The Postmodern University
In the previous essay we examined Julia Schleck’s defense* of the postmodern university. Though she admits that the postmodern university no longer believes in knowledge, truth, and virtue in the traditional senses of these terms, she nevertheless argues that society ought to grant professors academic freedom and tenure and generous financial support even though they engage in activities that seem destructive, useless or perverse to most people. My somewhat tongue in cheek paraphrase of her argument goes like this:
Trust us with your children and your money. Give us unfettered freedom, good pay, and lifetime employment. But don’t expect us to answer to you or explain why your investments are sound.
With Scheck’s argument in mind, I want to contrast the idea of a Christian college with her description of the postmodern university. As I observed in my former essay,
A university that no longer believes in knowledge, truth, or virtue no longer believes in itself. As far as I can tell, its driving purpose is maintenance of a system that provides faculty unfettered freedom, good pay, and lifetime employment in exchange for expressing their private opinions in esoteric vocabularies.
By rejecting all presupposed knowledge, truth, and virtue, the postmodern university loses its purpose, forfeits its prospects for progress, and gives up any measure by which we could judge its outcomes. To the casual observer, the postmodern university’s rejection of all “dogmas,” presuppositions, and time-honored truths, and its openness to strange and unpopular ideas may seem the epitome of enlightenment and a fine formula for uncovering new truth. But in this “the casual observer” is completely mistaken. For as described by Schleck, the postmodern university is not about discovering true and useful ideas. It’s about winning a struggle for power and money. The postmodern university replaces knowledge, truth, and virtue with ideology, power, and pretense.
The Christian College
A Christian college worthy of its name believes in knowledge, truth, and virtue; therefore, it believes in itself. Hence it can devote itself energetically to achieving its purpose. Its knowledge is faith, its truth is God and God’s creation, and its virtue is the way of Jesus Christ.
Faith Knowledge
The founding principle of the Christian college is faith, the apostolic faith preached and preserved for us in the New Testament. Far from viciously restricting our search for understanding and truth, faith points us toward truth and away from idols and ideologies. It protects us from evil, immoral, and superstitious paths. The knowledge of faith serves as a foundation on which to build our understanding of God, the world, and ourselves. Faith provides a language within which every discipline and every professor in the college can communicate with every other. Faith, sincerely held by every member of the college community, unifies the Christian college in a way the postmodern university can never achieve.
Transcendent Truth
Because it believes in God the Creator of heaven and earth, the Christian college believes in an objective reality. For God is unchanging and eternal and is the Creator of all else. Truth is the conceptual form of reality and knowledge is the form of a mind in which dwells truth. In faith, the Christian college believes it possesses knowledge of God centrally and principally in Jesus Christ who is the living truth of God manifest in the world. And with respect to this knowledge, its purpose is twofold: (1) to pass this knowledge to the next generation unchanged and (2) to seek deeper understanding of the truth in all its dimensions. Every discipline and every professor is united in this purpose. All seek to know God and God’s works in truth.
True Virtue
A Christian college worthy of its name looks to Jesus Christ as the model for its conduct. There are not two systems of virtue, one for the church and one for the Christian college. Jesus Christ is the Lord of both. The way of Jesus is obedience to the Father; his is the way of humility, faith, love, hope, peace, and patience. The Christian college affirms the teaching of Jesus and his chosen apostles as the normative guide for our relationships to others and the use of our bodies. We are not allowed to do as we please with regard to money, power, sex, and honor. We must bring our words and deeds under the sanctifying and strengthening power of the Spirit. For the postmodern university “virtue” is a mere strategy for attaining power, a Darwinian struggle for money, control, and honor. It should not be so in a Christian college.
Freedom Versus Freedom
At first glance, the postmodern university seems to offer more freedom than does the Christian college. Professors have the freedom to reject Christian faith and traditional morality and to affirm atheism, immoralism, and perversity. They can blaspheme the holy, praise the profane, and parade the ugly without sanction. And they can teach their students to do the same. Christian colleges do not allow professors these freedoms, and true Christians do not want them. On the other hand, postmodern universities do not allow believing faculty to affirm Christian faith and interpret the world under the guidance of the Christian faith. And postmodern universities have their own dogmas, sacred cows, and lists of virtues and vices. They will not tolerate the blasphemies of sexism, homophobia, and transphobia; you may not speak against their sacraments: fornication, adultery, and abortion.
The Christian college holds a different view of freedom. There is no freedom in the power to do evil, only blindness and slavery to lust and pride. True freedom is God-given power to know the truth and do the good. Since Christian colleges believe in knowledge, truth, and virtue, they encourage believing faculty to teach and research under the guidance of their Christian faith. Students can learn from faculty who are so guided. Instructed by faith, Christian faculty can pursue the truth of God and creation with confidence, energy, and hope. And this is the freedom I cherish!
*Dirty Knowledge: Academic Freedom in the Age of Neoliberalism, University of Nebraska Press, 2022).
ifaqtheology 
Hello Ron,
It is ironic that in a world lacking in both “truth and peace” (something which all christians wish to see changed) that it was Nietzsche who predicted this situation we see played out in this 21st century…
In his ‘The Will to Power’ he specifically attacks ‘truth’ doesn’t he Ron? One of the attributes you observe as lacking in non-christian establishments. But i should say it is much worse than that; tgere is a global epidemic of post-christian nihilism just like Nietzsche said.
However. When our Lord Jesus specifially spoke of these things, recorded wonderfully so in St John Chapter 14 (see lines 17 and 27 if you want the gyst only) then we have a different cause. Jesus says that this world does not know or understand truth or peace. And it is these attributes which he especially leaves us (absolute truth and absolute peace) through his gift of the Holy Spirit. To both guide and comfort us.
It’s my wish, that folks who want to know more about Jesus’ heavenly blessings (” blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall…”) might join with me, and read John’s Chapter 14 today. It wouldn’t do any harm for all universities to offer some religious options– moreover in the wider world, it is a complete lack of truth and peace that we see now prevalent.
Finally, i’d like to point out to scholars that in Nietzsche’s philosophical predictions (and sometimes the “traps” which he laid) we should note that he shares what we sometmes see in judeao-christian religious philosophy and ethics; namely, the right answers for the wrong reasons. No amount of rules and morals are going to solve differences if people have no idea what truth and peace are. Jesus makes it clear what is needed.
It is my belief that Jesus’ transcendent virtues (to use a popular word) are spoken of and detailed by the prophet only. Isaiah explains the relationshiip between knowledge, wisdom and understanding echoed in the new testament and repeated for surety by Jesus. Can a thing without a mind possess knowledge? And more specificlly, can an establishment with no heart feel piety? It must be at the very heart of a metaphysical body, that the core values of peace and truth are anchored, both industinguishable and indivisible from Christ himself (and as the prophet says, ” laid down in the holy fear of God and magnifed by the power of the Holy Spirit”).
The Lord grant us His truth, and His peace which the world understandeth not.
JS
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