David Greer, Ph.D.
Rochester University
Professor of History
THE PURSUIT OF TRUTH AND FREEDOM
Founded in 1959, North Central Christian College—subsequently Michigan Christian College, Rochester College, and now Rochester University (RU)—was, like many other private American institutions of higher learning, established with two broadly-conceived missions in mind. One was—and remains—distinctly “spiritual.” That is, founders sought to provide an environment for the encouragement and development of Christian faith, devotion, and leadership, or, as more recently expressed, a place to foster spiritual formation and growth. This was understood, of course, from within the particular tradition of Churches of Christ, whose relevant theological, historical, and cultural characteristics are among the topics treated in these essays. The other mission—envisioned as the best means for achieving the first—was to provide a high-quality, regionally-accessible education grounded in the liberal arts. The founders believed that a liberal arts curriculum not only provided essential knowledge in a wide variety of disciplines, but also developed skills, personal attributes, and habits of mind for functioning effectively in the world and society. More fundamentally, the “liberal arts”—as their historical origins and the term itself attest—were held out as a learning regimen for the development of “liberated”—that is, free, creative, clear-reasoning, and independent—individuals.
These two missions, though different and not infrequently in tension, shared powerful impulses: among them, both affirmed the pursuit of truth and both advocated for freedom in the endeavor. Also, as Keith Huey and Mark Love highlight in accompanying essays, both of these “missions” had deep roots in the American religious movement of the early-to-mid-nineteenth century from which Churches of Christ emerged, most often referred to as the “Christian,” “Stone-Campbell,” or “Restoration” movement. Nathan Hatch, eminent among historians of nineteenth-century American religion, observes of the Restorationists that “theirs was a religious movement that brought into question traditional authorities and exalted the right of the people to think for themselves.” Likewise, Richard Hughes, among the most prolific and influential interpreters of American Christian primitivism and Restorationism, and a lifelong member of Churches of Christ, adds: “Even a cursory review of the early literature produced by the founders . . . reflects their preoccupation with Christian freedom and the right of every Christian to search for truth.” That preoccupation drew deeply from Protestant, Enlightenment, and American Revolutionary inheritances and related notions of liberalism, egalitarianism, democracy, and an anti-elite populism. The latter was exceptionally potent in the trans-Appalachian frontier where the Restoration Movement was strongest (and where many hardscrabble inhabitants imagined being looked down upon by polite society as the “deplorables” of the day).
ALEXANDER CAMPBELL AND THE LIBERAL ARTS IDEAL
Among early leaders of this “largest indigenous Christian movement in the United States,” Alexander Campbell (1788-1866) stands as foundational—not only for much of later Church of Christ doctrine and culture but also for the movement’s approach to higher education. It was he more than any other “founder” that advocated for Restorationists to acquire a broad education in the arts and sciences, freely using the best scientific, literary, and philosophical scholarship of the day. While he articulated the movement’s intense anti-elitism and prejudices against denominational creeds and clergy, Campbell’s “populism” bore no anti-intellectualism. Indeed, unlike his Restorationist co-founder Barton Stone—to whom we shall quickly turn—he was decidedly unenthusiastic about religious “enthusiasm,” emotionalism, or revivalism, certainly as any reliable substitute for sound reason, knowledge, or adherence to the biblical text. Campbell’s own Bethany College, founded in 1840, demonstrated his commitment to liberal education. His was an Enlightenment-infused Baconian philosophy—rationalist, empiricist, and textualist. That his approach and arguments would in later eras be found wanting in some particulars, even among many within Churches of Christ (for example, his assertions that the Bible is a book of scientifically reliable facts and clearly discernable patterns that requires no speculation) does not detract from the valuable legacy of his conviction that faith and learning were ultimately harmonious, dignified, and mutually beneficial in God’s created order. God’s world as well as God’s text had something to teach humanity about God. That powerful liberal arts ideal was carried forward in the establishment of later colleges and universities by heirs of the movement, including the founders of Rochester University, who desired a “liberal arts college with Christian ideals” that would be “open to students of all faiths.”
