The Integration of Faith and Learning

David S. Dockery

One of the most influential individuals in the realm of Christian higher education is David Dockery, president of Union University in Jackson, TN.  In one of his recent books, Renewing Minds: Serving Church and Society through Christian Higher Education (Nashville: B&H, 2007), Dockery shows how the integration of faith and learning was once considered the essence of Christian higher education and how this integration was, at one point, the goal of American colleges.

Dockery writes:

I believe that the integration of faith and learning is the essence of authentic Christian education and should be wholeheartedly implemented across the campus and across the curriculum.  This was once the goal of almost every college in America.  This is no longer the case.  Before the nineteenth century every college started in this country, with the exception of the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Virginia, was a Christian-based institution committed to revealed truth.  All of that changed with the rise of secularization and specialization, creating dualisms of every kind – a separation of head knowledge from heart knowledge, faith from learning, revealed truth from observed truth, and careers from vocation.

What happened was a loss of an integrated worldview in the academy.  There was a failure to see that every discipline and every specialization could be and should be approached from the vantage point of faith, the foundational building block for a Christian worldview.  The separation of faith from learning and teaching was the first step toward creating a confused and disconnected approach to higher education, even in church-related institutions (Renewing Minds, 5-6, emphasis mine).

May God bless the labor of those who seek to reverse this trend and recover an integrated Christian worldview in higher education.