Dr. Richard G. Jewell '67, President of Grove City College, and Dr. William Anderson, Provost and Vice President for Academic Affairs, kicked off the new 2010-2011 academic year with the Opening Convocation address Aug. 31. The following is a transcript of the presentation. 

Dr. Richard Jewell

Good morning and welcome all students, staff, faculty and administrators to the opening convocation of the 2010-2011 academic year of Grove City College – our 135th year. Welcome also to our four new faculty members and to our sixteen students overseas at the University of Nantes in France, who for the fourth year in a row have the opportunity to hear these remarks via simulcast.

As we begin both today and this year I ask you to join me in prayer: Almighty God, our Savior and Redeemer, who by Your grace has brought us by faith to everlasting life, we humbly ask that You continue to shower Your providence on this great institution. Most importantly continue to provide Your guidance to those who lead, teach and learn here. For we understand that learning is far beyond the mastery of subject matter – it is about the mastery of following a life well lived – a path illuminated by the life of Christ and His teachings.

The path ahead is never easy and the way forward fraught with peril. But with You alongside, we shall come through and proceed in a moral and confident fashion as a community of scholars, teachers and learners. We are together for a short but critical journey. It is a journey that requires mutual trust. It is a journey that requires us to not necessarily accept all, but to examine, in a critical fashion, the policies, ideas, and accumulated wisdom that, over time, has brought us to this point. And it is a process that requires us, in fundamental fairness, to adhere to the strictures of academic integrity and reasonable interaction with each other. We are not perfect, but fallen, so in reaching out for these our highest ideals, we seek Your help and Your guidance, for without it we cannot make it and with it we cannot fail. Amen.

This morning marks the beginning of my eighth year serving as the eighth President of Grove City College. For me, it has been the opportunity of my lifetime. I first came to our College 47 years ago and so it has been the most significant relationship of my life (with the exception of the 40 years of marriage my wife Dayl and I have shared together). So for almost half a century my energy and my passion have continued unabated for our College, its scholars, teachers, administrators and staff and most especially our students.

My topic this morning, “Benchmarks and Bedrock” is actually our topic, and when I say “our” I mean remarks by both myself on “benchmarks” and by our Provost and chief academic officer, Dr. Bill Anderson, on the “bedrock” aspect of the College, which is our Christian underpinning.

There are two ways, I believe, to measure a college. One is to look at its progress and challenges in many areas year over year, and the other is to examine the strength of its philosophy or core beliefs. The two are not mutually exclusive and in our case, in fact, mutually reinforcing. So I will briefly comment on the past years or so and some future challenges and opportunities. We’ll call these areas benchmarks. Dr. Anderson will speak to keeping a Christian College Christian and that, of course, is our bedrock.

Over the last seven years, in concert with the Board of Trustees, led by its very able Chairman, Mr. David R. Rathburn ’79, we have achieved much together. Many new academic programs, new professors, athletic opportunities, new buildings and additional but needed infrastructure replacement and rehabilitation of existing buildings have occurred. I won’t outline all of it except to say that, guided by a campus-wide-prepared and Trustee-approved strategic plan, we have accomplished much. Almost all of the metrics or benchmarks of the 37-page strategic plan will have been met this academic year. Accordingly, we will roll out and reset our strategic plan for the next five years during this academic year. It will be a year-long process involving students, faculty, staff and trustees just as we did before, so all will continue to have a say in the future course of our College.

Next we will complete and begin to implement our first ever comprehensive marketing plan. A number of you have been involved already working with our staff professionals and the professional group we have retained from off campus to assist. The purpose as I have said before is not to change or modify our mission, vision and values but to better position our College and what it stands for to all our served constituencies and to prospective students, parents and supporters across America and around the world.

In the area of fund raising, our life blood, especially for a college that does not, as we all know, accept direct or indirect federal or direct State funds, there is much benchmarking to report. First our annual giving campaign called “Full Circle” for alumni and friends just completed this past fiscal year (ending June 30th) set an all-time record for unrestricted giving of just over two million dollars! Much of this is used to support alumni programs plus student needs and programs. In addition, we raised about $8 million for donor-restricted purposes, much of it for the Capital Campaign. This is a wonderful outcome given the ongoing economic decline of the last two years. We also, of course, continue the quiet phase of our “Grove City Matters” Capital Campaign. We have to date raised in cash and pledges $25 milllion which is a reasonable pace given the financial experiences of the past two years. Our big challenge in the months ahead is to add to that amount so that, hopefully by May, we will be in a position to go public with our campaign so as to invite many more prospective donors into this vital process. And while I am talking about fundraising, I also challenge the Senior Class President Sean Sullivan and the Class of 2011 to match or exceed the wonderful fundraising total for the senior gift established by the Class of 2010. Their gift, as all can see and appreciate, is the new fountain near the Breen Student Union.

