Three types of Christian higher ed
There isn’t only one kind of Christian higher education; there are three.
This, I confess with some embarrassment, has proved something of a revelation to me. Both the types of Christian ed and their manifestations in concrete institutions have always blended together in my experience. But recently I’ve had occasion to reflect with some better informed colleagues on these things, and combined with some visits to other campuses, I found some clarity on the subject. Perhaps you can relate. See if my mini-typology resonates.
First, there is theological education. This is the now two-centuries-long project of, broadly speaking, white American liberal Protestant seminaries and divinity schools to educate (eventually ordained) pastors in theology, ethics, history, ministry, and biblical studies, with the overarching aim of making them learned professionals alongside lawyers and doctors. These institutions could be extensions of ecclesial bodies or independent thereof; they could expand their demographics by race, gender, region, nationality, denomination, and even religion; they could focus more or less on academic standards and prestige; they could hire faculty with stronger or weaker connections to historic Christian commitments; and so on. But it is this project, however malleable, that “theological education” names, a project that is now coming to an end but persists in weakened and ever more rapidly declining form.
(NB: “Religious studies” is not a form of theological education, nor of Christian higher ed, though like all such disciplinary branches in the American academy, it is not unrelated to either.)
The second type is Christian higher education in the classical liberal arts tradition. At first glance you might think this group encompasses the rest, so let me be clear about what I mean.
Not every postsecondary institution that includes the humanities belongs to the classical liberal arts tradition. The kinds of institution I have in mind have deep ties to classical schools, offer a robust Great Books program, feature long-standing and well-funded Honors Colleges, and/or require every entering undergraduate student to undertake a “core” curriculum. This curriculum is typically highly theorized—it constitutes a shared mission that faculty of every kind understand, believe in, and sign on to—and it tends to be designed (and revised over time) by liberal arts faculty with the goal of familiarizing students with great literature, thinkers, and ideas across the millennia. This work of familiarization is usually interwoven with attention to religious thinkers in the West, especially Church Fathers, medieval doctors, and Protestant Reformers, albeit placed in close connection to Jewish, Greek, and Roman culture, art, and politics.
Sometimes the aim is something like “citizenship” or “membership” in “the Western heritage”; sometimes it is indexed to the American story, and thus to the blessings of the Enlightenment (downplaying its downsides); and sometimes the emphasis is not at all regional or national but simply Christian: a global patrimony to which all educated believers are both subject and heir.
Schools in this category come in both Catholic and Protestant varieties, though it is worth noting how difficult it is to be root-and-branch anti-Catholic when most of the history and texts you cover precede 1517. The result is often a gentle, if subtle, ecumenism, which in turn drafts off and encourages a cultural and chronological catholicity: so many centuries, continents, peoples, and languages!
Or so it seems from afar, since I have never been a part of one of these institutions. I had never even heard of one until I was in my doctoral studies. Part of the reason for this is that they are popular with families that home school or send their children to private classical Christian academies, whereas I went to public school and, growing up, knew almost no one who fit either of these categories. I certainly didn’t know what “classical academies” were. And I just assumed that private Christian schools were smaller public schools plus uniforms and prayer.
As I’ve written before, had I known about Great Books programs as a high school senior, I think it likely I would have applied to one. Heck, I’d apply to one today. They sound like heaven on earth for this under-read bookish nerd.
Okay. So that’s only two out of three. What’s the other type?
The third kind is higher education that is also Christian. Here’s what I mean. On one hand, these are collegiate institutions, founded sometime between the middle of the nineteenth century and the middle of the twentieth, that are explicit about their Christian beliefs and their behavioral expectations and spiritual goals for students. They may have chapel; they may require courses in religion, theology, or Bible; the faculty, staff, and admin will all be Christian; and there will certainly be a code of conduct.
On the other hand, these institutions have no formal, explicit, or organic connection to the tradition of classical liberal education outlined above: no Core, no Western Civ, no Great Books, no Honors College, no humanities-forward vision of “inheriting the patrimony of ancient literature and ideas” animating the curriculum. For some, the reason is that the school was founded with an outright animus against such things—a sort of anti-intellectual educational institution. For others, the reason is an intense, even rigorous commitment to biblicism; nuda scriptura entailed, at the founding, a self-conscious uncoupling from so much in Western civilization that either corrupted the gospel or was seen inevitably to distract from focusing on the Bible alone. For still others, the reason isn’t so much the presence of a conscious choice as its lack: a simple disconnection from and perhaps even ignorance of the classical liberal arts tradition and the texts, ideas, habits, and aims at its heart.
In addition to these reasons, this third type of Christian higher ed is, to put it bluntly, just less lofty in its rhetoric and self-understanding than the second type. More often than not this is the result of the denomination with which it is associated. It goes without saying that small, marginal, or socially downscale denominations will not have the capital or the hubris to found schools that cast themselves in grand, world-historical terms; they merely want to provide a space for their children to go to school in a Christian environment.
By definition, these schools are not especially prestigious. They’re also less pretentious than their peers. In a word, they are not meant for elites. They’re meant for normies. They aren’t a ladder to D.C. or Wall Street. They’re a pathway to a stable job, a middle-class life, and a Christian family. The aspirations might be lower, but they’re also more realistic. They’re not trying to ape the Ivies; they’re offering an oasis to families who want their children to remain believers while receiving the benefits of a college degree. At their best, that’s exactly what these schools do. At their worst, the function like trade schools with a spiritual facade. Probably, for most institutions, the reality is somewhere in the middle.
What’s important to see is that this third category is distinct from the second, even though the former will often drape itself in the trappings of the latter. In retrospect, this is what kept the two fused in my mind for so long.
In any case, neither is the same as “theological education,” which was an embarrassing confusion for a theology professor to have made for so long. Perhaps there are other distinctions worth adding, but these are the three that made the most sense to me.
