — and it will read like a college catalogue because it relies on course descriptions from Covenant and Hillsdale to compare the religious dimension of a liberal arts college purporting to be Christian.

In his first post, professor Green distinguished between civilizational and confessional Christian colleges. Part of the difference stems from whether faculty actually need to affirm (believe) Christian statements of faith. At Covenant they do. For Green, Hillsdale is different because it “is a civilizational Christian college” in the sense of “acknowledging and honoring the strategically important role the faith played in laying the foundations of both Western Civilization and the American Founding.” He knows that many faculty at Hillsdale “also embrace Christianity in a confessional sense.” But because belief is not required at Hillsdale, “less time and attention are given to using Christian insights to critique things like Western Civilization and the American Founding.”

By the way, somewhere in here is a big point about ecclesiology and whether colleges should function like churches.

Not to be missed as well is an apparent assumption that Green does not develop — the idea that if you believe and teach Christianity you will critique Western Civilization and the American Founding. Does he mean to suggest that true believers will automatically be skeptical of the West and the United States? Or will they simply be willing to be critical, just as they would criticize Chinese or Islamic civilization and China and Indonesia? Or is he simply hinting that because Hillsdale is not sufficiently critical of the West and America — it is very political according to Green — the college loses its Christianness.

Whatever Green means about the relationship between Western civilization, the United States, and Christianity, his understanding of a confessional college leaves out what the apostle Paul included, namely, that those who preach the gospel out of envy or spite should be praised as long as they preach the gospel. That is, no matter the motives of the preacher or the faculty member, the content of what they preach or teach should be of first importance.

If catalogues are revealing, here is Covenant College’s description of basic courses in their core curriculum.

COR 100 The Christian Mind
This course is designed to introduce newly enrolled students to the general scope and distinctive emphases of a Covenant College education. The first portion of the course focuses on our calling in Christ and some of its implications for the task of being a student. The second portion introduces students to the Reformed tradition; and the third portion invites students to join with the faculty in addressing challenges that the tradition currently faces. 2 hours.

COR 225 Cultural Heritage of the West I
This course fosters cultural literacy by surveying important philosophical, theological, literary, scientific, and aesthetic ideas which have shaped Western culture. It begins with the earliest origins of Western culture in ancient Semitic (including Old Testament) and Greek cultures, then considers the transformation of these earlier influences successively in Roman culture, the rise of Christianity, the medieval synthesis of classical and Christian sources, and the Renaissance and Reformation. The course includes exposure to important works or primary sources, critiqued from a Christian perspective. 3 hours.

COR 226 Cultural Heritage of the West II
This course fosters cultural literacy by surveying important philosophical, theological, literary, scientific, and aesthetic ideas which have shaped Western culture. It considers the emergence of Modernism in the physical and social sciences from roots in the Renaissance and the Enlightenment as well as the effect of later reactions like Romanticism and Existentialism. The effect of these philosophical and scientific ideas on literature and other arts is also explored. The course includes exposure to important works or primary sources, critiqued from a Christian perspective. 3 hours.

Hillsdale in contrast spends a lot more time with the West’s cultural heritage though its catalogue says less about teaching from a “Christian perspective.” As part of the core curriculum students at Hillsdale take at least six courses — two in history, two in English, and two in Philosophy and Religion — that add up to 18 hours (ten more than Covenant). Here is what those courses are supposed to cover.

HST 104 The Western Heritage to 1600 3 hours The course will focus on the development of political cultures in Western Europe before 1600. It begins with a consideration of Mesopotamian and Hebrew civilizations and culminates in a survey of early modern Europe. The purpose of the course is to acquaint students with the historical roots of the Western heritage and, in particular, to explore the ways in which modern man is indebted to Greco-Roman culture and the Judeo-Christian tradition.

HST 105 The American Heritage 3 hours This course, a continuation of HST 104, will emphasize the history of “the American experiment of liberty under law.” It covers from the colonial heritage and the founding of the republic to the increasing involvement of the United States in a world of ideologies and war. Such themes as the constitutional tensions between liberty and order, opportunity in an enterprising society, changing ideas about the individual and equality, and the development of the ideal of global democracy will be examined. Attention will also be given to themes of continuity and comparison with the modern Western world, especially the direct Western influences (classical, Christian and English) on the American founding, the extent to which the regime was and is “revolutionary,” and the common Western experience of modernization.

