by Pas­tor David Cox

To some peo­ple in Chris­ten­dom, the entire Chris­tian­ity rests on the back of Chris­t­ian uni­ver­si­ties. With­out them, Chris­tian­ity will fall. They are our “Sav­iors” when it comes to solv­ing all the prob­lems and issues of our day. I beg to dif­fer though. It would be wrong for me to crit­i­cize a Chris­t­ian uni­ver­sity because I per­son­ally hgad a bad expe­ri­ence while there. Within the con­text of Chris­tian­ity, there is long lost teach­ing of soul lib­erty (which sup­pos­edly Bap­tists still hold, but most only in word, and not in deed).

My issues with Chris­t­ian uni­ver­si­ties are not per­sonal. I went to one (Bob Jones Uni­ver­sity), and for the most part I liked it, and I had mostly a good expe­ri­ence there. Although I am not a sup­porter of Bob Jones any more, when I went there, I felt at the time they did have stan­dards and high norms. So that I don’t seem “vin­dic­tive”, I will refrain from recount­ing per­sonal bad expe­ri­ences I had and then crit­i­ciz­ing them for it. Per­haps I was wrong or rebel­lious, or per­haps the indi­vid­ual staff or teach­ers or other stu­dents put in charge were wrong. Noen of that is not the point. Every stu­dent which goes off to school will have some run-ins with the author­i­ties that be, and most will always defend their own fool­ish ways against the school.

My issue with Chris­t­ian uni­ver­si­ties is not with any one in par­tic­u­lar, but with the sys­tem as a whole. We were taught that every Chris­t­ian young per­son should go to a Chris­t­ian uni­ver­sity to get a good Chris­t­ian edu­ca­tion that would serve him for his Chris­t­ian life. First of all, that is not cor­rect. The Bible nowhere exhorts us to go away to study the word of God in some recluded place called “a school”.

The pat­tern which the Bible gives us is per­sonal Bible Study done in con­junc­tion with a good, sound local church. The pic­ture is always the same, God teaches us locally through a local church. That is the only thing we see in the Scrip­tures. What is galling to me is that the whole basis of a Chris­t­ian uni­ver­sity is the under­ly­ing idea (seen if not actu­ally spo­ken)  that “the local  church is inca­pable of teach­ing the Bible in any mean­ful way”. If you go to any Chris­t­ian uni­ver­sity, and tell them that you are rep­re­sent­ing your church with­out a pas­tor, and ask what they think about the edu­ca­tional require­ments for a pas­tor, they will push for “only accept­ing a man (from our school) with a PhD”. Peo­ple trained under pas­tors with­out a sem­i­nary degree “are laugh­able” in their eyes. In other words, the con­cept is that a local church pas­tor can­not pre­pare their peo­ple, and espe­cially their young peo­ple, to live the Chris­t­ian life cor­rectly with­out help from these Chris­t­ian uni­ver­si­ties. They are the guardians of the Chris­t­ian faith.

Where are the Chris­t­ian uni­ver­si­ties in the Bible? Are they not of recent inven­tion? The entire con­cept of “get­ting a Chris­t­ian edu­ca­tion in a spe­cial­ized place” (not a church but a uni­ver­sity) doesn’t have many years of history.

From a Bible-believer’s view­point, there are some extremely seri­ous prob­lems with the con­cept of a Chris­t­ian uni­ver­sity. The most glar­ing offense is that local churches are inept, inca­pable, and fum­ble the ball. (I know of a lot of pas­tors who do exactly that so I need to be care­ful, but inter­est­ingly, all these bum­bling pas­tors seem to have got­ten their prepa­ra­tion in a Chris­t­ian university!).

That most pas­tors today have no drive nor ded­i­ca­tion to give their best to Christ speaks ill of our times. The solu­tion to this prob­lem is not dump­ing the plans and designs of God for “some­thing bet­ter than God can come up with” but to return to the purity of God’s plan.

I will direct you to other pages for each of these main issues in why Chris­t­ian uni­ver­si­ties are wrong:

• Only a liv­ing exam­ple can teach morality
• The Church: the Genius of God
• Invest­ment of tithes in “God’s work”
• Excel­lence is not greater than faithfulness.
• The sin of “min­istry for hire”

Future pages on this topic

5. God’s exam­ple rejects “Denominationalism”.