Why Do We Need a Christian Studies Center at The University of Kentucky?

by Jerry Walls

I vividly recall a conversation that helped ignite the spark that led to the idea of a Christian Studies Center at the University of Kentucky. I was talking with a group of friends including Brian Marshall, Campus Minister at UK’s Christian Student Fellowship, as well as a noted Christian faculty member at UK. In the course of the conversation, I was informed that while UK had a Professor of Islamic Studies and a Professor of Jewish Studies, there was not a Professor of Christian Studies.

I was dumbfounded and incredulous. Anyone remotely aware of the greatest ideological conflicts rocking the world today knows that among the deepest roots of those conflicts are profoundly different world views shaped by religious convictions. One simply cannot intelligently participate in the vital conversations that will shape the future of our world without a critically informed understanding of the religious issues involved.

How can it be, I asked, that a major state university provides academic courses in Islam and Judaism but not comparable courses in Christianity, the religious tradition of the vast majority of students at the University?

Now, one might assume that Christian students come to college with a well-formed understanding of their own religion, and thus, need only to study other religions on an academic basis. The fact of the matter, however, is that many students, even those who have grown up in the Church, come to college with what I will call a “Sunday School” level of understanding of their faith. That is to say, they have never really advanced intellectually beyond the understanding of Christianity they received as children. I have never forgotten a remark by one of my college professors about such “simple” faith. He stated that an informed and intelligent presentation of another religion will always compare favorably with a “Sunday School” level presentation of Christianity. If students are to remain serious about their faith as their thinking grows and matures, their understanding of their faith must keep pace with their intellectual development.

Another closely related reason why serious study of Christianity as proposed by the Christian Studies Center is needed is the problem usually called “compartmentalization.” What I mean by this can be illustrated by an observation of a friend of mine who worked for several years at another large state university. She was herself a relatively new Christian and was puzzled by the striking difference she saw between how Christian students behaved at campus worship services and their attitude and demeanor in the classroom. Whereas God seemed so real to them and they seemed so bold about their faith in the worship setting, in the classroom, it was if God had faded entirely from their minds or was completely irrelevant for the work at hand. The fact of the matter is that in most academic courses in state universities the educational enterprise is carried out as if God does not exist, or at best, is utterly insignificant for the issues discussed in the classroom. Thus, God gets confined to the worship compartment of life on Sunday morning and perhaps Wednesday or Thursday evening, but He seems irrelevant to the rest of life, which just happens to be the vast majority of the hours of the week.

If God is treated as irrelevant to how we think about history or science or philosophy or politics, it is easy to fall into the mindset that Christian truth claims are not actually to be taken seriously in “the real world.” To avoid this mindset, Christian students need to learn to think in a holistic way about the truth claims of their faith, and how those truth claims bear on all of life and all of knowledge. The Christian Studies Center is a powerful way to acknowledge God in the classroom and to help young believers explore how Christian truth relates to and can be integrated with their other studies. Nothing less than this is necessary if we are to take seriously the great commandment, which requires us to love the Lord or our God with all our heart, soul, mind, and strength.

[Dr. Jerry Walls is Professor of Philosophy of Religion at Asbury Theological Seminary and Chairman of the Board of Directors of the Christian Studies Center at the University of Kentucky. He is the author of numerous articles and books, including Hell: The Logic of Damnation, Heaven: The Logic of Eternal Joy, and The Oxford Handbook of Eschatology.]

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