Nightmare on College Avenue

During the late 1960s and early 1970s, a wave of protest and counterprotest rocked college campuses nationwide. Evangelical and fundamentalist schools were no different, though the protests usually took on the tones of the evangelical/fundamentalist family feud. Students fought for and against a list of reform ideas, including ideas about American policy in Vietnam, free speech for students, and greater freedom from traditional lifestyle rules for students. Perhaps more important than these headline-grabbing protests, however, were the radical changes in demography and college attendance fueled by the baby boom and the GI Bill. Just as they did on all campuses, these trends utterly transformed fundamentalist and evangelical schools.

Fundamentalist U

Why do so many conservative politicians flock to the campuses of Liberty University, Wheaton College, and Bob Jones University? In Fundamentalist U: Keeping the Faith in American Higher Education, Adam Laats shows that these colleges have always been more than just schools; they have been vital intellectual citadels in America’s culture wars. These unique institutions have defined what it has meant to be an evangelical and have reshaped the landscape of American higher education. In the twentieth century, when higher education sometimes seemed to focus on sports, science, and social excess, conservative evangelical schools offered a compelling alternative. On their campuses, evangelicals debated what it meant to be a creationist, a Christian, and a proper American, all within the bounds of biblical revelation. Instead of encouraging greater personal freedom and deeper pluralist values, conservative evangelical schools have thrived by imposing stricter rules on their students and faculty. If we hope to understand either American higher education or American evangelicalism, we need to understand this influential network of dissenting institutions. Plus, only by making sense of these schools can we make sense of America’s continuing culture wars. After all, our culture wars aren’t between one group of educated people and another group that has not been educated. Rather, the fight is usually fiercest between two groups that have been educated in very different ways.

Martin Luther’s Views on Mission and Christianization

Reformation and mission are not unconnected concepts. According to Luther, every single person, being a helpless sinner in the eyes of God, needs to hear God’s word as law and gospel. The church’s mission finds its source, content, and strength in the missio Dei, God’s mission to save the lost. The Christian church’s mission on earth is to preach and lend credibility to its proclamation through Christians’ witness of a new life of evangelical freedom. Church doctrine and real-life practice of one’s Christian identity converge on the mission field, that is, in Christians’ daily life of witness as they fulfil their human callings in the new freedom of evangelical faith. It was precisely the lack of an authentic Christian piety, including gospel-aligned practice within medieval Christendom, that prompted Luther to set out on a mission to “Christianize Christendom,” beginning in Germany and extending beyond. Though Luther’s “missionary” agenda crystalized primarily during 1517–1522, he arrived at a fuller understanding of the dire state of Christianity in Germany after his Saxon visitations of 1528. His vision of a genuinely Christian church emerged as he processed the biblical witness in the light of his own monastic experience as an Augustinian friar, the legacy of selected scholastic teachers, medieval mystics and renewal movements, earlier reformers, and the ideas of 16th-century humanists, as well as a number of his contemporaries, and, above all, his colleagues in the so-called Wittenberg Circle. Motivated by his understanding of the missio Dei, Luther’s mission was to destroy the existing rampant idolatry and superstition in its various forms and to reintroduce the theocentric message of the gospel which changes not only humans’ ideas about God and their attitudes toward Him, but also the Christian practice of piety in the areas of liturgy, the personal life of a Christian, and one’s social, political, and economic engagements. United in faith to Christ, believers are moved by the Holy Spirit away from religious schemes of merit to a theocentric, communal vision of life in true devotion, which not merely produces new obedience but entails it. Luther did not champion a one-sided internalization, spiritualization, and individualization of faith. Much of the medieval heritage could be reappropriated in the renewed Christian faith and practice, provided the old forms were conducive to evangelical teaching. Luther realized that the Holy Spirit’s work of regeneration in Christians will never be complete in this life, just as the mission of the gospel will not achieve the conversion of all. Instead, “real Christians” are to live in repentance, ever renewed in faith, hope, and love as they patiently bear the cross of suffering. While never losing hope in the final victory of God over the forces of the devil, Christians must accept that they will always be a minority, constantly under attack by the evil one. Persecution may help the church to live and spread the gospel. In what Luther considered to be the final stage before the imminent apocalyptic closure of history, the newly Christianized, evangelical church must use all its resources for the sake of faithful proclamation of the gospel—even to Jews, Turks, and newly discovered territories (though these emphases are rather marginal in Luther). For this to happen, new preachers and teachers need to be trained and new evangelical schools must be established, which is the duty and responsibility of Christian landlords and magistrates. Christian liturgy and preaching, evangelical catechesis, the singing of Christian hymns, the spreading of Reformation pamphlets and woodcut engravings, Christian art, architecture, and prayer are all effective missionary tools at the church’s disposal. An acute sense of apocalyptic urgency stimulated in Luther not only a highly focused, disciplined, courageous stance and action, and a strong prophetic self-perception, but also impatience with his opponents, which resulted in some inexcusable statements against Jews, “papists,” Anabaptists, and other dissenting groups of his time. While Luther’s agenda of Christianization took root almost exclusively in Germany and Scandinavia, his effort to reinvent an evangelical (i.e., theocentric, gospel-oriented) piety found its new expression in later pietistic renewal movements (among Lutherans, Moravian Brethren, and Methodists), thereby influencing, though indirectly, global Christianity and mission.