The mystery of Trinity

Posted by admin on Oct 31, 2005 in Issues & Ideas | 0 comments

Editor’s note: After the all-campus assembly last week, announcing uncertain times for TWU’s future, many people were deeply concerned. Many questions rushed to mind: what will this mean for the administration? How will this affect my studies? What does this mean for the school’s reputation?

As I was thinking about these things at the assembly, I found comfort seeing Professor Szabo sitting on the gym floor next to the students she teaches, the janitorial staff shoulder-to-shoulder with those they clean up after, and the Wellness Centre staff supporting the student body they doctor. Overall, this school is not about what happens in the administration, my degree, or where TWU will be 20 years from now. It is, however, a community of faith, reliant on the providence of God, believing in a common vision. In this article, Jeff Hamel gives us a background to this vision and how TWU takes part in it. – Jeremy Hutcheson

Trinity Western University is not a normal place. I don’t think anyone that has attended or visited this institution would call it run-of-the-mill, but I wonder if many students realize exactly why TWU is so different. Certainly, we give everything different names – the Wellness Centre, the Centre for Life Calling and Career Development, etc.– and one stroll down the halls of Fraser, with its multitude of bridal magazines, or Douglas, where college guys drink pop instead of beer on Friday night, will tell you that you are not at UBC. But, the most remarkable aspect of TWU that many people don’t understand is that it is one of only a few serious attempts by evangelicals to be involved in a university in almost a century.

Until the 1920s, the evangelical movement once stood at the forefront of university academic life in the English-speaking world.

Although Charles Darwin might be the only recognizable 19th century academic to many Trinity students, in reality, evangelicals predominantly staffed the scientific and humanities departments of most British Universities in the 19th century. William Buckland, an evangelical geologist who taught at Oxford, is an excellent example of this. He was the first man to identify dinosaur fossils, and he was highly respected in the scientific field for his investigation into the geological evidence of the Biblical flood. Although strictly evangelical universities did not exist, the evangelical presence was acute, even dominant, on campuses such as Oxford and Cambridge. Scholars like Sir Isaac Newton, who wrote more on alchemy and Biblical interpretation than on physics, represented the evangelical communities’ commitment to higher learning. This school of thought advocated that Christians need not be afraid of scientific or historical truth, because they would inevitably prove a literalist interpretation of the Bible.

With the rise of modernism in the secular university, however, the evangelical community retreated into newly formed Bible colleges in the 1920s. After the Scopes “Monkey” Trial, in 1925, many “science proving Genesis” evangelicals saw that they were no longer respected in the secular university and abandoned it; eventually forming think tanks such as the “Institute For Creation Research.” Humanities and social sciences soon followed suit and within a decade the overwhelming majority of evangelical study moved from the university to the Bible college. The Bible college was created specifically to counter the evangelical’s loss of respect in the secular university. There, isolated from analytical reason and scientific inquiry, students could learn and grow in a community based solely on revelation, free from the corrosion of continental rationalism, modernism, postmodernism, and other perceivably negative influences. This was the case for nearly a century.

Recently, however, there has been a resurgence of evangelical involvement in the university, and TWU is an example of this effort. TWU started out as “Trinity Junior College” offering a two-year transfer program, but, by 1985, TWU was a fully accredited university. There are other examples of the evangelical university movement, such as Wheaton College, and Tyndale University College and Seminary. Tyndale has reflected its move towards secularly recognized scholarship by changing its name from Ontario Bible College in 1998. These institutions represent an effort by the evangelical community to re-engage a culture that has isolated itself from religion. They accomplish this by bringing a Christian integration perspective to “secular” subjects such as history, sociology, biology and economics.

The problem then arises of how the institution should run this new experiment in evangelical higher education when it has no contemporary model to follow. For example, how do you create an evangelical physics program, when your latest example of a prominent evangelical physicist working in a faith-affirming university is a man who believed he could use incantations to turn dirt into gold? Conversely, how do you create a history program with evangelical integration when the last prominent evangelical historians teaching in a faith-affirming university concentrated on Biblically justifying European imperialism? TWU has attempted various ways to overcome the problem of integrating Christian faith into the academic life. One of these ways is the holistic approach to scholarship that has been prominent in Catholic schools around the world. A good example of this integration paradigm is the Interdisciplinary Studies program, which has gained significant praise lately. TWU hasn’t found a perfect way to completely incorporate faith and learning, but the vision remains strong, and it is the vision that makes us different.