David Dockery on Christian Higher Ed's Key Challenges
Posted by tom | Sep 7, 2007Check out the recent interview of David Dockery, president of Union University in Jackson, Tennessee, regarding Christian Higher Ed's Key Challenges. CT: One of the significant divides in terms of conceiving the Christian university is between the "two spheres" model which aims to provide an excellent secular education in a Christian environment, and the integrationist model, which aims at distinctively Christian education. You endorse the latter. Why?
Dockery: A two-sphere model recognizes the place of chapel, campus ministry, mission trip opportunities, and residence-life Bible studies. This model sees a place for faith on one side of the campus and learning on the other. This model can be achieved with parachurch ministries on secular campuses. I do not believe this model represents the best of Christ-centered higher education nor do I think it represents the best of the Christian intellectual tradition through the years.The conjunction of faith and learning, the one-sphere or integrationist model, points to the essence of a Christian university. In recent years, among an increasingly large number of intellectuals, there has arisen a deep suspicion of today's thoroughly secularized academy, so that there is indeed a renewed appreciation for and openness to what George Marsden calls "the outrageous idea of Christian scholarship." As Mark Schwenn of Valparaiso University has suggested, it may be time to acknowledge that the thorough secularization of the academy is, at least, unfruitful. There is even a renewed interest in many places in the relationship of the church to higher education. Ex corde ecclesiae is the way our Catholic friends frame this idea, which calls for the church to be at the heart of the university and for the university to be at the heart of the church.
Being faithful will involve more than mere piety or spirituality, which by itself will not sustain the idea of a Christian university. We need a model of higher education that confesses the sovereignty of the triune God over the whole cosmos, in all spheres and kingdoms, visible and invisible.
Dockery will be one of the speakers at InterVarsity's Faculty Conference 08. His new book Renewing Minds: Serving Church and Society through Christian Higher Education will be published by Holman Academic in October. I'd also like to take a look at Shaping a Christian Worldview, a book which he co-edited.
