C. John Sommerville
C. John Sommerville is professor emeritus of English History at the University of Florida. He has a Ph.D. from the University of Iowa, and an M.A. from the University of Kansas. Published works include The Decline of the Secular University (Oxford, 2006), How the News Makes us Dumb: The Death of Wisdom in an Information Society (InterVarsity, 1999), The News Revolution in England: Cultural Dynamics of Daily Information (Oxford, 1996), The Secular-ization of Early Modern England: from Religious Culture to Religious Faith (Oxford, 1992), and The Discovery of Childhood in Puritan England (University of Georgia, 1992).
The following essay was published in the October 2006 edition of Reconsider-ations, the quarterly publication of the Christian Study Center of Gainesville, available at www.christianstudycenter.org.
Editor’s note: In a class on “Religion, Scholarship, and the University” at the Christian Study Center of Gainesville, John Sommerville’s book, The Decline of the Secular University (Oxford University Press, 2006), was used as a starting point in an ongoing conversation about the role of religion in the university. This book helped frame a discussion that began with Dr. Sommerville explaining why he wrote the book and offering his thoughts about how religion might actually contribute to the university. This essay is an abridged version of Dr. Sommerville’s second lecture on how Christian ideas could contribute to the university.
Previously, we looked at the reasons that this seemed like a good time to write The Decline of the Secular University and challenge the mindset of the academy. So far, the reviews of the book have been positive, but there is one point they all raise. They complain that I don’t offer many constructive suggestions for changing things. So in response to that I’d like to offer some suggestions about how Christian ideas might actually change the university.
Actually, in the book I wanted to leave that matter of positive responses open so that a whole generation of Christian scholars would be challenged to contribute from their own disciplines. It was unrealistic to think that such a short book could offer the blueprint for our future. This is going to be a big job because religious scholars and students are so out of practice. But there are also some things we could start doing immediately. And things that even students could do.
First, Christians need to think what our goal is. Are we trying to prove the main Christian doctrines? Probably not, when you think what proof means. Proof involves three things: shared assumptions (since you can’t prove anything to someone who doesn’t share your assumptions about how things work), then agreed knowledge, and finally a common logic to show their relations. Then it’s a matter of showing that your opponent’s assumptions require her to accept your conclusions, in light of that knowledge, organized by that logic. So proof is an exercise of power over your opponent, forcing her to surrender. Power over opponents seems completely out of place in Christianity.
Jesus wasn’t doing this. Rather, his goal was to create faith or at least raise issues of faith, trust, dependence, commitment. In contrast to proof, Jesus’ efforts to generate faith actually respects a person’s freedom. It aims at opening the person’s mind, and you are more likely to do this with questions, as Jesus did, than by thundering away at an "opponent." You need to show the person his own assumptions, his own faith, whatever it happens to be. Now we should understand that faiths aren’t something foreign to the university. As historian George Marsden states, "broadly understood, faith in something or other informs all scholarship." Faith comes before thinking as well as after. Scientists had to have a belief in the regularity of nature before they could discover it, and as Einstein used to say, they often went decades with only that faith to sustain them, while they fought with the evidence.
So we’ll be looking for questions that could begin this process of opening minds. They will be questions pointing to faith, broadly speaking, or showing the faiths that underlie our thinking. And, students specifically should be able to use these questions in conversations with fellow students, with TA’s and even, with due modesty, with professors.
You might start with (1) "Have you ever read the new book called The Decline of the Secular University?" I hoped the book could be used this way, as a conversation starter as it’s being used here. Being able to focus on it might take the heat off you a bit, so that you can partner with others in discussing the questions raised in it. I didn’t answer a lot of the questions that I ask, so people will be challenged to discover their own answers.
When you are talking about issues that revolve around certain assumptions about human nature, you could ask: (2) "Doesn’t this whole discussion turn on your definition of the human?" We previously pointed out how central the view of the human is to the New Paradigm university. That is, a university dominated by professional programs (more than by science), which all serve some understanding of human needs. Secular universities are seriously unprepared for this question, having just been involved in denying that human is a meaningful concept. Both science and postmodernism have real problems making sense of the human. But religions, and certainly Christianity, are very largely about the human situation, and developed the concepts and the language we must use in thinking about it.
If you ask this, you need to be prepared to have the other person ask "Well, what’s your definition?" Again, you can deflect the issue away from yourself a bit by saying "Well, a Christian definition would probably emphasize responsibility and other ethical dimensions, or a relation to something basic to the universe, we would say God." You’ll be directing attention to Christianity, as a religious knowledge tradition, instead of yourself. You could also helpfully suggest that "A secular definition would probably put each individual at the center of their world." Kind of a staggering idea, isn’t it?
You shouldn’t feel like you’ve got to say everything all at once or rush through a whole elaborate explanation. There will probably be more to the conversation and the topic of Jesus might easily come up. You can indicate how he is your ideal image of the human and also of the divine. How utterly surprising it is the world's most widespread religion began the way Christianity did. How unique it is when it is truly centering on love rather than triumph, and how we criticize it by its own ethic.
A discussion of (2) might lead to a third question, (3) "Shouldn’t a definition of the human be about our difference from animals?" That’s what definitions do, distinguish one thing from all others. Definitions of Homo Sapiens are definitions of an animal species, and are largely about the similarities. "Human" differs from Homo Sapiens by being about ethical and personalist issues, even more than about intellectual ones.
By the way, if your friend objects that human is only a word, a concept, you can remind them that so are species, which are generalizations. Words are not unimportant, they are our ways of organizing reality. Sciences are, in effect, languages which allow us to talk about different parts of reality. To sound erudite, you might even add that this is what the "linguistic turn" in twentieth-century philosophy was all about -- Wittgenstein and all that.
