“Faith and Institutional Purpose”

Position Paper

by Harold Haas

I write as faculty emeritus [a.k.a. academic gadfly] and former professor of psychology. I have been active in Lutheran higher education for some fifty-plus years: LCMS upper division [only] college, Valparaiso University, Lenoir-Rhyne College [L-RC].

First, as academic gadfly, I see L-RC as falling in the third type of Church Related College [Benne, chart p. 49]: Intentionally Pluralist, with a few features each in Critical Mass and Accidentally Pluralist. I was surprised, and a little naïve I suspect, when I came here some 20 years ago, to see how little evidence there was of active Christian involvement: chapel only once a week and poorly attended, few faculty outside of the religion department to whom the College’s religious commitment seemed relevant, a yearly contract form that seemed to ask only that one not be publicly “against” the school’s Christian and church related nature. No chapel, not even a very suitable place to hold chapel. A few quasi-religious music programs a year. Academics and athletic activities seemed to be the dominant themes of the campus ethos. Not even social life, sororities and fraternities and partying, seemed to be more than a minor motif. I attributed this to the tenor of the times: post WW II trends in education and a sparse faculty recruitment pool which did not allow small schools to get too picky in selecting new faculty. I thought I sensed also a cadre among the faculty who believed that religion was passé at the college/university level.

I think things have shifted a bit in the Critical Mass direction with the current president taking a more evident and active role as exemplar of the faith, a more vigorous chapel program with somewhat better student and faculty involvement, a music program with stronger programmatic religious elements. I believe there is yet hope that L-RC may have stopped the slide into an Accidentally Pluralist school and move to the “left” [Critical Mass] on Bene’s chart.

Now, as a former professor of psychology, well-grounded in the naturalistic and scientific assumptions of psychology, my reflections are these. L-RC has fortunately had a history of strong Christian people in faculty and social science positions. The “social and behavioral sciences” [notably psychology and sociology] have regularly had two or more ordained clergy among them [in my time Kupke, Thuesen, Ludwig, Haas]. Why this seeming bias, I do not know, but I don’t think it’s accidental and I’m reasonably sure that we and others in the department have been fairly articulate about our Christian orientation in the classroom. Approaches vary, but there is no such thing as a Christian psychology.

Psychology is a somewhat misunderstood discipline in the public mind. People too quickly identify it with practitioners of mental health. But the core of psychology [and sociology and anthropology] is essentially empirical. These disciplines are data based and guided by naturalistic assumptions and scientific methodologies [not really “anti-supernaturalistic]. How this comes out in the classroom depends very much on the individual professor. How much contradiction there is between this kind of science and Christian faith is complex and debatable and ranges from “there can in principle be no contradiction” between science and religion and a healthy tension about the “where and how” of contradictions and attempts at resolution.