REDEEMER UNIVERSITY

Our Educational Task: Witness to the Victory of Christ in University Education

We who are members of Redeemer University College are called in our teaching, research and artistic expression to witness to the victory of the cross and the lordship of the resurrected Christ. We understand the overall purpose of a Christian university education to be to equip men and women to serve as witnesses to Christ’s victory in the various vocations they will take up in society. They are to be witnesses not solely by using the opportunities for evangelism that their positions may afford, but by testifying to the transforming power of Christ in every aspect of their professional or vocational conduct as teachers, homemakers, businesspeople, lawyers, journalists or artists, or in whatever other tasks to which God may call them. Redeemer University College seeks to prepare servant leaders who dare to challenge the idols of our culture, and who in the very exercise of their callings bear witness to Christ and his gentle yet liberating rule. In formulating the purpose of university education in this way, we are deliberately repudiating the mistaken conception that study is merely the handmaid of economic competitiveness. It is good that Christian university students should become prepared in the course of their studies to become successful and productive members of society. But when social status and financial gain become the principal goals of education, that good has become twisted and rendered evil. Our students’ first task is, as ours, to witness to God’s rule over creation.

We place high value on the kind of scholarship that is deliberately and explicitly shaped by the Gospel. A faithful witness in the university is committed to study all aspects of what God has made, both in the non-human creation and in human culture, and to pass along these insights to students, equipping them to carry out in all their lives a faithful witness to the coming kingdom of God.

In this task, Redeemer University College participates in two venerable traditions. The first is that scholarly tradition within western culture stretching back to the Academy of classical Greece; the second is the tradition of Christian participation in higher education which had its beginnings among the early church fathers, flourished in the middle ages and was refined during the Reformation and in subsequent ages. As Canadian Christian academics in the twenty-first century, we do not seek to create an academic ghetto in which we might devise a new "Christian" scholarship from the ground up. Instead, we seek to participate in the ongoing work of scholarship from within a Christian tradition which seeks to carry out its academic task in the light of Scripture. More specifically, we stand in the tradition of scholarship rooted in Augustine and Calvin which has been given more recent expression in Dutch neo-Calvinism and its conceptions of the relationship between faith and learning, a tradition associated with such scholars and theologians as Kuyper, Bavinck and Dooyeweerd, among others. Our participation in these two scholarly traditions compels us to discern the religious foundations and faith commitments that shape all theoretical work, acknowledging with thanks the creational insights they confer while seeking to identify and to reject the idolatrous twisting that can disfigure them.

In articulating the task of Christian scholarship in this way we stand against two very different idols of the mind that have had great influence. The first is rational objectivism: in this view, the academic enterprise can be religiously neutral. While some modernist scholars might once have looked upon all pre-theoretical commitment in academic work as something which compromised scientific integrity, the Christian scholar recognizes (with the postmodernist) that no academic enquiry can begin without presuppositions, that all theoretical work is shaped by foundational beliefs. The second of these idols is radical relativism: in this view, since perspectives on reality have been shaped largely by personal experience and by the arbitrary influences of one’s own history, society and culture, all points of view are alike subjective, and objective knowledge of reality is an impossibility. For ourselves, while we do affirm the insight that human knowledge is always shaped to some degree by human subjectivity, we differ from the radically relativist point of view in two important respects. In the first place, the subjectivity that informs scholarship is, at its deepest level, religious in nature. That is, the paradigms and world views that mould theoretical work have not merely evolved to maturity under historical, social and cultural influences. Paradigms and world views are the products of that fundamental and directing power – the religious impulse – which lives at the very heart of humankind. Religion is not merely one more element of human subjectivity standing alongside all the others: it is what shapes and moves them all. Secondly, we reject the relativism that can arise from paying inordinate attention to the subjective elements in human knowledge and knowing. We believe that there is a given order of creation which can be known, and that we are called in our scholarly work to give a faithful account of what we can perceive of that order. Though our knowing never occurs in a vacuum, and though our knowledge is always partial and imperfect, genuine insight into the order of what has been made can be achieved.

For this reason Redeemer University College is honoured to have become the Canadian partner and administrative base of the Scripture and Hermeneutics Project and to stand with the British and Foreign Bible Society, the University of Gloucestershire, and Baylor University in promoting cutting-edge scholarship in the study of the Scriptures that is faithful to the classical Christian tradition.

* excerpted and adapted from The Cross & our Calling (Redeemer University College, 2003)