Global Pentecostal Renaissance? Reflections on Pentecostalism, Culture, and Higher Education, by Jeff Hittenberger
How might Pentecostal higher education contribute to a Global Pentecostal Renaissance?
Though the Pentecostal movement was born among people of few means and, in general, little formal education, it has had remarkable success in establishing institutions of higher education, and these institutions have played a major role in the development of the movement. Here we consider the potential role Pentecostal higher education might play in the emergence of a Global Pentecostal Renaissance. To this end, a review of the roots of Pentecostal higher education is in order.
The first of the Pentecostal institutions of higher education were short-term Bible schools focused on training people for church ministry and missions. Eventually, these short-term schools expanded the range of their curriculum to become multi-year Bible institutes and Bible colleges, many with residential facilities for students. Many of the people who graduated from these institutions went on for further study at seminaries and universities and some became intellectual leaders in the Pentecostal movement. For example, Dr. Russell Spittler, who started at Southeastern Bible College (now Southeastern University), went on to earn his Ph.D. at Harvard University and to become Provost at Fuller Seminary and Vanguard University. While Pentecostals were initially skeptical of seminaries (often likening them to “cemeteries”), in recent years Pentecostals have established numerous seminaries and “advanced schools of theology” around the world.
Beginning in the 1950s and ‘60s, Pentecostals began to establish regionally-accredited liberal arts colleges, sometimes as new institutions (such as Evangel College) and sometimes as the next stage of development for existing Bible colleges (such as Southern California Bible College, which became Southern California College, and is now Vanguard University). This movement toward multi-major colleges responded to a desire among Pentecostals for a kind of higher education in which their children could prepare for careers outside the church, but in an environment that was not hostile to their Pentecostal experience and Christian faith.17 Not only the AG, but also the Church of God (Cleveland, Tennessee), the Foursquare Church, and the International Pentecostal Holiness Church, among others, have established Christian colleges staffed largely by Pentecostal faculty and staff.
In order to care for God’s world, we must seek to understand it.
In the past decade, many of these Pentecostal colleges have refashioned themselves as universities, following the lead of Oral Roberts University, established in the 1960s as the first American university in the Pentecostal tradition.18 Ten such Pentecostal universities are now functioning in the United States alone, with others being established in Asia, Africa, and Latin America.19
With the launch of liberal arts colleges, Pentecostals began to engage a broader world of learning in domains beyond the traditional Biblical studies curriculum. They were faced with the age-old question posed by second century theologian Tertullian: “What indeed has Athens to do with Jerusalem? What concord is there between the academy and the church?”20
To answer that question, Pentecostal leaders in higher education looked to older Christian intellectual traditions and began to bring the ideas forged by others into a Pentecostal context. Of particular influence were ideas from evangelical institutions like Wheaton College. Schools like Wheaton, in turn, drew on centuries of Christian reflection on the relationship of faith and learning, rooted in Christ’s command to “Love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength.”21
To early Christian educators, loving God with all one’s self meant, among other things, participating in the cultural mandate. God provided humanity with stewardship responsibility for the world that God made and called “very good.” While nature is for our use, that use is to be made responsibly and with care, given that we are sub-rulers (or stewards) over the Creation that God made and rules in an ultimate sense. As humans have filled the earth, we have often failed to steward God’s creation, with devastating effects both for ourselves and the earth. Human stewardship for God’s creation cannot simply be accomplished by an individual. It is within human societies governed by the shared beliefs of human cultures that decisions are made and actions are carried out that either care for the creation (including human beings) or destroy creation (and human life).
In order to care for God’s world, we must seek to understand it. That quest for understanding takes many forms, through many “modes of inquiry,” including the study of Scripture, the study of humanity (hence, “humanities” and “social sciences”) and the study of the natural world (hence “the natural sciences”).
One of the early debates within Christianity was about whether the ideas and writings of non-Christian thinkers on matters such as these were appropriate subjects of study and inquiry for Christians. Tertullian urged caution, though he had a deep education in the pagan writings.22 Clement of Alexandria (c. AD 150-215) embraced learning that would enrich Christians’ understanding of God’s world, whatever the source of that learning might be.
Clement, Origen, Augustine, and other early Christian educators laid foundations on which Catholic monks and others built during the Middle Ages, culminating in Thomas Aquinas’s ambitious efforts to draw on Aristotelian thought in constructing a Christian philosophy. During the Middle Ages, though, the seeds were sewn for a conception of knowledge that would dichotomize the “sacred” realm (inhabited by those with a religious vocation) and the “secular” realm (inhabited by everyone else).
Category: Living the Faith, Pneuma Review, Spring 2013
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