I'm currently reading through Harry Lee Poe's Christianity in the Academy. Poe, a prof at Union University, tends to make claims about Christian academia that are over-generalized and under-documented, but here and there he makes some very wise observations. Here's one:

Christians build institutions. Usually the result of a movement that emerges from a period of spiritual vitality or awakening, institutions are well intended as a means of carrying on the work or contribution of the genius of that period. It did not work with the monks of Cluny in the early Middle Ages, and it did not work with the YMCA. Spirituality cannot be institutionalized. This observation is central to the problem of maintaining a Christian college or university. If an organization with such a clearly defined purpose as the YMCA can go from being the leading organization for evangelizing young people in America to the largest franchised health club, then one should not expect that a college with such diverse interests can remain Christian for long. Institutions assume the character and agenda of the financial interests that support them.

... then be prepared to fight traffic in the nine circles of hell.

[HT: Brandon]

In his paper, "The Metaphilosophy of Naturalism," noted atheist philosopher Quentin Smith writes:

The secularization of mainstream academia began to quickly unravel upon the publication of [Alvin] Plantinga’s influential book on realist theism, God and Other Minds, in 1967. It became apparent to the philosophical profession that this book displayed that realist theists were not outmatched by naturalists in terms of the most valued standards of analytic philosophy: conceptual precision, rigor of argumentation, technical erudition, and an in-depth defense of an original world-view. This book, followed seven years later by Plantinga’s even more impressive book, The Nature of Necessity, made it manifest that a realist theist was writing at the highest qualitative level of analytic philosophy, on the same playing field as Carnap, Russell, Moore, Grünbaum, and other naturalists. Realist theists, whom hitherto had segregated their academic lives from their private lives, increasingly came to believe (and came to be increasingly accepted or respected for believing) that arguing for realist theism in scholarly publications could no longer be justifiably regarded as engaging in an “academically unrespectable” scholarly pursuit.

Naturalists passively watched as realist versions of theism, most influenced by Plantinga’s writings, began to sweep through the philosophical community, until today perhaps one-quarter or one-third of philosophy professors are theists, with most being orthodox Christians. Although many theists do not work in the area of the philosophy of religion, so many of them do work in this area that there are now over five philosophy journals devoted to theism or the philosophy of religion, such as Faith and Philosophy, Religious Studies, International Journal of the Philosophy of Religion, Sophia, Philosophia Christi, etc. Philosophia Christi began in the late 1990s and already is overflowing with submissions from leading philosophers. Can you imagine a sizeable portion of the articles in contemporary physics journals suddenly presenting arguments that space and time are God’s sensorium (Newton’s view) or biology journals becoming filled with theories defending élan vital or a guiding intelligence? Of course, some professors in these other, non-philosophical, fields are theists; for example, a recent study indicated that seven percent of the top scientists are theists. However, theists in other fields tend to compartmentalize their theistic beliefs from their scholarly work; they rarely assume and never argue for theism in their scholarly work. If they did, they would be committing academic suicide or, more exactly, their articles would quickly be rejected, requiring them to write secular articles if they wanted to be published. If a scientist did argue for theism in professional academic journals, such as Michael Behe in biology, the arguments are not published in scholarly journals in his field (e.g., biology), but in philosophy journals (e.g., Philosophy of Science and Philo, in Behe’s case). But in philosophy, it became, almost overnight, “academically respectable” to argue for theism, making philosophy a favored field of entry for the most intelligent and talented theists entering academia today.

It's interesting to note that Smith pins all of this on the success of Plantinga's work. So even if they don't agree with some of his views, I think all Christians in the academic world owe him a measure of gratitude and respect for showing the academy that orthodox (and yes, Reformed) Christianity is a legitimate and respectable worldview, even in this ubersecular age.

