Lead Article

In 1986, after teaching philosophy of religion for seven years at a well-known evangelical seminary, I found myself out of a job. The Academic Dean, convinced that Philosophy of Religion was not an integral part of a seminary education and eager to divert funds into the new doctoral program in theology, persuaded the President to go directly to the Board and have the department closed and the M.A. in Philosophy degree abolished.

Seven years later, Talbot School of Theology opened its doors to the first students in its new M.A. in Philosophy of Religion and Ethics. Was this an incredible blunder on Talbot’s part, a failure of administration and faculty to understand the purpose of a seminary education? Or were they inspired by a different vision that discerned more clearly the strategic role played by philosophy in the task of theological education? Why philosophy? Why Talbot? Let’s take those questions one at a time.

Why Philosophy?

Let me suggest three reasons why philosophical study ought to play an integral part in theological training.

First, Christian philosophy is vital to transforming our post-Christian cultural milieu. In America we now find ourselves living in a post-Christian culture that is increasingly coarse, superficial, promiscuous, and profane. Beneath it lies the widespread conviction of religious relativism. There is no one true religion, and to assert that there is to expose oneself as arrogant, coercive—even evil. In the absence of objective truth, religiousbelief becomes a purely private matter of subjective feelings.

Such a cultural context is inimical to the mission of the Church. In order to speak the Gospel effectively, the Church needs an intellectual milieu where the Gospel can be heard as an objectively true alternative; otherwise it will either be dismissed as superstition or appropriated only as “true for me but not for you.”

The Church thus faces, as Charles Malik emphasized in his inaugural address at the Billy Graham Center in Wheaton, two tasks in our evangelism, saving the soul and saving the mind; that is to say, not only converting people spiritually but converting them intellectually as well. And the Church is lagging dangerously behind with regard to this second task. Malik declared,

I must be frank with you: the greatest danger confronting American evangelical Christianity is the danger of anti-intellectualism. The mind in its greatest and deepest reaches is not cared for enough. But intellectual nurture cannot take place apart from profound immersion for a period of years in the history of thought and the spirit. People who are in a hurry to get out of the university and start earning money or serving the church or preaching the gospel have no idea of the infinite value of spending years of leisure conversing with the greatest minds and souls of the past, ripening and sharpening and enlarging their powers of thinking. The result is that the arena of creative thinking is vacated and abdicated to the enemy. Who among evangelicals can stand up to the great secular scholars on their own terms of scholarship? Who among evangelical scholars is quoted as a normative source by the greatest secular authorities on history or philosophy or psychology or sociology or politics? Does the evangelical mode of thinking have the slightest chance of becoming the dominant mode in the great universities of Europe and America that stamp our entire civilization with their spirit and ideas? For the sake of greater effectiveness in witnessing to Jesus Christ, as well as for their own sakes, evangelicals cannot afford to keep on living on the periphery of responsible intellectual existence.¹

These words hit like a hammer. Evangelicals really have been living on the periphery of responsible intellectual existence. The average Christian does not realize that there is an intellectual war going on in the universities and in the professional journals and in the scholarly societies. Christianity is being attacked from all sides as bigoted or irrational, and millions of students, our future generation of leaders, have absorbed this viewpoint.