Another benchmark for this year, especially for our students and their parents, is our striving to remain affordable. So far as we can tell, our tuition increase this year is about the lowest we are aware of in our state (public or private). Also, the just-released survey of all 77 private colleges or universities in Pennsylvania shows us to have the least expensive tuition, as well as tuition, room and board total costs. Affordability, rigorous academics in a Christian environment – these are great strengths to both espouse and maintain.

The immediate path forward, however, unlike a few years ago, has considerable peril. This past year, for example, those in control at the federal level have essentially federalized most of the federal loan market and enhanced the federal grant opportunities. As all know, to protect our independence we do not permit our students to accept federal loans or grants. So, more than ever, we are competing with Uncle Sam and our government’s endless source of taxpayer money. Health care reform has the potential to greatly increase the College’s health care costs. Other recently passed legislation may impact companies’ and colleges’ various compensation benefit areas, plus a very large federal tax hike affecting at least some Americans is coming in just four months, without further Congressional action.

On the national economic front, employment recovery has been anemic and this, of course, affects you, our students, especially our seniors looking to the job market, and the livelihood of your parents. It also affects our current and prospective donors. And of course, the greatest upset condition of all, inflation, is staring back on the horizon. All of these conditions go to the most important matter that underlies everything – confidence in the economy – confidence in our government leadership and ultimately, confidence in each other and our nation. We have encountered these challenges and obstacles before in our College’s135-year history, and we will do our best to navigate our unique paradigm in higher education that is Grove City College through these times. But it won’t be easy.

So those are a few benchmarks and challenges – as we navigate, however, we do so from a firm foundation – a foundation so well described in Matthew chapter 7, verse 25, which says, “and the rain descended and the floods came and the winds blew and beat upon the house, and it fell not; for it was founded upon a rock.” That rock, of course, represents the teachings of Christ. It is an essential underpinning of our College. Over the past year, my colleague and partner in the senior leadership of our College Provost Dr. Bill Anderson has been contemplating and writing about the importance and effect of Christianity at a school like ours.

Dr. Anderson has been at Grove City College 20 years and has served as Provost since 2001. He is a sociologist with his masters and doctoral degree from the University of Connecticut and an undergraduate degree from Lambuth College. – so I now turn these remarks over to him as he comments on what our “bedrock” is about. . . Mr. Provost:

Dr. Bill Anderson

"Bedrocks of a Christian College: Faculty and Curriculum"

John Henry Newman’s description of the institutional Church also captures the essence of a Christian College and the challenges of keeping it so. He writes:

It is a vast assemblage of human beings with willful intellects and wild passions, brought together into one by the beauty and the Majesty of a Superhuman Power . . . brought together as if into some moral factory, for the melting, refining, and molding, by an incessant and noisy process, of the raw material of human nature, so excellent, so dangerous, so capable of divine purposes.

Willful intellects and wild passions brought together into one . . . so excellent, so dangerous, so capable of divine purposes. Isn’t that exciting? For Divine purposes! Not ours, but Christ’s . . . There is no more exciting calling today than to be in Christian higher education. Here are some reasons why:

First, a Christian college builds a faculty who are experts in their disciplines yet whose hearts are touched by the burning coal of God’s grace — a grace unveiling our Lord’s role in the advance of knowledge and how it is shared and learned — a sense of calling.

Second, a Christian college seeks students committed to stretching their minds, discerning the connections of all knowledge, and growing in their faith and learning.

Thirdly, a Christian college crafts a curriculum that speaks coherently to the times, a curriculum eager to engage the world and bold to speak of Christ as the apex of knowledge and learning — unafraid to assert Christ’s claim over all learning and all culture, showing what He extends to a broken and heartsick world hungry for Him.

