A Proposal for Evangelical Advance

Founding of an Institute of Advanced Christian Studies depends on evangelical response to a strategic opportunity

Looking ahead to a great Christian university on an evangelical transdenominational base, we commend to the vision and prayer of American believers the establishment of an Institute of Advanced Christian Studies. Highly qualified scholars related to the institute might later become the graduate faculty core of the Christian university. But meanwhile they would effectively serve the cause of evangelical scholarship by research and writing that advances Christian truth.

Ideally, the Institute of Advanced Christian Studies would be located within an hour’s access to an outstanding secular university campus. If a modest suburban estate or a suitable urban center were provided, the institute could be established as early as the fall of 1967 or 1968.

Compared with an estimated $25 million needed to establish a liberal arts campus supporting graduate schools of education, theology, philosophy, and creative and communicative arts, the endowment required by the Institute of Advanced Christian Studies would be far less. Even before the supplying of its ultimate endowment need (estimated at $10 million, and eventually mergeable into the larger university project), the institute could be launched on the basis of a modest foundation grant, some evangelical support in matching gifts, and the provision of a serviceable research center.

Quite apart from the possible future emergence of a great university, such an institute has now become an academic imperative for evangelical Christianity.

In the first place, the present intellectual climate in the secular realm has a repressive and retarding effect upon the Christian view of life and the world. State universities are establishing departments of religion, but these reflect the radical pluralism of modern society by emphasizing both the variety of world religions and divergent notions of the Christian faith. Many colleges and universities, in fact, seem to present almost every option except historic Christian supernaturalism; although competent exponents of evangelical faith are sometimes found in other divisions, they seem almost excluded from philosophy and religion. Because the mainstream of faculty conviction on the American campuses now runs strongly against faith in the supernatural (as Professor Michael Novak of Stanford University points out in his recent book (Belief or Unbelief), this situation is all the more deplorable.

In the Protestant religious world, meanwhile, the prevailing ecumenical current is largely unrepresentative of evangelical theology, and this has a conspicuous diluting effect upon evangelical institutions. The pursuit of religious merger above redemptive mission, of modern theories above apostolic theology, is so much the main concern in some church-related colleges and even in some denominational seminaries that many graduates confess they lack a reasoned view of life within biblical perspectives and, in fact, are unsure even about the nature and validity of the Christian revelation.

State universities may be forgiven their pluralism, because as slate institutions they must not support any one religious system. (Their show of bias against historic Protestantism, however, is less excusable.) But who can at all forgive administrators and teachers in institutions specifically established to provide a comprehensive Christian education, when they confuse the best young minds in their denominations about the great truths of the Judeo-Christian revelation or leave them in ignorance of those truths?

But, in the second place, the need for an Institute of Advanced Christian Studies is more than external and environmental; it inheres in the very nature of Christianity. Christianity is a religion of rational, historical revelation, and its message has never been more needed than in the present era of irrational existentialism. The modernism movement in twentieth-century Christianity may be accurately depicted as a deepening revolt against reason and objectivity; in its latest surrender of the supernatural, it struggles against the last vestiges of connection with the faith of the Bible. Now that the assault on the historic Christian revelation is at its height, and even some loud-voiced theologians and bishops are deploring biblical supernaturalism as mythological and outgrown, the evangelical community faces a full challenge to respond. A select, core of the ablest evangelical scholars, working cooperatively and in open sight of those of antithetical views on the secular campus, can lift evangelical thought and literature to new levels of relevance and power, beyond the most commendable efforts of scholars working in isolation.

What would be the nature and function of the proposed Institute of Advanced Christian Studies?

Such a center of evangelical studies would bring together a community of evangelical minds and provide the opportunity for outstanding biblical scholars of demonstrated achievement to complete important writing projects. These scholars, invited on a two-year basis, would be expected to devote at least one full year to research and writing at the institute, and would then spend all or part of the second year as invited guest lecturers or professors on accredited college and university campuses. Facilities of the Institute would necessarily include administrative offices, an expanding library (additional resources would be available at the nearby secular campus), residential quarters for a director, and nearby housing for a dozen or more scholars.

