CHRISTIAN COLLEGES AND THE HOPE FOR REVIVAL

It is a long-standing, historical fact that the Holy Spirit usually commences periods of authentic revival by working among youth as Jonathan Edwards has so clearly pointed out in his Narrative of Surprising Conversions, and in the classic American work on experiential grace and revival, Religious Affections. The following editorial, presented in a slightly condensed format, was written in The Presbyterian Journal by William Barker, and underscores this timely truth in reference to the need for Christian colleges. Its content represents particularly appropriate matter for us to consider at present as our denominational college committee continues its weighty task of preparing a report for our 1986 Synod relative to the feasibility of establishing a distinctive college in our Reformed tradition. Let us pray for our committee that they be given essential wisdom in their preparations, and may God grant us, above all, to remember our young people who stand in dire need of Christ-centered education at every phase of their educational path.

-Ed.

Within 50 years of Martin Luther’s conversion 22,000 graduates came out of the University of Wittenberg to spread his new understanding of justification by faith alone and of the authority of Scripture alone.

The Protestant Reformation was to a great extent an educational movement. Luther’s rediscovery of the gospel was conveyed by the latest technology — the printing press. But even more essential to the passing on of the faith was the age-old Biblical method of teaching: “… the things you have heard me say in the presence of many witnesses entrust to reliable men who will also be qualified to teach others” (II Timothy 2:2).

Enrollment in the University of Wittenberg grew from an average of 308 in the period 1506-10 to 960 in 1556-60. In the same half-century that this tripling occurred Erfurt’s enrollment dropped from 473 to 156 and Leipzig’s from 819 to 490. Clearly something significant was going on at Luther’s Wittenberg, and 16th-century Germany recognized it.

Revival of the sort that the Protestant Reformation brought is the need today. It must be rooted in the gospel, the grace of God in Jesus Christ applied by the Holy Spirit as the only way of salvation. It must also be firmly grounded in God’s revealed Word as the basis for all truth. And it must extend its applications into every branch of life and thought, bearing fruit in government, the marketplace, the home, human relations, the environment, science, and the arts.

The pulpits of our churches, our Sunday schools, and the growing Christian school movement all play their part (under God’s blessing) in producing such a reformation today. So do theological seminaries. But surely the most strategically placed institution for carrying out this kind of reformation today is the Christian liberal-arts college.

The Christian liberal-arts college, properly conceived, is not a reform school where we send our problem young people in the hope that they will get straightened out by suitable spiritual influence. It is not just a refuge from the evils and threats of our secular society and its public institutions. Nor is it merely a high-quality curriculum somehow sanctified by daily chapel services and prayer before classes.

No, the Christian liberal-arts college ideally possesses strong instruction in the Scriptures and then teaches the various disciplines of the curriculum from a distinctively Christian perspective.

We can be sure that there is no perfect Christian college in this fallen world. But because we are in a fallen world, we must support those who are striving for this goal.

Let me testify to the difference such Christian colleges can make. I am grateful for the “Ivy League” education I was privileged to receive at Princeton, Cornell, and Vanderbilt. I sat under some excellent teachers, I appreciate what, in the world’s sense, a good education can be.

But not until I was in the context of Christian education was I ever directed to think about history, my major field, from the perspective of its meaning in God’s sight. My Christian upbringing and knowledge of the Bible helped give me clues as I sat under secular thinkers. But for the most part my understanding of history was flat and two-dimensional until I reflected upon it from the perspective of God’s providential purposes. Then certain aspects jumped into significance, as if I had inserted one of those old blurry cards into a steropticon and the picture had leaped into three-dimensional relief. God’s world cannot be rightly understood apart from knowledge of God and his Word. What is true for history is true also for science, the arts, and every field of human knowledge and activity .…

In his 1963 book, The Christian Mind, Harry Blamires predicted, on page 189, “the possible approach of a crisis in Western civilization of a kind that is not being publicly anticipated. For, nuclear disaster apart, increasing mass-education, alongside increasing material well-being and accelerating pursuit of it, is going to make secularism more consciously and articulately secularist (as it is already in Russia).… The question is, will the Christians of the next fifty years, over against a strengthened secularism, deepen and clarify their Christian commitment in a withdrawn cultivation of personal morality and spirituality, thereby achieving the kind of uneasy coexistence which Church and State appear to have arrived at in Russia? Or will the Christians of the next fifty years deepen and clarify their Christian commitment at the intellectual and social levels too, meeting and challenging not only secularism’s assault upon personal morality and the life of the soul, but also secularims’s truncated and perverted view of the meaning of life and the purpose of the social order?”

We know that the Christian liberal-arts college has much more than even these good things to offer. It is time that we get behind our Christian colleges with our funds, our young people, and our prayers for a Reformational revival in our day.

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