The Table Video

Dr. Amos Yong of Regent University presents a paper on the role of the Holy Spirit in Christian higher education by discussing the possibilities and potential pitfalls for the Christian university in the emerging global culture. He also suggests how the Pentecostal and Charismatic traditions might help shape the Christian university in the future.

Another essay on Christian higher education, truth be told, there is by now an industry of such writings that would take any researcher more than a year’s full of a sabbatical to digest. To be sure, part of the reason for the especially recent explosion of works in this domain has to do with criticisms of the university as it has developed in the modern West on the one hand, and with the growth of specifically Christian institutions of higher education on the other hand. With regard to the former, the criticisms of the university, many have lamented that the processes of secularization have eviscerated the fundamental spiritual and moral impulses at the foundation of Western higher educational experiment, in effect, undermining its capacity to contribute to the formation of a free society and to enable the flourishing of human culture. Perhaps in reaction to such trends in the secular academy in the last few decades, there has been an upsurge in the popularity of the specifically Christian university. Students enrolling in such institutions in droves, leading to reflection on their whence and whither.

So amidst those who are bemoaning the future of the university in general are another group more frantically attempting to discern what it means to provide a Christian higher education in the globalizing and pluralistic world of the 21st century, particularly in light of what appears to be the winding down of at least the anti-religious processes of secularization among historic universities of the Western world. Into this fray, I leap. Having been deeply shaped by Pentecostal and Charismatic forms of Christianity, I’m motivated by the possibility that perspectives on higher education from this vantage point will be of interest not only to those in institutions affiliated with this movement or tradition, but to all engaged with the task of the Christian university regardless of ecclesial background or connections.

So to be sure, having also worked within Pentecostal and Charismatic institutions of higher education, I am under no illusions, given the challenges and realities that myself and my colleagues face, that the following presents any kind of final or definitive template for what we do. Yet as unfolded here, and I also think that Pentecostal and Charismatic institutions and sensibilities about the educational enterprise, especially when linked to the broader history of Christian tradition, which is intended to be enfolded in the larger project of which this paper is but a small part, all of this can make a contribution to contemporary conversation.

So this essay serves as a prolegomenon to such a project and does so in four sections. The first sketches the opportunities lying before Evangelical Christians as they consider the task of Christian higher education, while a second examines the specific hurdles to be overcome, in part because of 20th century Renewalist instincts and habits. Section three suggests that the renewal is focused on the person and work of the Holy Spirit, invites for the reflection about what difference such an emphasis makes for the Christian university. The final section briefly sketches the main lines of what such a project might involve. Section one, titled “Global Renewal: “Opportunities for Christian Higher Education.” In order to appreciate that Renewalist Christians, the newest arrivals on the block of Christian higher education, might have something to contribute to this discussion, let us situate the emerging Christian university within its broader historical and global context.

It is no secret by now that it is only in the last century that we can talk about Christianity as a world religion. There are, of course, two sides to the story. On one hand, Christianity has always been a missionizing religion, and its literal internationalization during the 20th century can be understood in connection to many of these missionary impulses. On the other hand, not only have the missionized been agents in their own right in constructing a form of Christianity more palatable for their own times and places, but there have been many other indigenous Christian movements that have also arisen and played roles in the emergence of the present shape of what we call World Christianity.

So if the former missionaries were purveyors also, at least in part, of Western culture to the majority world, the latter have both transformed the gifts of the missionaries for their own purposes, and in many cases, have been motivated in return from the rest to the West to re-evangelize Euro-American nations of the northern hemisphere. On both registers, that of the missionary initiatives, and that of the indigenous reception, mobilization, and re-engagement in reverse mission, so on both of these registers, Pentecostal and Charismatic types of Christians have been arguably at the forefront.

Since its appearance during the first decade of the 20th century, Pentecostal Christians have been intensely involved in the missionary enterprise. Convinced that their empowerment of the Spirit was for the specific task of world evangelization, they courageously brave hostile conditions to fulfill the Great Commission. Although for at least the first half of the century, the results may have been meager, after about the mid, late-1960s and early 1970s, explosive growth has occurred around the global south. Pentecostal and Charismatic forms of Christianity have multiplied exponentially across Asia, Africa, and Latin America in the last 40 years. Not without reason, then, the 20th century has been dubbed by a Pentecostal historian, of course, the Pentecostal century. In a very real sense, as many impartial observers have noted, the emergence of World Christianity has taken on a very real Pentecostal and Charismatic shape. I’m referring here to folks like Philip Jenkins, impartial to some degree, at least not Pentecostal and Charismatic in the obvious sense.