ENG 104 Great Books in the Western Tradition: Ancient to Medieval 3 hours This course will introduce the student to representative Great Books of the Western World from Antiquity to the Middle Ages. Selections may include the Bible and works by authors such as Homer, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Plato, Aristotle, Vergil, Ovid, Augustine, and Dante. The writing content includes a variety of writing exercises that incorporate traditional compositional and rhetorical skills.

ENG 105 Great Books in the British and American Traditions 3 hours A continuation of English 104 but with a focus on Great Books in the British and American traditions. English authors may include Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Swift, Wordsworth, Dickens, Yeats, Eliot; American authors may include Thoreau, Hawthorne, Melville, Whitman, Dickinson, Twain, Frost, Hemingway, Faulkner, and O’Connor. The writing emphasis continues with a variety of writing exercises that incorporate traditional compositional and rhetorical skills.

PHL 105 The Western Philosophical Tradition 3 hours A general overview of the history of philosophical development in the West from its inception with the Pre-Socratic philosophers of ancient Greece to the 20th century Anglo-American and Continental traditions. The contributions of seminal thinkers and innovators such as Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, Aquinas, Descartes, Locke, Hume, Kant, Mill, and Nietzsche are studied. Major works by these and other important philosophers are read, analyzed, and discussed with the aim of understanding what they argued for and against in regard to metaphysical, epistemological, and ethical issues. The course investigates to what extent they influenced their own and subsequent societies, how these philosophical systems create varying views of the world and human life, and how they address the perennial questions humans universally ask, existential questions such as, “Is there purpose and meaning in life?”; epistemological questions such as, “What are the limits of human knowledge?”; metaphysical questions such as, “What is the ultimate nature of the reality in which we live?”, “Is there life after death?”, “Are humans identical to their brains?”; and ethical questions such as, “What is the fundamental criterion of right and wrong human action?” In short, the course examines the main Western philosophical thinkers and traditions in an effort to understand what they have taught, why they have so taught, and how they have helped form and shape Western civilization.

REL 105 The Western Theological Tradition 3 hours A survey of the history of Western theology, analyzing and exploring the teachings of the various theological traditions that have influenced Western Civilization. Given the dominant influence of Christianity on Western culture and society over the past 2000 years, the course makes clear the theological teachings of the major Christian traditions that have prospered and played a significant role in shaping Western societies. The connections between theology and notions of proper community and individual life, theology’s influence on Western metaphysics and ethics, and the influence theology has had on the development of modern institutions and enterprises, such as modern science, are explored. In addition, the conceptual innovations about the nature of man and his abilities which theological disputes over the nature of God and Christ have provided are pointed out and discussed. Moreover, particular notions of the religious life and of the role of religion in life that have dominated Western thought on these matters are also explored. In short, students are instructed in the basic teachings of that faith that has dominated and, until recently, to a large extent directed the course of Western civilization in order to understand how religious belief informs self-understanding, provides a comprehensive view of reality, and, by instilling a vision of human life, its purpose and proper comportment, shapes the larger culture.

One aspect to notice, irrespective of the personal convictions of professors, Hillsdale’s curriculum is set up to present Christian context for the West and American government and culture. This instruction may be too friendly to Western culture and the United States, but it is very positive about Christianity. No specific confessional tradition claims to be at the center of Hillsdale’s Christian identity (though some faculty may try). But for Hillsdale to call itself a Christian college hardly looks like a bait and switch.

What is also striking is that Hillsdale delivers these courses on the West and America through specific academic departments. These courses are both in the core and at the beginning of a sequence of an academic major. Because they are not set apart in an interdisciplinary “Core” area which may be staffed by sociologists, English professors, historians, or musicians, Hillsdale’s “Core” curriculum is not set apart in a nebulous, required, general education or interdisciplinary part of the curriculum, something that students check off before getting to real courses in English, history, and philosophy. At Hillsdale, the core courses are the real courses (even if students still check boxes when taking them because of curricular requirements). This likely accounts for why Hillsdale has so many majors in English, history, and philosophy.

The exception to this pattern at Covenant are the required “Core” courses in Bible and Theology.

BIB 111 Old Testament Introduction
This course introduces the basic theological themes, chronological framework, and literary character of the Old Testament with a focus on Genesis – Kings. It aims to provide: 1) the foundations for theological interpretation of the Old Testament, giving special attention to the covenantal framework for redemptive history; and 2) an introduction to critical theories concerning the authorship, canonicity, integrity and dating of the documents. 3 hours.

BIB 142 New Testament Introduction
The course will deal with 1) questions of introduction (authorship, canon, inspiration, integrity of the documents, dating, etc); 2) beginning hermeneutics; 3) inter-testamental history as a background to the New Testament, as well as 4) a study of the historical framework of the New Testament as a whole, and key theological concepts. 3 hours.

