The College Fix

If two theologians who’d like to send each other to hell can have a “delightful conversation over a glass of wine at the post-seminar reception,” why can’t today’s students have civil disagreements that end with mutual respect?

That’s the question posed by Carl Trueman, professor of church history at Westminster Theological Seminary, in a fantastic essay at First Things.

Trueman recounts speaking at a recent seminar “at an Ivy League divinity school” where a woman minister “challenged me with some vigor” for his position against the ordination of women:

For a few minutes we exchanged trenchant but civil remarks on the subject. We each spoke our minds, neither persuaded the other, and then we moved on to the larger matter in hand: The use of modern media in the church. The matter of my opposition to women’s ordination never came up again in the remaining two days of the seminar.

This exchange amazed not only “a young research student” at the seminar who said his generation has “no idea” how to disagree respectfully “on an issue that typically arouses visceral passions,” but also Trueman’s son, who said he’d never seen “such civil disagreement” in a university classroom:

This is an ominous, if fascinating, indictment, for I had simply done what I had seen modeled when I was an undergraduate: Vigorous disagreement in the classroom followed by friendly conversation in the pub. If we no longer have a university system which models ways of civil engagement on such matters, then the kind of civic virtues upon which a healthy democracy depends are truly a thing of the past.

Trueman has good thoughts on oppression as a “psychological category” that blurs together actual, speech and thought crimes, and the “American tendency” to bring all our disputes to court, as contributors to this student perspective.

Anyone else think of persecuted Mozilla ex-CEO Brendan Eich when reading Trueman’s description of humans now as “aggregates of whatever opinions they happen to hold”?

Thus, those who hold even a single belief which the panjandrums of the culture find obnoxious are of necessity essentially defined by that, no matter how marginal it might actually be to their overall social existence and no matter how many other virtues they might embody.

Try to ignore his use of “safe places” – his heart’s in the right place:

I suspect that the future health of democracy depends upon university administrators worrying less about the dangers posed by whatever is the micro-aggression du jour and more about providing safe places for those who actually want to hold opinions and have debates.

Read the essay.

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