Yet to say this is not to say that there is a homogenous form of Pentecostalism around the world, since there isn’t. Yeah, there are various forms of even Western Pentecostalisms that continue to be exported around the world, but even in these cases, it is more accurate to speak about Pentecostal types that have been received, rather than about any one form of Pentecostalism. Further after the Charismatic renewal was initiated in the 1960s in the mainline Protestant churches, and even in the Roman Catholic Church, there are now many forms of Pentecostal Charismatic spirituality that have persisted across these denominations and church traditions, yet these Christians remain themselves identified… That have stayed within their churches. In these cases, we can talk about a Charismatization and even about a Pentecostalization of these churches, but these Christians remain self-identified within their denominations, or as Evangelicals, or as Catholics, and so on.

Beyond these various Pentecostal and Charismatic types, there have also been dynamic developments around the global south. There are also many forms of indigenous churches across the majority world that have been established independently of either classical Pentecostal, or mainline, or Catholic mission organizations, but have embraced and expressed an undeniable form of Pentecostal and Charismatic type spirituality. These churches look and sound Pentecostal-like or Charismatic-like in their style of worship, in the manifestations of the various spiritual gifts, especially in healing, speaking in tongues, in exorcisms, and so on, but they retain neither the labels Pentecostal or Charismatic as part of their names or self-identifications. In effect, this new wave of Pentecostalized or Charismatized communities of faith are at the vanguard of Christian expansion in our post-Western world.

It is in part because of what is happening on the ground of the World Christian movement that I’ve chosen to talk about Renewal Christianity, rather than to persist with either the Pentecostal or Charismatic label. A recent and widely cited pew forum study entitled “Spirit and Power: “A 10 Country Survey of Pentecostals,” 2006. You can find it easily on the internet. This particular study has already deployed the word renewal or label renewal as the more encompassing category that includes within it Pentecostalism, Neo-Pentecostalism, Charismatic Renewal, and the various forms of Pentecostalized and Charismatized indigenous and independent forms of Christianity around the world. In this context, the more inclusive language of renewal and its derivatives may be more appropriate.

So my advocacy of this terminological shift will be especially important if the intent is to ground the project on a renewally-informed re-reading of select moments in the history of Christian education. Such a move is crucial precisely since much of what Renewal perspectives can bring to the present discussion has already appeared in similar or related guises among Charismatics or other types of Renewal movements in the history of Christianity. So within this broader historical framework, it would be anachronistic to deploy especially the nomenclature of Pentecostalism, since that is now widely established as a 20th century phenomenon. Perhaps not surprisingly, then, given these recent developments in global Christianity, the work of Christian higher education has also accelerated across the international scene.

According to Joel Carpenter, director of Calvin College’s Nagel Institute for the Study of World Christianity, and one of the most astute observers of what is happening in the arena of global Christian higher education, not only are there at present almost 600 identifiable Christian universities in the majority world, many of these Evangelical type, but there are many and upwards of three or four dozen different Evangelical Protestant degree-granting institutions of the arts, sciences, and professions that have been founded both outside of both North America and Western Europe in the last 30 years. Within this milieu, there are only a few institutions with somewhat official university status that are affiliated with what I’m calling Renewal Christianity. Yet amid the globalizing, Pentecostalizing, and Charismatizing trends that we’ve just discussed, these small numbers can be deceiving to the uninitiated.

Futurist demographers are clear that within the next generation, Christianity will increasingly become not only a southern phenomenon, which it already by and large is, in terms of just percentages, but will also be essentially Renewalist in its basic forms, and as this unfold, many of these students will be looking for a Christian education that attends to if not also explains more cogently their religious and spiritual experiences. It is beyond the scope of this essay to discuss these developments, both within and outside of Renewal Christianity in greater detail. Suffice it to say for now that for the foreseeable future, Christian universities will continue to emerge and it is prudent to ask about what it would take to engage its largely Renewalist constituencies.

As in most cases, these schools will be struggling to meet demands in the face of insufficient public and private resources, but amidst these trends and challenges, many institutions in the global south will continue to look to those in the Euro-American West for guidance. I mean, we’ve been setting the pace for higher education for the last couple hundred years. That’s not gonna change. They’re gonna keep looking to the West, so I think we need to think about this. Within this global scheme of things, what might Renewal Christian higher educators contribute to the discussion, if anything. Even as far back as a generation ago, scholars and church leaders were calling attention to the irony that uneducated Renewalist, remember when I say Renewalist, I’m talking shorthand for Pentecostal types, Charismatic types, and all those other related types in that mix, right? Everybody get that?

