the New Pantagruel

Further Scandal: Christian College Professor Doesn’t Teach from a Christian Worldview

by Jack Heller

The following essay reprises the author’s earlier contribution, “Christian College Professor Flunks Christian Worldview Tests.”

am now into my third year of teaching English at Huntington College, a member institution of the Coalition of Christian Colleges and Universities. Because of where I teach, students, parents, and administrators take it for granted that I will teach from a Christian worldview. But what does teaching from a Christian worldview mean? Is it my task to critique every work of literature from some doctrinal perspective? Do I say of Edith Wharton’s novella Ethan Frome that it presents from a naturalistic worldview the struggles of a man against his social isolation through his desires for his wife’s cousin? Do I then contrast naturalism to biblical theism and say that Wharton, for her naturalism (or her secular humanism, if one prefers), falls short of Christian belief, and therefore a proper response is a rejection of her ethos? I am very disinclined to let students evade the issues the text raises by dismissing it as stemming from a naturalistic worldview. I am more inclined to discuss how Wharton creates her fictional world and let students process for themselves how truthful they find that world to be. Worldview criticism too often depends on facile labeling that makes a work’s artistry mere window-dressing for amateur philosophizing.

My approach to teaching does not conform to some descriptions of a Christian college professor’s job. Claude O. Pressnell, president of the Tennessee Independent Colleges and Universities Association, complains that “Tragically, a number of faculty within our own Christian colleges and universities struggle with how to think Christianly about their disciplines. We have lost the unification of knowledge under the lordship of Jesus Christ.” Pressnell defines the task of Christian college professors:

Christian scholars are charged with the task of teaching their academic disciplines with a well-informed knowledge base and from a distinctly Christian worldview perspective. The task requires rigorous study and a growing and intimate relationship with Christ. The need for attention to the sanctifying process of Christ is of utmost importance when we are dealing in the arena of ideas. Because of the fallenness of our intellect, we must always be kept in check by the standard of God’s Word and the community of fellow believers.

I have a confession to make: I don’t feel a connection with that description of my task. It splits apart for me in several directions. First, I do believe in the fallenness of the intellect, so much so that I don’t think it can be separated from that which is labeled as my Christian worldview. How does a person gain a sense of confidence in his worldview if, in fact, the intellect from which it proceeds is fallen?

On the other hand, I am not convinced that my teaching Shakespeare or Wharton successfully depends upon my having an intimate relationship with Christ. I certainly had no such expectation of my professors in graduate school, only two or three of which would have identified themselves as Christians and none as evangelicals. One professor I had who asserted the need to attend to Shakespeare’s Christian faith was gay and not a Christian. While I hope that I develop in my Christian faith, I don’t believe that the merit of my teaching should be measured by my faith.

Pressnell evades a question that his description of the Christian scholar’s task begs to have answered: What does he mean by “a distinctly Christian worldview?” As his reader and putative audience, I don’t take on the responsibility of defining this phrase for him. Pressnell sets up an incomplete contrast; at some point I am asking questions that he would find tragic. Why? What version of a Christian worldview should prevent my having these questions? The catch-22 for Pressnell is, of course, that if he defines his term, he moves from “a distinctly Christian worldview” to “the distinctly Christian worldview.” That might clarify whether or not my questions remain tragic, but it would also open the definition to critique from historical, sociological, theological, and other perspectives.

Pressnell’s essay appears in a collection entitled The Future of Christian Higher Education (Broadman and Holman, 1999). I was given this book for the orientation to my first year as a professor at Huntington. Its contributors include the presidents, provosts, and deans of such Christian institutions as Baylor University, Calvin College, Westmont College, Union University, and Beeson Divinity School, and such writers as Arthur Holmes and Millard Erickson. With varying degrees of nuance and qualification, most of the contributors speak of the Christian professor’s responsibility to teach from a Christian worldview while ducking the question of what that means. However, one of the volume’s editors, David Dockery, president of Union University in Tennessee, has no reticence specifying what a Christian worldview excludes:

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