The Pietist Vision of Christian Higher Education
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The Pietist Vision of Christian Higher Education

Forming Whole and Holy Persons

Christopher Gehrz, Christopher Gehrz

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eBook - ePub

The Pietist Vision of Christian Higher Education

Forming Whole and Holy Persons

Christopher Gehrz, Christopher Gehrz

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About This Book

Pietism has long been ignored in evangelical scholarship. This is especially the case in the field of Christian higher education, which is dominated by thinkers in the Reformed tradition and complicated by the association of Pietism with anti-intellectualism. The irony is that Pietism from the beginning "was intimately bound up with education, " according to Diarmaid MacCulloch. But until now there has not been a single work dedicated to exploring a distinctively Pietist vision for higher education.In this groundbreaking volume edited by Christopher Gehrz, scholars associated with the Pietist tradition reflect on the Pietist approach to education. Key themes include holistic formation, humility and openmindedness, the love of neighbor, concern for the common good and spiritual maturity. Pietism sees the Christian college as a place that forms whole and holy persons. In a pluralistic and polarized society, such a vision is needed now more than ever.

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Information

Publisher
IVP Academic
Year
2014
ISBN
9780830897131

Part One

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Teaching, Scholarship and Community in the Pietist University

Students should unceasingly have it impressed upon them that
holy life is not of less consequence than diligence and study,
indeed that study without piety is worthless.

Philipp Jakob Spener,
Pia Desideria


The relation between teacher and students should not be that of
superior and subordinate, but one of real friendship and helpfulness,
remembering that One is our Master, and we are all brethren.

