the New Pantagruel

Baylor 2012: Universal Vision in a Particular Place

by Andy Black

n Language and Love, William Mallard introduces the main features of Augustine’s theology through a recounting of the Confessions. Mallard frames Augustine’s intellectual and spiritual pilgrimage as the attempt to find a vocabulary able to unify and encompass the two “worlds” he had known since birth: the religious world of his mother with its talk of sin, salvation, and Jesus; and the world of everything else: business, culture, and philosophy. From this perspective, the conflict between the divided internal and external worlds we inhabit creates the “restless heart” that draws us toward rest in the transcendent yet graciously available God of Christianity.

Solid Foundation by Jim Janknegt

I am reminded of this interpretation of Augustine as my alma mater, Baylor University, is currently in the midst of a heated controversy over the attempt to transform itself–the world’s largest Baptist university–from a primarily regional school with respectable but not quite prestigious academics into the world’s premier protestant research university. There is much talk on campus in Waco, Texas these days (at least by some) of rejoining what was torn asunder by the Enlightenment; of integrating faith and learning across academic disciplines; of Baylor bravely pointing the way toward peace for the restless hearts of contemporary academe, culture, and Christianity.

Officially launched in 2001, the “Baylor 2012” plan calls for a decade of major building projects, graduate program expansion, increased emphasis on faculty research, lower student-faculty ratios, and the hiring of “world-class” scholars. (This is the point at with writers are tempted to use the cliché “Texas-sized” when describing Baylor’s ambitions.)

The Baylor envisioned in the 2012 vision will become a magnet for Christian intellectual muscle, a place for innovative interdisciplinary programs, a model for the integration of vigorous faith and serious learning and a Christian intellectual community giving students the resources and guidance to develop a sense of vocation and a commitment to service.

Entertaining the prospect of my alma mater achieving or even trying to attain these lofty goals has often been intoxicating. This has partly to do with school pride and the temptation to have it all: to succeed on the world’s terms (U.S. News and World Report’s coveted “Tier One” status!) while retaining enough religious character to feel superior to other religious schools who decisively chose the path of secularism in their quest for academic greatness.

But I have also been deeply attracted to the “vision” of Baylor’s current administration because it holds out the prospect of overcoming the “Scandal of the Evangelical Mind” that Mark Noll so famously analyzed and mourned in 1994. My first reading of Noll’s book affected me like few books have before or since.

As I read Noll’s analysis of evangelical anti-intellectualism, I gained a sense of solidarity: I grasped that I was one of many who had nearly concluded, with heartache, that “at least in the United States, it is simply impossible to be, with integrity, both evangelical and intellectual.” Noll offered keen historical insights into evangelical Christianity’s mistrust or disregard for disciplined reflection about God, human beings, and the world. More importantly, he provided a formidable theological argument for why evangelicals and all Christians should consider this a scandal.

As a Baylor undergraduate during the mid-1990s, I received a rigorous and enjoyable education. Opportunities existed for students so desiring to gain an outstanding academic experience. Baylor’s best graduates have historically been able to hold their own and more at the highest levels of academia and the learned professions. But Baylor has never seriously been considered a bookish place, notable exceptions notwithstanding. I spent my undergraduate years straddling the intellectually stimulating world of my academic peers in the honors program (the majority of whom had no use for the broadly evangelical ethos of campus religious life) and the world of my closest friends, whose sincere and admirable evangelical piety I both shared and struggled to maintain.

Campus worship events and informal spiritual gatherings urged students to be “passionate” for God and the gospel and to settle for no less than the experience of deep personal intimacy with the divine. This highly-charged spiritual atmosphere tended to be extremely inhospitable and off-putting for any inclined to acknowledge complexity, mystery, or doubt. My growing concerns about the appropriateness of sharply dividing the world into distinct “saved” and “unsaved” (or “reached” and “unreached”) segments caused me to question my own Christian devotion. I turned away from considering a ministerial vocation during those years, despite sensing a “call to ministry” (in Baptist terminology) as a child.

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