Christian Colleges Search for Survival

The prophets of doom continue to predict that hundreds of colleges will close their doors before the end of this century. The chief cause of death in academia is money, or rather, the lack of it. Yet for the evangelical schools that find themselves among those in jeopardy, it is questionable whether survival is simply a matter of money.

Evangelical colleges must deal with three crises: an identity crisis, an ideological crisis, and a financial crisis.

The identity crisis is no new problem for Christian educational institutions; today it may seem new, because our vastly increased scientific and sociological knowledge, disseminated almost instantaneously via radio, TV, and the printing press, is more and more calling old identities into question. In its simplest terms the question is, Will the institution remain Christian or become secular? Schools like Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and Columbia have answered that question by choosing to become completely secular. No biblical integrating principle binds their educational processes together. Agnosticism, atheism, a little theism, along with religious indifferentism, are all offered in a cafeteria-like array. No consistent life- and world-view lies at the center of the educational experience.

For many Christian colleges, sheer pragmatism dictates the decision to dilute and finally abandon their Christian identity; the explanation given is that economic survival is impossible if they remain Christian. Once a school has lost its Christian identity, its reason for being changes considerably. The question then is whether such institutions, if they are economically marginal, should survive. State colleges and universities generally do a better educational job than emasculated Christian institutions that no longer win the financial backing of committed Christians.

Christian higher education also faces ideological crises. By the very nature of their commitment Christian institutions are called upon to develop a specifically Christian intellectual approach, in systematic fashion, to every area of human thought and experience. This is what Christian education is all about. It seeks to integrate faith and learning, but it starts with the assumption that faith provides immutable absolutes as a foundation on which to build an enduring superstructure.

Christian educators should welcome and pursue truth, all truth, whether it be in science, philosophy, sociology, or some other realm. All truth harmonizes with God, from whom truth proceeds and whom we know through his Holy Spirit and his Word, incarnate in Christ and inscribed in the Bible. Christian institutions need not fear or oppose change. It has been and will always be the order of the day. Change and progress, however, are not necessarily the same. And amid change there is always the unchangeable. A straight line is still the shortest distance between two fixed points. And the Pythagorean proposition that the square of the hypotenuse is equal to the sum of the square of the other two sides has stood for millennia.

The compass that must determine the course of any truly Christian institution is the Word of God written. Institutions that have been secularized first started to drift when they lost confidence in that compass. It is here that the battle has ranged for a century. Still today one ideological point of crisis even for those institutions that profess to be distinctively Christian is the temptation to accommodate to the world by watering down Scripture, or by considering it irrelevant to learning, or by allowing the claims of scholarship or science to sit in judgment on it. What is needed if Christian education is to survive is the development of what Jonathan Edwards sought: “A Rational Account of the Christian Religion, in which all art and all science would find center and meaning in theology.”

The third contemporary crisis in Christian education, the financial, is bound up with the first two, those of identity and ideology. An institution with a clear, unambiguous creedal commitment will attract the sympathy and merit the support of people of like mind, especially since the image of secular educational institutions has been greatly debased in the public as well as the Christian mind. And when a Christian school has gone beyond creedal commitment to integrate faith and learning and to advance a comprehensive life- and world-view consonant with Scripture, it will enlist the support of innumerable Christians.

The financial crisis cannot be viewed apart from the sovereignty of God. If he is all Scripture proclaims him to be, then the ongoing financial support of schools really dedicated to his glory is a divine concern. They will survive not because of the plaudits or even the wealth of men but because God himself will intervene on their behalf. The urgent need of the hour is for Christian institutions to be dynamically Christian in substance, not merely in public posture. God’s blessing and help will follow.

Plain Talk On Viet Nam

After years of asserting that no North Vietnamese troops were engaged in South Viet Nam, the Hanoi government suddenly launched a full-scale invasion on several fronts, using a greater mass of armor than Hitler had for his invasion of Russia in 1941. A few weeks later, President Nixon announced that the United States was mining North Vietnamese harbors and would interdict ships loaded with military supplies for the North. He indicated that he does not want to provoke a confrontation with any other nation.