Audience: Yeah.

Now it’s after lunch. Look to your neighbor real quick. Just look them in the eye and say I am glad. Come on now. Look them in the eye. I am glad.

Audience: I am glad.

That I do not.

That I do not.

Look like you. [audience laughs] Aren’t you? [laughs] Even as far back as a generation ago, I just wanted to make sure everybody’s awake still. We’ve still got 3/4 of this paper, you know? [audience laughs] Man, I used that one too quickly. I should’ve saved that one for a little later. [audience laughs] Even as far back as a generation ago, scholars and church leaders were calling attention to the irony that uneducated Renewalists were flourishing, while educated Methodists, Presbyterians, and other mainline Protestants were stagnating and wondering who should be teaching who. But even if non-Renewalists might have been ready to listen then, Renewalist then and now may neither have been willing to collaborate, nor may have had anything distinctively substantive to say. Why is that?

So part two, which I’ve titled “Hearts and Hands, But Not Heads?” with a question mark, “Challenges for Renewal Spirituality.” Maybe a simple answer to the preceding question is that Renewalists are well-known for their having warm hearts and hot hands, an affective if not infective spirituality, and an intense commitment to mission and evangelization, but not for what is arguably at the center of the educational task, which are cool heads and effective minds. An amen on that one? A couple of you here. Rather, Renewalists stereotypically considered have had resolutely maybe cold heads, [audience laughs] almost a disdain for the intellectual life. If the foregoing proposals are to gain any traction, or the foregoing and then subsequent proposals to now are gonna gain any hearing, we might have to reconsider this matter in some detail. And what if by now across much of the North American Evangelical intellectual world, historian Mark Noll challenged his compatriots at the end of the last century about the fact that there was not much of an Evangelical mind.

While the causes of this were varied indeed, a few of the major culprits in Noll’s estimation were linked to or connected directly with Renewalist Christianity. In particular, Noll’s analysis highlighted the roles played by the Revivalist tradition of the 18th and 19th centuries, the Holiness movement’s prioritizing of a dynamic spiritual life in the mid to late 19th century, and the Prophecy movement and its dispensationalist theological innovations of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. These were all of Noll’s culprits here. For our purposes, in Noll’s assessments, these streams coincided in Pentecostalism. The Revivalist focus on spiritual vitality was consistent with the Holiness call to heart piety and both presumed the minimal importance of the intellectual life in view of their other-worldly and dispensationalist eschatology, in Noll’s accounting.

For Pentecostal Christians, saving souls was much more urgent, given the apocalyptic horizon within which they discerned the signs of the times unfolding. For Noll, this dynamic web of events in the history of Evangelicalism was an intellectual disaster that brought about the scandal of the non-existent Evangelical mind. While Noll’s book was working its way through to publication, Roman Catholic scholar James Burtchaell was researching and writing his, and these labors resulted three years later in his massive book on the disengagement of colleges and universities from their Christian churches, and their concomitant slow spiritual death. Of the 17 institutions of higher education studied by Burtchaell, only one, Azusa Pacific University, I hear that they’re like a rival to Biola or something. Is that right? [audience laughs] Anyway, only one could have been understood as having connections to the Renewalist movement, and even in that case, Pentecostal strands were only a minimal part of the multi-faceted ecclesiastical cord woven into the original DNA of the school. And while in many respects, developments at that school have bucked many of the secularizing trends meticulously documented elsewhere in Burtchaell’s book, it also has been and remains assailed by various internal and external factors. In Burtchaell’s appraisal, the fortunes of schools like Azusa Pacific University were threatened by what he calls “the Pietist instability.”

Beyond what Noll discusses, Burtchaell explicates various aspects of such instability. First, while historical Pietism emerges oftentimes as a protest movement against an overly-scholastic form of religious life, what for the protesting tradition is a simplified account of vibrant and fervent faith in the face of highly rationalized tradition, runs the risk of devolving for the second generation into being merely simplistic piety. There are historical factors to be observed here. This next generation, then, is affectively engaged, but without theological substance. Faith in this case becomes dislodged from learning and this, in turn, undermines the capacity of pietist Christians to build strong theological institutions. In the worst case scenario, for Burtchaell’s overall thesis, such pietistic instability degenerates over time into a liberal indifferentism with the net effect of being the institutional disestablishment of and disengagement from their churches. A number of responses to these charges have emerged from the Holiness side, the Holiness side being one strand that informs Pentecostal Christianity, so I’ve sorta focused in on that little bit.

