Christian Education at Bob Jones University
Originally written by Dr. Ron Horton, Division of English Language and Literature
Our concept of Christian education grows out of our identity. Our sense of who we are determines what we do and why we do it. Let us take these subjects in order.
Who We Are
Christian Religious Identity
We have, of course, a Christian religious identity. This identity gives us a supernaturalist view of the world. We believe that naturalism is a way of viewing the world, but not the way—that scientific materialism is a greatly limited and false way to see ourselves and the universe.
We therefore have no difficulty in accepting the miracles of Scripture and the supernatural inspiration of the original writings of Scripture. We hold to the power of God to create a world and to re-create a human soul in salvation—that He has done the one and continues to do the other. Hence our anti-secularism.
Historical Protestant Identity
We have a historical Protestant identity. Our defining beliefs are the shared core of the great historical creedal statements of Protestant Christianity. If one were to superimpose the Augsburg and Westminster Confessions, the Thirty-Nine Articles of Anglicanism, the Twenty-Five Articles of Methodism, and the Baptist London Confessions of 1644 and 1689, the overlap would be roughly distilled in what we formally affirm in our daily Chapel service. Hence our historical essentialism.
Protestant is used here in a broad sense and inclusive of Baptists, though the stricter sort of Baptists would reject this classification. Bob Jones University is a nondenominational institution, though Independent Baptists make up by far the greater number of students and faculty.
American Evangelical Identity
We have an American evangelical identity. We continue in the spirit of the Great Awakening of Jonathan Edwards and George Whitefield and subsequent revival movements, which laid an evangelical base for American Protestantism and exalted the preaching of the Gospel of salvation by grace through faith in Christ as the church’s primary duty in the world.
We are not liturgical or sacramentalist in our approach to worship. Though something of the dignity of traditional Protestantism remains in the formal order of our Sunday morning service, the selection of the music, and the recitation of the University creed, it is tempered by an evangelical concern for the spiritual state of the persons present and an invitation to those with spiritual needs to come forward for counseling at the end of the service.
The evangelist founder had a quaint way of expressing this paradoxical coupling of dignity and fervency. He said that in founding such a university as this, he was “putting a red carpet on the sawdust trail,” referring to the sawdust that kept down the dust of the aisles in his tent campaigns. We are very much in the populist tradition of American evangelicalism. Hence, our fervent evangelism.
American Fundamentalist Identity
We have an American Fundamentalist identity. We are not in agreement with sweeping changes occurring in American Evangelicalism. We are the heirs of an interdenominational movement of American conservative evangelicals, who published a set of doctrinal statements in the early twentieth century in a series of pamphlets titled The Fundamentals.
These statements expounded doctrinal essentials rather than denominational distinctives. They defined the theological common ground of Protestant orthodoxy, raising a bulwark against the tide of modernism in the denominational churches and seminaries. Specifically they stood against the twin threats of Darwinian scientism and historical biblical criticism, which they rightly saw as directed at the heart of their faith. They drew battle lines and committed themselves to an aggressive separatist theological stance. Hence, our anti-ecumenicism.