Reformed Tradition and the Mission of Reformed Colleges
James D. Bratt, Professor of History, Calvin College

[This paper was originally delivered at the Reformed University in North America Conference, Grand Rapids, Michigan, March 11, 1993.]

The Puritans of Massachusetts Bay organized Harvard College six years after they founded their colony. It took Anglican-dominated Virginia 80 years longer to found William and Mary. More remarkably still, the Quakers did not get around to establishing their first college, Haverford, until 1856, 175 years after they had arrived in Pennsylvania. Haverford was the fifteenth college begun in the state; ten of its predecessors originated out of Reformed denominations. The commonwealth's first venture in higher education, the College of Pennsylvania, began as a joint Anglican-secular venture, some 70 years after the colony's start.

With apologies to Robert Frost: "Something there is about Calvinism that likes colleges." I bring up colonial American examples not just to underscore that adage but because the contrast between Puritan and Quaker cultures has clear relevance for the future of Reformed higher education in North America. At least that is the lesson I take from E. Digby Baltzell's provocative study, Puritan Boston and Quaker Philadelphia (Boston: Beacon Press, 1979), from which I am shamelessly cribbing here. Baltzell wrote his book to explain the contrasting foundations of these two cities and to trace the contrary legacies they bequeathed the United States. Just as much, however, he wished to diagnose the crisis of authority that shook the United States between 1963 (when the slain Bostonian John F. Kennedy was borne out of the White House) and 1974 (when the disgraced Quaker Richard Nixon was evicted from the same) the better to comprehend the culture which that crisis has left us. That culture, Baltzell argues, is "Quaker": tolerant, diverse, egalitarian, antinomian, and (by strict definition) publicly irresponsible. The spirit that animated Harvard, Boston, and (by extension) Calvinism everywhere was precisely the opposite. Thus, the challenge facing Reformed higher education in North America can also be understood as the challenge facing Puritan schools in a Quaker age.

On first hearing, the question posed that way speaks ill of Calvinism and bodes ill for its schools. By Baltzell's logic, Puritan qualities are antithetical to contemporary values, some of which Reformed people, too, have come to own. If Quakers were tolerant, Puritans were intolerant; Quakers diverse, Puritans homogeneous; Quakers egalitarian, Puritans hierarchical. The Quakers got along well with the native peoples in their region, though they had the good fortune to land among pacific clans. The Quakers were the most gender equitable of all the English colonizers; Puritans treated women better than did many, but under protective patriarchy, not egalitarian justice. Quakers eventually led the way toward the abolition of slavery. They built their religion on respect for each person's inner light; Puritans fortified theirs with orthodox dogma. Quakers had benign assumptions about human nature and wished ultimately to produce good people; Puritans expected sin even among the saints and so aimed for sound institutions. In short, if you seek a colonial society conformed to today's nominal creed, look to Pennsylvania.

As Baltzell demonstrates, however, Quaker virtues came at a price. First, William Penn was not just a spiritual visionary but a royal favorite and a salesman of the first order. The hippie of the 1670s, like some in the 1970s, hid a hustler who worked the ropes of privilege and connection. Philadelphia was founded not just on brotherly love but on one of American history's great real estate sprees. Second, the colony proved virtually ungovernable, as Penn himself sputtered on many occasions. Devotees of the inner light neither asserted nor accepted coercion, leaving Philadelphia politics the scandalous mess that Baltzell argues it ever remained. Winding these two threads together, it is no surprise that plutocracy, rule by the rich, emerged as the reigning principle in city affairs already by the dawn of the second generation. The end of the state was to ensure sanctity of contract, distribute commercial advantage, and then to get out of the way. The broadened private space of Quaker culture so shrank and stripped the public square that, in the end, money alone talked. Moreover, high-property franchise requirements helped Quakers keep for themselves two to three times the number of legislative seats they deserved. In short, if you seek democracy in colonial North America, do not look to Pennsylvania. But if you seek a replica of American politics in the 1980s, where pious proclamations decorated a feeding frenzy at the public trough, where political leaders were saturated in skullduggery and financial scandal, where the real mottos of state were 'caveat emptor' and 'ubi meum?,' then look no further than to colonial Philadelphia.

