Faith and Learning

A faculty perspective into the mission of Grove City College, the role of Christian scholarship in higher education, and the connection between faith and learning.

Dr. Carl R. Trueman is professor of Biblical and Religious Studies at Grove City College. An esteemed church historian, he previously served as the William E. Simon Fellow in Religion and Public Life at Princeton University and was on the faculty at Westminster Theological Seminary. He holds a Ph.D. in Church History from the University of Aberdeen and an M.A. in Classics from the University of Cambridge. Trueman has written or edited more than a dozen books, including The Creedal Imperative, Luther on the Christian Life and Histories and Fallacies.His next book The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self: Cultural Amnesia, Expressive Individualism, and the Road to Sexual Revolution is slated for publication in November.

An education that unifies in an age of division

By Dr. Carl R. Trueman

One of the most striking aspects of our times is the fragmentation of life. This takes numerous forms, from the way in which we blithely separate the public and private morality of our political leaders, as if the two had no connection, to the manner in which we frequently fail to place the rapid changes in the world around us within the context of deeper and broader historical and cultural trends.

And perhaps nowhere is this fragmentation now more evident than in the area of education, particularly higher education. Academic disciplines have fragmented dramatically over the last 50 years, becoming increasingly isolated from each other. In part this is a function of the internal dynamics of academia – the need for academics to produce original research fuels increased specialization. In part it is a function of information technology – while a hundred years ago a scholar could read not just widely but also comprehensively, the sheer vastness of available resources now makes that impossible to do unless one’s specialty is narrowly focused. And in part it is because of the loss of any kind of metaphysical foundation upon which one might argue for the basic unity and interrelationship of all fields of knowledge. Critical theory has shattered the humanities and turned them from a quest for what makes human culture tick into a battlefield of competing political identities.

This is one reason why I decided to accept a job offer at Grove City College. Two things loomed large in my decision. First, it seems clear to me that the age of undergraduates surely spans the most critical point in their intellectual and personal development. Eighteen to twenty-two, away from parents, standing on their own two feet, they are facing for perhaps the very first time the question of whether what they believe is really what they themselves hold to be true or merely what mom and dad have taught them. There is really no way they can avoid the bracing challenge which comparative independence necessarily brings in its wake. And to engage with students during this time is both a privilege and a responsibility because this is the moment when the big ideas which will inform the rest of their lives will take root. To shortchange them or to offer them poor arguments is to fail them in a catastrophic way. The undergraduate classroom is a place where the battle for minds is won and lost, where students will either grasp truth and beauty or perhaps be turned away from such things forever. That is why undergraduate teaching is so important.

Second, I believe that the foundation of an education in a basic and broadly Christian view of the world offers a means of overcoming or at least of mitigating the problem of fragmentation of scholarly disciplines and the fragmented thinking about everything to which such inevitably leads. That is not to say that there are not a number of Christian views of the world – Roman Catholics, Orthodox, Anglicans, Reformed, Baptists, etc., will all have somewhat different ideas about the world and different emphases about certain things. Yet all Christians share a basic commitment to the idea that the world is not random chaos but the creation of a living God, and that all human knowledge is therefore interconnected and ultimately coherent. And all also share a belief that what binds human beings together – that they are made in the image of God – transcends that which divides us, whether it be race, nationality, age, gender, or whatever the immediate tastes of identity politics might dictate.

That is what makes the liberal arts foundation of the Grove City curriculum so attractive. It reflects the idea that knowledge has a unity and a coherence, and it implicitly teaches students that that their specialized degrees and then subsequent careers, whether as physicians or engineers or teachers or lawyers, etc., can only be competently pursued when they are understood as part of the big picture. A fragmented education fosters a fragmented view of the world. And that leads to decisions which only look to the short term, to pragmatic ethics, and to a selfishness that focuses on our personal desires rather than the common good.

Critical theory has shattered the humanities and turned them from a quest for what makes human culture tick into a battlefield of competing political identities.

The liberal arts foundation also fosters thinking that is not mesmerized by the present and by the immediate symptoms of our culture but which probes to the deeper, underlying commitments, ideas, and practices that have led to the social fractiousness and angry political polarization that characterizes the public square and threatens its stability. We can spend a lifetime playing a form of social whack-a-mole, trying to respond to this threat to freedom or that threat to morality or some attack on the weak and vulnerable and miss the larger picture and the more profound underlying shifts in culture of which these things are merely symptomatic. A liberal arts education, pursued in the context of a commitment to the unity of truth and to the reality of beauty, can foster both virtue in us and make us aware of where the real challenges of this day and age lie. Our problems are likely much deeper and more longstanding in origin and cause than many in society understand. But those who pursue learning not in the narrow and isolated silos of the research university but in the integrated manner of a liberal arts college should be able to gain an understanding of the depth and breadth of the problem. And that is the necessary foundation for mounting an appropriate response.

Ours is a fragmented, fractious, and unstable age. Who knows where all this chaos will end? But one thing surely is certain: those who will be best equipped to meet the challenges it poses will be those who have an intellectual and spiritual foundation upon which a coherent view of the world and our place in it can be built. That’s why teaching at Grove City College at this moment in time in such an attractive – and important – privilege.