BARTON W. STONE AND THE “APOCALYPTIC WORLDVIEW”
Campbell’s priorities and methods, however, were not the only ones in the heritage of Churches of Christ, nor the only ones available to inform the culture and priorities of colleges and universities of that tradition. The “Stone-Campbell” label exists for a reason. Barton W. Stone (1772-1844), the other key founder of the movement, shared much with Campbell but also differed in profound and consequential ways. The separate movements of the two men merged in 1832 in common service to, for example, visions of ecumenical unity, primitivist restoration, anti-creedal nondenominationalism, anti-clerical egalitarianism, advocacy for total separation of (institutional) church and state, simplicity in worship, and the authority of scripture. Nevertheless, differences of emphases, priorities, and doctrine (on present-day miracles and workings of the Holy Spirit, for example) also reflected divergent worldviews and sustained strong tensions within the presumably united fellowship. The result, in one later historian’s outsider view, was to produce “perhaps the most schismatic [movement] in American religious history.” Although Campbell, through his voluminous writings and well-publicized debates, and by providing system, order, clarity, and a sense of certainty in doctrine and practice, became the dominant influence in the Restoration Movement, Stone’s vision and spiritual emphasis persisted in influence and maintained a potent (or at least potential) check on and challenge to the more modernist, rationalist, and—as will be noted—nationalist “Campbellites.”
That vision reflected what Hughes has deemed Stone’s “apocalyptic worldview.” This does not refer so much to millennial expectations or speculation about end times but rather “an outlook that led Stone and many of his followers to act as though the final rule of the kingdom of God were present in the here and now.” Hughes explains: “Though Stone seldom used the exact phrase ‘kingdom of God,’ he routinely used phrases such as ‘God’s rule,’ ‘God’s reign,’ and ‘God’s government,’ and he sought to live his life as though God’s rule were complete in the present world.” This had major implications for Stone’s reformist and restorationist priorities. Unlike Campbell’s reform, which was “primarily rational and cognitive, focusing on . . . forms and structures,” Stone’s foremost concerns were “ethical and spiritual, focusing on inner piety and outward holiness.” The apostle Paul’s admonition in Romans 12:2—“Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind”—was key to Stone’s thought. Separation from the values and norms of the larger culture to lovingly serve in God’s kingdom was the essence of faith and discipleship. Christians were but strangers and resident aliens in the world, being in it but not of it, belonging to a different order and bearing different citizenship. Among other things, Stone “called on his followers to open their lives to the Holy Spirit and, in the power of the Spirit, to abandon self for the sake of others, to render aid to those in need, and to stand with those who suffered.”
The social implications of Stone’s views were—and remain—enormous. In his day, Stone expressed his vision by living humbly, donning plain attire and traveling often as a poor itinerant, preaching and ministering largely among impoverished frontier folk. (He had in fact been born to moderate wealth and was college educated, had once abandoned plans for a career in law, and eventually took up editing a movement journal, The Christian Messenger, from 1826 to 1844.) Care for the poor and marginalized was an imperative. Moreover, he and most of his followers openly condemned the institution of slavery, eventually speaking out in support of abolitionism and incurring threats of violence that came with it. (In the 1830s, Stone and his wife moved from Kentucky to free-state Illinois, at least in part to emancipate slaves she had inherited from her Tennessee mother.) In short, Stone lived and taught counterculturally and prophetically in expression of radical discipleship under an apocalyptic—that is, a kingdom of God—vision.
As noted, both Campbell and Stone advocated for Christian restoration and freedom. However, where Campbell thought more in terms of restoration of original forms and freedom from denominational creeds and authorities, Stone was much more concerned about restoration of pure Christian ethics and freedom from the values of a corrupted secular world, American society included. Campbell’s modernist optimism about the potential for moral progress and Christian restoration once oppressive systems had been removed; his noticeable affection for the achievements of Protestant and Anglo-Saxon civilization; his measured confidence in American ideals and institutions in an era of Christian “Awakening” and rising “Manifest Destiny” nationalism, even to the point of harboring hopes that the United States might indeed become God’s chosen agent for the millennium; and his surprising trust in the state to provide sound moral training—all of this indicated a degree of comfort with the culture of his time. In stark contrast, Stone’s bias was anti-modern and anti-nationalistic. He held out no hope whatsoever for human moral progress, let alone salvation, through any state, government, or other secular agency, or through any modernist reasoning, science, technology, or other human ingenuity. Righteousness, hope, and peace were to be found not through “worldly” values, institutions, or innovations, but only through a wholehearted embrace of apocalyptic reality and values.