However, Christian higher education faces many challenges today. Our world works against providing the continuity that gives our lives a coherent narrative. Our jobs, families, and where we live are ever-changing. A lifetime’s work means nine-10 jobs and four to five different careers. We relocate nine times after graduation, scattering families across the country. Moreover, to use Pope Benedict XVI’s terms, a “dictatorship of relativism” confronts us wherever we turn and questions anything definitive beyond the individual’s self and self-actualization. 

Frankly, it’s dizzying. But there is a way out of our confusion: As Cornelius Van Til teaches us, only Christianity, the Faith, works as a transcendent narrative, for it brings Truth and thus unity and coherence to our stories, learning, and understanding. Only when we implicate our fragmented worlds into Christ does it expose the truth and unity we missed before. A Christian education gives us the tools to do just that: It teaches that all facts, all creation, are of God; in other words, it unites knowledge rather than pushing it to splinter. Indeed only in thinking God’s thoughts after Him can our knowledge and lives express coherence. 

Restoring the Christian college calls us to recapture, through our curriculum and faculty, our prophetic call during times seemingly deaf to our voice. A truly Christian education needs re-embedding in our culture so as to restore balance to our cultural vertigo. Every college lost from the Faith costs us graduates capable of articulating a Christian vision for society with the love of neighbor and devotion to family, community, and church that heals and restores our country. Every college lost from the Faith leaves the public square less accountable and directionless — stealing the healing vision our churches, families, and communities need.

How does a Christian college remain Christian when many see its education as irrelevant or prejudiced copies of other colleges? A college is kept Christian when it steps forward confident in its identity, when as a community it testifies to a unifying Christian ethos starting within itself as a learning community then reaches out to the world. That ethos must transcend pietistic catchphrases. It is revealed in our daily actions toward one another. A Christian ethos, remember, is most deeply etched in what we do, in our smallest acts. The acts of love and forgiveness we speak and show to each other illustrate, indeed promote, the faithfulness to that call. But they require the context of something larger: an intentionally Christian faculty, Christian curriculum, and Christian student life. Today, I will focus upon two important academic parts of that community — faculty and curriculum.

The Faculty:

In 1853 University of South Carolina president and Southern Presbyterian theologian James Henley Thornwell put the matter of a Christian faculty and Christian education succinctly: “Have godly teachers, and you will have comparatively a godly college.”

In the same letter to Governor Manning, he further describes how Christianity unifies a curriculum: “A godless education is worse than none . . . . Man is essentially a religious being and to make no provision for this noblest element of his nature, to ignore and preclude it from any distinct consideration, is to leave him but half-educated . . . . Science languishes, letters pine and refinement is lost, wherever and whenever the genius of religion is excluded.”

Dr. Thornwell says it well. What kind of faculty member keeps a Christian college Christian? Here are some observations drawn from my 25 years in Christian higher education and 11 years as a provost:

First, they should be professing Christians. For a Christian college, faculty should profess to the two essentials of the Faith that unite strengthens the Body of Christ: a personal faith in Jesus Christ with the promise to follow Him as their Lord and Saviour with all that includes. Plus, they should have a high view of the Holy Scriptures—as at least inspired by the breath of God.

Secondly, be Christian intellectuals — not having sectarian or ideological agendas in the classroom. While it certainly is appropriate for Christian colleges to be an extension of their denominational affiliation where applicable, Christian colleges sometimes misunderstand themselves to be churches themselves. But a college is not a church, and our responsibilities under Our Lord are quite different. Again, Cardinal Newman writes:

If then a University is a direct preparation for this world, let it be what it professes. It is not a Convent, it is not a Seminary; it is a place to fit men of the world for the world. We cannot possibly keep them from plunging into the world (with all its ways and principles and maxims) when their time comes; but we can prepare them against what is inevitable; and it is not the way to learn how to swim in troubled waters never to have gone into them.

Because the faculty are intellectuals and scholars, they should want to teach divergent points of view without losing their Christian perspective nor attempting to build a cult of admirers. Young and eager minds can be too easily swayed by the personal charisma of their professors. How tempting it is for we faculty to recruit disciples to our personal ideological or sectarian battles. But, such is not teaching, nor is it education. As the German sociologist Max Weber wrote, “The prophet and the demagogue do not belong on the academic platform . . . . After all, it is somewhat too convenient to demonstrate one’s courage in taking a stand where the audience and possible opponents are condemned to silence.”

