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Book Reviews
Benne, Robert. Keeping the Soul in Christian Higher Education: A History of Roanoke College. Grand Rapids, Michigan: Eerdmans, 2017, 284 pp.
How can a Christian college retain its religious identity and mission in an increasingly secularized world? This is the question Bob Benne poses in this insightful history of Roanoke College, which is a continuation of his work on the topic started in 2001 with the publication of Quality with Soul: How Six Premier Colleges and Universities Keep Faith with Their Religious Traditions.
Benne, an emeritus professor at the college and founder of the Benne Center for Religion and Society, traces the history of Roanoke College by chronicling each of its presidents from its founder, David Bittle, to Michael Maxey, who retired just last year. Benne provides the highlights of each administration, along with an analysis of each president’s inaugural address and with other noteworthy speeches. He reveals the college’s Lutheran roots and how its first president was an avid evangelical supporter of revival and an energetic advocate of moral formation for his students. But Benne also shows how the latest president’s inaugural address makes “no mention of vocation, the importance of grace, or faith and learning engagement,” not to mention any reference to Jesus Christ himself. Furthermore, Benne explains that as the college grew, mandatory religious curricula were removed and the emphasis on moral formation became almost nonexistent.
Benne did recap some progress that he and others made during President Fintel’s and later tenures in the 1970s, 80s, and 90s which increased the dialog between faith and culture through well-attended lectures delivered by such Christian lights as Wolfhart Pannenburg, Martin Marty, John Richard Neuhaus, and N.T. Wright, and others. However, what is troubling here is how almost every succeeding administration after Bittle’s has become more and more secularized.
So what is the solution to this slow decline in the faithful mission of Roanoke College and Christian colleges in general? To answer this question, Benne outlines four types of church-related colleges: orthodox, critical mass, intentional pluralist, and accidental pluralist. The first class, orthodox, invites “fellow believers to an intentional Christian enterprise.” The second kind of Christian college, critical mass, presents itself “as a Christian school, but includes others.” The third type, intentional pluralist, presents itself “as a liberal arts school with a Christian heritage.” And the fourth kind, accidental pluralist, is “a secular school with scarcely an allusion to Christian heritage.” Benne seems to think that Roanoke is in the fourth category, accidental pluralist, and should strive to become an intentional pluralist school, stressing its Christian heritage and seeking to hire Lutheran scholars. Benne writes that “the point of such a strategy would be to have an unabashed Christian presence in every fact of the college that would make Christian intellectual and moral commitments publicly relevant to the college.”
But one wonders if this is enough. An intentional pluralist Christian school, the category Roanoke College was likely in seventy years ago, even if attained today, would inevitably slip back into becoming an accidental pluralist school as it follows the secularizing stream of American culture. Might the critical mass status be needed, at the very least, to have any hope for real staying power as a genuine Christian institution? Perhaps Benne believes there is no hope of even reaching critical mass these days, due to the forceful and organized opposition of the faculty at the college.
But leaving aside the debate over Benne’s strategies, it is nonetheless indisputable that Keeping the Soul in Christian Higher Education opens the dialog for understanding what it might take to save our Christian universities from becoming indistinguishable from the public universities which surround them. The question is this: are we willing to struggle against entrenched opposition to preserve our precious Christian institutions of higher learning for the benefit of future generations of the Church?