Not unexpectedly, the rejoinder emphasizes that, quote, “Pietism rightly understood was not a movement “opposed to reason, but one that sought to put reason “in its proper context,” unquote. Yet rather than being a merely cognitive approach to higher education, the pietist model, the rejoinder urges, is integrative, requiring engagement of the whole person in not only right thinking, but also in right worship, right behavior, and, indeed, right formation for all aspects of life. This pietism is a head, heart, and hands religion and the Pietist tradition promotes an education for the head, heart, and hands, one which does not reduce educational tasks to the shaping of world views, but emphasizes formation of the whole person.

You can sorta maybe hear in that a sort of commentary on the side on reformed emphasis on world view formation. Pentecostal Holiness educator and theologian Cheryl Bridges Johns, however, desists from either internalizing this, what she calls, oppressive narrative or offering a rebuttal. She’s actually responding more to Noll, but I’m talking now about her response in the context of Noll and Burtchaell’s thesis about the pietist instability. So instead of buying into the dominant group’s understanding of what the life of the mind consists, Johns exhorts her Pentecostal colleagues to press into the scandal, exploiting the postmodern opening into a plurality of narratives against any hegemonic meta-narrative.

This approach for Johns, quote, “is a way of celebrating marginality “rather than worshiping an elusive center,” unquote. So as such, Johns insists that Holiness and Pentecostal Christians ought to embrace precisely those aspects of the tradition that Noll, in particular, criticized as fomenting Evangelicalism’s intellectual disaster. So, yes, quoting Cheryl Johns, “Let God and let go.” I mean, I’m sorry, “Let go and let God.” Let God and let go, okay, typo here. [audience laughs] Important one. Start over. For Johns, so yes, “Let go and let God,” as the Holiness folks say, and even further, be filled with the Holy Ghost, as Pentecostal Christians urge. To be sure, she realizes such responses represent the scandal, not only of the Evangelical line, but of the intellectual undertaking as a whole. But is it possible that from out of the mouths of these uneducated might come forth embarrassing words? And I would add, tongue speech, even, that reflect, quote, “a knowing which is not a grasping, “but a letting go, a knowing which is not grounded “in its own self-presence, but in the presence “of the source of all knowing,” unquote.

All right, where do we go from here? In attempting to work with Johns, and perhaps to take next steps beyond her, does not mean that the traditional of Renewal Christianity is beyond criticism. Not to recognize the anti-intellectualism that remains suffuse throughout many segments of the movement is to be dishonest. Yet it is arguably the case that most often Renewalist anti-intellectualism derives from mistaken and indefensible dichotomizing of the spiritual and intellectual aspects of human life. So the task will necessarily involve, on the one hand, resisting the prejudices inimical to loving God with our minds, yet simultaneously on the other hand, following out some of the paths charted by Johns, and this does not require an uncritical adoption of other forms of rationality, which may diffuse some of the distinctive gifts that Renewal perspectives have to offer.

Perhaps in short, the goal might be to mine resources from Renewal Christianity that might reinvigorate the task of Christian higher education, while yet being mindful of undercurrents that could, in turn, exacerbate whatever elements of pietist instability that might be lurking behind the scenes or underneath. Is such a via media possible or plausible? Perhaps not if limited only to specifically 20th century Pentecostal resources, but what if our Renewal sensibilities generated a historiographic perspective that enabled retrieval from the history of Christian education, important elements for the present task. So part three, “The Renewal of Christian Higher Education: “What Difference Does the Holy Spirit Make?” Part of the way forward, I think, is to look back, and doing so helps us to discern from out of the heart of the Christian traditions a range of possibilities that might stimulate what might be called a pneumatological vision of higher education.

Such an approach to Christian higher education foregrounds not necessarily the practices and ideas of a particular Christian tradition, like the 20th century Pentecostal one, but precisely because of such a set of perspectives might foreground the Person and work of the Spirit and explore that in relationship to the educational task. So what difference does the Holy Spirit make at a Christian university? Some might think this question quaint, or maybe misplaced. Rhetorically, however, it is now commonplace to acknowledge the return of God, even to the university. Best-selling books over the last two decades have announced not only the search for God at Harvard, but also, indeed, that God has been found at Harvard. In fact, not only has God appeared at what was presumed to be God-forsaken places, even Jesus has showed up. Harvey Cox published a book, “When Jesus Came to Harvard,” 2006.