A shameless public life is relevant to our topic because, by Baltzell's analysis, it entailed disregard for formal education. Quakers early established private elementary schools for their own children and let other groups do as they pleased. Pennsylvania did not mandate a common school system until the 1830s, just when Horace Mann, harvesting his native Massachusetts' 200-year experience in this domain, created the model that the nation would follow. In higher education, the Quakers did and let do as everyone pleased, and before the Revolution everyone pleased to do little. By contrast, New England had four colleges by 1776, had cooperated with Presbyterians in starting a fifth (Princeton), and would proceed with the same partners after the Revolution to plant colleges all across the northern states. By Baltzell's count, nearly a third of the United States' 200 colleges at the time of the Civil War had been founded "by the heirs of Calvinism," and another third were "indirectly controlled by the Presbyterian church" (248). The prototype of them all was Harvard.

The Puritans who came ashore at Massachusetts Bay honored a divine trinity in heaven and a human trinity on earth: the minister, the magistrate, and the schoolmaster. (The New England schoolmarm, mythic civilizer of the West, came later.) Ideally, the three persons below worked with each other as closely as did the Three above; their offices were the legs of a tripod that was to support the whole society. Puritanism deemed religion or piety by itself inadequate for a holy commonwealth; so also the state, or sheer politics; so also the school, or mere knowledge. It was their mutual support that created a coherent, responsible public life, that propounded a public philosophy and public norms to shape Massachusetts into a commonwealth whose accent was on the first word of the compound (common) as much as Pennsylvania's was on the second (wealth).

A price had to be paid here, too. First, hierarchy, although Baltzell argues that Pennsylvania paid in similar coin; he would have us prefer Massachusetts' culturally defined "ruling class" over Pennsylvania's materially measured "elite." Second, tribalism or homogeneity, although Baltzell argues that Harvard, over time, successfully brought members of other clans into the family: archetypically, the Kennedys from the Irish, Louis Brandeis and Felix Frankfurter from American Jewry. By his account, these are the unavoidable costs of a project such as Harvard mounted. To quote a sentence that falls hard upon ears that have heard H. Richard Niebuhr's siren song: "Perhaps all great transforming ethics have been authoritarian and hierarchical" (99).

Lest we quail too early, however, let us remember that Massachusetts had the most generous franchise qualifications in colonial America. It was in practice, though not in theory, a democracy. A deferential democracy, however. As John Adams noted, in town after town ordinary voters elected to office members of the same three or four families for 200 years. The system worked, Baltzell suggests, because organic relationships characterized New England society throughout. The rank and file paid taxes to cultivate a leadership that was beholden to them because all were accountable together to higher standards (first, God; later, tradition; later still, good taste). This system could be oppressive; it could also be liberating. After all, it was tradition-rooted hierarchies in Massachusetts and Virginia that catalyzed the American Revolution, to which the mendacious middle colonies responded by hoisting a finger into the air to see which way the winds blew. New England culture steeled individual rebels, too. The pantheon of American literature and reform movements is filled with its children who came to their own visions by way of combat with — but also dialectical appropriation of — their elders' creeds. In short, a fiber-rich diet produces tougher stuff than does jello; it is easier and more productive to resist ideology than therapy.

The organic connectedness of New England society also characterized its curriculum. One of the striking features of Baltzell's book is its delineation of the different sorts of intellectual work that appeared in the two cities. Puritans wrote systematic theology, history, and political theory; Quakers published personal journals. Eighteenth-century Boston majored in law; Philadelphia in medicine. When nineteenth-century Philadelphia became a byword for law, it was the law of "the bar" — cunning advocacy of a particular case. Boston's law remained of "the bench," a line of juridical theory spooled out from James Kent to Joseph Story to Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. Harvard set its mainsail to the humanities, Penn to the sciences; but also here, Philadelphia's science was nominalistic — cataloguing, experimenting, observing in the life sciences — while Harvard's was realistic, working at theoretical physics. In sum, New England's knowledge was architectonic, designing big systems that could be communicated by a trained leadership to a unified community. Philadelphians worked piecemeal, seeking incremental additions to personal happiness. Ben Franklin truly was the city's avatar, and the opening lines of Jefferson's Declaration were well suited to their first Philadelphia audience. The Quakers' goal was the pursuit of happiness; Puritan happiness came by the pursuit of goals.