Here the political implications of Stone’s views were—and remain—enormous. Since all governments and nations were pretenders and usurpers of the rightful reign and rule of God, they were illegitimate if not demonic. It followed, Stone argued, that Christians must not be co-conspirators through participation in political systems, whether by office-holding or, in a democracy, electioneering or even voting. Christians could and should submit to authorities as scripture commanded, so long as doing so did not violate God’s moral law or justice. Obeying most civil laws and paying taxes, for example, remained duties. But Stone held that to be Christian was to be apolitical in the affairs of the world, neither posing a threat to authority nor being an aider and abettor. Certainly, Christians should not engage in armed rebellion or fight in wars. “A nation professing christianity [sic], yet teaching, learning and practicing the arts of war cannot be of the kingdom of Christ,” he declared. God’s kingdom was peaceable and holy and therefore called for faithful, absolute pacifism. Here again Stone urged believers to detach from “worldly” values and live counterculturally, prepared both to accept any resulting suffering and to take delight in the blessings of living under the sovereign will of God.
It is worth noting here that pacifism was a pervasive though not universal position of Restorationists and Churches of Christ up to the First World War era. Indeed—and perhaps surprisingly in light of their later history—Churches of Christ once represented “one of the most important American pacifist sects.” Even the Civil War and its heady passions did not generally coax movement leaders away from this stance. This may be less surprising when we remember that Restorationists were largely made up of relatively poor, “outsider” folk “with a class-conscious membership” who were “grounded in left-wing Protestant perspectives” and skeptical of traditional policymakers. But even the well-educated and well-traveled among them such as Campbell, one of the wealthiest men of West Virginia, argued for pacifism, highlighting war and violence as incompatible with Christ’s teaching and the primitive church’s practice.
Yet one more political implication of Stone’s apocalyptic worldview demands attention. Indeed, its greatest import was not fundamentally political, but a matter of identity. Christians’ recognition of the kingdom of God as real, present, and paramount necessarily rendered all other identities and loyalties, if not meaningless, at least conditional and dependent. Hence, for Stone and his spiritual heirs, nationalism—broadly speaking, devotion to a particular state, ruler, ethnicity, race, caste, heritage, political system, ideology, or any group or organizing principle other than Jesus Christ and one’s fellow subjects of the kingdom—was unthinkable. Nay, it was idolatry. The scope of God’s love and concern for humanity and his creation was boundless, boundary-less, and borderless. Nationalism and its relatives such as racism, social injustice, and other forms of discrimination, by prioritizing and preferring some people over others, stood in defiance of God’s kingdom of equally beloved subjects.
COUNTERCULTURAL HEIRS: DAVID LIPSCOMB AND JAMES A. HARDING
Stone died in 1844 and so did not live to witness the devastation of the Civil War, the joy of slavery’s end, or new convulsions that quickly followed: the rise of white supremacist activism; Jim Crow segregation, convict leasing, and lynching in the South; rapid expansions of corporate power, wealth concentration, and labor unrest in the industrial North, and dizzying changes in social and material life under industrialization. Among those who did, the most influential heirs of Stone’s apocalyptic vision from the era of Reconstruction to the First World War were David Lipscomb (1831-1917) and James A. Harding (1848-1922). Both men, themselves college graduates, exerted a major influence not only on emerging Churches of Christ but also on higher education within that tradition. Based in Nashville, Lipscomb was, in Restorationist historian Leonard Allen’s view, “unquestionably the most influential leader among southern Churches of Christ in the second half of the nineteenth century,” while Harding “emerged in the closing decades of the nineteenth century as a leading evangelist, debater, and educator among Churches of Christ.” Without question both men manifested aspects of Alexander Campbell’s Baconian rationalism and biblicism. They were “modern people within a modern movement rooted in modern perspectives,” as John Mark Hicks and Bobby Valentine note in an insightful study of the pair’s legacy. However, Lipscomb and Harding also fundamentally championed the apocalyptic tradition of Barton Stone and thoroughly “critiqued the progress of modernity.”
