When I left for Basel in the summer of 1980, my friends warned me that, if I wasn't very careful, I would lose my high view of Scripture. Indeed, I myself was amazed when I witnessed the surfacing of theological liberalism and political radicalism on the campuses of so-called evangelical colleges and seminaries. The ease with which evangelicals could mouth the platitudes of the religious left as if they were a viable intellectual alternative was gobsmacking. Some, though not all, of those who travelled to Europe to earn their doctorates had a strong desire to be accepted and respected by their secular peers. At the present time, it seems as though many Christian colleges and seminaries are either preparing to or are already following the path set by the countercultural left. Those who teach that truth is always relative end up saying the same thing about ethics. What must we think of an evangelicalism that regards this sort of thing as serious scholarship? Some of these "evangelical" schools do not take their doctrinal statements seriously any more. The great Carl Henry once described this as "a murky neoorthodoxy." Many professors have rejected the evangelical position on the Bible without admitting it. As I witnessed in Basel among some of my peers, slowly but surely the doctrine of biblical inerrancy suffered under a thousand qualifications until it finally collapsed under the weight of innumerable compromises.
As my grandchildren enter their college years, I fear they will be easy targets for professors whose goal in life is getting students to think that a college degree requires them to become good liberals. Students naturally admire and wish to emulate their teachers. Who will tell them that the conservatism that these teachers are rejecting as anti-Christian is a misrepresentation of their Judeo-Christian heritage? No wonder theology has become a tool for studying "social class," and biblical study has become a mechanism for subverting truth through a theological sociology of agnosticism.
All this to say that the Christian church needs to recover an understanding of the role that faith plays in education. The church's central claims can no longer be evaded or watered down. Christianity is not a suggestion. It's not merely a process of inquiry. It claims to be Truth. It therefore contains doctrines. Hence true Christianity will always repudiate liberal claims that belief is unimportant or that modern Christians are free to believe anything they wish. Nothing in what I've said here is incompatible with a truly liberal arts education. New Testament Christianity is anything but anti-intellectual as long as the scholar acknowledges the central role that supernatural truth plays in the educational process.
A man can be a doctor of theology and a failure at everything else. The earliest Christian heretics were called Gnostics, meaning "the intellectual ones." Their goal was to turn Christianity into a philosophy, claiming that the simplicities of the gospel required a far more elaborate and erudite knowledge added to them. They failed to understand that true Christianity has no intellectual aristocracy. It presents a gospel for every man and every woman, however learned or unlearned they may be.
I went to Basel at a time when assorted theological hucksters were trying to persuade evangelicals to exchange the historic Christian faith for a new Christianity in tune with modernity. Wise Christians rejected the offer then, and they will do so today.