Organic coherence in both thought and society depended on a high conception of law. Here we find the affinity between the Reformed tradition and New England's constructions. Calvinism's third use of the law makes law not just the measure of sin that drives people toward salvation nor only the proscriptions that restrain particular evils. Rather, law becomes a chief means of grace: the fabric of order by which creation is sustained after Eden; the natural instincts of justice and creativity that prompt the unregenerate, too, to do good; and the web of interaction in which any society exists. The drive to more perfectly realize that law motivated the New England way and prompted these colonies' remarkable support for education. Harvard's first purpose was to plumb ever deeper, to explore ever further the reach of God's plan, in the heavens and on earth, in nature and history, in the self and society. Revelation, experience, reason — faculties our time deems disparate, even conflicting — worked in tandem, according to the Puritans, to display the full counsel of God, much as did the human representative of each (revelation, the minister; experience, the magistrate; reason, the schoolmaster) in earthly society.

Obviously, there are problems in dividing up the sources of knowledge this way and in assigning each a separate human office. But the Puritans' sense of organic coherence remains essential for Reformed higher education, and for a society that Christians would call good. In other words, bearing or applying coherent knowledge to, for, and within a coherent society remains a central calling of Reformed higher education. Not that each of us must devote every page or class session — or even many of them — to explicating grand theory. But imbuing and undergirding the particulars we treat must be a well-considered sense of what holds them together, of what makes them make sense.

What that sense will be for Reformed Christians, I will consider later. But first, we need to consider how hard a row we have to hoe if my conception of Reformed higher education is at all correct. The chief difficulty lies not as it did a century ago with a newly ascendant secularism in high places. That was the problem on which Abraham Kuyper cut his teeth and for which he left us good models of response. The problem, rather, lies in the dissonance within society and culture, whether high or low, whether theist or secular, or anywhere in between. Worldview may well fight against worldview, as Kuyper boldly proclaimed, but what happens when worldview gives way to lifestyle? Conviction to preference? The magistracy to the strip-mall? Schoolmarms to MTV? It does no good to seek refuge in a return to the so-called classical curriculum, to flee "popular" for "high" culture. In the first place, that bears an elitism contrary to Christian canons and counter to the examples of a publicly responsible Reformed higher education presented by the original Harvard no less than by the original Free University of Amsterdam. In the second place, of course, today high culture is pop culture, and pop, high. The fragmentation of time, intention, identity, and meaning proposed by post-structuralists simply extends to the religious texts of high culture what electronic media have carried out in everyday life. Indeed, I look for these two ventures to be wed when Yale endows in its English department the McDonald's chair of semiotics. Fondly might we hope, fervently might we pray that our students will rise to cultural critique a la Kuyperian worldview analysis. But do we not find our students neither battling nor embracing this approach but baffled by it or bored? The fault lies not in our commitments nor in their supposed lack of the same but in the symbolic universe we all inhabit. Our culture is antinomian in every sense of the word. All America has become Baltzell's Philadelphia: personal, piecemeal, sporadic, erratic, medicinal, and therapeutic. In such soil, any use of the law must struggle to survive, much less thrive.

So what do we do? For this historian it is easier to warn of false cures than to prescribe sound ones, which task I leave to philosophers and theologians. Let me simply give some justification for our present antinomianism and then briefly consider what we might learn for our current circumstance from three other models of Reformed higher education: Yale, Princeton, and the Free University.

When bad law rules, obedience is troublesome and dogmatic coercion reprehensible. I believe it to be wrong and — for Christians — crippling to follow certain calls for a forceful reassertion of law and order in society and of the traditional canon in the university. For the current antinomianism is to some extent reasonable. When the American presidency for a quarter century (with one Democratic and one Republican exception) has been awash in lies, corruption, and extra — if not unconstitutional — adventures, when politics has become heedless of the past and careless of the future, then politics deserves disrespect. If Boston jurists have given way to Philadelphia lawyers, law is properly held in suspicion. If the classic canon has silenced many voices or upheld human texts for virtually religious adoration, then we as Christians can join with others in, at the very least, reconsidering its canonicity. If post-structuralism is an anarchic phase that scuttles an overbearing system, then we as Reformed educators must relax our love for order a minute and let our ancestral iconoclasm observe the idol's fall.