Third, be subject matter specialists: Christian colleges have no license to compromise the academic quality of their faculty just because they are Christians. Too often Christian colleges are accused of this; too often we stand guilty as charged. Again, a Christian college is not a church, its classrooms not Sunday schools. The faith commitment of a faculty is essential but is one part of their qualifications. Without it, faculty should not be hired; however, possessing it does not guarantee being hired.

Fourth, be committed to the integration of faith and learning: This area is perhaps the most challenging for assembling a faculty. Graduate education does not encourage it, and the profession does not reward it. Few graduate students have opportunities to prepare themselves for serving in a Christian college—or, upon realizing that it is a lifelong process, to stick with it.

Fifthly, faculty in a Christian college must be open to collegiality, personal and spiritual growth in themselves and their students. One of the deepest rewards of being a professor comes from how the Lord develops each of us intellectually and spiritually as we advance in our careers and minister to students. Yet, the professoriate is no substitute for the pastorate. Just as a college is not a church; professors are not called to be clergy. Their responsibility is broader and more inclusive, especially to show intellectual patience, guidance, and a commitment to dialogue and discussion.

Faculty also are responsible to educate their students beyond mere academic rigor. First, students should be challenged to be independent thinkers. The greatest compliment students extend to faculty is when they develop their own ideas from what they have learned from us, not when they parrot our thoughts alone. Secondly, students need to be challenged to think empathetically about others and other ideas — and to do so with respect and civility. Faculty should be accepting of their students’ viewpoints, holding back from immediate condemnation or correction especially during discussions, modeling an irenic spirit of civil give-and-take irresistible to a student’s mind and heart.

This is a diverse world hungry for Christians who can articulate the reason why we believe but doing so in a winsome and loving way. We faculty know the importance of working through these issues because we did so ourselves and can trace how the voice of faith informed us throughout our lives. Unless we Christian educators give reason for the faith that is in us and do so with our students and each other, we cannot expect to graduate students able to carry the same spirit to the world.

So, how do you keep a Christian college Christian? Through much prayer and discernment, build the bedrock of a Christian faculty. 

The Curriculum:

No major prepares students for five career changes; so, we should highlight the skills that transcend majors. The liberal arts teach those skills by their emphasis upon writing, speaking, quantitative reasoning, and content-area grounding. They prepare graduates for any job, any career because they hone lifetime skills easily transferable to any job. In addition, unifying Christian principles weave the curriculum together with its coherent vision while remaining open to the questions life asks and the answers Faith affirms. Then, the curriculum approaches what it should be—a ladder ascending to God. But many things deter a Christian college from teaching a cohesive curriculum--especially in a consumption-driven culture like ours.

One challenge is that many Christian students and parents expect the same sovereign consumer experience they claim when shopping at a mall — a sparkling retail mix of majors with flattering tuition discounts, course options galore, ready customization of programs, an excellent return on their investment in a job or prestigious graduate school placement, and a recognizable athletic logo to go with it. But Christian colleges are no more a store than they are a church, and faculty should not be pressured to perfectly satisfy customers any more than they be expected to be clergy.

No education embracing the consumerist mentality can deliver an education worth its name, especially not a Christian one.

A second challenge is the ongoing fragmentation of knowledge. Reflecting the same consumerism it tries to educate against, many Christian colleges offer a core curriculum packed with distribution requirements, peddling large numbers of courses from which students may pick and choose how to meet an educational objective. Where is any commonality of purpose in that? Absent the unifying principle of the Faith, an education dissolves into topics apathetic to one another — not even connected enough to be adversarial.

Soon, a college degree is reduced to a checklist of general ed courses finished so students can take the highly specialized “important ones” in mistaken preparation for a single career they never will have in their lives anyway. Not surprisingly, Faith then is compartmentalized in education like it is in our culture — hidden from public view and appropriate only to certain courses and majors.

Students next should be put in touch with the richness of Christian learning across the curriculum. Doing so, we must find creative ways to offset the pressures to increase the number of courses required by majors. Such “credit creep” is the most subtle yet insidious threat of all. Its roots are twofold. First, outside disciplinary (not regional) accrediting bodies demand more specialization of undergraduates than ever before. For them, the unifying foundation of faith and learning is secondary. Be it engineering, education, the sciences, the fine arts, or social work, these accreditations require adding even more courses to majors already crammed to their limits.

