Evangelical Praise
for the Pope’s Remarks

By Dr. Hunter Baker

When my mother was growing up in small-town Alabama, she commonly heard anti-Catholic slurs. In that same town, the pastor of the First Baptist Church delivered some extraordinary remarks upon the occasion of Pope John Paul II’s death. He stated up front that he had some theological disagreements with the Catholic Church, but went on to say that as Christians we should all pray that the next pope would be as great a man as John Paul II had been for the pope is seen as the representative of Christianity to the world. Pope Benedict is now that man.

As an evangelical Christian in the academy, I find myself grateful for Pope Benedict’s leadership in higher education. There is a continuing question echoing through the halls of our buildings: “What’s a Christian college for?” The old view that education is a commodity and that a school maintains its faith by having a Christian president or by hosting devotional exercises on campus has plainly failed to resist the secularizing trend. The Pope clearly recognizes the core of the problem when he asks, “Are we ready to commit our entire self—intellect and will, mind and heart—God? Do we accept the truth Christ reveals? Is the faith tangible in our universities and schools?”

Unless we agree with the Pope, we find ourselves wondering why we as Christians—Catholic or Protestant—should continue to maintain private schools in competition with state-subsidized counterparts. If we provide the same old cake with a different colored frosting, then our entire project comes into question. The challenging reality is that we not only must re-dedicate ourselves to understanding what it means to be a Christian university offering a Christian education, but we must also find a way to better fund our universities.

We should be able to educate more students and have more scholarship dollars to bridge the gap in price with state schools. Our professors should have lighter teaching loads so they can participate in the worldwide scholarly conversation through research and publication. And—dare I say it?—we should be in the business of doctoral education much more ambitiously than we have to date. Christians who have spent five years pursuing a doctorate without benefit of supportive mentors often have little idea of what it means to integrate faith and scholarship.

The simple truth is that Richard John Neuhaus is correct when he says, “There is no such thing as a university plain and simple.” Pope Benedict obviously agrees as he charges the presidents of Catholic colleges with pursuing a brand of education that is confidently and distinctively Christian.