Mr. Nixon’s actions have aroused a storm of criticism and protest. A few voices—but only a few—have noted the perplexing fact that while many have condemned Nixon’s actions in the most sweeping terms, very few critics have been honest enough to place it in the context of the Blitzkrieg to which it is a response. As President and Commander in Chief, Nixon has the responsibility of making the decisions on Viet Nam. Rallies, threats of impeachment, and the like will not deter him—nor should they. Under our system of checks and balances, the President’s power is not absolute. The Congress has the authority to tie his hands and change his policy. All it need do is cut off all spending for Viet Nam. Of course, if Congress were to take this step, it would have to assume the responsibility for the consequences, including the impending military debacle that the President, by his controversial actions, is trying to prevent. It is highly unlikely that Congress will so act, though some of its members may talk themselves hoarse.

No one can predict with any certainty whether Mr. Nixon’s decision will check the North Vietnamese offensive. What does appear certain is that Hanoi will remain intransigent unless it suffers a decisive military defeat. From its own point of view, this is only logical.

We need to remember that all of us, from the President down, are finite and fallible. History is replete with examples of men’s tragic blunders committed through ignorance, miscalculation, venality, naïveté, or plain stupidity, sometimes with the best of intentions. History also teaches us that no one can foresee all the contingencies; sometimes bad decisions yield good results and good decisions seem to turn out badly.

It is widely questioned whether we should ever have gotten into Viet Nam in the first place. After all, we chose not to intervene in the abortive Hungarian revolution of 1956 or in the massive military occupation of Czechoslovakia by the Soviet Union in 1968. But we are already in Viet Nam, and Mr. Nixon has been trying desperately to extricate us from this entanglement. Anyone who thinks he hasn’t is blind to reality. It certainly is in the President’s own political interest to do so. But getting out is incomparably harder than getting in.

Whether we approve or disapprove of the President’s conduct of the war, we are going to have to live with what he has chosen to do, because he is President and the Congress as a whole has shown unwillingness to take steps that could negate his actions. However, the people will have their say in November. At that time the electorate can return Richard Nixon to the White House or send him home. If they do the latter, they should send home a lot of senators and congressmen as well for permitting the President to continue a policy they had the power but not the civic courage to stop. To attempt to pressure the President into backing down without actually ordering him to do so—and thus incidentally to encourage the other side to persist in the aggression he is trying to suppress—may be prudent electioneering tactics, but it can hardly be called responsible statesmanship.

Meanwhile all Americans, and especially Christians, should stand by the President, even if they think his policy is mistaken. Every Christian should pray that what is being done will lead to peace and justice.

Lest We Forget

We reach a sad anniversary this month, one that vividly reminds us how long Americans have been involved in the Viet Nam violence. May 30 marks ten years since three American missionaries were seized and led off into the jungles near Ban Me Thuot. As far as is generally known, they have not been heard from since. Unconfirmed reports occasionally trickle through, however, to give hope that they may still be alive. There is less optimism over the fate of two other missionaries taken captive during the Tet offensive in 1968, but some intelligence experts say there is no hard evidence that they have not survived the ordeal so far.

Unhappily, the plight of captive missionaries who were in Viet Nam for humanitarian reasons—some long before the American military involvement—has received far less attention than that of the prisoners of war. We think the missionaries deserve priority because they were engaged in saving rather than taking lives.

Visiting Prisoners

No part of our population is more neglected by Christians than those who are imprisoned. What few jail ministries there are go largely unheralded and inadequately supported, even though there is good evidence that prisoners respond to the Gospel quite readily.

Your sheriff or the warden of a local reformatory can tell you if some faithful Christian is already carrying on a ministry with which you and your church could cooperate. More likely, you will have to pioneer.

For a start, recognize that many inmates never receive any visitors or mail. You might be welcomed just to help relieve their isolation from the outside world. It won’t be easy, but remember the figurative words of our Lord himself: “I was in prison and you visited me” (Matt. 25:36).

The Future Of The Fbi

Only a few days after CHRISTIANITY TODAY published his essay entitled “A Morality For Violence” (April 28 issue), FBI director J. Edgar Hoover died. For one day his body lay in state in the Capitol, an honor previously accorded only the highest elected officials and the most renowned military heroes.