Credit creep also comes from misunderstanding the purposes of the core curriculum. Here, the “Core” is expected to carry the bulk of liberal learning, and all else goes to the major, or the “Core” is reduced in favor of the major. Both approaches sacrifice electives as either unnecessary or unimportant. Even worse, both approaches promote the pigeonholing, then calcification, of the Christian mind.

General electives in a Christian college are a necessity. Electives open students’ minds to see beyond their majors fields. Electives set into place opportunities to engage our culture and times through a Christian humane vision that complements some narrowness and specialty in a major.

Electives are especially needed to balance overspecialization in technical subjects. Beautiful in its own right, the mind of technique naturally seeks mastery over its subject (be that in ways to teach, ways to engineer, ways to study Scripture grammatically, ways to study people, or whatever). But technique‘s understanding is limited, often missing the mystery of things by reducing them to “facts” alone.

Sadly, our culture worships technique because we fear speaking to what it helps us to escape: our common humanity and “the problems of the human heart [ever] in conflict with itself.” We really see this when technique exceeds the boundaries of its capabilities. Driven by the cold logic of its formal rationality, it invades areas beyond its competency to reduce problems to technical ones easily subject to instrumental reason — i.e. Just a tweak here and there to create the optimal solution.

Technique is corralled then channeled to the good things, the permanent things, when informed by a Christian education. Unfortunately, across the country, these majors (especially in science and engineering) require so many courses that no room remains for students to take much else. Our future scientists and engineers sadly have no chance to take courses in the humanities and social sciences, courses which by their very nature offer worldview analysis in areas of life as important as any technical field—such as the arts, economics, politics, work, and interpersonal relations. Just as bad, non-science students are gated from science and engineering classes because no seats are open. So, they lose the worldview analysis of science. If all Truth is God’s Truth, how can we justify this?

We need graduates with Christian educations to guide us in all fields, from biotechnology to educational reform. But if our curriculum is gated against acquiring the Christian perspective needed, where will these people be found? How can they be witnesses to our age, prophets to our time, if they are effectively barred from the faith and learning upon which to draw?

Our third challenge is restoring the rightful place of theology and Christian philosophy to the curriculum. In today’s culture, religion increasingly is seen as too divisive — as a private concern. Public faith is called the enemy. It’s disruptive, they say; so, it is reduced to a personal opinion without truth claims superior to any other and deserving no legitimate part in a college education. This prejudice is anti-intellectual. John Henry Newman writes in The Idea of a University that each academic discipline has its distinct sphere. Exclude faith, and the quality of the whole education is harmed. Other fields exceed their bounds and rush into the vacuum to claim Christianity’s place in higher learning. “[These other disciplines] intrude where they have no right” he says. Losing theology from the curriculum thus perverts other disciplines because the one subject able to unify them is gone.

To be more specific, majors should be taught with reference to their Christian foundations. That does not mean that the Scriptures are to be treated as a textbook for everything. Nor does it mean that theology need be forced. Yet the reference point of a discipline’s knowledge should be our Christian tradition and heritage, a promoter of humane learning and serious scientific exploration of the beauty of God’s creation. Every major works this out uniquely, easier in some than in others. But the result is the same: Graduating students able to think Christianly about their lives and their professions.

As to General Education . . . The center of its general education curriculum should be a healthy Christian humanism committed to the nurture of wisdom and virtue and an appreciation for beauty. God created us in His image, and though fallen, we are given grace to stand and accomplish wonderful things for “Divine purposes.” Indeed, His very Son became incarnate in human flesh, not by converting his Godhead into our flesh but instead taking our flesh onto Him. Thus, though fallen and sinful, people possess a dignity as part of God’s creation especially because of the iconography of Christ in human flesh, helping us better to understand suffering, too. The two are tied together. As Hilaire Belloc once said, “That same force which ignores human dignity also ignores human suffering.”

This Christian humanism is very important to keep in mind when constructing any curriculum, particularly a general education curriculum; it binds curriculum so all courses speak to one another. It sensitizes us to God’s creation, the development of knowledge He bequeaths to us, and a deeper appreciation of Him and our fellow men and women. A healthy Christian humanism deepens our graduates beyond seeing their education self-centeredly or instrumentally — i.e. as “What’s in it for me?” or “How much money will I make?” Instead, students hopefully come to appreciate their educations Christianly — i.e. how it privileges them to contribute to God’s creation, serving others in their suffering, too. Then we all will see, in William Porcher Dubose’s words, “It is the Cross that raises us; the pain of the world is the lever by which God lifts us to Himself.

