To be fair, old-guards worries are not entirely unfounded: imprudently pursuing reforms would put some evangelical colleges at risk, setting them on the hackneyed path of becoming yet-another liberal arts college estranged from its founding religious mission. If these schools are to maintain a distinctive mission, then judicious hiring practices and faith statements are not beside the point, not only to ensure a clear mission but — and one can argue this on liberal grounds — to foster a rich institutional diversity in American higher education.

This spring semester, California’s Biola University, among the nation’s largest evangelical institutions, opens the doors of its ambitious new Center for Christian Thought. Resembling institutions such as Princeton’s Institute for Advanced Study, Biola’s center seeks to bring a mix of senior and postdoctoral fellows to campus to collaborate with internal fellows and faculty.

The center is unusual in operating from a distinctly Christian vantage point. The mission statement is forthright: “The Center offers scholars from a variety of Christian perspectives a unique opportunity to work collaboratively on a selected theme…. Ultimately, the collaborative work will result in scholarly and popular-level materials, providing the broader culture with thoughtful Christian perspectives on current events, ethical concerns, and social trends.”

If the idea of Christian perspectives raises your eyebrows, it might be time to brush up on Augustine, Aquinas, Dante, Pascal, Kierkegaard, Dostoyevsky, Karl Barth, Martin Luther King, Edith Stein, Reinhold Niebuhr, and many others. Consider, too, the recent scholarship of historians such as Mark Noll, Philip Jenkins, and the Pulitzer Prize winner Edward Larson; political theorists such as Jean Bethke Elshtain and Oliver O’Donovan; scientists such as Sir John Polkinghorne, Francis Collins, and physics Nobel laureate William Phillips; and philosophers such as Charles Taylor, Nicholas Wolterstorff and Alvin Plantinga.

Wolterstorff of Yale and Plantinga of Notre Dame, in fact, joined Biola recently for the inauguration of the Center, conducting a seminar with fellows focused on the Center’s first theme, “Christian Scholarship in the 21st Century: Prospects and Perils.”

Biola’s center is the latest chapter in a comeback of the “evangelical mind.” While serious scholarship by self-professed evangelical Christians did not disappear entirely in the 20th century, it went into eclipse in the postwar period. These decades, especially 1960-1980, saw the high-water mark for Western secularism when, contrary to subsequent evidence of religion’s persistence, Time Magazine in 1966 asked on its cover “Is God Dead?” Social scientists in The New York Times confidently predicted in 1968 that “by the 21st century religious believers are likely to be small sects, huddled together to resist a worldwide secular culture.”

But of course a funny thing has happened on the way to the 21st century: God and religion came back, and institutions such as Biola are capitalizing on the rediscovery of homo religiosus, both as an object of inquiry and, more relevant for the case at hand, as an inquiring subject.

The eclipse of Christian thought in the 20th century did not derive entirely from the inattention of secularists. It can also be attributed to evangelicals themselves, insofar as many individuals and institutions clung to some of the more problematic tenets of “Fundamentalism” (originally a term of honor), which had defined itself against “Modernism” in American Protestantism’s epic internecine conflict that played out in the early 20th century, culminating in the Scopes “monkey” trial in 1925.

At stake was the interpretation of the Bible. Liberal Protestants, “Modernists,” were attracted to both Darwin’s theory of evolution and historical criticism of the Bible, wafting across the Atlantic, primarily from German universities. “Fundamentalists,” on the other hand, opposed these currents, convinced that they represented a mortal threat to what had recently become known as the Bible’s “inerrancy.” Founded in 1908, Biola was squarely in the Fundamentalist camp. (Its first dean, R. A. Torrey, in fact, was a major contributor to The Fundamentals [1910-15], the multivolume “statement” of Protestant Fundamentalism, published at Biola, then called the Bible Institute of Los Angeles.)

Stung by ridicule after the Scopes trial, Fundamentalists retreated to the sidelines of American culture. There they nurtured a parallel universe of publishing houses, magazines, journals, radio stations, and, not least, colleges and universities to combat the threat of secularism from without and the threat of theological modernism from within. One might see this as little more than the predictable, age-old flight of obscurantism from enlightenment. But Fundamentalists were not without good reasons to consider their retreat as necessary to protect Christian supernaturalism and the authority of the Bible from the acids of modernity that they believed were corroding the pulpit and pew of fellow believers.

Fundamentalists carried into exile many core tenets of Christian orthodoxy — the Trinity, the Incarnation, the Atonement — shared by Catholic and Orthodox Christians as well. But they also carried dubious novelties, such as newfangled teachings on biblical inerrancy and speculations about the End Times. What is more, they became pointedly hostile toward American culture and disengaged from serious intellectual pursuits, convinced that Christianity was almost exclusively about “the world to come,” with only negligible concern for the here-and-now.

