Scholarship
Our Legacy of
By Dr. James Watson
The idea of a “Christian liberal arts university” may, at first blush, seem like an inherent contradiction. In fact, when I was first asked to write this brief reflection on the legacy of scholarship at NCU, a friend asked me whether it wouldn’t be wiser to avoid the term “liberal arts” altogether, for fear that some readers might take it amiss. Of course, I hold our readership in higher regard than that, and so let me begin by saying it flatly:
Northwest Christian University is a Christian liberal arts university—and that is precisely what she ought to be.
D
uring the first week of my freshman writing and research classes, I write the words “liberal arts” on the whiteboard, and then ask the students to define them for me. Sharp as the students are, I’m usually met by an uncertain silence. The confusion stems from a mis-parsing of the phrase itself, which, etymologically, has nothing to do with the modern connotations of either “liberal” or “art.” And so I begin to trace the history of the phrase on the board: “artes liberales” comes into English from the medieval Latin, and refers to the seven branches of study that made up all of classical education (no “hard” versus “soft sciences” dichotomy here).
“liberal arts” actually means “the studies befitting a free person.” A slave or serf had no need of knowledge beyond basic mechanical utility. As I remind the students, they are by definition “free
The real revelation, though, is that the word “liberales” does not describe the artes (studies, skills) at all, but rather the nature of the scholars themselves who are undergoing the task of acquiring them—that is, free persons. And so
persons” (whether they feel like it or not) simply by virtue of having been granted the historically rare privilege of pursuing knowledge at a university. And thus in our writing classes, we begin our apprenticeship in “rhetoric” with an
14
Winter 2020 | The Beacon
awareness of the mantle of responsibility attendant to this privilege. But this does not remove the question: how can a Christian—purportedly concerned with things “not of this world”—spend her time pursuing truth and beauty for their own sakes, when there is so much “practical” work to be done? This tension is not new. The leaders of the Stone Campbell Movement out of which our university was birthed wrestled with the same questions. The very cornerstone of their ideology was a rejection of ecclesiastical complexity in favor of “getting back to the basics” as they saw them. “No creed but Christ; no book but the Bible” was their battle cry. We can hear an echo of this in today’s various evangelical philosophies. This outlook would seem to preclude much in the way of university study. However, both Barton Stone and Alexander Campbell did value