Such a curriculum will inevitably be a counterpoise to the spirit of our age because it is coherent, implicating all learning into God. It challenges the mores of our age, with the Psalmist’s words asking our culture: “What is man, and why art thou mindful of him?” With such a coherency, it will question existing social forms — mass urbanization, government and politics, private and public education, consumerism, family, free market vs. command economies, the privileged position claimed of science in our public ethos, questions of justice and fairness and equity and, of course, freedom.

Perhaps most important, general education should emphasize the consilience or unity of all disciplines with their consummation being in God. As such, it must include from science to literature to art to history and mathematics, along with the civic foundation in history and politics to prepare graduates to contribute to their communities and to the nation--to join in Tikkun olam, “repairing the world.”

More specifically, a core curriculum should include . . . 

1: A strong foundation in the Sacred Scriptures and the Christian tradition which has produced them: How can we expect to graduate students prepared to articulate their faith if they have an insufficient grasp of its major source documents?

2: An understanding of how Christian ethics apply to their daily lives: The Faith is more than doctrines and concepts, fun as those may be to extract and debate. Christ commands us to apply His teachings, too. Learning these applications can be included in the general education curriculum and also introduced in specific courses through opportunities for civic engagement.

3: An appreciation for the beautiful: God created us to recognize beauty — to love it and recreate it. Christian colleges are best positioned to reclaim “the beautiful” from the crudeness our culture and society. If we fail, our students graduate with deformed moral imaginations unable to recognize: what is beautiful, what can be beautiful, and, by extension, the beauty of God and His creation. But with a Christian aesthetic sense, they can reproduce the beautiful in their own lives and be enriched by its presence in others’ lives.

4: A critical perspective on the popular media and pop culture: We ignore this at our peril. The media are becoming the virtual reference points for today’s values, ethics, even role models as celebrity and image fold back upon our reality and establish a media-shaped common narrative. Graduates should be discerning of what they see, hear, and read and be prepared to contribute to the recovery of the image and truth in late Modernity.

5: An understanding of how we got here and the interconnectedness of today’s world: By this, I mean a strong foundation in world history capped by a deeper appreciation of all cultures and religions along with the interplay of those factors with geo-politics. Obviously, concentrated study in modern languages is important, here. Remember, we “People of the Cross” are a people of history and a people of many nations.

6: A critical understanding of disciplines which have rushed to fill the vacuum left by the exclusion of theology from the curriculum. Just as Cardinal Newman warned, both the social sciences and the natural sciences now impose substitute meanings on subjects outside of their competency. Consequently, courses that critically examine the presuppositions of various disciplines — particularly their views of human nature and society and ethics — become central.

7: Science and mathematical education: To counter the materialist understandings of our day, students should learn to hear in nature’s broken accents the voice of God. Yes, students must be conversant in the latest findings in science and mathematics. Yet the material world around us is not all there is, for God is there as well.

8: Teach the unity of body and spirit: We are given our minds, yes, but bodies, too, for service to God. Physical health is the foundation for intellectual and social health, and Physical Education develops those habits essential to ongoing success in life, especially lifelong fitness and nutrition. It teaches us the great lessons of life: that we have strengths and weakness but with hard work and patience they can be overcome. In other words, it teaches us how to handle success and failure. Moreover, it also cultivates leadership gifts and teamwork abilities, both essential to our families and communities. 

How else do you keep a Christian college Christian? Provide a curriculum that is intentionally grounded in the Faith, unified from humanities to sciences to mathematics to physical fitness. Then, graduates are ready to enter their adult lives capable of reasserting the relevance and importance of the faith to our society.
In Conclusion, . . . As John Henry Newman writes in the “Tamworth Reading Room,”

Christianity, and nothing short of it, must be made the element and principle of all education. Where it has been laid as the first stone, and acknowledged as the governing spirit, it will take up into itself, assimilate, and give a character to literature and science. Where Revealed Truth has given the aim and direction to Knowledge, Knowledge of all kinds will minister to Revealed Truth.

While there are many challenges facing Christian education, they are calls to us and to Christian higher education to build upon our bedrocks — to influence our students and the world in which we are embedded by teaching how all true knowledge and learning is God’s.