March 1, 2002 - 12:00pm - Alden Thompson

EDITORIAL NOTE: From the AT Archive; Jan/Feb 2000

Most AT readers have experienced Adventist education, and most have felt the tension that often arises at the interface of piety and faith with academic and intellectual discourse.

The challenge

"Either you think or you believe; you can't do both."

Says who?

Powerful voices in our culture, maybe the whole culture, that's who. For Adventists, it's a dilemma that looms, haunts, lurks and mocks - you pick the verb. It's an urgent issue on every Adventist campus, a tension felt in every Adventist home.

I've heard the "educated" voices. I've seen them in print:

"It's no longer necessary to convince educated Englishmen of the 20th century that..."

"I didn't think even Evangelicals believed that any more..."

"As every schoolboy knows..."

"Carl Sagan says that only those with an IQ between 85 and 120 can believe. If you're lower than that you're not smart enough to believe; if you're higher you're too smart..."

"Either you pursue the truth and destroy the church; or you give up the search for truth to preserve the church."

Those were all educated voices, some quite sophisticated. C. S. Lewis has noted that the company of unbelievers makes faith harder, even when their opinions on any other subject are known to be worthless. True. And when the unbelievers' opinions are known to be highly valued instead of worthless, we feel very vulnerable indeed. None of us takes kindly to condescension or scorn. Nobody wants to be dumb. Nobody.

In some ways, the tension between thinking and believing is a modern phenomenon; at least the stakes are much higher now than they used to be. In the past, great thinkers have also been revered as great men of God; the scholar and the saint could happily live inside the same skin: Jerome, Augustine, Wycliffe, Luther, Calvin, and Wesley. Now, it seems, one has to choose.

I don't like the choice. Not at all. I want to think and believe. And I believe we can do something about it - more than just huddling together after dark to talk about this funny business of being educated and Adventist.

But before we consider ways of saving the marriage, a glimpse of history will help us understand how the two partners have drifted apart. And it's not just an Adventist problem. I don't know of any church that has a tidy solution. Church historian, Mark Noll, one of the first "evangelical" scholars to gain respect in the "secular" academic community, bluntly addressed the problem in his book, The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind (1994). Noll argues that believers simply haven't developed good universities.

For me the issue was cast into bold relief several years ago when the academic dean from Whitworth College (Spokane, WA) told our faculty that of all the Presbyterian colleges founded in the 19th century in the US, only Whitworth has retained an explicit Christian identity. All the others have gone secular. In our own town, Whitman College is a constant reminder of that phenomenon: a respected liberal arts college with a handsome endowment, a kind of west coast Ivy League campus.

Ironically, the most persistent echo of its Christian past is in the name of its athletic teams, the Whitman "Missionaries."

Adventists still have a cluster of colleges and universities. Some are at risk; each is struggling in its own way. But each is still fully bonded to the church. That's good. The challenge is significant, however, and deserves our careful attention.

Diagnosis: historical perspective

Our dilemma can be variously described: faith vs. reason; grace vs. free will; divine sovereignty vs. human freedom. In the end, the tension is rooted in the ambivalent human response to authority: from fear and submission on the one hand to hostility and rebellion on the other. If fear destroys the spirit of inquiry, rebellion elevates it to the point of arrogant independence. Thus the biblical ideal of authority as something which liberates and enables is replaced by a view of authority as something which represses and restricts. On such a view, authority must either be passively accepted or totally rejected. But to describe the biblical ideal positively in terms of "enabling" already betrays my bias; the rebel sees only "repression" ("It is time this scriptural tyranny was broken," shouts a cover blurb on Deceptions and Myths of the Bible, 1975, 1995). And the war rages on.

At the risk of over-simplifying, it can be said the fruit of the medieval period was a church which restricted human inquiry in the name of God. In 1633 Galileo was forbidden to see what he had already seen, and Galileo was "wrong" until Rome finally declared him "right" in 1992. No wonder the Enlightenment announced the independence of human reason, ruling the divine out of court.

