The Crossroads of Christianity and Culture

In the ongoing debates about the safety of opening universities a lot of focus has been on the necessity in some fields of having laboratories. As a result many schools and education experts have sought to distinguish between students who need to live on campus where they have access to labs, and students who can as easily “learn online.”  This is a false distinction that demonstrates how little some people (not least some faculty and administrators) understand what a private liberal arts university really is.  We are not vocational schools, whether at the undergraduate or graduate level. We don’t hand out knowledge and skills, test on them, and then hand out certificates so new workers can enter some professional world. There are plenty of universities that do this and many are already online.  The liberal arts university only produces skilled workers as a byproduct. Its real job is to prepare men and women  to be leaders,  in their professions to be sure, but ...

More than 2000 years ago in China there lived political philosopher named Han Fei Zi.  His work gave rise to a school of Chinese political thought called legalism.   The idea was quite simple. If the laws are clear enough and the punishments harsh enough everybody will behave and order will ensue.   The classic legalist story has the philosopher leading a young disciple to the edge of a cliff. It was clear that to step over the cliff would lead to certain death.  And so the emperor asks his young disciple whether an animal ever stepped over the side of the cliff?  Had a child or an insane person ever stepped over the side of the cliff, or even approached it?  When the young disciples answered “no“ the philosopher had made his point. This philosophy actually fit nicely with the earlier Confucian ideal of the "rectification of names." In an ideal society the title of an official, or even the name of a profession, indicates exactly what the person does. No one...

It is past time to completely rethink Christian theological education; starting from the most basic principle that it is to serve the mission of the Christian church. I have been involved in theological education continuously since I was student in the late 1970's. Most of my teaching has been outside the US, but while the schools in Asia and Eastern Europe in which I taught were more conscious of contextualization and cultural diversity than is typical in the US, they still fell under the long shadow of Western European and US models of theological education. That tradition, in its context, had much to offer the church. But the context in which Western models of theological education were formed is gone, and those models must go as well.  Hence an outline of the kind of reflection we need: The sole purpose of the church is the evangelization of the world. It is  to witness to the truth of God’s love as revealed in Jesus Christ so that all humans and human societies may accep...