This article appeared in BreakPoint's Findings Journal.

Higher education in the West draws upon earlier traditions that go back several thousand years, but it is the immediate product of the dominant value system of the West for the last 1,500 years since the collapse of the Western Roman Empire. A variety of forces, however, threaten to dissolve it. The intellectual tradition itself is at risk as a result of the divorce of the university from beliefs and values that created it.

CULTURE AND EDUCATION
Every culture on earth has some way of teaching its young the things that the culture values. Every culture has some way of passing on to the next generation its knowledge, values, beliefs, and practices. Every culture has an institutional way, established by custom, for the education of its young. In most cultures, the family has primary responsibility for this education, but beyond the family, the shape of education varies from culture to culture depending on what the culture values.

CULTURES AND LEARNING
Cultures that develop writing also develop distinct institutions or schools for educating their young. When cultures first advance to this level, the skill of writing is known to a relatively small circle of trained scribes. Cultures that develop skilled technology and crafts develop a system for training the young in these areas. In some cultures, a system of apprenticeship emerges whereby young novices work with skilled craftsmen until they become masters at their craft. In some cultures, medicine or the healing art is learned through a period of apprenticeship. The Western “professions” originally were learned through apprenticeship.

Every culture develops some form of “science” or knowledge of the physical world. The most primitive cultures discover medicinal properties of plants, but these discoveries are not made according to the discipline of the scientific method. The primitive culture may discover that something works to relieve pain or settle stomach problems, but it does not necessarily know why something works. In primitive societies, the boundary between the physical world and the spiritual world does not exist. More advanced cultures discover patterns in the evening sky. They track the motions of the stars and planets, the sun and moon, and develop calendars based on the motions of the heavens. While their science describes what they observe, the beliefs of the culture explain why the changes in the sky occur. Primitive cultures develop an interest in numbers, perhaps to keep track of property. More advanced cultures, however, develop an interest in more advanced forms of mathematics that may serve no common utilitarian purpose at all.

ADVANCED CULTURES
When we say that a culture is advanced, we generally mean that the culture has accumulated a great deal of information and skill at using the information it has accumulated. Some cultures accumulate a great amount of information that is closely held by a guild of scholars, shaman, or soothsayers and never used. Under the influence of the conservative philosophy of Confucius, Chinese culture did not take advantage of its many scientific discoveries and build upon them. The belief system of Chinese culture determined the shape of Chinese education and what information and skills would be encouraged. Chinese culture for the last several thousand years may be called “advanced,” but its belief system kept it in a state of stagnation until the twentieth century.

Every advanced culture has produced some form of higher education for a select class within society. In many cultures, this form of education is housed within a religious institution like a temple, mosque, synagogue, church, or monastery. In other cultures, the most important forms of education emerge within the military, the government, or the marketplace. The shape of higher education within any culture depends upon its core values and beliefs, or its worldview. Prior to the globalizing trends that began with the period of European conquest and colonization of most of the world, the shape of higher education and the content of higher education looked different in every culture. What people studied and how they studied it varied from culture to culture, depending upon their beliefs and values, though some similarities and parallels can be seen.

HIGHER LEARNING, BELIEFS, AND CULTURE
The Buddhist monks of Tibet, the Hindu priests of India, the Muslim imams of Persia, the Mandarins of China, and the Christian monks of France all developed systems of higher learning and curricula that reflected their belief systems. These approaches to education, in their turn, helped to shape the cultures in which they developed. While all advanced cultures have their corresponding approach to higher education, the product is quite different. History, literature, mathematics, music, art, medicine, and astronomy may form the curriculum of study in more than one culture, but how these subjects are studied can result in quite different bodies of knowledge. Chinese medicine developed acupuncture while Western medicine developed anti-biotics.

The kind of learning that develops in a culture is inextricably linked to the belief and value system that produced it. Advanced cultures may borrow from older cultures, as Classical Hellenistic culture borrowed from the older Egyptian and Mesopotamian cultures. In borrowing, however, an adaptation takes place. The approach to learning followed by the Greeks differed significantly from that of the cultures from which they borrowed. In turn, Justin Martyr, Origen, and Augustine borrowed from the older Classical culture even as they constructed what would become the new Christian culture with its own approach to learning. That cultures borrow from one another is not unusual, but whether or not the borrowing results in any significant advances depends largely upon the worldview that animates the culture. The medieval Christian culture borrowed lavishly from Muslim culture, which had borrowed lavishly from Byzantine Christian culture, which had borrowed lavishly from Classical culture, yet their approaches to learning moved in different directions.

