The Holy Spirit and the Liberal Arts: Higher Education, Innovation, and the Mission of the Church

Will twenty-first-century Christian college leaders rise to the challenge of innovation as we have throughout history or will we merely get stuck in the past? 

by Gary David Stratton

“One Athanasius against the world,” was in fact, “One Christian college against their culture.” (Wikimedia Commons)

Whether John Mark or one of his later disciples invented Christian higher education in Alexandria, Egypt, it was one of the most “apostolic” innovations in the history of the church. Eusebius (263-339 CE) and Jerome (347-420) each report that the Holy Spirit led John Mark to this remarkable strategy as he sought God for the wisdom to reach this great center of Roman culture in a season of intense prayer.

Founded by Alexander the Great in 331 BCE, Alexandria grew into one of the Mediterranean’s largest and most prosperous cities. It was home to both the Temple of Serapis (the Serapeum), which was considered the most magnificent Temple outside of Rome, and the great lighthouse at Pharos—one of the seven wonders of the ancient world. 

However, Alexandria’s true wonder lay in her commitment to scholarship and education. The great library at Alexandria—The Mouseion—contained as many as 500,000 works. Mouseion means “House of Muses” (the source of the English word “museum”), and it served as the muse for countless scientific discoveries and academic disciplines, including the field of library science. Mouseion faculty and students included Euclid, Archimedes, and Eratosthenes, whose mathematical calculation of the 24,901-mile circumference of the earth was off by less than fifty miles.

By the time John Mark would have visited Alexandria in the mid-to-late first century, the city was a shell of her former glory. Scholarly stagnation, multiple library fires, and Ptolemy VIII’s (182-116 BCE) expulsion of scholars greatly diminished the strength of the library school. Still, the life of the mind and higher learning remained the center of Alexandria’s culture. Students and scholars continued to flock there from throughout the Roman world. 

Led by the Spirit, Mark decided to fight-fire-with-fire. He established a “Didascalium”—a school utilizing the best methodology of the Graeco-Roman liberal arts tradition to teach students the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus and the teachings of his apostles. The Gospel of Mark appears to have become one of the school’s primary textbooks, so even if he didn’t establish the school, his teaching played a key part. In fact, the cutting-edge library sciences of Alexandria led to the Gospel of Mark becoming the first Christian document to be reproduced, not as a scroll, but as a book (Barnard, 149).

No matter who founded Alexandria Christian College, it was Clement of Alexandria (150-215 CE) who forged the school’s curriculum, publishing one textbook for each year of study in his philosophy class.

Year One: Protrepticus (An Exhortation to the Greeks) was designed to teach non-Christian students the tenants and reasonableness of the Christian Faith. “Let us remove the ignorance and darkness that spreads like a mist over our sight, and let us get a vision of the true God.”

Year Two: Paidagogos (the Instructor) educated students on the moral life of Christ and its imitation. Let us “…learn frugality and humility, and all that pertains to love of freedom, love of man, and love of excellence.”

Year Three: Stromata (Miscellanies) A capstone course on the wisdom of God and the path of spiritual formation. Your “business is not abstinence from what is evil … or the doing of good out of fear … nor any more is he to do so from hope of promised recompense … but only the doing of good out of love and for the sake of its own excellence….” (Christian History).

And, of course, this learning was done in a rich relational Christian community of prayer and worship, where service, scholarship (and celibacy) were held in high honor.

By the late second century, the Alexandrian school had grown from something resembling a modern campus ministry (like InterVarsity Christian Fellowship), into a full-fledged college that rivaled and eventually eclipsed all other Alexandrian higher learning.  

College Against Culture

It is difficult to imagine how European civilization might have developed without the integrative mindset fostered among the faculty and students in the Alexandrian Christian College. This single educational community boasted three of the most influential minds of the Patristic era: Clement, Origen, and Athanasius.  Its faculty provided clear-headed theological reflection and courageous cultural leadership in some of the most significant turning points in early church history.

This was particularly evident in their fourth-century battle against the heresy of Arianism. By this time the Alexandrian school had grown into an academic powerhouse with strong secular connections and studies, so much so that Eusebius reports that even non-Christian noblemen entrusted their sons to instruction there. The school became the training ground from which their most famous alumnus, Athanasius, launched his attack against the official Roman endorsement of Arianism.

Each time he was rebuffed and excommunicated by a church council (five times by four emperors), Athanasius returned to Alexandria for counsel and prayer with his colleagues in his robust educational community. The common perception that orthodoxy finally prevailed because of Athanasius contra mundum, “One Athanasius against the world,” is far too individualistic an interpretation.  The battle was actually, “One Christian college against their culture.” And the Christian college won.

Over the centuries since, Christian colleges and theological seminaries have often proven significantly more effective than local churches in nurturing faculty and students whose leadership is genuinely transformational. Although God often furthers his kingdom through unschooled saints, a surprising number of the names in the honor roll of church history are intricately connected to the schools where they studied and/or taught, including Martin Luther and the University of Wittenberg, John & Charles Wesley and Oxford, Timothy Dwight and Yale, Charles G. Finney and Oberlin, D. L. Moody and A. J. Gordon and the institutions that bear their names to this day. Each stands as a monument to the extent and influence of Christian higher education.