BIB 277 Christian Doctrine I
A survey of the major doctrines of the Christian faith. First semester investigates the biblical data on Scripture, God, man and Christ. Second semester investigates the biblical data on the Holy Spirit, salvation, Church and last things. The Westminster Confession of Faith and Catechisms serve as guidelines and resources. 3 hours.

BIB 278 Christian Doctrine II
A survey of the major doctrines of the Christian faith. First semester investigates the biblical data on Scripture, God, man and Christ. Second semester investigates the biblical data on the Holy Spirit, salvation, Church and last things. The Westminster Confession of Faith and Catechisms serve as guidelines and resources. 3 hours.

These four courses give Covenant a leg up on Hillsdale, especially if you are a Presbyterian. Covenant requires two courses that survey study of Scripture, and two that summarize Christian doctrine. These arguably constitute the most confessional pieces of Covenant’s education. But because professor Green is more concerned with what faculty believe and profess, he spends little time in his published pieces on curriculum and academic departments.

What may be the most important difference between the two colleges is the way they conduct a liberal education. Both schools advertise themselves as liberal arts colleges. But at least at their websites, Hillsdale uses language that informed a long line of liberal arts colleges in the United States. Covenant’s statements are much less liberal education-inflected and bear some of the conviction of a Bible college where the Bible is pre-eminent and the arts and sciences are second string.

Consider this answer at Covenant to the FAQ, what makes Covenant different from other top-rate liberal arts colleges?

At Covenant, why you learn something is every bit as important as what you learn. Here, you will learn to see God in every facet of your life, and you will be personally taught by acclaimed professors who could teach virtually anywhere in the world and choose to be here.

At Hillsdale’s website the following describes the College’s commitment to a liberal arts core curriculum:

Liberal learning produces cultivated citizens with minds disciplined and furnished through wide and deep study of old books by wise authors. . . . It does so by leading forth students into a consideration of what has been called, “the best that has been thought and said.”

For what it’s worth, until the so-called fundamentalist controversy, Protestant denominational colleges (even Free Will Baptists) had no trouble offering a Christian and liberal education. Those colleges offered way more courses in the arts and sciences than they did in Bible and theology. Then when the mainline Protestant denominations started to go liberal (theologically) and dabbled with notions of God revealing himself as much through literature as through Scripture, fundamentalist-leaning Protestants turned to the Bible as the core of the college curriculum — first at Bible colleges and then at liberal arts schools like Wheaton, Gordon, and Westmont. How Hillsdale pulled off what it has — a return to the Protestant denominational Christian liberal arts college without being exclusively Protestant — is anyone’s guess.

If professor Green is a bit befuddled in pigeonholing Hillsdale College, he is not alone.

Machen Day 2018

Published on by D. G. Hart3 Comments

Timely.

The undergraduate student of the present day is being told that he need not take notes on what he hears in class, that the exercise of the memory is a rather childish and mechanical thing, and that what he is really in college to do is to think for himself and to unify his world. He usually makes a poor business of unifying his world. And the reason is clear. He does not succeed in unifying his world for the simple reason that he has ho world to unify. He has not acquired a knowledge or a sufficient number of facts in order even to learn the method of putting facts together. He is being told to practice the business of mental digestion; but the trouble is that he has no food to digest. The modern student, contrary to what is often said, is really being starved for want of facts.

Certainly we are not discouraging originality. On the contrary we desire to encourage it in every possible way, and we believe that the encouragement of it will be of immense benefit to the spread of the Christian religion. The trouble with the university students of the present day, from the point of view of evangelical Christianity, is not that they are too original, but that they are not half original enough. They go on in the same routine way, following their leaders like a flock of sheep, repeating the same stock phrases with little knowledge of what they mean, swallowing whole whatever professors choose to give them and all the time imagining that they are bold, bad, independent, young men, merely because they abuse what everybody else is abusing, namely, the religion that is founded upon Christ. It is popular today to abuse that unpopular thing that is known as supernatural Christianity,
but original it certainly is not. A true originality might bring some resistance to the current of the age, some willingness to be unpopular, and some independent scrutiny, at least, if not acceptance, of the claims of Christ. If there is one thing more than another which we believers in historic Christianity ought to encourage in the youth of our day it is independence of mind. (What is Faith? 16-17)

Fishermen Need Not Apply

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Does the path to sanctification (or virtue) really lie in a liberal education?