Culturally, however, believers still held the upper hand. At the beginning of the 19th century atheism was seen as almost a form of insanity. With reference to the Bible, Sir Walter Scott could say: "Better had they ne'er been born, that read to doubt or read to scorn."

But by the beginning of the 20th century, the tables had turned in "educated" circles: atheism was assumed; belief was scorned. Speaking of the Bible, the great American poet Wallace Stevens exclaimed: "I'm glad the silly book is gone." By the 1920s, Fundamentalism had sent "believers" and "thinkers" into opposite camps. We're still paying the price.

The Adventist scene is particularly striking, for our schools were established right in the middle of this war, shaped by a prophetic mandate in the name of God. Ellen White called for the rule of "sanctified reason." Fundamentalism has left its mark on us, to be sure. But I'm convinced that without the prophetic ministry of Ellen White, Adventists would have no schools and we would simply be a tiny sabbatarian sect with a footprint similar in size to that of the Advent Christian Church or the Seventh Day Baptists.

Instead, Adventism is a tumultuous, unruly body, struggling with problems of diversity and church polity, burgeoning growth and unsettling decline. I think all this tumult and frenzy is linked in part with Ellen White's dictum, that "Christ can be best glorified by those who serve him intelligently."

Rescue and rehabilitation?

Can the marriage be saved? Indeed. And I believe Adventist education can do much to brighten the corner where we are. We can't go far if we go it alone. But our unique heritage, our commitment to "sanctified reason," will enable us to capitalize on significant cultural trends which are making it easier to think and believe.

Two British authors deserve a great deal of credit: G. K. Chesterton and C. S. Lewis. Lewis described Chesterton's The Everlasting Man (1925) as "the best popular apology for Christianity." Though certainly no Fundamentalist, Chesterton wrote just as Fundamentalism was reaching its peak and provided believers with understanding as well as ammunition. He noted that the drive against traditional religion was fueled by "a particular mood of reaction and revolt" with predictable effect on the ability to be even-handed: "An iconoclast may be indignant; an iconoclast may be justly indignant; but an iconoclast is not impartial. And it is stark hypocrisy to pretend that nine-tenths of the higher critics and scientific evolutionists and professors of comparative religions are in the least impartial."

Beginning in the 1940s, first by radio and then in print, the brilliant and devout university man, C. S. Lewis, introduced millions of readers to the life-transforming power of Jesus in his Mere Christianity. He himself had once been an atheist and spoke candidly of the uncertainties on both sides of the divide: both the believer and the atheist have their moments of terror when the other's position seems so temptingly true.

Today, I see several hopeful impulses in the broader culture: a touch of humility among scientists, a renewed interest in mystery and spirituality, a readiness to hear the message of Scripture without insisting that it be merely a human book on the one hand or an absolute reflection of God on the other.

Adventists, like other conservative Christians, are inclined to focus on the errors of dominant cultural trends. Yet these trends often correct previous excesses. Just as the Enlightenment helped break the hammerlock of church authority, so Postmodernism is loosening the grip of Enlightenment rationalism by focusing on the importance of the individual experience. That's good.

Finally, I would suggest that the real reason for the war between faith and reason is the powerful impulse from both right and left to take Scripture as a final and absolute revelation of God. Both extremes assume that if God were to reveal himself, it must be in absolute terms. The left rejects such a position and the right defends it, and neither one is really hearing Scripture.

Adventists can walk a middle way. When Ellen White said that "God and heaven alone are infallible," she was recognizing that Scripture points toward God, but is adapted to catastrophic human circumstances and limited human understanding. Some may say that "such an expression is not like God." No problem, for "God has not put Himself in words, in logic, in rhetoric, on trial in the Bible." And that's because God inspired the "person," not the "words." Scripture points to God, but is never the same as God.

The brokenness in our world touches all authorities and they fall short of perfection. But they are still our authorities. The Bible is no exception. If Adventists can make peace with the Bible, we can help the world make peace with the Bible, and thus find peace with God, a God who took human flesh so that we might live forever.

That's an exciting mandate for Adventist education.