Original sinners that we are, however — and that we are certain everyone else, too, must be — we cannot long live with anarchy. Nor, if the Philadelphia story still applies, should we advise anarchy as a permanent state. In any case our theology assures us that we won't have to endure anarchy very long. The Reformed law/common grace theme teaches that the order principle is as deeply rooted in humanity as the freedom principle, is just as necessary, potentially just as helpful, and just as susceptible to distortion. The trick, naturally, is to replace bad law or non-law with good law — a task far easier assigned than accomplished. But since our antinomian society and academy are not forever, it is the mission of Reformed colleges to help structure the emerging new order while simultaneously espying the inequities and oppressions it contains.

Some instruction for this most difficult task may come from consulting the historical experience of other Reformed projects in higher education. The present never duplicates the past, but by watching how our forebears addressed their times, we might gain some wisdom for our own and avail ourselves of what is still valuable in their legacies. Let's begin with Harvard's child and step-grandchild, Yale and Princeton. Yale was founded in 1701 by Connecticut valley Congregationalists disturbed by theological trends at Harvard. Princeton was founded in 1746 by middle-colony Presbyterians in league with some Yale graduates who together were committed to the pro-revival party of the Great Awakening and convinced of the safety (theological and transportational) of training the rising generation closer to home than at Cambridge or Edinburgh.

Of the two colleges, Princeton took command earlier, being at the geographical and denominational center of the colonies just before Independence and of the new nation just after it. (I am following Mark Noll's Princeton and the Republic, 1768-1822 [Princeton University Press, 1989]). From Princeton's halls in these years (1760-1810) streamed not the revival preachers its founders might have envisioned but architects of the new nation: a president and vice president (James Madison and Aaron Burr, Jr.), governors, judges, legislators, and delegates to constitutional conventions, both state and federal. Aptly, its president in the first part of the era was John Witherspoon, Madison's teacher and the only clergyman to sign the Declaration of Independence. Witherspoon deftly wrapped the Calvinist proclivity for law with its pride of liberty. For Revolutionary Princeton, liberty and law were born for each other, could be fulfilled and protected only in each other's grasp. No need, then, to choose between the two. Or between eternal verities and the new nation. Or, for that matter, between Christianity and the Enlightenment. In Kuyperian retrospect, Princeton's fateful gamble was:

1. to identify God's law with Nature's;

2. to build a supposedly autonomous moral and political science on reason and experience's reflection on that law, the better to defend Christianity; and

3. to believe that education by itself could shape behavior.

Revolutionary Princeton assumed that, having scaled so far up the mountain of learning and virtue, its students would readily go on to the peak of faith and holiness. In civic life, the formula worked well enough in the Federalist era but fell apart after Jefferson's election in 1800. On the moral and religious side, the project failed from the start. Witherspoon's successor, Samuel Stanhope Smith, was cashiered in 1812, the year of "Mr. Madison's war," for student disorder and riot, for Princeton's failure to produce ministers, and in protest of the calamity into which Madison supposedly had led the nation.

Princeton's linkage of Christianity and Enlightenment, of God and country, of right thinking and right behavior lives on today wherever Protestant fundamentalists operate by the common sense realism that Witherspoon imported from Scotland and made the centerpiece of his curriculum. Fundamentalists occupy quite another quarter, however, than the corridors of power that Witherspoon's students filled. The "organic union of political and religious aspirations" (Noll 243) that Revolutionary Princeton embodied unravelled after 1812. The college's legacy for Reformed higher education shifted over to the seminary founded in that year. It filled pulpits and college presidencies with guardians of orthodoxy, and a tendency toward political quietism and conformity.