THE DEVELOPMENT OF WESTERN LEARNING
The modern university, with its broad curriculum, and the scientific method that has fueled so many revolutionary discoveries are the products of the Christian culture of Western Europe. Alfred North Whitehead argued persuasively from a non-Christian perspective that modern science arose as a result of the faith convictions of the medieval world, which provided Western culture with a belief “in the existence of an Order of Things, and, in particular, of an Order of Nature.”[1] It is neither necessary nor particularly helpful to argue that modern science as we understand it in the West could have arisen only in a culture dominated by the Christian faith. It is only necessary to point out that it did arise in such a context.

LEARNING DISJOINTED
What happens when an approach to learning becomes separated from the worldview that gave rise to it? Does it continue and take on a life of its own? It is a difficult question to answer. We have examples of the deaths of old cultures whose educational institutions and understandings of the world came to an end as a living process of learning as a result of conquest. Conquering empires may borrow what seems profitable, but only to the extent that the learning suits the beliefs and values of the conquerors. The barbarian hordes who ran roughshod over Europe for centuries cared no more for the learning of antiquity than Cortez’s army cared for the learning of the Aztecs. Learning requires the nurture of a belief system that cares for it. When people no longer believe in the body of knowledge that the culture has preserved and passed on, or when people no longer care about that body of knowledge, the learning dies. It is not unusual for this death to take place in periods of warfare or in the transition from primitive cultures to advanced cultures, but C. S. Lewis suggested in his inaugural lecture as professor of medieval and renaissance literature at Cambridge University that this death has begun to occur in the modern world.[2]

THE RISE OF WESTERN LEARNING
The last great disruption and destruction of learning in the Western tradition occurred following the collapse of Roman authority during the barbarian invasions. The Byzantine Christians of the East maintained their schools, and the Irish monks on their island preserved what they could.[3] What emerged from the monasteries several centuries later looked quite different from Plato’s Academy and Aristotle’s Lyceum. The Christians had different assumptions about the nature of the world (it was not yet time to talk about “the universe”), and they brought different questions to the body of knowledge they had preserved. Cut off from Byzantium by a continent torn by warring tribes, the West was deprived of the body of ancient knowledge preserved by the Orthodox Christians in the great city of Constantinople, but the scholars of Islam had access to the older tradition and made use of it. How Islam made use of the Greek philosophers, however, always stood under the beliefs and values derived from the Qur’an and the traditions of the elders.[4]

What the West retained of the ancient philosophers depended largely on the extent to which the Church Fathers had made use of them. Augustine’s conversion depended to a great extent on his examination of Plato and the Neo-Platonists.[5] Boethius, the great popularizer of Augustine, also made use of Plato. As a result, Plato was never lost to the West, but the theologians adapted his thought to their concerns and ignored those aspects of his thought that they found irreconcilable to the Bible and Christian faith. The essential beliefs and values of a culture’s worldview form the filter that appropriates and discards ideas. A culture grows or dies depending upon how this filter works. If all alien ideas are filtered out, the culture stagnates. A healthy culture distinguishes between the compatible and the incompatible while it adapts alien ideas that can be helpful. When a culture no longer possesses a uniform collection of beliefs and values, however, it no longer has a healthy worldview to hold the culture together.

Since the Eastern Church (Constantinople) and the Western Church (Rome) were not on speaking terms after the fifth century, the majority of the ancient learning of the Greeks did not come to the West from Byzantium but from Islam. Aristotle in particular played a major role in the development of Western thought because of the appropriation of his thought into the theology of Thomas Aquinas (d. 1274). Aristotle’s theory of knowledge focused on sensory perception of the physical world, whereas Plato’s theory of knowledge focused on the eternal world of ideals. Translated into popular Christian theology, Plato focused on heaven while Aristotle focused on earth. The introduction of Aristotle alongside Plato would play a major role in the shift of the Western worldview and the transformation of Western learning. It is no accident that the great universities of Europewere emerging within the monastic communities during this same period. The great question of Augustine 800 years earlier had been “What kind of God exists?” The great question of Thomas in the high Middle Ages was “What can we know because an eternal, all powerful, all knowing creator God exists?” The monastic communities of learning had the leisure to pursue such questions to the glory of God, who had made all things.