John Alexis Edgren,
founder of Bethel University

1

Pietism and Faith-Learning Integration in the Evangelical University

David C. Williams
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What is the function of the evangelical university? Is it to further scholarship through academic inquiry? Is it for the purposes of spiritual formation? There is, of course, widespread agreement that an evangelical university does and should do both of the aforementioned, but there is no clear consensus on how the two should be related.
Articulating the relationship between these two ends falls under a number of terms like “faith-learning integration,” and these issues are pursued primarily at the level of particular academic disciplines—for example, “How does studying physics relate to faith?” But how one understands the relationship between the notions of faith and reason dictates how those in evangelical institutions of higher learning allocate resources, determine what has value and what is honorable, and decide how the Christian life is articulated, understood and lived. Investigate any decision of significance made at evangelical universities in depth and you will discover a position (consciously held or not) on the relationship between faith and reason. No question is more important for determining the function of an evangelical university, yet very little consensus exists regarding the answer.
To some extent, this is because evangelicalism has, like Augustine, a kind of dual parentage that creates specific kinds of tension. The events that shaped evangelicalism to the greatest degree—the Great Awakenings that occurred in Britain and the American colonies during the 1730s and 1740s—embody the tension between the Pietist and the Puritan/Reformed influences. The towering figures of these events were John Wesley and Jonathan Edwards; both were influenced by Pietism as well as Puritan/Reformed theology. The Pietist roots carried a strong emphasis on the experiential, while the Puritan/Reformed strain tended to prefer a “strong interest in correct doctrine and orthodoxy from Protestant Scholasticism. The post-Reformation thinkers embedded within Puritanism lent to evangelicalism a commitment to doctrinal correctness with a strongly Reformed flavor.”1 Roger Olson calls this tension an “unstable compound” because the streams of Pietism and Puritanism combine two extremely strong impulses that at times are in conflict.2
I will address two specific problems that arise because of the tension between the Reformed and Pietist positions. The first problem is that the Reformed side of the equation has produced an extremely articulate and influential way of approaching the issue of faith integration, but universities with roots in Pietism have been less interested in matching the precision of the Reformed tradition’s answer to Tertullian’s question “What has Athens to do with Jerusalem?” This is not to say that many of these pietistic institutions have not flourished in the world of higher education and scholarship, but arguably a student or faculty member at an institution like Bethel will be less able to specify a relationship between the life of the mind and the life of the Spirit, than, say, their counterparts at Dordt or Calvin.
Working from John Calvin’s position on how Christianity should engage culture, Reformed thinkers and universities have produced powerful arguments for “transforming culture” (as Richard Niebuhr plots their position on his “Christ and Culture” categories3) that provide a mandate for how faith considerations are related to academic inquiry.4 Figures such as Alvin Plantinga and Nicholas Wolterstorff have altered the landscape of contemporary academic philosophy and the role that Christians play in its practice. Plantinga’s “Reformed Epistemology” and his critiques of naturalism are ones with which all philosophers must contend.
Reformed universities, then, have a clear “usable past” within the history of evangelicalism that allows for the communication of a very specific approach to faith-learning to their administration, faculty, staff and students. Because there is a historical relationship between scholarship and faith that can be used to answer the questions regarding why one would have to study x at a Christian university, the Reformed tradition can offer accessible reasons for answering these types of questions. Why has it been so difficult, though, for evangelical universities that do not come out of the Reformed tradition to explain how the life of the mind relates to the life of faith?
The second problem manifested by the tension between the Reformed and Pietist impulses affects all evangelical universities to a degree. Every evangelical university is concerned with both the academic as well as the spiritual life of students and aims to cultivate the “whole person.” The experiential impulse to create community and foster rich forms of spirituality is, however, most often the task of Student Affairs (residence life, student development, campus ministries), concerning itself with leadership, community and spiritual life. The academic disciplines, on the other hand, tend to the minds of students. Or so it is assumed. In worst-case scenarios, the academicians can feel that the increased professionalization of the Student Affairs arena creates a cottage industry that dilutes the aims of the university and marginalizes academic pursuits. Student Affairs can view academics as failing to deal with the “whole person,” treating students as minds simply and neglecting the most important aspects of their development. A university can have brilliant academic and Student Affairs programs, but it is quite rare for there to be much communication between these aspects of the university. Why?
The attempt to address the “whole person” in evangelical universities will inevitably embody the “unstable compound” of evangelicalism: the experiential energies of Pietism become housed in Student Affairs, while the Reformed energies shape the culture of the academicians. Evangelical universities, then, do appeal to the “whole person” but do so in a highly bifurcated fashion, with students compartmentalizing their university experience accordingly. If there is no overall structural narrative that shapes the relationship between academics and Student Affairs, then those who participate in the life of the university will fail to have a narrative that specifies the function of the university.
Asserting that one must maintain “balance” between one’s spiritual life and one’s academic development is at least a start, but simply encouraging the development of good multitasking allows the student or faculty member to successfully avoid discovering the relationship between a living, vibrant faith and academic inquiry. The question here is not one of time management or simply balancing competing tensions but the function of the evangelical university.
I argue that two aspects of Pietism’s usable past are useful in addressing the two problems outlined above. I will show that Pietism’s emphasis on new birth (Wiedergeburt) can provide the basis for thinking about a distinctively pietistic conception of faith-learning integration, and that the conventicle model so essential to Pietism provides a way of overcoming the bifurcation between Student Affairs and academics.

