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For well over twenty years, Christian scholars and educators of various disciplines have been engaged in an examination of the nature of Christian and secular higher education. Much of that reflection with regard to the North American context in particular has turned on one of two types of examinations. The first type is comprised of a positive assessment of Christian higher education and its specific goals and achievements as these are embodied and witnessed in self-identified Christian colleges and universities. The second and perhaps more dominant type is marked by a sober appraisal of the loss of Christian influence and identity in the sphere of higher education in general over the past two centuries. The argument offered here differs from both of these types of contributions and is, instead, a theological account of the university, and specifically of the Christian rather than the secular one, though that task has its own place and integrity.1
Mike Higton, in his recent book, A Theology of Higher Education, attempts to mediate between explicitly Christian aims and ends as embodied in the church's doctrinal, moral, and liturgical life and those aims and ends of the secular university. He seeks to draw lines of coordination between a specifically Christian theology of the university and the secular university's own self-understanding, practices, and activities.2 Other projects attempt to display the inherent appropriateness of including theology as a discipline within the secular university context. Such studies often are particularly European in flavor due to the historic placement of ecclesial centers of training and divinity schools within national research universities, but James McClendon has made a related case for including a department of theology comprised of various religious traditions within secular American universities.3 The task I undertake here differs from these in that it is a theological description of the Christian university itself, attempting to render its unique position within the economy of God's work in creation and redemption and its placement in relation to the church and the world.
To begin, we might articulate how such a theological account will differ from the two types of examinations of Christian faith and the university earlier noted. On one side, much reflection upon Christian higher education has been rooted in a celebration of its distinctive...