Liberal education, according to Blessed Cardinal Newman, is primarily formation of the mind enabling it to seek, know, and contemplate truth, which is the good of the intellect and which prepares us to know fully and love fully the One who is the truth. But I do not think education of the mind is sufficient. Just as a specialist education in one field or skill should not come before a generalist and integrative education in the principles and mindset of all fields, education of the mind alone or as foremost is imbalanced, and can lead to extreme deformations in the soul, such as hyper intellectualism, an inability to act decisively, and a lack of emotional intelligence and integration. In addition to the mind, there must also be an education of the body in endurance and long-suffering, the imagination in beauty, and the will in the good. All this is to say that a proper education is an education of the whole person, but the person is neither his intellect, his will, his imagination, his memory, nor his body. He is, rather, his heart. And the heart is what WCC educates best.

Why is the heart so important? In a word, God. God makes His presence known in our hearts, and we see God with our heart, not our eyes, and not even our intellects. But the synthesis of all our powers at the very core of our being. The heart is supernaturally educated by grace, the sacraments, the life of Christian charity, and the teachings of the Catholic Church, but the heart needs a robust natural education in order for the supernatural formation to take root and bear fruit. How can the heart be educated? Only by a “curriculum of the heart,” one that forms and perfects all our powers in different disciplines: humanities, the moral imagination; the fine arts, the aesthetic sense; the outdoors, the will, the senses, and our character; math and science, our powers of observation and interpretation; philosophy, our critical and questioning powers, our dialectical mind; and theology, our contemplative essence.

Imagine if Peter and Paul had had to go to college before attending seminary with their Lord. Jesus would be dead and they’d be rising seniors.

Or maybe, just maybe, word, sacrament, and prayer work independently of philosophy and literature. Nothing wrong with education and in Protestant circles, literacy was pretty important for participating in the worship service — hymn singing and all. But education will not save us. If we know that in politics, why not (Christian) religion?

Liberal Education After the Fall

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Must a student be baptized before pursuing the true, good, and beautiful? That questioned occurred after reading Fr. James Schall’s summary of Tracy Rowland’s lecture on Roman Catholic education.

For Rowland and Schall, the Trinity informs the study of everything and so Christianity is at the foundation of any genuine education:

…the basic Catholic approach to education is that there “exists a relationship between the human intellect, the theological virtue of faith, and the transcendental of truth; there also exists a relationship between the human will, the theological virtue of love, and the transcendental of goodness, and there exists a relationship between the human memory, the theological virtue of hope and the transcendental of beauty.” The transcendentals—one, being, good, true, beautiful—are predicates we can apply to everything that is. They reflect in our being the inner relation of the three persons within the Trinity.

It is possible to pass through schools, even at the graduate level, and not really learn much of truth or of what is important. This result can happen also in Catholic schools. Thus, we need graduates who actually have “Catholic intellects, Catholic wills, Catholic imaginations, and Catholic memories.” They need to be conjoined in a proper order of soul. We want to know the truth, to control our own disorders, to imagine what can enlarge our vision. A Catholic memory will know of its saints and their foibles, of glories and tragedies.

But I wonder why a Christian approach to education, one that takes Genesis 3 and the triumph of Augustinianism over Pelagianism seriously, wouldn’t first start with fallen human nature and the incapacity for those, either unregenerate or unbaptized (depending on your communion), to see the Trinity in the true, good, and beautiful because unbelievers are turned in on themselves. In other words, doesn’t a Roman Catholic view of education presuppose that professors and students are baptized and belong to the same communion?

Schall goes on to explain that Rowland acknowledges that not all students have the same intellectual capacities:

This is not an evil, but an aspect of a common good that makes it possible to participate in a broad range of goods and fruits of labor, and insights of others. Some will be more gifted intellectually than others. Some will have greater hearts, be more insightful, or possess skills or virtues that are good. Not everyone is a genius. Indeed, studies show that only about twenty percent of students are able to grasp subtle abstract points of knowledge. The teachers and schools must know and attend to the differences.

An educational egalitarianism that presupposed that all students have the same capacities, talents, and discipline will probably end by teaching very little to neglect the real needs and skills of actual students. Some students will be more attracted to truth, others to goodness, others to beauty, and still others to all sorts of practical and unexpected things. “Human lives can turn into narrative wrecks if educators produce people who can think at high levels of abstraction but are emotionally retarded or who lack sapiential experiences, or who conversely are emotionally sensitive but have no intellectual framework with which to make judgments about their inner life.”

But imagine the narrative wreck that comes with a failure to acknowledge that students can’t understand the Triune God without a prior work of grace, that all students try to suppress the truth in unrighteousness apart from God’s saving work.