During his last years as head of the FBI, Hoover became the target of greatly increased criticism, much of it partisan rhetoric, some of it legitimate. Yet hardly a hostile or vindictive remark has been heard since his death—silent evidence that the criticism was aimed more at his office and the police power it symbolized than at the man himself, especially when viewed from the perspective of his whole life. In retrospect it seems difficult to believe that one man could serve in so high a capacity, under both parties and in peace and war, for almost half a century, and harvest as little hostility as Hoover did.

Like Charles de Gaulle and Konrad Adenauer, Hoover attained almost legendary stature during his lifetime. After the elections, whoever is President should, in seeking a new FBI head, look for a man whose integrity and impartiality will enable him to lead this sensitive bureau in a non-partisan way. But political tides shift, like those in society, economics, and the arts. Can there be any certainty that a man who today appears to be above prejudice, factionalism, and intrigue will still be so ten years hence?

Hoover was for many years an elder of the National Presbyterian Church in Washington. Although he was very reticent about making what evangelical Christians call a “personal testimony,” he made no secret of his reverence for the Bible and of his commitment to its precepts. Perhaps the finest tribute to his work, and at the same time the most likely guarantee that the best of his principles will be carried on, will be the appointment of a successor with equal respect for the Bible and its teaching.

The Ubiquitous Methodists

The United Methodist Church boasts a spread that is hard to beat. Virtually every community in America with a population of 2,000 or more has a Methodist congregation. Probably no other denomination has as much built-in opportunity to exert spiritual initiative at every level of national life. Methodists can be the “salt of the States” if they have the will.

Delegates to the United Methodist General Conference last month did too little to realize grass-roots potential (see News, page 36). They spent most of their time drafting statements on issues on which conscientious Methodists are very divided. They kept busy telling the world what they thought should be done, instead of trying to put their church in a place where it could show the world how.

One hopeful sign is that Methodist officials are acknowledging more and more that they have neglected the Gospel’s vertical dimension. They seem to be admitting that to operate without that dimension is to invite frustration, a truth Wesley learned when he visited Georgia before his conversion and things went wrong.

Bishop F. Gerald Ensley, in his Episcopal Address, declared that “there is a slow attrition of Christian belief that must become a first concern. The supply of Christian motivation is running precariously low.”

Strangely enough, while affirmation of basic truths is hard to come by, “prophetic” utterances on complex problems abound. This raises a serious question of credibility compounded by the fact that many official social analyses have little support among the rank-and-file. We hold no brief for a “consensus church,” but to attribute to the United Methodist Church as a whole positions that lack substantial support among the laity approaches dishonesty.

For evangelical Methodists it is clear that they can make the greatest contribution to Methodism by pressing for more adequate representation. If age, sex, and ethnic background are valid factors for selection of delegates, is not theological persuasion even more so? Inasmuch as the church is pluralistic, are not evangelicals entitled to a greater voice when delegates are chosen?

Betrayal Of A Mandate

Readers who base their impression of the World Council of Churches on current reports in newspapers and magazines might find it hard to recognize these lines:

To the Church, then, is given the privilege of so making Christ known to men that each is confronted with the necessity of a personal decision, Yes or No. The Gospel is the expression both of God’s love to man, and of His claim to man’s obedience. In this lies the solemnity of the decision. Those who obey are delivered from the power of the world in which sin reigns, and already, in the fellowship of the children of God, have the experience of eternal life. Those who reject the love of God remain under His judgment and are in danger of sharing in the impending doom of the world that is passing away.

That paragraph is taken not from the proceedings of an evangelical missionary society but from the report of Section II, “The Church’s Witness to God’s Design,” unanimously received by the First Assembly of the World Council of Churches in Amsterdam in 1948 (W. A. Visser’t Hooft, editor, The First Assembly of the World Council of Churches, Harper, 1949, p. 64). The reports of that First Assembly represented the World Council’s understanding of its mission for the years to come. Just how far the WCC has strayed from the goal it accepted as God-given in those early days is becomingly increasingly obvious. The preparatory papers, discussions, and meetings for the WCC’s projected World Conference on Salvation Today could well be described as nails in the coffin enclosing that early commitment.

