The Struggle for Soul in Christian Higher Education: Burtchaell Was Right, and I Was Wrong, Part I
After some positive comments about the St. Olaf of the 90s, he mysteriously pronounced that: “Other indicia suggest the Midwest college is entering a divestiture of its Lutheran identity that, though much longer in coming, could be swifter in its eventual accomplishment.” Other schools—Azuza Pacific and Calvin—were assessed quite positively, but Burtchaell had little confidence in their futures as Christian schools.
During my sabbatical year of 1985–86 at St. Edmunds College of Cambridge University, I had the good fortune of having many conversations about Christian higher education with James Burtchaell, who also had a year-long sabbatical there. He had recently moved from the provost’s office of Notre Dame to its theology department.
I had moved in 1982 from the Lutheran School of Theology at Chicago to Roanoke College in Salem, Virginia, recruited by President Norman Fintel in order to build a strong religion department and to help strengthen the connection of the college to its Lutheran heritage, including the founding and shaping of a Center for Religion and Society.
Burtchaell was fearful that Notre Dame was loosening its connection with the Catholic tradition, as so many other Catholic schools had done. He was very interested in criticizing and preventing such a move.
I was still in mild shock about the Roanoke College that I found when I arrived there in 1982. Half the department chairs were hostile to the college’s connection with any sort of religious tradition. The other half were apathetic about that connection, not seeing any relevant connection between the college’s Lutheran heritage and liberal arts education. Only two of us department chairs thought it important to hire Lutheran Christians if the college was to have any continuing relation to its original founding. The Dean and the President both farmed out the hiring of new faculty to the departments.
The shock came from the contrast to what I experienced when attending a Lutheran college in the Midwest in the late 50s that was unabashedly Lutheran in its identity and mission. Though I had lectured at many Lutheran colleges while I was a seminary professor for nearly twenty years, I had not looked closely at their overall religious substance. After my jolt in arriving at Roanoke, I now had to take a closer look. What had happened in those twenty years?
A great aid in taking that closer look came from my friend Burtchaell, who had followed up his interest in the secularization of Christian schools. In the April and May 1991 issues of First Things Burtchaell wrote two connected articles entitled “The Decline and Fall of a Christian College.” The articles presented a very long and highly erudite historical account of how Vanderbilt moved from being what Methodists hoped would be their flagship Christian university to a thoroughly secular institution in which Christianity offered no public relevance. In the articles he points to nine fateful moves that were crucial in that secularization.
Though there were some earlier studies of secularization in higher education, this one was a game-changer because of its clarity and passion. In hopes of understanding the process of secularization, I had already organized a faculty/administration discussion group on the subject of Christian higher education. When Burtchaell’s articles came out, we were given tools to understand what had happened. We could almost put our college’s name in every reference to Vanderbilt that Burtchaell made. His work was enormously helpful to understand what had happened and gave us clues about how we might take measures to mitigate the secularization process and perhaps rebuild a viable Christian college.
However, those articles were but a foreshadowing of what was to come in his The Dying of the Light: The Disengagement of Colleges and Universities from their Christian Churches, a tome of 868 pages, published by Eerdmans in 1998.1
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Leveraging Leviticus
Leviticus is a book of hope, not in running from God but in running to Him, where He redemptively points us to the unblemished Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world. By His stripes we are healed.
For it is the blood that makes atonement for the soul.Leviticus 17:11, NKJV
Whenever I read the opening chapters of Leviticus I am taken aback by all the different sacrificial offerings (burnt, peace, grain, guilt, sin), the frequency with which they are to be made, and the detail in which they are presented. I am much relieved to be ministering on this side of the cross.
Leviticus gives us an idea of the insidiousness and pervasiveness of sin. No one is untouched by it. Sin is a stain to life, our awareness brought to the fore in the presence of the holy God. As with Isaiah, the closer we draw near to God the more acutely aware we become of our sin and sinfulness, and of our abject helplessness to do anything about it (Isa. 6:5).
What particularly strikes me in the descriptions of these sacrifices is all the attention given to unintentional sins (Lev. 4-5), those sins of which we are unaware and may commit inadvertently or by omission. It brings to mind the expression that ignorance of the law is no excuse.