Where am I? Harvey threw me off here. [audience laughs] It’s not the first time he’s done that, but… [audience laughs] Oh, so yet even if I believe the foregoing is relevant also for secular universities, in particular for Christians who find themselves laboring in such contexts, my primary focus is on the intentionally Christian form of educational projects. In these contexts, especially within the Evangelical world, Jesus is certainly no stranger. Many Evangelical institutions of higher education, especially those affiliated with or seeking formal ties to the Council of Christian Colleges and Universities are explicitly committed to advancing, quote, “the cause of Christ-centered higher education, “and help our institutions transform lives “by faithfully relating scholarship and service “to the Biblical truth,” unquote.

So if the work of at least the Evangelical Christian university is shaped by our christomorphic character, why would it be incredulous or out of line to ask about the Person and work of the Holy Spirit in such arenas? Let us be clear that our shifting to a pneumatological register is not intended to displace or even neglect the Christ-centeredness that marks Evangelical commitments. Charles Malik’s clarion call to the Western university not too long ago about regrounding the task of higher education on its proper christological foundation could only have come from within an Evangelical frame of reference wherein Jesus Christ is the indispensable source, criterion, and goal, even of the scholarly and educational enterprise. More recently, the diagnostician of enfeebled if not absent Evangelical mind turned his gaze toward probing more intentionally about what such a Christocentric life of the mind would look like, referring, of course, to Mark Noll’s book, “Jesus Christ and the Life of the Mind.” If, in fact, Jesus Christ is the center of Evangelical faith, would not this make a material difference for the Christian university?

So Noll makes at least three fundamental, christological, and more specifically incarnational claims that he sees us providing guidance for Christian teaching, research, and scholarship. First, the materiality, humanity, personality, and beauty of the Incarnation invites careful exploration of each of these domains of the created order, including the human realm, and this provides an explicitly theological rationale for him for the many disciplines of the university. Second, everything, then, in light of this incarnational vision, has a form of double-sightedness, identified in the Calcedonian Confession of Jesus’ two natures, and these also invite or at least suggest that there are dual levels, at least two, the theological and the non-theological, that might provide explanatory points of view for any topic. Third, the particularity of incarnation alerts us to the relativity, contingency, and yet dignity of all created and cultural realities, including the disciplinary endeavors designed to study and to understand such. Last but not least, the humiliation of incarnation ought to inculcate in Christians the virtue of scholarly humility. Noll then goes on in the remainder of his book to elucidate how these guidelines are suggestive for Christian thinking and anthropological, historical, and scientific disciplines.

Malik’s prophetic clarity and Noll’s patient enunciation of a Christ-centered educational paradigm are central for anyone interested in the distinctive character of the Christian university. An unambiguously formulated christological vision provides a principled orientation to Christian thinking that is, as Noll’s work indicates, deducible in various ways from out of the core doctrinal commitments of historically evangelical and orthodox faith. While certainly and sufficiently Christian, yet Noll’s proposal remains a partially articulated trinitarian faith. All Christians have believed in the Holy Spirit since the earliest form of the Nicene Confession. I believe in the Holy Spirit. [audience laughs] The Spirit’s Person and work remains minor, if not an entirely neglected theme with little implications or application of Christian life. Even Jesus is Christ only as the one anointed by the Spirit.

So I would suggest not only that Christ-centeredness needs recognition of the Spirit’s work, but that apart from this Christian faith itself would lack this trinitarian character. How can we neglect the work of the Holy Spirit, for instance, if Jesus Christ himself relied on the Spirit in his ministry in sparking the imagination of Jesus and enabling his improvisation in his life and his ministry, and in inspiring his creativity in the words and deeds that we read about in the Gospels? Isn’t it well nigh impossible to retain a vital Christocentricity apart from a vigorous pneumatology? My answer to this question is that a deeply christomorphic vision can only be sustained given an equally expansive pneumatological imagination. This suggests a model of the Christian university that is both Christ-centered and Spirit-filled.

What, however, does the addition of the latter mean? It’s not possible within the confines of the remaining time that we have to fill out this claim, but for a moment, I will quickly summarize what I will presume barely that would be involved in such a task. Well, first, of course, the Holy Spirit is the teacher and guide to all truth. Of course, this involves illuminating the Scriptures, enabling a personal interaction between teachers and students, and between students as well, and between teachers and teachers, and scholars and scholars. In other words, invigorating the learning environment. Yet although I’m a theologian, I am writing about Christian higher education, and so want to do more than just make these abstract theological pronouncements. If the Spirit teaches, we ought to want to know how we should teach.