The conference, scheduled for Bangkok next December 29 to January 12, will be held in conjunction with the Third Assembly of the WCC’s Commission on World Mission and Evangelism, under the commission’s director, Dr. Philip A. Potter. According to a preliminary study guide, it will have as its goal “exploring what salvation means.” The study guide explains, “The diversity of voices about Salvation Today is emphasized at various points in the preparatory papers arising from the two-year study on the main theme of the conference.” One of these, the booklet “Salvation Today and Christian Experience,” is not yet generally available but was used at the Toledo meetings of the U. S. Conference of the WCC April 11–18.

Although “Salvation Today and Christian Experience” is only a “preliminary paper” and does not reflect any position the WCC has officially taken, we are now familiar with the way in which such “preliminary papers” can be presented supposedly “for study only” but actually as a first step toward their official adoption. It is characteristic that there was no “preliminary paper” calling for the accelerated proclamation of the Gospel to the unevangelized, though such a demand would have corresponded far better to the spirit of the WCC’s original mandate and to the convictions of many of its present members.

The day before the April 16–18 public meetings, Dr. Potter met with a number of conservative evangelicals in a day-long invitational seminar illustrating the WCC’s often expressed desire for interaction with them. Unfortunately, though the preliminary paper “Salvation Today and Christian Experience” met with the evangelicals’ criticism because of its one-sided view of salvation as social justice, subsequently in his April 16 sermon and April 17 public address Dr. Potter did nothing whatever to meet their objections, other than to ridicule those “preoccupied” with individual salvation.

In view of the cavalier treatment accorded to the convictions and concerns of the “conservative evangelicals”—which are, after all, those of historic, biblical Christianity—we can only wonder at the WCC leaders’ determination to maintain the facade of dialogue. Can their purpose be to keep evangelical leaders talking to them, and thus to prevent them from denouncing the WCC to its own constituency, most of whom favor a far more traditional, conversion-centered view of salvation?

The Toledo conception of “salvation today” sounds far more like the welfare state than the kingdom of God. Yet even the wealthy, industrialized nations with advanced welfare-state legislation are still a long way from fulfilling Potter’s description of salvation as “restoration of the fullness of life in joy and splendor.” It is deliberately perverse to suppress the testimony to the transforming power of the Risen Christ, available to all believers without regard to their economic potential, in favor of pleas for a this-worldly salvation that can never be more than partial at best and must ultimately crumble into dust together with those who have put their chief trust in it.

The Gift Of God

Even those of us who wholeheartedly believe the good news that God has given eternal life to all who receive it often find it hard to hold uncompromisingly to this marvelous truth. Aware of all that Scripture says about following Christ and doing his will, we may end up acting as if God had not already given us eternal life but instead had only promised to bestow it at the end of our earthly lives if we prove to be pretty good disciples. What we need to realize and to hold tenaciously is that the Bible distinguishes clearly and repeatedly between that aspect of salvation often called justification, which is the gift of God, and the aspect that involves human effort and is best called discipleship.

Jesus told the Samaritan adulteress, “Whoever drinks of the water that I shall give him will never thirst; the water that I shall give him will become in him a spring of water welling up to eternal life” (John 4:14). But just a little later he told the disciples who had been following him: “My food is to do the will of him who sent me, and to accomplish his work” (v. 34). Then Jesus made it clear that he wants those who have drunk the freely given water of eternal life to go on to eat the food of doing God’s work.

A new book written in a way that allows every Christian to grasp both the distinction and the relation between the gift of God and the work of the Christian is The Hungry Inherit (Moody, 128 pp., $3.95), by Zane Clark Hodges, who teaches New Testament at Dallas Seminary. Hodges’s style is to use his imagination to reconstruct the setting of some crucial but often misunderstood passages in the writings of John, James, and Paul that when correctly interpreted show that “eternal life is free [but] discipleship is immeasurably hard.”

Hodges’s aim is not to make Christianity easier by making it free but to be true to the scriptural standards for discipleship, standards that are often watered down by those who teach that only disciples will be in heaven. Hodges deals head-on with such questions as whether those who once truly believe the Gospel but later abandon this belief will be in heaven. (Yes, but “while mere access to God’s kingdom [is] an unspeakable privilege … there is incomparably more to be had than that.)

One does not have to agree with every part of the exegesis that lies beneath the easy-to-read narrative to profit immensely from this book. Indeed, even if one comes away mostly disagreeing, the book is still worth reading for the way in which the author makes often read passages of Scripture come alive by trying to reconstruct the setting in which they arose.

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