[HT to Tom Gilson at Thinking Christian for the link to Smith's paper]

The following was written by an "anonymous" author and can be found in Ron Nash's Life's Ultimate Questions: An Introduction to Philosophy. It deals with the "hermeneutics of suspicion" that characterizes deconstructionism:

Either deconstructionists are among the dumbest people ever to get university teaching positions, or there is something sinister going on. But deconstructionists are not dumb, though at times they can put on a convincing act. So what are they really up to? As we learn from the hermeneutics of suspicion, whatever a text is hiding has to do with power, never with truth. It hardly seems a coincidence that many deconstructionists are Marxists. Naturally, this does not mean they are Marxists in any sense that the historic Marx or even Lenin would approve. Marxian deconstructionists recognize that most nontrivial sentences in the writings of Marx and Lenin have been falsified. They know that Marxian economics is a fraud. After years of watching Russian and Chinese and Cuban leaders impoverish every citizen in their nations, except the rich and powerful people at the top, we know that no Marxist cares about poor and oppressed people. Their entire program is keeping the power they have and smuggling as many American dollars as they can into their Swiss bank accounts.

As for Marxian intellectuals in America, the name of their game is also power. They know that deconstructionism is bunk. The real purpose of the deconstructionist power brokers is to separate as many Americans as possible from their families and from their literature and traditions. If we cannot know the meaning of any text, then we cannot know the meaning of the Bible, including the Ten Commandments. Neither can we know the meaning of the United States Constitution or any other text that might sustain social order or provide meaning and direction to life. Once students become alienated from their families, their religion, their values, and their traditions, they will be like lambs prepared for the slaughter. And when that day comes, who do you suppose all the people with empty heads and empty chests will look to for their orders? They will look to their deconstructionist, Marxian, power-seeking professors who introduced them to the mysteries of a world without meaning. The real name of the deconstructionist game is not meaning or truth; it is power, raw political power.

Deconstructionism, while difficult to define, can be viewed as postmodernism's literary interpretation wing. Proponents of deconstructionism claim (often through ways that are very roundabout and difficult to make sense of), that written texts have no authoritative meaning, not least of all the alleged meaning given by the writer of that text. The reader has authority to deconstruct the text, finding the hidden and often cryptic structures in the writer's language that reveals his or her true agenda: the gaining of power. This is the so-called "hermeneutics of suspicion" that looks not at what a text says but at how the author is supposedly using his or her truth claims as vehicles for achieving dominance over the reader. On this view (and following Foucault, to some extent), all claims of absolute or monolithic truth are only veiled attempts to give the truth-claimer more power. We see this often today in how the far left treats Christian truth claims. The claim that Jesus is the only way to salvation, for example, is characterized as an ingenious ploy to assert dominance over non-Christians, nothing more than a version of spiritual imperialism aimed at giving Christian leaders more control over political and economic resources. The above quote is an example of how turning the hermeneutics of suspicion back on the deconstructionists might work. It is at once both tongue-in-cheek and utterly terrifying.

It looks like an unfortunate church in Israel was the victim of a textbook example of religious intolerance recently. Although evangelicals get hammered as being "intolerant" for refusing to believe that God hands out free passes to heaven to everyone who has a religious or moral worldview, I don't think that's exactly fair. Suppose I simply believe someone is going to hell for his sins unless he repents and places faith in Christ, but I love him as an individual and respect his decision to disagree with my viewpoint. I have many friends and acquaintances who fall into this camp. I think they're wrong, and they think I'm wrong. What's the big deal? Why is that so intolerant?

To understand this a little more, I might classify two definitions of intolerance. We'll call one the politically correct definition of intolerance and the other the classical definition. Now let's define the definitions:

(politically correct) intolerance = a disagreement and/or statement of that disagreement with another on the nature of ultimate religious truth, specifically the belief that adherence to another religion will result in ultimate condemnation or hell for the one adhering

(classical) intolerance = denying practitioners of a competing religion their right to practice or believe that religion, usually through violent or coercive means

I thoroughly reject the feel-good, let's-all-get-along, fuzzy politically correct version, which itself is a sort of religious intolerance (according to its own definition) since it asserts a moral dictate about what kind of religious beliefs one can hold. I recognize that there is a virtual academic cottage industry devoted to this PC tolerance, where anyone who claims that their religion is the sole correct religion (or the sole path to heaven, or whatever) is vilified as a racist hatemonger. The obvious reply is, "So, the only legitimate religion I can hold is pluralism? Gee, that sure does wonders for cultural distinctives!"

So the classical definition is better, and much more compatible with a society that values religious freedom. True religious intolerance occurs when someone actually acts on that religious disagreement by harming the other person, or denying his right to religious freedom, or destroying his property, or whatever. For a lesson in how that's achieved, just take a gander at the behavior of those Orthodox Jews from Arad.