This volume's title might suggest a monograph reviewing major academic freedom cases from the history of Christian higher education, and William Ringenberg does survey a handful of such notable recent cases. His intentions in this book, however, are far more encompassing. Here is an extended state-of-the-Christian-college address delivered by a scholar who has committed his professional career both to close observation and the promotion of Christian higher education. In view of Ringenberg's four decades of research in this field, he enjoys a prominent vantage point (shared with such colleagues as George Marsden, Nathan Hatch, and Mark Noll), and his insights merit close attention and consideration from the academic community at large. This valedictory address to the whole of higher education covers three key, interrelated themes: the distinctive values that Christianity contributes to the academic enterprise, Christianity's historic role in making and sustaining the academic community in the Western tradition, and the threat and promise of contemporary issues for future of Christian higher education.
Ringenberg's first section is an apologia contesting the persistent and sometimes permissible prejudice in the academy against the “Christian university.” Inasmuch as Christian higher education begins with certain confessional commitments, some academicians dismiss Christian colleges as insular, provincial, and inferior, that is, an obscurantist enterprise designed to avoid the very questions that universities are tasked with asking. “Religion engenders fear in much of the academy” (233), Ringenberg detects. Although the history of Christian higher education includes institutions that have spent more energy defending what is already “known” than in a spirited pursuit of truth, the “ideal for a Christian institution of learning,” asserts Ringenberg, is to “operate from the principle that all truth is God's truth and that a scholar should seek truth wherever it may be found” (xxi). Central to Ringenberg's rejoinder, therefore, is his argument that “defining an institution as a Christian college” does not “in and of itself place limits on its search for truth. It need not; indeed it should not” (xvii). At its best, the Christian college is no different than any good academic community. The finest are truth-seeking communities valuing diversity of opinion, the free exchange of ideas, and the validation of such ideas according to the intellectual standards of the academic professions (87). In fact, for Ringenberg, core Christian values (e.g., freedom, seeking, honesty, humility, courage, prudence, love, meaning, harmony and balance, and community) can provide the Christian college with a distinct advantage for all its academic endeavors.
The volume's second section provides a centuries-long narrative arc, illustrating how Christianity has sustained and inspired the best of the Western intellectual tradition (with special attention to the American context). The modern era has certainly challenged Christianity's standing in academia, as secular newcomers have raised probing questions. Nonetheless, history illustrates that all academic communities draw lines of inclusion. “Every college, religious or secular,” Ringenberg maintains, “operates with self-definitions and thus boundaries within which they work. There is no school where ‘anything goes’” (90). Christian colleges forthrightly draw their theological boundaries, while secular institutions impose their own ideological lines. Again, Ringenberg asserts that Christian higher education can be as good as, and has reason to be superior to, secular universities insofar as the academy's truth-seeking mission is in Christianity's DNA. If the Christian college is to honor its inclusive identity and be more than a gated community, however, it must attend to the increasingly insurmountable barrier of cost, vis-à-vis the state university. What, after all, is “faith-informed” about saddling students with crippling debt? Ringenberg rightly calls for “Christian higher education to offer its public more models in more price ranges” (117).
In the volume's third segment, Ringenberg continues addressing his Christian communities, disclosing their sectarian, illiberal, and myopic failures. On the matter of macroevolution, for example, Ringenberg celebrates scholars such as Francis Collins and the BioLogos Foundation, calling on Christian scholars “to be as objective as possible and enlisting the aid of the spirit of God in their inquiries [which] may well reach better overall personal understanding” (147). Then, having reviewed more than twenty cases of gender and LGTBQ exclusion in Christian colleges, Ringenberg reminds that “colleges by definition are places for free exchange of ideas in the context of respect for those participating in the discussion; this principle should apply to the social and personal issue of same-sex orientation and marriage no less than any other issue” (170). This leads Ringenberg to ask rhetorically, “Isn't the Christian college at its best an open forum on the seeking together of the mind of God?” (154).
For those who remember H. Richard Niebuhr's Christ and Culture typologies, Ringenberg's thesis seems reminiscent of the Thomistic “Christ Above Culture” model, for example, Christian higher education enters into the same academic enterprise as other universities, yet with resources and attributes that human effort alone lacks. In the free pursuit of truth, therefore, Ringenberg's Christian institution synthesizes comfortably with the secular university. Should, however, Christianity integrate so quickly and conveniently with academic convention? Historically Christianity has been at its best when threatening the powers-that-be, and scandalizing the authorities. Going forward, is the need for close affinity between the academic communities, or for a more unrepentant appeal to the obstinate freedom of Christianity's countercultural genius? When it comes to truth-seeking, Tertullian's question remains incisive: “What has Athens to do with Jerusalem?”
In conclusion, Ringenberg offers an encouraging and conciliatory plea to the entire academy (both secular and confessionally based). It is a masterfully articulated appeal, exhaustively researched, and rendered by a scholar statesman. “Do not fear truth. Fear bad theology, or bad science, or bad sociology,” Ringenberg counsels. “Do not fear truth; fear missing the truth. For where truth is, there is God. God is light, and God is truth” (231).
