The Fall 2017 issue of Christian Scholar’s Review features a roundtable with David Hoekema, George Marsden, Richard Mouw, Nicholas Wolterstorff, and Alvin Plantinga on “Christian Perspectives on Learning.” With that formidable lineup, this is a discussion of great interest, but here I want to focus on Marsden’s remarks. They are a brief and optimistic assessment of the “burgeoning of Christian scholarship,” as he calls it, over the past half-century since he started his first teaching job at Calvin College. Marsden attributes the burgeoning to several factors, including the development of “a vital, sophisticated, and substantial intellectual community among theologically traditionalist—or evangelical—American Protestants.”
Marsden (my doctoral adviser at Notre Dame) notes that it was not this way in 1965, when he was finishing his PhD at Yale and starting his work at Calvin. Remarkably, Marsden says that in the mid-1960s Calvin and Wheaton College were about the only options that he knew of for intellectually serious Christian colleges. (Whether that reflected the reality, or just the limitations of Marsden’s northern Reformed network, he doesn’t say. Surely there were fewer such schools then than now, however.) He found Calvin a congenial destination, but even there, he found the school “insular” in its narrow world of Dutch Reformed life. “With my non-Dutch name, I was an exotic curiosity” at Calvin, Marsden recalls.
What changed at Calvin and elsewhere to make the world of Christian academia more dynamic? Marsden says that one key was faculty tapping into the broader worlds of Christian higher education, and networking with like-minded Christian scholars. These came through visits and conferences at places like Wheaton and other schools associated with the Council for Christian Colleges and Universities (founded in 1976). Marsden also highlights his experience of networking with Catholic scholars. Eventually Marsden and Plantinga would join the faculty at Notre Dame, signaling the alliance between many Protestant and Catholic scholars, who made common cause in the increasingly secular world of elite higher education.
Marsden argues that another essential development was the emergence of many Christian colleges from “fundamentalist sectarianism” into the “Christian mainstream” of C. S. Lewis’s kind of “Mere Christianity.” Here I would note that there is a delicate balance between a trajectory of maintaining a generous orthodoxy and one that will ultimately lead to jettisoning basic Christian beliefs. Some of the differences between Christian schools today involve disagreements over what beliefs count as essential. But certainly it is more difficult for a school that requires faculty to adhere to particular doctrines such as premillennialism or young-earth creationism to participate in Marsden’s “burgeoning” of Christian academic life, much less in elite academic discussions as Marsden, Plantinga, and other Christian scholars have.
In any case, it is heartening to see Marsden argue that the past half-century has been a time of increasing vitality for Christian academia and Christian intellectual networks. His assessment is a good reminder of the value of Christian schools remaining outward-focused, encouraging the networking of Christian scholars, and helping those scholars develop publications and other products that make a difference in the top levels of American academic conversations. That’s what Marsden has modeled for us.