Just then, Yale took over. Faced with the disestablishment of their church in 1818, Connecticut Congregationalists retooled to carry out their old functions on a voluntarist basis and to extend their culture across New York and the upper Midwest. They did so by revising Calvinism upon the premises of human free will, i.e., by Arminianizing it; by retailing its message through a home missions program that became a revivalist network; and by insisting that conversion flower into concerted engagement in the social order. The governing trinity of this enterprise were Nathaniel William Taylor, its theologian; Lyman Beecher, its organizer; and Charles Finney, its supreme salesman. All three went on to lead schools themselves (Yale Divinity, Lane Seminary, and Oberlin College, respectively) and inspired more, from Ohio to Iowa, through their spiritual offspring. Just as revivals thrived wherever the Yankee exodus spread, so the colleges that came in their wake carried on the traditions of the New England commonwealth. Where Princeton proceeded from rationalist premises, the Yale crusade went forth from moral zeal, generating the rage for order and the contempt of compromise that made the Yankee belt the breeding ground of radical reform in antebellum America. Here the divine will was linked not with Nature's law but with the "higher law" of conscience, the disinterested benevolence of the revived heart. Nonetheless, law it was, social organicism it assumed, and a socially responsible education it produced.

The Yale crusade culminated and evaporated in the Civil War. The eminences of its postwar campus who are best remembered today are William Graham Sumner and his brother-in-law, Walter Camp: Sumner, the theorist of conservative Social Darwinism; and Camp, the architect of college football and of the Yale juggernauts that dominated the sport for a generation. Camp played what Sumner descried: a struggle of cunning, will, and plan that replicated the military combat of recent memory and the industrial combat of daily experience. Here the social organism became the evolutionary process epitomized by the football team, where individual spontaneity was subordinated to group discipline, play turned into work, and right fused with might. By the turn of the century, Yale offered up the first of its three sacrificial lambs for a one-term U.S. presidency, William Howard Taft, but its most influential twentieth-century alumnus is probably still Henry Luce, who never quite distinguished the Kingdom of the Presbyterian Lord he claimed from the American Century he announced.

This lineage points back to some of the flaws a Reformed measure will find in the Yale educational program. The Yankee belt assumed an organic society, but the New Haven theology started from the assertion of individual free agency. The logical contradiction was matched by a critical lapse. Free schools, a free republic, and free-enterprise capitalism were taught as the eternal will of God and rode the radical urgencies for salvation and abolition. Once the Civil War had made America safe for bourgeois civilization, the latter could dilute or discard its Protestant fuel. The classic example is Sumner himself, who began in divinity, one day tucked his notes into a desk drawer to take up sociology, and twenty years returned to the old folder to find his first beliefs dead.

At this juncture, in 1880, the Free University of Amsterdam was founded. Its pioneers were well aware of such mistakes as Princeton and Yale had made and were determined not to repeat them. Princeton's autonomous reason would never lead to faith on its own, and so here was carefully subordinated to a prior religious commitment. Yale's moral will could neglect or displace faith, and so was subordinated similarly. Cultural values could comprise an idol, and so Christianity was to be kept free from their syncretic embrace. At the same time, faith without reason seemed infirm, so the Dutch Calvinists built a university. Faith without zeal seemed equally infirm, so the Free (read schoolmaster) was linked with the Antirevolutionary Party (the magistrate) and a cleansed Reformed church (the minister) in a campaign to bring about a national revival of Christianity. Faith without cultural values was naked, and so the heritage of the West, including contributions from the unregenerate under common grace, were acknowledged, sometimes celebrated. All this was done from a principled recognition that other worldviews also had rights to public space and in hopes that such ideological pluralism would respect the conscience and advance a more equitable order. That vision produced a comprehensive curriculum, public activism, systematic theology, and — note well — Dooyeweerd and Vollenhoven's "philosophy of the law-idea." It also spawned much of the better parts of the Dutch Reformed colleges in North America.