When it comes to sin in our lives, we tend to think of willful sins, those sins we commit or omit with intention. The psalmist has this in mind when he says, “Keep back Your servant also from presumptuous sins; let them not have dominion over me. Then I shall be blameless, and I shall be innocent of great transgression” (Psa. 19:13).
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Listen to Jesus, not only Moses and Elijah
We must not ignore the Old Testament and think it unimportant. Moses and Elijah, and the rest of the Old Testament, are the background for Jesus. If we want to understand Jesus better, we need to know the Old Testament. It is there we read of creation and sin, of sacrifice, of covenant promises, of God’s presence, and so much more.
The Old Testament is rich and full of useful things for Christians to think about. We see how God relates to his people, his faithfulness to the promises, and instructions about how to live. All of that is true. Yet there is a real danger that we don’t see the Old Testament in the right light. The transfiguration of Jesus helps us to avoid a few fundamental mistakes that it is easy to make.
In the transfiguration, Jesus was transformed with his face and clothes glowing. And while he was in this transformed state, Moses and Elijah appeared beside him.
(As an aside, this raises all kinds of issues for us. How did the disciples know they were Moses and Elijah? Were there nametags or subtitles or something? Were they really there or some kind of vision? This is one of those passages we wish we had more detail in, but we are told what we need to know.)
Why Moses and Elijah? Well, together they symbolise the Old Testament. Jesus often referred to the Old Testament as the Law and the Prophets (as in Matt 5:17, 7:12). Moses wrote the Law, the first five books of the Old Testament. Elijah didn’t write any books, but he is the greatest of the prophets in the Former Prophets. So these two men represent the Old Testament.
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Why it’s Hard to Believe in God’s Goodness
The Lord is compassionate and gracious, slow to anger and abounding in faithful love. He is faithful to a thousand generations, forgiving iniquity, rebellion, and sin. And this is exactly what we see Him do throughout the passage, and throughout all of history. We see that God’s goodness is not dependent upon His people’s faithfulness. And Nehemiah 9:18-25 certainly does demonstrate the unfaithfulness of the Israelites.
In the fall of 2021, as our church was going through the book of Nehemiah, I was working through the prayer of confession in chapter 9. As I studied the passage, it helped me to recognize something extremely important:
It’s really hard to believe in God’s goodness.
Most Christians will say that we do believe God is good, of course. We can affirm the general truth. But when we start looking at our own lives, we struggle to see how God can be good to us because we’re not terribly faithful people.
But Nehemiah 9 has some very good news for us all, even today, which is that God’s goodness is not limited by our faithfulness, because it’s not based on our faithfulness.
Where We Start in Thinking About God’s Goodness
The prayer that comprises Nehemiah 9 starts where it should—with praise for God’s self-disclosure, His creation of the world, His covenant with Abraham, and His rescuing of the people from bondage in Egypt. But in verse 16, the prayer moves from praise to confession. It is a recognition of the people’s ongoing rebellion against Him. That rather than responding with worship, they countered with rejection.
They refused to listen—they refused to obey God. They did not remember the wonders He performed, even the ones that
And then there’s the last half of verse 17:
But you are a forgiving God,gracious and compassionate,slow to anger and abounding in faithful love,and you did not abandon them.
Even in the midst of this confession of the people’s sin, the Levites couldn’t not point the people back to God. In fact, the language here is a paraphrase of God’s own self-disclosure from Exodus 34:6-7:
The Lord is a compassionate and gracious God, slow to anger and abounding in faithful love and truth, maintaining faithful love to a thousand generations, forgiving iniquity, rebellion, and sin.
Now, stop and think about those words for a second. The Lord is compassionate and gracious, slow to anger and abounding in faithful love. He is faithful to a thousand generations, forgiving iniquity, rebellion, and sin. And this is exactly what we see Him do throughout the passage, and throughout all of history. We see that God’s goodness is not dependent upon His people’s faithfulness. And Nehemiah 9:18-25 certainly does demonstrate the unfaithfulness of the Israelites.
God’s Goodness to the Faithless
In the wilderness, the people denied Him at every opportunity. Before the Red Sea had been parted, they were sure that God had led them into the wilderness to be killed.
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