The Life of the Mind and the Life of the Spirit

One of the keys to the influence of these learning communities is the surprising degree to which the life of the mind and the life of the Spirit can and often do coexist in a Christian liberal arts education. Authentically Christian liberal arts colleges and universities birthed many of the most significant reformation and renewal movements in history, while most reformation and renewal movements have, in turn, spawned colleges themselves. This is particularly evident in American higher education where more than half of our first 600 colleges were founded by evangelicals, whether Congregationalists, Presbyterians, Methodists, Baptists, or Lutherans. In fact, the broad historical definition of the term evangelical is best applied to movements that hold to both the power of the Holy Spirit to produce new birth and holy lives with the power of the holy scriptures to guide and shape the life and practice of the church.

It is in these “Spirit schools” that the integration of the life of the mind and the life of the Spirit and achieved its greatest synergy. The study of the Word of God, and the World of God, when empowered by the Spirit of God has proven profoundly transformational in the lives of students and in their ability to renew church and society. In other words, they were effective because they were able to train young men and women to become what we have called two-handed warriors. By cultivating both the life ofthe mind and the life of the Spirit, they produced students capable of mastering both spiritual formation and culture making.

The Troubled History of Maintaining a Two-Handed Approach

This potential Spirit/Mind synergy is particularly important to faith-based colleges at the outset of the twenty-first century. The history of American higher education is littered with colleges that have abandoned their lofty ambitions to train two-handed warriors for a decidedly more “one-handed” approach. Burtchaell (1998), Marsden (1994), Reuben (1996), Benne (2001), Budde and Wright (2004), Ringenberg (2006), and others have carefully outlined just how easily colleges lose their spiritual cutting-edge.

Whether Catholic or Protestant, Reformed or Wesleyan, nearly every time a church-founded college or university manages to achieve societal respectability and financial independence they have immediately abandoned its integrative mission. Like prodigal sons, once they received their share of the inheritance they immediately “set off for a distant country where they squandered their wealth” and their ability to train true two-handed warriors. Their graduates go into the world with one hand tied behind their backs to the detriment of their own souls and the culture they create. It turns out that balancing a commitment to the life of the mind and the life of the Spirit even in a Christian college is not as easy as one would suppose.

The Twenty-First Century Challenge

Will the twenty-first century be any different? Burtchaell’s (1998) chronicling of the demise of nearly every Christian college in American history (including at least two CCCU schools) reads like a modern-day Book of Judges. Knowing that within a few generations of the death of nearly every college’s founding leadership, “the people of God did what was evil in the sight of the LORD and worshipped other Gods” (Judges 3:7) is depressing reading for anyone who has given their life to Christian higher education.

Burtchaell concludes his book with a sobering challenge:

“The failures of the past, so clearly patterned, so foolishly ignored. And so lethally repeated, emerge pretty clearly from these stories. Anyone who requires further imagination to recognize and remedy them is not up to the task of trying again, and better” (p. 851).

Will the leaders of 21st-century Christian colleges rise to his challenge?

Can we innovate new approaches to Christian higher education as we have throughout history?

As the Alexandrian Christian College illustrates, the future of higher education, the church, and society may very well depend upon it.

Future Posts: I will explore key movements history of higher education and how their educational philosophy and practices could help 21st century Christian colleges nurture two-handed warriors.

Next: The Greco-Roman Liberal Arts: Education with Friendship and Heart

Notes

Barnard, L. W. “St. Mark and Alexandria.” The Harvard Theological Review 57, no. 2 (1964): 145-50. http://www.jstor.org/stable/1508784.

Benne, R. (2001). Quality with soul: how six premier colleges and universities keep faith with their religious traditions. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans.

Budde, M. L, & Wright, J. W. (2004).  Conflicting allegiances: the church-based university in a liberal democratic society . Grand Rapids, MI: Brazos Press.

Burtchaell, J. T. (1998). The dying of the light: the disengagement of colleges and universities from their Christian churches. Grand Rapids, Mich: W.B. Eerdmans Pub. Co.

Dickey, Eleanor (2007), Ancient Greek Scholarship : a guide to finding, reading, and understanding scholia, commentaries, lexica, and grammatical treatises, from their beginnings to the byzantine period, Oxford, England: Oxford University Press.

Holmes, A. F. (1975). The idea of a Christian college. Grand Rapids: W.B. Eerdmans.

Marsden, G. M., & Longfield, B. J. (1992). The Secularization of the academy. New York: Oxford University Press.

Marsden, G. M. (1994). The soul of the American university: From protestant establishment to established nonbelief. New York: Oxford University Press.

Newman, J. H. (1852). The idea of a university: Defined and illustrated. London: Longmans, Green & Co.

Reuben, J. A. (1996). The making of the modern university: Intellectual transformation and the marginalization of morality. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Ringenberg, W. C. (2006). The Christian college: A history of Protestant higher education in America, 2nd edition. Grand Rapids, Mich: Baker Academic.