What kind of pedagogical methods ought we to use, for instance, as those who are filled with the Spirit, or aspiring to follow the Spirit’s teaching? That’s a big question. In other words, what are the pedagogical implications of teaching in the Spirit, if you will? Second, I recognize the Spirit empowers life, and this includes teaching and learning. One Renewal educator warns against any, quote, “domestication of the Holy Spirit, “since that inevitably brings with it “a form of debilitating rationalism “and the loss of spiritual power,” unquote. While I’m also concerned about these matters, I think we should go beyond these homiletic platitudes to interrogate what spiritual power and what spiritual life looks like in the Christian university context.

Does such involve what Renewalists call signs and wonders and miraculous healings? Is that what we maybe reduce it to? What does it mean to engage with these matters and with these questions as teachers and researchers and scholars? Last but not least, of course, the Spirit impassions followers of Jesus to take up his cause with zealousness and urgency, and hopefully my listeners and readers will also be able to sense the passion with which I’m engaged in this task of Christian higher education. But after the immediate adrenaline rush is gone, Burtchaell’s concern is that there is a sufficient foundation to sustain institutions and enable not only their being passed on from one generation to the next, but also to foster their thriving, and that’s part of my concern as an educator in this particular tradition.

So in the end, the coherence of such a Renewalist approach to the Christian university will only receive traction if it can specify the difference the Holy Spirit makes to empowering teaching and imbuing research and scholarship with vitality. If this can be delineated, then the results ought to be relevant for all Christians, and especially Evangelical educators. How then might these Renewalist tongues be translated into a higher educational discourse? So my last section here. I’m not sure. Yeah, we’re doing all right, I think. Last section, “Sketching a Renewal Vision of Christian Higher Education.” So I’m suggesting there might be at least two parts to such a project. The first would involve an essay, historiographically influenced by Renewal perspectives that revisits the history of Christian higher education and identifies therein the outworking of the Spirit-filled life in the formation of the Christian mind. What might be interesting about historic Christian educational practices that would span patristic paedeia, medieval scholasticism, the monastic enterprise, Renaissance humanism, and the reformational, educational enterprise?

So what might be interesting as we look across these broad strands of the Christian tradition is the emphasis on how a divine encounter or encounter with God and sanctifying transformation directed toward a fully-engaged, spiritual, moral, and intellectual life were dominant throughout these educational projects. By and large, these goals, along with many of the attendant means towards such objectives, are evident also in the educational initiatives across the last century of Renewalist history, Pentecostal and Charismatic history. The historical thesis, then, that might be retrieved is that a pneumatologically charged vision of Christian education will involve necessarily a fully Charismatic life, one that facilitates encountering God, that cultivates the sanctified life, and that inspires a transformational engagement with the world in anticipation of the coming reign of God. Obviously, it needs to be fleshed out in terms of how it gets worked out curricularly, both formally as well as extra-curricularly, pedagogically, in terms of research, and so on, which takes us to the second part of such an argument, that would build on this historical account in order to reconsider the nature of the Christian university.

To be sure, the university itself is an incredibly complex phenomenon, and even the qualifier Christian might be understood in many different ways. The goal of such an undertaking, however, ought to be quite modest, our undertaking. And the modesty would merely be to suggest how Christian education might be beneficially rejuvenated in light of perspectives derived at least in part from Renewal Christianity’s emphasis on the Spirit-filled life. My suggestion is that a Charismatically-oriented Christian university promises to open up and nurture spaces that invite the encounter with the transcendent, the encounter with God, that develop formative practices for shaping the moral, spiritual, and intellectual life, and to initiate service in the name and Spirit of the coming Christ.

These basic motifs ought to be articulated as a secondary part to the historical essay. Along the way, a triadic Charismatic theme, a set of triadic Charismatic themes will emerge. The most obvious being the basic dimensions of the human constitution, and how this is engaged in the university task, what the Pietists, as we have seen, have called the heart and the hands and the heads. Each of these domains can be shown to be a site that unfolds how Charismatic encounter, the quest for the sanctified life, and missional service are directed toward realizing the truth, the beauty, and the goodness of Christ in the fallen world. Further following this triadic scheme, the discussions can also be organized theologically or theoretically, for instance, on roles of thinking and feeling and doing.

When I think about… Well, let’s continue on, for instance, on thinking and feeling and doing imaginatively with regard to possible educational trajectories of development in the classroom, outside in extracurricular activities, engagement with the world in service, and then practically or via concrete case study of missional applications. Yet, rather than being independent discussions of what the Gospel writers called the mind, soul, and strength, these are all intertwined. Each discussion ought to presume the other two in order to ensure that the holistic vision of the Christian university is being articulated. So what I hope comes through is an expression of a Christ-centered and Spirit-filled approach to the Christian university that initiates and sustains a holistic and fully trinitarian theological vision for Christian higher education.