WESTERN PHILOSOPHY, WESTERN LEARNING, AND THE UNIVERSITY
In a worldview, philosophy plays as important a role as theology, because both fields represent beliefs and values. A worldview belongs to a culture, whereas a faith belongs to a religion. The worldview of Byzantium differed somewhat from the worldview of decentralized Western Europeeven though they both shared the same faith. Byzantium represented a line of continuity with imperial Rome established by Octavian at the close of the first century B.C. The city of Rome may have fallen to the barbarian hordes in the fifth century, but imperial Rome did not fall until the Ottoman Turks captured Constantinople in 1453. The cultures of East and West moved along different lines, but each had the filter of the Christian faith to set the parameters of their respective worldviews.

In the West, we can see this process working in the way that Thomas Aquinas used the thought of Aristotle. Aristotle had taught that matter existed eternally, but Thomas could not accept that proposition because of the Christian understanding of creation.[6] Augustine had made similar criticisms of Plato. Plato believed that physical matter had come into existence, but not as a result of the creative activity of God. In fact, Plato argued that matter was evil. The theological critique of Plato and Aristotle, however, resulted in the most important ideas in the development of the Western intellectual tradition and the creation of the university. Christian theology insisted that a real world exists. The Nicene Creed taught that God had created “all things visible and invisible” as the opening words of Genesis and the Gospel of John declared. Plato’s philosophy suggested that a perfect invisible order lies behind the shadowy and imperfect world of common experience. Aristotle’s philosophy suggested that this order can be discovered through the study of the visible world of experience.

The modern Western university and its curriculum grew out of this medieval discussion of philosophy and theology. Over time the various beliefs and values of a culture tend to co-mingle with religion to the extent that the worldview becomes identified with the religion. In part, the conflict between the Eastern Church and the Western Churcharose for this reason. When philosophy and tradition become enmeshed with religion, reforming movements may arise that serve to sort out the various strands of belief within the culture’s worldview. Such a conversation began about a hundred years after Thomas Aquinas as John Wycliffe (d. 1384) raised a number of questions related to the practice of the medieval Church. These questions would continue to circulate within the universities until 1517 when Martin Luther posted his Ninety-Five Theses on the door of the university church in Wittenberg.

THE REFORMATION AND WESTERN LEARNING
In his discussion of the rise of modern science, Alfred North Whitehead dismissed the Protestant Reformation as a “domestic affair” and a “popular uprising” that “drenched Europe in blood.”[7] He managed to think of modern science as somehow unrelated to religion, when modern science is the product of religion, and more specifically, it is the product of a heated debate within the Christian communities of learning. In the Reformation, the principal issue at stake was one of authority.  In the sixteenth century, the science faculty did not observe with detached bemusement the discussions of the theology faculty. The science faculty was the theology faculty. The university was a monastic community. All disciplines were sub-disciplines of theology. Theology was the “queen of the sciences,” and philosophy was her handmaiden. The Protestant Reformation was a debate about not only authority in matters of religion, but also authority in politics and all areas of scholarship.