The invited research scholars would be available to one another for regularly scheduled dialogue, as well as for informal discussions. They would also be available, for periodic counseling of evangelical students who were pursuing graduate studies and engaged in research and the writing of theses or dissertations on nearby secular campuses. The research and writing force at the institute could serve, moreover, as a selection board to commend to interested foundations young scholars needing and meriting scholarship aid for the completion of advanced studies. It could also serve as a clearing house for the recruitment of faculty members needed by evangelical colleges and agencies. The research center would itself provide a basis of sustained intellectual liaison with scholars on secular campuses.

Before funds can be solicited, and property secured, such an institute requires a show of evangelical enthusiasm and legal incorporation. If a governing board of seven Christian leaders—later augmented to seventeen or twenty-one, as necessary—would lend their names to the project and commend the effort, we believe that in God’s special providence a multitude of devoted evangelicals would rally in support of such a venture of faith, and that an outstanding foundation would take an interest in launching the project. This governing board should include outstanding evangelical scholars and evangelical leaders in secular affairs.

After the board was organized, its immediate needs, in sequence, might be:

1. Preparation of incorporation papers by a competent legal specialist and application for tax exemption.

2. A commitment of $100,000 a year for three years by a foundation interested in Christian education.

3. Participation in the project by interested Christians who would give cash, securities, property, and select libraries.

4. The gift of a modest suburban estate or the acquisition of a suitable urban center not prohibitively distant from the library and campus of a large university.

5. Designation of a director, announcement of an opening date, and processing of applications of eligible research scholars, particularly those at or near retirement age who were already known for a substantial contribution to the intellectual formulation and defense of the Christian faith.

We believe that dedicated believers can ultimately envision even a Christian university, and that in time funds will be available for such a venture of faith (as evidenced by the recent establishment of Oral Roberts University on a much narrower base). Yet there are obstacles. The growing taxation of wealth increasingly limits philanthropy. While Roman Catholic and many nominally Protestant institutions eagerly accept government subsidy of education, most evangelical institutions are non-participants on principle or participate reluctantly. The suspicion is widespread, moreover, that advanced education is destructive of Christian faith; this suspicion is encouraged by the decline of once-evangelical institutions and by the secular drift in the world of learning. The disposition of established evangelical colleges to view a large university project as competitive must also be weighed (see News, page 00).

Even if these obstacles were surmounted, it would take most of a decade to establish a new liberal arts college as the base of a university and to secure academic accreditation—and those steps would necessarily precede extensive graduate offerings. But an Institute of Advanced Christian Studies would rise above these reservations. It would gather together outstanding scholars of demonstrated evangelical loyalties at their greatest maturity, and it would bring the fruit of their labors directly to some campuses and indirectly to all.

The readership of CHRISTIANITY TODAY represents the best-informed and most articulate segment of evangelical Protestants in the English-speaking world. The response of our readers to this proposal, as individuals and in their churches, will either bring the Institute of Advanced Christian Studies into reality or forfeit what may well be an irrecoverable opportunity for evangelical breakthrough in the late 1960s. Which will it be?

Evangelicals And The Campus

The idea of a Christian university was approved in principle last week by an evangelical educator but disapproved by an evangelical editor.

Eternity magazine tends to view evangelical university education as a retreat that provides spurious security and forfeits an evangelical witness to society. The already “struggling Christian colleges,” comments Eternity, could improve their situation if several of these “hard-pressed institutions” would pool facilities, faculties, and endowments. But preferably, as Eternity sees it, evangelicals should endow Christian centers at leading secular universities.

On the other hand, the new president of Wheaton College, Dr. Hudson T. Armerding, thinks the best evangelical colleges should coordinate facilities into a university program.

Surely Christianity’s stake in education is so great that both evangelical penetration of the secular campus and evangelical integration of higher learning are highly desirable. A vision to match the need of the hour will rise to both challenges.

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