All the Renewalists have never been shy in their evangelistic mission. I’m particularly sensitive about charges of triumphalism and elitism that are perennially being cast in our direction. Hence, the preceding ideas are offered not as if they were something new that youthful Renewal upstarts, at least to the business of higher education in general, much less Christian higher education in particular, might have to offer to those who have been up to now their teachers. Indeed, as the preacher said of old, “There is nothing new under the sun.” Rather, what I’m calling for is a re-visitation of the wisdom of the ancients and those who have gone before us, in that sense, a retrieval from the rich heritage of the church, and then re-application of these insights and achievements to our own newly emerging global context. If there’s anything of value in what emerges, it will consist of making new connections for old ideas, in part involving the discernment of the signs of our present times. And what comes about might perhaps be nothing more than seeing how Christ and the Spirit are present and active today, even in the task of constructing, maintaining, and growing a Christian university. Thank you very much.

Audience Member: I have two questions for you. First, while Christians do need seminary-trained clergy, and I do understand the idea of a complete Christian worldview occupying the university or college training, there is an implicit problem. As Christian students hive off into Christian universities, they are abandoning a mission field. As a very selfish and personal testimony, I was won to Christ through the human mediation of a fellow student in an extremely secular university, and I’m grateful he didn’t go off to a Christian college. We were both learning science and engineering, I an unbeliever, he a profound believer in a university that majored in that, and so while the existence of the Christian university is a valuable thing, is it not abandoning an extremely important mission field? That is, during the college student, university student era, one talks to and exchanges ideas with people better than any time before or after in most people’s lifetime, and I think it’s a fertile mission field. I hope Christian students don’t abandon it. The second is more a curiosity. Is it not possible that the best source of Renewal theology is J. Rodman Williams’ book, and that he, from his history, had been a Presbyterian who became Charismatic? Can’t one indeed learn a lot by occupying seriously more than one of the Christian traditions, and do they not come into better balance than if you spend your whole life in one of them?

Yeah, thank you, amen. I would say just real quickly that I think it would be an abandonment only if we did abandon the secular university. In other words, if the church were to invest all of its educational efforts only in the Christian university, and actually do abandon the secular university, then, yes, it would be an abandonment, right? But I think we’ve got a number of different kinds of initiatives in secular university contexts. I don’t think that they’re gonna go away any time soon, and I’d certainly wanna continue to support those initiatives. So in that respect, it’s not a matter of either/or, but it’s a matter of how can we continue to do what we do at a Christian university context better, and how can we also continue to do what we need to do in a secular university context better and more and so on and so forth. And, yeah, I mean, I think one of the remarkable gifts of the Charismatic Renewal, I think, which also resulted in, for example, what J. Rodman Williams was able to accomplish as a Presbyterian who encountered a Spirit-filled life in and through his church, and in connection with other Charismatics and Pentecostals, and then Neo-Pentecostals in the late ’60s and early ’70s is it doesn’t require, as you say, an abandonment of whatever church that one might be in. I think that’s in part why I’m partial to this label of Renewal. This label of Renewal, for me anyway, in the tradition of Rodman Williams, opens up spaces for Pentecostals, but it doesn’t reduce to Pentecostalism. It opens up space for Charismatics, informed by a wide range of Protestant and even Catholic perspectives and commitments, but who through divine encounter, encounter with the Spirit-filled life, can contribute to a mutual conversation. So I think that’s the kind of conversation that ought to continue happening, and hopefully that will happen.

Audience Member: I have a question, Amos. Thanks, that was great, very interesting. I’m really interested in that question, what difference does the Holy Spirit make in higher education? And for you, being someone who’s been at secular universities. You’ve been at an Evangelical university and now at a Pentecostal-oriented university, I’m just wondering, I know it’s a small sample size, but I wonder if you could speak to just your own personal experience. How has being at a Pentecostal place affected, whatever, your experience, or the curriculum, or the way it’s structured? Yeah, in your current situation.