If Christian education is going to be redeemed, doesn’t redemption need to be part of the conversation?

Is Joseph Epstein Off Limits to a Christian?

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About a year ago, Joseph Epstein, one of (all about) my favorite writers, produced a piece on the value of liberal learning. It is smart and clever, as Epstein’s essays always are, and this one helps me try to convince freshmen in Western Heritage of the value of Greek philosophy (during a wee peek at the Epicureans and Stoics; truth be told, it also allows the philosophically challenged like me to find a network time killer in the third week of classes).

But it occurred to me this morning while preparing for class that Epstein is also useful for exposing the posturing of transformationalists as either theonomists, fundamentalists, or both.

Epstein talks about the value of a liberal education in ways that seem impermissible to many neo-Calvinists who employ the language of w-w:

The death of liberal arts education would constitute a serious subtraction. Without it, we shall no longer have a segment of the population that has a proper standard with which to judge true intellectual achievement. Without it, no one can have a genuine notion of what constitutes an educated man or woman, or why one work of art is superior to another, or what in life is serious and what is trivial. The loss of liberal arts education can only result in replacing authoritative judgment with rivaling expert opinions, the vaunting of the second- and third-rate in politics and art, the supremacy of the faddish and the fashionable in all of life. Without that glimpse of the best that liberal arts education conveys, a nation might wake up living in the worst, and never notice.

Notice that Epstein makes these assertions without any reference to God, special revelation, or regeneration. (Why would he? He is not pretending to be a Christian.) He is thinking entirely as a human being. Some might say he is doing so — gasp — autonomously. But can anyone who is serious about literature and learning (Christian or no) really take issue with Epstein’s notion of a liberal education and its value? Someone like Bill Smith has questioned the idea of Christian math or Christian pedagogy with all the sense that common sense yields. But when it comes to a liberal education, are Calvinists really supposed to say that Christians know a liberal education better than non-Christians? Even though the liberal arts and their derivation from classical languages and letters by Christians predated Reformed Protestantism, we are now supposed to conclude that only faculty with a biblical or Reformed w-w will be the ones to yield a genuinely liberal education?

This is complete nonsense and amazingly smug, as if regeneration somehow gives Christians insights into tragedy, epistemology, or historical contingency. I have been around lots of Christians where those awarenesses have never shown the slightest signs of presence. And that’s because an education comes through lots of long hours of reading and reflection, and even then doesn’t necessarily take hold. You need a certain natural acumen for such things; regeneration cannot make a Christian intelligent (only God can and he does it through nature, not supernature).

And yet, transformationalists continue to opine that 2kers are the ones who are rocking the boat and upsetting the consensus of Reformed churches, as if a hyper-antithesis is not far more radical than anything 2k advocates are saying. Just yesterday I heard a podcast which described the Christian scholar’s task as one of bringing secular universities into conformity with biblical truth. The reason is that secular learning is illegitimate since it denies the fountain of all truth. Well, if secular universities are illegitimate, then what of secular governments? And if secular governments are illegitimate, what of secular persons? Is there a place in this world between the advents of Christ for non-Christian learning, non-Christian governments, and non-Christian persons (like Joseph Epstein)? If Epstein is wrong about sound learning and informed aesthetic judgments, if persons can only know good from bad literature by reading the Bible first, or can only form valid political arrangements by having Christians perform the political founding, or persons are not worthy of reading or hearing unless they are first regenerate, then Christians are in the same position as some forms of political Islam.

But Reformed Protestantism has never insisted on such a construction of the antithesis because it never questioned the legitimacy of contributions from non-Christians. Once you accept that people who do not know Christ, along with the institutions they found, are legitimate and reflect in some measure of the image of God in man along with the truths of general revelation, then you can aspire to be learned the way that Epstein is, or try to follow constitutional republicanism the way the founders of the U.S. did, or even read Plato and Thucydides for profit the way most college students in the West for centuries have (if you were rich and smart enough). If you appeal to common grace to free you from the polarities of such hyper-antithesis, by all means, go right ahead. That means you have to stop bellyaching about secular learning, secular governments, and secular persons because common grace is a way of affirming that all of those institutions and people have a legitimate role in God’s gracious ends. It also means giving up transformationalism because common grace has already done what you seemed to think transforming the culture would do.

But if you draw a line between the regenerate and unregenerate and extend it to intellectual life, or institutions, whether political or educational, you have removed yourself from the history of the West and taken a harder line than even some popes were prepared to go. You have not gone to the Land of Chocolatebut to the Twilight Zone.