Lipscomb is the most obvious case in point, for, as Hughes has observed, “he reflected Stone’s countercultural views almost perfectly.” Reminiscent of Stone, for example, Lipscomb “identified with the outcast and the poor, resisted racial discrimination, and refused to vote or fight in wars.” The horrors of the Civil War had dispelled any earlier confidence he had in human institutions and deepened his identification with the kingdom of God, leaving him thereafter a fierce Christian pacifist and skeptic of all civil government. He laid out his strong views as editor of the Gospel Advocate magazine from 1866-1912 and in his influential Civil Government: Its Origin, Mission, and Destiny, and the Christian’s Relation to It, which also first appeared just after the war. Like Stone, notes Allen, “Lipscomb believed that all human government represented the rebellion of humankind against God’s sovereign rule.” The kingdom of God was “a transcendent reality that alone should claim Christians’ allegiance.” Lipscomb would scoff at the idea that the United States was, could be, or should seek to declare itself a “Christian nation,” having lived through both North and South making such claims in the Civil War and political activist groups such as the “National Reform Association” (an earlier NRA) and “Evangelical Alliance” seeking an amendment to the Constitution explicitly declaring Christian nationhood as a shield against secularism, non-Protestantism, and radical ideologies like Marxism.
Harding, an 1866 graduate of Campbell’s Bethany College, likewise evolved toward a thoroughly apolitical and pacifist position on the basis of a commitment to a kingdom vision. Governments, he held, stood as separate, rival kingdoms to God’s. The United States or any other government was “not a necessary prop to help support the Christian faith but was actually a Satanic seduction away from the utter dependence on God.” Christians lived as “foreigners” in the world, bound like resident aliens and sojourners to submit to government—to obey laws, pay taxes, and pray for leaders. The faithful, however, would “not seek to advance the agenda of the kingdoms of the world.” To participate in violence or coercion, to threaten it, or even to offer any proactive support to secular power was but to participate in Satan’s designs.
It should be emphasized that Lipscomb and Harding’s positions were not first anti-political, anti-American, or anti-denominational, but rather pro-kingdom in the apocalyptic tradition. Christians were to be “a distinct people [who] had values distinct from this age.” As summarized by Hicks and Valentine, Christians are “stewards of God’s good gifts to be shared as freely as they were received”; so, for example, “the poor are not considered a burden but are regarded as the preference of God’s heart. The color of one’s skin, in the shadow of the second coming, [loses] all relevance as a basis of relationship. Indeed, a church that is truly a beachhead of God’s reign will risk cultural alienation for the sake of those victimized on the basis of social location and race.” The Stone-Lipscomb-Harding tradition was foremost a radical commitment to “seek first the kingdom of God and His righteousness.”
Hicks and Valentine fully acknowledge that both Lipscomb and Harding, as Stone and Campbell before them, were imperfect vessels, sometimes falling short of their own ideals—as do we all—by too closely mirroring their cultural inheritance. Lipscomb, notwithstanding his outspoken condemnation of racism, still manifested an unfortunate amount of “White Man’s Burden” racial paternalism, and both he and Harding remained “social segregationists in relation to race.” Also sadly, with regard to higher education, neither of the colleges they established in the turn-of-the-century years—the Nashville Bible School (founded by both men in 1891) or Potter Bible College in Bowling Green, Kentucky (founded by Harding in 1901 and no longer existing)—admitted Black Americans. The former institution, which would evolve into today’s distinguished Lipscomb University, did not change this policy until 1964—such was the potency of Jim Crow and the power of culture.
Despite such flaws and blind spots, all too common across white American society, Lipscomb and Harding did seek to strengthen Christian commitment with higher learning in service to a God-centered mission in the world, holding out that the kingdom of God was not to be equated with any nation or denomination (even a “nondenominational” one). The “Nashville Bible School Tradition,” as Hicks and Valentine have named it, sought “God’s fully consummated kingdom” on earth by calling for peaceable, non-nationalistic, countercultural lives open to all humanity and marked by, for example, “the spiritual disciplines of prayer, Bible reading and caring for the poor.”