The change of mind that we call the Reformation began to take place at least 150 years before Luther’s posting of the Ninety-Five Theses, and it would continue to unfold 150 years afterward. The work of Francis Bacon (d. 1626) in developing what we now call “the scientific method” emerged in the context of the working out of the English Reformation. The proposal he made for scientific research involved nothing less than a rejection of philosophy as the determinative starting point for understanding the physical world.[8] Though Aristotle’s philosophy had been the catalyst for engaging the physical world during the high Middle Ages, by the time of Bacon it had become a straitjacket. Just as the theologians had insisted on going to the Bible as God’s revealed Word for its authority, Bacon insisted on going to creation as God’s handiwork to understand the physical order. Calvin and Luther rejected the authority of tradition and insisted upon immediate examination of the written text. Bacon rejected the authority of philosophy and insisted upon the immediate examination of the data. The purpose of the scientific method was not to protect scientific inquiry from the assumption that God had made everything. Rather, the purpose of the scientific method was to protect science from the speculative philosophical systems that explained the world rationalistically by theory without recourse to experimentation. The “God hypothesis” did not hamper science as much as the philosophical explanations of how the world works hampered science. The most famous case of this sort occurred with Galileo, who was attacked and prosecuted by the academy for holding ideas that conflicted with Aristotle’s explanations of the world. Galileo’s great case was not a conflict of science and religion, but of science and philosophy.

THE CONTEMPORARY ACADEMY
The Western university looks different from the models of advanced learning offered by other cultures because the reality posed by Christianity is different from the reality posed by other religions. The reality posed by Christianity raises different questions than the ones raised in other cultures that their education models address. The Western model of education developed from the old trivium (grammar, logic, and rhetoric) and quadrivium (arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and music) of classical education during the high Middle Ages because Christianity has a different understanding of reality than did the Classical world, and its questions developed an entirely different curriculum and body of knowledge.

DISCIPLINES IN THE MODERN UNIVERSITY
The modern university has divisions of disciplines grouped by their similarities: arts, sciences, humanities, social sciences, professions.[9] Because the disciplines of the academy have a tradition reaching back into the early Middle Ages, their very nature and what they examine are inextricably linked to the concerns of the Christian monks who valued their examination. All the disciplines of the Western university relate in some way to the Christian understanding of a personal Creator God, and the different families of disciplines focus upon the assumptions and concerns of Christian doctrines that derive from the Doctrine of God. The arts are concerned with human creativity as creatures made in the image of the Creator God. The sciences are concerned with understanding what God has made. The humanities focus on the study of humans who communicate as creatures made in the image of God, but who also tragically fail to communicate because they have fallen short of the glory of God. The social sciences also focus on humanity individually and corporately, as creatures capable of great achievement as made in the image of God, and great tragedy as creatures who have fallen short of the glory of God. The professions examine what it means to pursue a calling and labor, for we labor with purpose as ones called by God, yet our labor proceeds under the curse of having fallen short of the glory of God. Many of the disciplines in the Western university did not develop in other parts of the world as matters of study, simply because the theological issues that undergird the modern university are not found in other belief systems.

Very few professors in the modern university will probably agree with this assessment, simply because very little that happens in conversation within modern universities gives any lip service to Christianity. The leading theories of many of the disciplines in the modern university are blatantly anti-Christian. Nonetheless, even those who do not believe the affirmations of the Christian faith deal with the implications of the world that the Christian faith affirms. Their disciplines are the result of Christian views of reality. When I was a pastor, I observed that it was not necessary to be a Christian to get married in a church building or to be buried in a church building. The absence of faith does not alter the purpose and design of the building. Real estate agents struggle to sell old church property because it is not suited for any other purpose. It may be turned into a restaurant, but everyone is still aware that its original intent was to be a church. The university is a structure that grew in a certain way because of the beliefs and values of the culture that produced it to teach and foster those beliefs and values for each successive generation. What happens when a cultural artifact, custom, or institution ceases to perform its purpose?

THE SUICIDE OF THE MODERN UNIVERSITY
It is possible for the purpose of a cultural artifact, custom, or institution to be discarded by a culture. When this happens, it may survive for a while with a ceremonial function. At one time, a gentleman walked on the “outside” of a lady when walking down the street. The purpose was to protect the lady from mud being splashed up by horses, or from refuse being dumped on her head from a chamber pot thrown from an upper window (the theory being that the velocity of the refuse would propel it to the outside rather than directly below). With the obsolescence of chamber pots, horse transportation, and pedestrian locomotion, the purpose of walking on the outside grew obsolete. The practice continued, however, well into the twentieth century as a social function to demonstrate who was a gentleman. With the success of the feminist movement, the public display of courtesy by a gentleman to a lady became a matter of ridicule, if not hostility. The result? The cultural custom of walking on the outside has virtually disappeared.