Notably, everything about Neo-Calvinism was organic: its philosophy, its sociology, its curriculum, and its supporting social network. This was the movement's glory and limit. Against the pretensions of value-free scholarship, against rootless individualism, against theology by the week, Neo-Calvinism postulated a cosmic coherence in Christ. At the same time, claiming "every square inch" of life for the Lord, its North American holdings are quite contentedly parts of Grand Rapids, Sioux County, some Chicago suburbs, and a particularly chic sector of Toronto. This syndrome owes something to a trait Dutch folk share with the residents of Lake Wobegon: give them half a chance and they'll go straight for the small potatoes. But it has more to do, I think, with a sound sociological insight. Neo-Calvinism's unique slant required an integrated community as its plausibility structure. For many decades North Americans, Protestants included, were simply not ready to hear its voice. Recently, that has changed, and the Dutch Reformed colleges have responded, sometimes haltingly, sometimes more bravely.

So the question these institutions face is whether they, like Harvard, can open the house to members from other clans without, like Harvard, Yale, and Oberlin, sacrificing the religious vision that makes it home and without making it just another shop in the academic strip-mall. In other words, they need to keep the organic base as well as the organic vision of their tradition. Here, Dutch-American ethnic experience might be as helpful as Reformed theology is essential. North America truly is a continent of immigrants — of new arrivals but also of old inhabitants displaced in their own land. Asian-, Afro-, and Latino-Americans are searching for the formula of upward mobility, social solidarity, and moral coherence that Reformed colleges historically offered Dutch Americans. Deracinated mainliners may have achieved the first goal but surely seek the other two. Some parts of Dutch tribalism, then, can be virtues; in any case, some sort of organic community remains essential to realizing and sharing the Reformed higher educational vision.

The second besetting difficulty, hierarchy, can also be redeemed, though with no less difficulty and via no less wisdom than our first. Reformed colleges must put their money and energy behind their mouthings of excellence and leadership. But in this venture the Reformed can make a distinctive contribution by conjoining excellence with humility. Excellence has a bad name because of the pride and elitism that naturally go with it. But under grace, under the signs of Jesus on the cross and of Jesus at his disciples' feet, that natural connection might be broken. Whatever university Reformed people might create, whatever honors programs their colleges may develop, they ought to have these signs on their doorposts. Both current social need and the Christian faith demand the best cultivated, best disciplined, and most arduously challenged minds; but these must be turned to their appropriate service — intellectual leadership and cultural guidance for the broader community that supports them and that may fairly expect regular, responsive communication with them.

Finally, to the third difficulty, the lack of coherence in academy and society. We must frankly acknowledge that the day of deductive, a priori worldview construction has passed. But we need to remember that Kuyper himself did not start from "worldview." He began with beginsel, with "principle" or basic heart commitment. That, I think, our students can still recognize. From there we can proceed, more inductively and tentatively than before, cultivating a sensibility more than a system, but learning how to live and think consistently by that sensibility. Our image of coherence, then, ought no longer to be a bloc universe with everything in a box but, to borrow the words of Lambert Zuidervaart, a true alignment of our ideas, values, and life-practices, each feeding back on the others through critical reflection, so that genuine coherence might obtain in our selves and our communities.

The center of that coherence must remain, simply, Christ. Many of our students are attracted, indeed perhaps too enthralled, by the notion of a "personal relationship with Jesus Christ." Our task remains — as it was for Calvin, the Puritans, and Kuyper — leading others and ourselves to see and live by the full implications of that relationship. Those implications have nowhere been better epitomized, it seems to me, than in the opening words of Jonathan Edwards' Thursday Lecture at Boston in 1731, where, in the face of the Harvard crowd — well heeled, Arminian, and apostate as he saw them to be — Edwards asserted that "God [was] Glorified in Man's Dependence":

There is an absolute and universal dependence of the redeemed on God. The nature and contrivance of our redemption is such that the redeemed are in everything directly, immediately, and entirely dependent on God: They are dependent on him for all, and are dependent on him every way. The several ways . . . wherein the redeemed of Jesus Christ depend on God for all their good, are these, viz. That they have all their good of him, and that they have all through him, and that they have all in him: That he is the cause and original whence all their good comes, therein is of him; and that he is the medium by which it is obtained and conveyed, therein they have it through him; and that he is the good itself given and conveyed, therein it is in him. Now those that are redeemed by Jesus Christ do, in all these respects, very directly and entirely depend on God for their all.

Our mission remains to bear out that confession in academy and society, in our own tongues and times.