“APOCALYPTIC” DECLINE IN AN AGE OF WAR, POWER, AND AFFLUENCE
David Lipscomb died in 1917, notably just months after the United States had declared war on the German Empire in the “Great War” (not yet the even more tragically named “First World War”), and James Harding followed just a few years later. At the start of the war in 1914, the Church of Christ—which only recently had emerged as one of what would be three distinct “fellowships” (denominations) of the once unity-aspiring Restoration Movement—still constituted “the largest peace church in the nation.” But a combination of aggressive U.S. wartime propaganda, surveillance, and prosecutions, mounting editorial attacks from within the fellowship (some quite ferocious), and a longing among many church leaders and members for greater social legitimacy took their toll. For the apocalyptic tradition, states Joshua Ward Jeffrey, “the damage inflicted by the conflict ultimately proved fatal”—or nearly so. Voices of pacifism and apoliticism were marginalized or went silent altogether. On this subject, Keith Huey offers a poignant observation: “The turn away from apocalypticism came through experience, not theology.”
In short, World War I produced conditions—both external and internal—that accelerated a decline in the influence of the Stone-Lipscomb-Harding apocalyptic tradition in favor of what became over the succeeding decades a more nationalistic, pragmatic, and culturally mainstream movement—one which, although presumably more thoroughly “modern,” nevertheless continued to maintain much of its “outsider” exclusivist identity and legalistic impulses. There was a momentary revival of pacifism within Churches of Christ and other denominations in the anxious years of economic depression and gathering war clouds leading up and into the Second World War. That revival found cover in a broader surge of American isolationist sentiment (embodied, for example, in the original “America First” campaign). But shock over rapid Nazi German conquests, American naval run-ins with German U-boats, and at last the surprise Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor snapped most minds back into line. The cultural environments of the Second World War, the Cold War that followed, and the unprecedented American power and wealth in the postwar decades were not conducive to pacifist, anti-nationalist, or other countercultural appeals. The vision and priorities of Stone, Lipscomb, and Harding seemed distant indeed, now largely discredited or muted in the fellowship’s publications, “lectureships” (the closest thing the congregation-based Church of Christ had to denominational conventions), and college administrations. In the absence of a meaningful “apocalyptic” check and challenge, Churches of Christ—at least in the more numerous and increasingly prosperous white congregations—became more politically active, conservative (including intensely anticommunist), and comfortable in mainstream American culture. This was certainly a significant factor contributing to the fellowship’s greatest period of growth, reaching from fewer than 700,000 members in 1946-47 to over two million some twenty years later, with the large majority still in the southern “Bible Belt” region.
THE SINGULAR ERA OF RU’S FOUNDING
And so it was in this less “apocalyptic” and more “modernist” era of Church of Christ evolution that North Central Christian College welcomed its opening class of students to a newly prepared campus in “remote” Avon Township (later incorporated as Rochester Hills) in the fall of 1959. More than five years of planning and preparation had already passed since the first recorded meeting of area leaders to consider such a possibility. Representing various Detroit-area congregations, the number and sizes of which had significantly grown during the influx of migrants drawn by war production and the postwar auto-industry boom, founders and supporters lamented the absence of a nearby liberal arts college that reflected their particular denominational tradition. Among other interests, they hoped to keep their college-bound children closer to home by providing an alternative to the fellowship’s southern flagship colleges.