What does this have to do with higher education in the West? If the purpose of education is to pass on the beliefs and values of the culture to the next generation, the modern university is in the midst of a bizarre suicide ritual. The university exists largely as an empty shell in which many of the disciplines have lost their sense of purpose. Once a discipline rejects the values and beliefs that called it into being, it must go in search of new beliefs or return to the beliefs that gave it birth. It cannot survive without a purpose. For the last quarter century, many of the humanities have struggled to articulate their purpose or a reason why anyone would study them. The study of literature has wandered from one faddish methodology to another, largely because literature has attempted to divorce itself from values. The study of history has suffered a similar fate. Historians cannot quite decide what it is one studies when one studies history.  If you reject the idea that history has a goal and a purpose (eschatology), then a common understanding of history soon breaks down. Philosophy itself, which once dominated the academy, has gone through turmoil over its purpose, method, subject, and goal. In short, without the unifying beliefs and values of a worldview, a culture and its institutions are set adrift. Modern education is in crisis because it has lost touch with the unifying basis for the university, the purpose and subject of many of the disciplines of the university, and the relationship between the disciplines. The university has confused the American value that “all men [sic] are created equal” with the notion that all ideas are equal. In so doing, the university has abandoned critical judgment, without which it cannot survive.

Through the influence of Darwin’s understanding of Naturalism, many disciplines of the university have shed their connection to the Western worldview with its beliefs and values. But Naturalism comes at a dreadful cost. Social work has proven itself one of the most intellectually honest of the disciplines by recognizing this cost and refusing to pay it. The social work profession is based on core values of justice and the dignity and worth of every person. These are worthy values, deeply rooted in the faith aspect of the Western worldview. These ideas were contributions to the culture from biblical faith. Through its close association with the social sciences, social work had become quite secular during the twentieth century and had little place for the spiritual dimension of life advocated by religion. In the closing years of the twentieth century, however, the social work profession realized that Naturalism provided no basis for the values they cherished. They were faced with the dilemma of being intellectually dishonest, rejecting their values, or accepting the reality of the spiritual dimension of life. By no means has the profession embraced Christianity as the ultimate truth, but social work has stopped on the brink of the precipice before its discipline could fly apart into meaninglessness.

THE HIJACKING OF THE DISCIPLINES
Various disciplines have fallen prey to similar philosophical domination. The very problem that Bacon identified and constructed the scientific method to avoid was actually embraced by disciplines in the twentieth century. The professions (law, medicine, nursing, business, architecture and engineering, ministry, education) tended to embrace utilitarianism and pragmatism. The dominant question that superseded questions of morality and virtue, much less theology, was “Is it useful and does it work?” The humanities embraced Materialism, which did not look beyond brute matter for explanations. The social sciences embraced Naturalism. The sciences are divided. Biology has largely embraced Naturalism. The more mature sciences of chemistry, physics, and astronomy, however, have opted for what they call “methodological naturalism.” By this term they mean that in their research they study the data as though God were not there. The introduction of this term is a strange departure from objectivity. One would have thought that they would pursue philosophical neutralism instead.

CONCLUSION
As the Western university is adopted by other parts of the world, other cultures struggle with the beliefs and values they see imbedded in Western education. The Dalai Lama has taken an active role in developing a new theological and philosophical basis for modern science grounded in Tibetan Buddhist understandings of reality and consciousness. Similar efforts are underway among Hindu scholars in Indiaand Muslim scholars in many parts of the Muslim world. Christians have a rare opportunity during this time of great change to articulate an understanding of the underlying values upon which their disciplines rest. An intellectual vacuum has appeared that many voices clamor to fill. A strange Christian silence hangs on the periphery of the debates. Christianity has preserved learning twice in the last 1,500 years. It provides a picture of reality that the disciplines of the Western university must have in order to survive. If the West fails, however, and a new Dark Age of brute force appears, be assured that the Christians of the South or the East, who now far outnumber the Christians of the West, will rise to the occasion and develop new institutions of learning in the future.

[9] For a detailed discussion of how the disciplines relate to the Christian faith, see Harry Lee Poe, Christianity in the Academy: Teaching at the Intersection of Faith and Learning (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2004), 93-154.