All of this has begun to change in the past quarter century: evangelical Christians have been shedding their “fundamentalist baggage” and reclaiming a place within deeper traditions of Christian learning and at the table of American cultural life. Signs abound of this recent shift, clearly in evidence by the mid-1990s. In 1994 Mark Noll (formerly of Wheaton College in Illinois, now holding an endowed chair at Notre Dame) published The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind, calling evangelicals to repent of past anti-intellectualism and honor the Creator of their minds with first-order inquiry and creative expression. The book became a manifesto of sorts for younger evangelicals attracted to the life of the mind. Nineteen ninety-four also witnessed the publication of George Marsden’s The Soul of the American University: From Protestant Establishment to Established Nonbelief, analyzing the secularization of mainline Protestant universities and offering a blueprint for revitalized “Christian scholarship.”

In 1995 the journal Books & Culture, was launched; it has become a leading organ of evangelical thought. Significant funding initiatives of the Pew Charitable Trusts and the Lilly Endowment — such as the Lilly Fellows Program at Valparaiso University — also empowered a new generation of engaged Christian scholars, including evangelicals. These developments together with the influence of scholars like Wolterstorff and Plantinga, and the emergence of evangelical Christians into key places of academic leadership — such as the presidencies of Nathan Hatch at Wake Forest and Ken Starr at Baylor — put a new face on evangelicalism. As such, it bears little resemblance to your grandmother’s backwoods open-tent revival anymore, but represents, to quote the title of a much-regarded book by D. Michael Lindsay, president of Gordon College, Faith in the Halls of Power: How Evangelicals Joined the American Elite.

Periphery movements seeking the legitimacy of the center crave the approbation of others. This has been true of the evangelical intellectual resurgence (sometimes to the point of obsequiousness). It has not been remiss in coming. In 2000, the movement received a boost from Alan Wolfe’s cover story in The Atlantic Monthly, “The Opening of the Evangelical Mind,” in which he argued that evangelicals, long the wayward stepchildren of serious Christian thought, had begun at last to exhibit some intellectual heft. Catholics, too, have taken notice. Writing in Commonweal, the historian James Turner of Notre Dame described contemporary evangelical intellectual life as “something to be reckoned with.” And the impact has begun to be felt in the academy at large, as C. John Sommerville indicates in his book The Decline of the Secular University.

The Unwelcome Ghost of Fundamentalism

Is the launch of Biola’s Center for Christian Thought a victory lap for American evangelical intellectual life or at least another level attained on the purgatorial ascent toward intellectual respectability? The answer is as complicated as the question is timely.

It should not go unacknowledged, however, that the desire for respectability is fraught with dangers from the standpoint of Christian spirituality. In John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, one of the more dangerous tempters encountered is Mr. Worldly Wiseman, who seeks to lure the protagonist, “Christian,” off the path toward the Celestial City, not by sin or heresy, but by compromising accommodations to moral duty, legality, and the approval of “the world.” C. S. Lewis argues a similar point in his essay “The Inner Ring”; nothing will corrupt a good man as incrementally, imperceptibly, and thoroughly as when he is mastered by the desire to sit at the table of the wealthy, the influential, the respected. Dante’s Inferno is populated by the educated and well-heeled.

But beyond the problem of Mr. Worldly Wiseman is the problem of Biola itself. The problem of Biola, however, is not the problem of Biola alone; it is shared by a number of the more than 115 evangelical schools in the Council for Christian Colleges and Universities (CCCU), the largest umbrella network of evangelical institutions of higher learning. The problem is, quite simply, lingering attachment to some of the more dubious certainties and habits derived from Fundamentalism and hardened by the Fundamentalist-Modernist controversies of the 20th century.

This presents two acute problems for the emerging evangelical mind. First, in a well-intentioned effort to avoid “scientism” — the belief that all knowledge claims must conform to standards of evidence found in the “hard sciences” — it perpetuates skepticism about science itself. Second, lingering fundamentalist accents put these institutions in a deficient and compromised position vis-à-vis more venerable and enduring resources of fides quarens intellectum, faith seeking understanding — traditions going back to the seminaries of the Reformation era, the universities and monasteries of the Middle Ages, and the earliest formulations of Christian teachings in the creeds and councils of the early church.

This compromised position might be illuminated by examining Biola’s Doctrinal Statement. While such statements should not be presumed to capture the actual range of belief on a given campus, they are crucial for understanding a school’s identity and history and how it wants to be understood by its constituents. And since faculty at many evangelical colleges, such as Biola’s, are required to express agreement with doctrinal statements, they serve a gatekeeping function, even as they sometimes provoke dilemmas of conscience over the scope of possible interpretation.

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Author Bios

Thomas Albert Howard is the Stephen Phillips Chair of History at Gordon College, in Massachusetts, and author of God and the Atlantic: America, Europe, and the Religious Divide (Oxford, 2011), among other works. Karl W. Giberson runs a science and religion writing workshop at Gordon College and is author, with Randall Stephens, of The Anointed: Evangelical Truth in a Scientific Age (Belknap/Harvard University Press).