To describe the era of RU’s founding as extraordinary is understatement. The Second World War alone, writes historian Richard Polenberg, had “radically altered the character of American society and challenged its most durable values.” Massive wartime federal budgets, over ten times larger than any of the Depression-era New Deal budgets, had enabled the United States and especially the Detroit region to emerge as the “arsenal of democracy.” Adding to the dramatic economic recovery was the relief, elation, and pride of victory in what most Americans believed had been a morally clear-cut war. (The revelation of Holocaust and Japanese atrocities had only enhanced the notion of a righteous cause.) The defense of freedom and democracy had restored familiar themes of national identity and mission, which, as with Manifest Destiny before, was readily connected in many American minds with the will of God. The United States was not the only power critical to victory, of course, but Americans nevertheless had emerged from the war with far and away the most benefits. As a later Harper’s Magazine editor reminisced, “In 1945, the United States inherited the earth.” With scant physical damage suffered at home—Pearl Harbor excepted—the U.S. now dominated the global economy. By war’s end, for example, the U.S. owned two-thirds of the world’s gold reserves, half its shipping, and more than half its manufacturing capacity as former competitors—friend or foe—had become exhausted or destroyed. (Especially important to southeast Michigan was that by 1947 Americans produced 80% of the world’s automobiles.) Also, as the recent movie Oppenheimer has reminded us, the United States held a monopoly of atomic power, albeit briefly. (As for Oppenheimer’s movie release rival Barbie, we would only note that the Barbie doll, which would demonstrate America’s postwar affluence, consumerism, Baby Boom, and global cultural power, was introduced in 1959—the same year as RU’s founding.)
The majority in American society—including those within Churches of Christ—now embraced the U.S. role as “leader of the free world.” Moreover, with the rise of a “Cold War” against a new ideological, strategic, global, and soon nuclear adversary, Americans readily supported a massive expansion of the federal government, military expenditures and commitments, and international activism and intervention. (The G.I. Bill, Marshall Plan, CIA, NATO, Korean War, and rising “military-industrial complex” exemplified this, as would also the war in Vietnam and space program.) The culture of fear—reflected in fallout shelters, “duck-and-cover” school drills, the McCarthyist “Red Scare,” John Birch Society conspiracy-mongering, and a U.S. strategic doctrine of MAD (“Mutually Assured Destruction”)—was far from the peaceable kingdom that Stone, Lipscomb, and Harding had so fervently advocated for God’s people to occupy. Ironically, the apocalyptic tradition now appeared least in evidence at a time when the possibility of human self-annihilation appeared most in evidence.
As in the “Manifest Destiny” periods of the mid- and late-nineteenth century, prosperity and expansion served up plenty of temptation to Americans and American Christians to project successes and satisfactions of the moment into claims of U.S. “exceptionalism” and God’s perpetual favor. Added to that was the temptation to assume that the “unrighteousness” of an adversary (then, the Soviet Union and communism) rendered one’s own nation, institutions, and ideologies more righteous. Without an effective apocalyptic rebuttal to such hubristic thinking, the temptation to equate national interests with God’s (or vice versa) was all the greater.
CONSTRICTED VISION
An even more glaring problem in the absence of a strong apocalyptic voice among at least white Churches of Christ in RU’s founding years was a dulled sensibility about the era’s great moral issues of social ethics and racial justice. Coincidentally, the 1954 U.S. Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education appeared nearly concurrently to the first planning meeting of hopeful RU supporters. The Court decision denounced the racial “separate-but-equal” doctrine, launching desegregation efforts and an intensified Civil Rights Movement that featured the likes of Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King, Jr., and a host of other Black leaders, including the prominent Civil Rights attorney and Church of Christ preacher Fred Gray. To all this, as Richard Hughes recalls from his own memories and scholarship, the typical white Church of Christ response was mostly tepid. “Why,” he asks, “were we so reluctant to see the implications the gospel holds for large-scale issues of peace and justice?” This reflected more than entrenched racism or the Jim Crow cultural context of a southern-based denomination; it reflected as well the diminishment of a theological framework that would offer greater access, empathy, validity, and urgency to cries for relief and justice. This moment did not call for Campbellite rationalism and textualism, but for the prophetic witness and countercultural conscience of a Stone, Lipscomb, or Harding. Alas, that powerful voice of the Restorationist past was now too thin, with too few ears to hear it.