Thank you for that. I think the safe answer for me to articulate is something like we’re working on a book on this, and maybe by the end of the summer, it’ll be much more clearly articulated. So that’s kind of a wait and see kind of approach, but actually, there’s one part in my paper, I think in part two, where I was transitioning between the challenges confronting Renewal tradition, and then in conversation with Johns and a couple others, trying to find a way forward from there. I’m not so sure that Renewalists themselves, or there are a dozen colleges in the Assemblies of God, for instance, that are accredited, and so on and so forth, liberal arts and various kinds. I’m not so sure that we’ve actually articulated what it means to do Christian higher education in this sort of Spirit-filled framework. Maybe we are sort of living it out in some ways, but some of those ways in which we’re living it out do perpetuate still sort of some of the splits between the life of the mind and the life of the Spirit.

Here’s what we might do in classroom versus here’s what we do in chapel. I’m not gonna suggest turning the classroom into a chapel, but what I’m saying is that I think even in Pentecostal contexts, there are still some unexamined dichotomies, that I think if we heeded maybe some more historical examples, actually interrogated our own deepest impulses, what we articulate as dichotomies would be overcome. So my point would be to say that I think this is an important task, not only for us internal to the Pentecostal/Charismatic community, or internal to the Renewal tradition, but hopefully if we can find a way to articulate a more holistic approach, that we might actually live out in some respects. But having developed theological or other kinds of educational categories to yet talk about, that’s really, I think, in part what we’re trying to get at also in this project. So short answer is, we might be living out some of this better than in other places, but our language is still very much dichotomized in a lot of ways.

Audience Member: Since you’re teaching us to, in some ways, change, and maybe make a decision of some sort in the university setting, what would be losing if we changed over to maybe a more pneumatological viewpoint in our university setting? If we’re going from one thing to another, what do we, in a sense, lose out on? I mean, it could be positive losing, you could say, but what do we lose out on in your point of view?

Wow, okay, so I think we might lose out on a couple things. One, we would lose out on a view of the life of the mind that is overly abstract. Two, we would lose out on a view of affectively engaged Christian life as overly emotional. Right, in other words, I think the second part is just as important. We might think of affectivity, for instance, merely as reducible to some kind of an emotional investment, emotional response to things, and I think that may be a part of it, but I think that there’s a lot more about the affectivity of our constitution that needs to be engaged, pedagogically, and in all these other kinds of ways that will provide a richer notion of what affectivity means and, actually, that rich notion of affectivity can also inform what we think about when we think about the life of the mind. Now the life of the mind is not, in that case, abstracted from, or ought to be considered as separate from our embodiment, our affectivity, and so on. In other words, I think what we lose out for is this sorta set of dichotomizing, these kinds of spheres. We do this over here, we do this over here. I certainly wanna think that there are gonna be instances in which we’re doing something over here and something over here that are very intentional, but I think that intentionality needs to be thought through within the framework of the larger university context. How will we be intentionally engaging these certain aspects of our lives here? But how does this now tie into rather than leading to a bifurcation, so that, oh, we’re doing that over there, but we’re doing this over here, right? How do they actually come together? I think finding ways to articulate how what we’re doing in different spaces are interconnected is part of what we’re gesturing for.

Audience Member: So, Amos, I have a question. Thank you for your paper. This question, I think, comes out of my own frustration. So bear with me on this.

I’ve borne with you for three months. It’s fine. [audience laughs]

Audience Member: Ooh, thank you. [audience laughs] It seems that so much of university life these days is under a sort of corporate, I don’t wanna say stranglehold. That’s too strong, perhaps, but it certainly is run by a corporate ethos, right? And so the question is, how reasonable is it for us to expect that whether it’s christological or pneumatological, that the structures of the institution of the university are going to be permeable enough, open enough to even receive this kind of vision?

Whew! [audience laughs] Okay, so bear with this response. [laughs] Very, very half-baked. One of the things that we wanna tackle in our book is this issue of what, in the past, has been called distance education, and in the present is called online education. I don’t think there’s any doubt about the fact that these developments on the horizon, well, not just on the horizon, but currently, in many ways come out of the economic structures and the market structures within which we inhabit. So this is part of our question, what does it mean to be Christ-centered and Spirit-filled, if you will, online? [everyone laughs] I mean, it’s difficult enough to think about how to be Christ-centered and Spirit-filled with my wife, and so on and so forth, in just these very, very concrete things of the world. [audience laughs] So the book will come out in about four months, and I would heartily recommend it to you. [audience laughs] But, no, it’s a serious question, because online education is part of what we have to wrestle with, and so how do we form heads and hearts and hands in this kind of environment? I don’t think that we can get away from still finding ways to think about incarnation and Pentecost within what I would call this virtual space, and all virtual space is also inhabited by bodies. So our students, wherever they might be at online, are also concrete somewhere, and so we need to find ways to link these embodied spaces that are in part mediated electronically. [upbeat music]

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