Is the launch of Biola\u2019s Center for Christian Thought a victory lap for American evangelical intellectual life or at least another level attained on the purgatorial ascent toward intellectual respectability? <\/strong><\/p>\nThe center is unusual in operating from a distinctly Christian vantage point.\u00a0 The mission statement is forthright: \u201cThe Center offers scholars from a variety of Christian perspectives a unique opportunity to work collaboratively on a selected theme\u2026. Ultimately, the collaborative work will result in scholarly and popular-level materials, providing the broader culture with thoughtful Christian perspectives on current events, ethical concerns, and social trends.\u201d<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Biola\u2019s center is the latest chapter in a comeback of the \u201cevangelical mind.\u201d \u00a0While serious scholarship by self-professed evangelical Christians did not disappear entirely in the 20th century, it went into eclipse in the postwar period.\u00a0 These decades, especially 1960-1980, saw the high-water mark for Western secularism when, contrary to subsequent evidence of religion\u2019s persistence,\u00a0Time Magazine<\/em> in 1966 asked on its cover \u201cIs God Dead?\u201d\u00a0 Social scientists in\u00a0The New York Times<\/em> confidently predicted in 1968 that \u201cby the 21st century religious believers are likely to be small sects, huddled together to resist a worldwide secular culture.\u201d \u2026<\/p>\nAll of this has begun to change in the past quarter century: evangelical Christians have been shedding their \u201cfundamentalist baggage\u201d and reclaiming a place within deeper traditions of Christian learning and at the table of American cultural life.\u00a0 Signs abound of this recent shift, clearly in evidence by the mid-1990s.\u00a0 In 1994 Mark Noll (formerly of Wheaton College in Illinois, now holding an endowed chair at Notre Dame) published\u00a0The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind<\/em>, calling evangelicals to repent of past anti-intellectualism and honor the Creator of their minds with first-order inquiry and creative expression.\u00a0 The book became a manifesto of sorts for younger evangelicals attracted to the life of the mind.\u00a0 Nineteen ninety-four also witnessed the publication of George Marsden\u2019s\u00a0The Soul of the American University: From Protestant Establishment to Established Nonbelief<\/em>, analyzing the secularization of mainline Protestant universities and offering a blueprint for revitalized \u201cChristian scholarship.\u201d \u2026<\/p>\nIn 1995 the journal\u00a0Books & Culture<\/em>, was launched; it has become a leading organ of evangelical thought.\u00a0 Significant funding initiatives of the Pew Charitable Trusts and the Lilly Endowment \u2014 such as the Lilly Fellows Program at Valparaiso University \u2014 also empowered a new generation of engaged Christian scholars, including evangelicals.\u00a0 These developments together with the influence of scholars like Wolterstorff and Plantinga, and the emergence of evangelical Christians into key places of academic leadership \u2014 such as the presidencies of Nathan Hatch at Wake Forest and Ken Starr at Baylor \u2014 put a new face on evangelicalism.\u00a0 As such, it bears little resemblance to your grandmother\u2019s backwoods open-tent revival anymore, but represents, to quote the title of a much-regarded book by D. Michael Lindsay, president of Gordon College,\u00a0Faith in the Halls of Power: How Evangelicals Joined the American Elite<\/em>\u2026.<\/p>\nBut beyond the problem of Mr. Worldly Wiseman is the problem of Biola itself.\u00a0 The problem of Biola, however, is\u00a0not<\/em> the problem of Biola alone; it is shared by a number of the more than 115 evangelical schools in the Council for Christian Colleges and Universities (CCCU), the largest umbrella network of evangelical institutions of higher learning.\u00a0 The problem is, quite simply, lingering attachment to some of the more dubious certainties and habits derived from Fundamentalism and hardened by the Fundamentalist-Modernist controversies of the 20th century.<\/p>\nThis presents two acute problems for the emerging evangelical mind.\u00a0 First, in a well-intentioned effort to avoid \u201cscientism\u201d \u2014 the belief that\u00a0all<\/em> knowledge claims must conform to standards of evidence found in the \u201chard sciences\u201d \u2014 it perpetuates skepticism about science itself.\u00a0\u00a0 Second, lingering fundamentalist accents put these institutions in a deficient and compromised position vis-\u00e0-vis more venerable and enduring resources of\u00a0fides quarens intellectum<\/em>, faith seeking understanding \u2014 traditions going back to the seminaries of the Reformation era, the universities and monasteries of the Middle Ages, and the earliest formulations of Christian teachings in the creeds and councils of the early church.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Thomas Albert Howard and Karl Giberson: This spring semester, California\u2019s Biola University, among the nation\u2019s largest evangelical institutions, opens the doors of its ambitious new\u00a0Center for Christian Thought. Resembling institutions such as Princeton\u2019s Institute for Advanced Study, Biola\u2019s center seeks to bring a mix of senior and postdoctoral fellows to campus to collaborate with internal […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":197,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[106],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-25836","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-education"],"yoast_head":"\n
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