Such were some of the contextual elements of the founding of the liberal arts college that would become Rochester University. The southeast Michigan founders and supporters, as bearers of the rationalist-legalist Church of Christ heritage of the 1950s, were perhaps more constricted in their theological and hence social-cultural and fellowship vision than what a robust apocalyptic tradition—equally drawn from the Restoration heritage—might have enabled. Nevertheless, they were also, by fortune of geographical and cultural distance, less bound by the southern cultural constrictions that weighed so heavily on most other of the fellowship’s educational institutions. Reflecting their own regional realities, for example—as Beth Bowers notes in her essay—RU’s founders adopted a non-segregationist policy from the start, and soon thereafter a vision was cast to attract students from beyond Churches of Christ. The new college also exhibited the optimism of an era of denominational growth by developing a strong missions emphasis and ethos, which in turn encouraged a wider global vision and open-mindedness toward other cultures. Even so, there is no getting around the sense of a missed opportunity for Churches of Christ and, by then, Michigan Christian College, to have offered a more distinct and sustained contribution to the peace and justice issues of the 1960s. The diminishment by that time of a compelling prophetic voice from within the Church of Christ’s own heritage certainly played a role.
CONCLUDING OBSERVATIONS
Today, of course, the geopolitical, political, economic, social, cultural, technological, environmental, and religious contexts in which we are embedded differ just as profoundly from that of the founders of Rochester University as theirs did from that of Campbell and Stone or Lipscomb and Harding—indeed, one might easily argue, much more so. And yet the dual missions to cultivate both spirit and mind in devotion to transcendent reality and truth—that is, to God’s kingdom—remain as essential as ever. They still together form the basis and justification for RU’s existence. Certainly, as Huey argues, the liberal arts ideal of Alexander Campbell and RU’s founders should remain a core value and high priority for Christian higher education and not sacrificed to narrower or more “pragmatic” aims and outcomes. More to the focus of this discussion, however, is consideration of the value of the “apocalyptic tradition” in our institution’s heritage for its present and future. A few concluding observations might be offered.
A first point to be made is that this tradition draws us back to first principles and priorities. It focuses us on ends before means or methods; hence, it asserts and affirms purposefulness and value to the whole of the educational enterprise as a worthy endeavor in relation to ultimate truth—which is God. Relatedly, the apocalyptic vision infuses a deep Christian piety and spirituality to matters otherwise mundane or merely pragmatic. In short, it reminds students, professors, staff, administration, trustees, and supporters that what we do together and in our respective roles matters in the most fundamental way. We should regularly and gratefully refresh ourselves in this affirmation, individually and collectively.
Another observation is that the Stone-Lipscomb-Harding orientation offers a powerful countercultural impulse and challenge to which we might turn for grounding, guidance, and inspiration. Even if many of us are not prepared to embrace categorical pacifism or apoliticism, we may certainly agree with the apocalyptic tradition that, in recognizing God’s authority on earth, Christians are called not to accept conventional priorities, definitions, and values as normative. Instead, we advocate and seek to embody an alternative, kingdom-of-God vision and set of values, which may sometimes and for certain matters parallel secular views and interests, but also often will not. One implication is that we should remain extremely wary about aligning our identity, energies, and resources—or even appearing to do so—with any particular political, ideological, partisan, or national agenda or agency. (Among concerns at the present historical moment, given their demonstrated potencies, are nationalism and its most pernicious and self-contradictory form, Christian nationalism.) This, of course, is not to counsel unconcern or inaction. Pacifism is not passivity. Matters of peace and reconciliation, social and racial justice, environmental health, and human health and well-being, for example, remain important for Christian attention and activity. An apocalyptic outlook cautions Christ-followers neither to accept the world in its broken state, nor to abandon it, but to engage with it as a countercultural offering. As Hicks and Valentine remind us, the example has been set by God, who neither accepted creation’s estrangement, nor abandoned it, but radically engaged it, not with force but through love at the highest sacrificial cost.
Connected to the previous point is that the apocalyptic tradition calls us to adopt a view of humanity in which all members reflect the image of the creator and hold equal worth. Systems of value disparity such as nationalism, racism, genderism, wealth, power, caste, sexuality, health and ability, age, or heritage stand against the ethic of all being subjects equally loved by and responsible to God. The apocalyptic tradition in fact calls for attention to those who are disadvantaged, neglected, and suffering under such human schemes. The apocalyptic tradition reinforces a transnational and multicultural perspective, not merely a national or monocultural one; it prioritizes relationship over rules, competency, or achievement; it beckons us into a beloved community; it is inclusive and ecumenical; it offers, shall we say, an open table.
We would do well to recover much of the values and practices of this part of our Restorationist and Church of Christ heritage.
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