To take the conversation to another level, (4) "Isn’t it true that evolutionary psychology (formerly called sociobiology) failed to explain any value except prudence?" I think this is true, and will make you sound pretty advanced. Prudence is what "survival value" is all about, but it isn’t very high on anybody’s list of virtues. So this question is meant to show them how little evolution has to do with any discussion of the human. It doesn’t help with all those words we must use of humans that we can’t use of chimps or cabbages, like responsibility, truth, justice, sanity, wealth, purpose, trust, freedom, humane. The book even shows how even the concept of "science" points to an unbridgeable gulf between humans, the creators of science, and the creation they are studying.
In some arguments you might need to ask (5) "Is tolerance something for ideas, or for people?" Tolerance for ideas just means Relativism – the idea that every idea is equally valid, which is not an ethical matter. Tolerance for people is a virtue, deriving from Christian charity. This might squelch a lot of nonsense about "being tolerant of everything except intolerance.” That gets things exactly backwards, meaning not tolerating people who do not tolerate all opinions. After all, judging opinions is what intelligence means. And in fact, everybody finds some opinions that are simply out of the question. Or we should hope they do.
Still another line of questions could include (6) "What are you absolutizing in that argument?" Which means, what is going unquestioned in your thinking? No one likes to think that they are unaware of important things. They might come back at you with, "What would you absolutize?"
You have to be careful here. Remember that only one thing can be absolute. That’s what the word means: everything else is relative to the one thing that’s absolute. And in Christian theology, that one thing must be God. So Christians shouldn’t claim to have a bunch of absolute values, which would just be ignorant. All values find their proper relation in God, so they are all "relative" to God. But that’s such a difficult concept that I think you could get away with saying that the Christian view is that only charity, love, can be absolutized. But you’d have to add that you would often need Christianity to explain what that meant in practice.
Finally, in some arguments where you sense a clash of viewpoints, you might want to ask (7) "Which explains which?" Or as Dr. Horner often puts it "What frames what?" Maybe the most frequent way this comes up is in assessing religion as against science. And that becomes a really interesting issue. Does religion best explain science or vice versa?
There are three sciences that have made a stab at explaining religion, or explaining it away. They are sociology (which sees religions as society’s glorification of itself), psychology (which sees it as a residue of infantile fears), and rational-choice economic theory (which applies cost/benefit analysis to the whole enterprise). None of them actually explain the core idea of religion, which sees religion as a certain kind of response to a certain kind of power (the response and the power both being understood as beyond anything else we experience). Instead, these sciences only explain certain religious behaviors, ideas, or attitudes. They are often successful in this, but it doesn’t entirely dissolve the reality of the concept.
On the other hand, religion can explain science fairly well. Historians of science talk a lot about how Western science was born in monotheistic metaphysics, and how it has been both encouraged and retarded by religion over the years. The scientific revolution of the seventeenth century was largely the work of seriously Christian thinkers like Kepler, Boyle, Newton, and Pascal. They saw it as a way of understanding God’s creation.
Historians of science have also considered why other civilizations did not follow the path of the Jewish and Christian West in this regard. One of the reasons has got to be the fact that Asian religions were more interested in escaping the world than understanding it. So maybe this question of "what caused what" is more interesting than one would assume. If we tried to see science as one part of our whole religious point of view, we could think of it as showing the other half of God’s reality, and revealing a different part of God’s character.
The goal with all these questions is to wake friends up to the fact that secularism is blinding them to some really basic issues. Secularism is an impoverishment of thought. Religion can be a way of opening our minds, and quite relevant to intellectual questions. As I mentioned, the book might suggest other questions.
But you’re wondering, does any of this actually change the university? Or are these questions on too personal a level? After all, they don’t suggest some reorganization of departments or colleges or whatever. Nevertheless, it seems to me that they would change the way we think about universities. They would change what we call "the academic culture." The main intellectual virtues might cease to be suspicion, criticism, and competition. They might change to appreciation, openness, humility, seriousness. Proof of our views would be no more important to universities than understanding other views. Religious ideas would not banish non-religious ideas, but there would be a more level playing field, as we say. And religion, or at least some religions, might change the university simply by being recognized as serious knowledge traditions that deal with ever-present questions.
After my book came out, the student newspaper at the University of Iowa sponsored a debate over whether the university should be more open to religion or not. They printed the reactions of four students. Two thought that religion should be accommodated, but the other two said it would start controversies. Is that so bad? Aren’t universities ever supposed to discuss things? Right now, the secular university avoids controversy by silencing religious voices. The public may be conflicted about this, like those students were. American society is way more religious than universities are, but still we are a little afraid of what religious voices will say, since we haven’t heard them in so long. And we’d all agree that religious controversy could be very disruptive. Having some confidence in our position should keep us from being abusive.
To be clear, accommodating Christian and other religious voices would not make universities Christian. They would remain secular in the sense of being neutral. Religion wouldn’t rule. But it need not be ruled out. Universities wouldn’t be officially Christian unless they somehow privileged Christian viewpoints. That would not be good even for those Christian viewpoints. We need to keep them honest, and you do that by leaving them open to discussion.
Even Church-related colleges and universities would need to allow discussion of non-religious positions. Colleges serve all of society, and will reflect its thinking to some degree. And even as individuals we are amphibious creature. We live in a secular reality as well as a spiritual reality. Both are of God’s creation. It is part of our situation as human beings to try to negotiate these two worlds.
The upshot is that I suspect that once Christian arguments and perspectives are admitted more freely into the university they will not primarily cause trouble. To the contrary, they could seem rather convincing. After all, a lot of religious truth is built right into nature. But Christians must be wise in how they offer their arguments.
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