Salient Features of Pietism’s Usable Past

If we are enquiring into the function of the evangelical university, then the first question we need to ask is whether or not historical Pietism is relevant for the history of evangelicalism. Evangelical universities wishing to utilize a usable evangelical past have only been able to see as far as Edwards and Wesley, but the scholarship of the late W. R. Ward has opened up the seventeenth century to evangelical institutions that are rooted in the traditions that come out of that period.5 In a tribute entitled “Rewriting the History of Evangelicalism,” Mark Noll and Bruce Hindmarsh assert that
Ward changed the historiography of early evangelicalism. He turned the globe back a quarter turn toward Europe and turned the calendar back a century toward the post-Reformation era. Single-handedly, his herculean scholarship reconstituted 18th-century Anglo-American evangelical history in terms of 17th-century Central European history. This is one of the great contributions in all of modern historical scholarship.6
If Ward’s recovery of Pietism in evangelical history is as significant as Noll and Hindmarsh claim, then it surely warrants a look at how this history might contribute to the issue of faith integration in contemporary evangelical universities. For example, Bethel University comes out of Swedish Baptist Pietism, in which figures such as Johann Arndt, Philipp Jakob Spener and August Hermann Francke are treated as formative, yet these figures lack the evangelical bona fides of Edwards and Wesley. Ward’s account of early evangelicalism shows conclusively that Pietism’s heritage is central to the development of evangelicalism.
If it is the case, though, that we have only been using a portion of evangelical history to think about the function of the evangelical university, then Ward’s scholarship seems to open up new possibilities for thinking about the Christian life relative to the life of the mind. The following section will consider some aspects of the Pietist heritage that may be useful in thinking through the question of how faith relates to learning in evangelical universities that resonate with the Pietist side of the tension yet have failed to consider the importance of their own historical roots for how they understand what it means to be a Christian university.
Wiedergeburt: Pietism on the relationship between humans and nature. One way of contrasting a pietistic orientation to faith-learning integration with the Reformed model is to analyze the relationship between human beings and the created order.7 There is a longstanding debate in Christian theology about realism, or the belief in the extramental existence of universals (e.g., moral and scientific principles). This was Thomas Aquinas’s view, and it maintains that universals are instantiated in the created order and available through the use of reason. Universals like species and genera were real things found through the investigation of nature. The idea that one could discover truth through the investigation of nature opposed Augustine’s view that universals are known through illumination. Martin Luther, however, goes beyond even Augustine and accepts a view regarding nature that was influenced by nominalism. Nominalism is the view that universals are not real and that nothing exists but individual bodies that perform purely individual actions. That Luther was highly influenced by nominalism is well known, but the implications for Reformed theology are less well considered.8
What we have, then, are two main approaches to faith and reason offering two differing conceptions of nature and how human beings interact with the created order. The Aristotelian-influenced Thomism—rejected by Reformers like Luther—maintains that God’s revelation can be partially discovered in the created order through the use of reason alone. This view is called essentialism, as it maintains that scientific forms or essences inhere within the individual things of God’s creation. Natural law ethics, or the view that essences are normative for human conduct, is grounded in this view. On the other hand, we have an entirely desacralized view of nature in the nominalism of Luther. Luther’s attempt to equate Scholastic essentialism with idolatry, and John Calvin’s extension of this line of thought, have important implications for Protestant theology and ethics, as Charles Taylor points out:
But Protestants and particularly Calvinism classed it [essentialism] with idolatry and waged unconditional war on it. It is probable that the unremitting struggle to desacralize the world in the name of an undivided devotion to God waged by Calvin and his followers helped destroy the sense that the creation was a locus of meanings in relation to which man had to define himself.9
The Catholic and Reformed positions on faith-learning integration articulate, then, two very different conceptions of how Christians relate to the natural world. The scholastically influenced essentialism of Catholicism depicts the human intellect discovering, through the investigation of nature, normative aspects of God’s intentions for humans, while the Reformed position shifts the emphasis from the investigation of nature as a locus of theological meaning to the intellect and Scripture alone.10 Many new faculty members at evangelical institutions could learn a great deal from Aquinas on faith and reason but will most likely be inclined to turn to evangelical sources such as Mark Noll’s Scandal of the Evangelical Mind.11 They will discover, though, that Noll’s view is a robust part of the evangelical heritage, but his suggestion that the Puritans, and in particular Edwards, function as the model of faith-learning integration is connected directly to desacralization.
Pietism offers a third way between the desacralization of Reformed nominalism and Catholic essentialism. A helpful way of describing the opposition between Reformed scholasticism and Pietism is to note the differing emphases regarding justification and Wiedergeburt (“new birth”).12 Reformed scholasticism offers a jur...

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