The rebellious teenager. . .

There is hardly a stereotype more common than the rebellious teenager who has come to reject everything of the parent and disown his own family.  Curiously, that might be the apt description of the state of the university today.  Everyone knows that the Church all but invented the university but the truth is that today it has all but divorced itself from the Church that gave it birth and a home for most of history.  You could take that one step further.  The university has become such a secular institution -- without respect or place for the Church -- that it cannot allow even token colleges who wish to own and live out their Christian identity.  That is surely the state of things today and it is also true for Lutheran universities who are hardly a realistic competitor for the big names in higher education.  It is also the dilemma for those institutions since they are tempted in both directions -- one which honors their Lutheran identity and is consistent with their Lutheran faith and one which minimizes both so that they enjoy the cache without being committed to all its articles of faith.

The reality is that a school like Luther Classical College is small and less than a blimp on the radar even for Lutheran schools.  The reality is that it is hard to imagine that Lutheran universities would ever begin to look like Hillsdale even though they drool at the prospect.  We do not have the history or the money or the reputation to make that possible.  So what does the Lutheran university look like?  That is the question plaguing every historic Lutheran college today.  What does that look like?  There are Lutheran identity statements which are engaging and positive but it is not the theory that is the problem.  It is living out this idea every day and finding good faculty and interested students to make it all possible.  Underneath the skin of all those decent Lutheran colleges is the desire to be in the big leagues, to become a world class institution and not simply a world class Lutheran institution.  That is the temptation.  We may not be able to play in the big leagues but we would like to be respected by them and appreciated for who we are and what we do.

Roman Catholic universities have surely bought into this desire.  Consider what I posted not long ago about Notre Dame.  It is not alone.  Nearly every Roman Catholic college and university has not only been drawn to the light like bugs on the back porch but has been willing to sacrifice much of its theological baggage and doctrinal fidelity to get the dream.  Honestly, I have trouble remembering the names of any Roman Catholic institutions of higher education which have actually traded the dream for fidelity.  Maybe you can supply some of the names to help me out on this point.  It is not just that these schools do not foster the Roman Catholic mission on their campuses but they seem to be working very hard to undermine that mission.  

Some of it is the employment of non-Roman Catholic faculty, staff, and leadership.  The lottery for big names who might give them secular credibility and attract the diminishing number of young people in our nation is hot.  So what if they do not own the doctrine or support the Roman Catholic mission or, even, contradict it?  Academic freedom demands you have some naysayers to argue against such things, right?  And what is the critical mass here?  How many faculty who dispute your doctrinal identity are enough and how many are too many?  Somebody once said a little bit of leaven leavens the whole lump... or something like that.

I wonder if it might be easier if we gave up the illusion that the Lutheran University is a mission to the unchurched students and world.  Oh, of course, that happens but that is and never was the reason for the Church to establish universities in the first place and it is not the reason why we Lutherans began our colleges.  All of those rationales were internal.  We needed church workers and we valued those church workers as teachers of the faith as well as pastors.  So we began a school in which the mission was to provide such church workers, especially pastors.  Has that changed?  Is that mission now replaced by preparing medical professionals, lawyers, engineers, and a host of other valuable people and occupations with a hint of religious education thrown in?  It does seem like the small numbers of church work students means that no one can really admit that this is the primary mission of nearly all of our schools.  What is the mission?  If we are a religious version of a secular school doing the same things that secular school does but with a twist, that is pretty expensive to provide and pretty expensive for the student.  Is that a credible mission?  Can we afford it?  Is it worthwhile?  Rome must be wondering the same thing.  They have so many more institutions to worry about and so many more schools to monitor to get it right. 

Anyway, those are some of the things I wonder about.  Will the rebellious teenager ever come back home and be happy to be there?  I can hope so but my record of predicting things is so pathetic.  We can pray and I suspect there are many praying with me.