What Is Faith-Learning Integration?

A phrase we often use in Christian education is "the integration of faith and learning." What exactly does that mean, anyway? For professors, our area of study (such as literature, economics, history, ethics, politcal science, or theology--just to mention those represented by the professors who contribute here) shape the way we view the world, the questions we ask, and the answers we receive. Looking at the broad picture, unpacking the assumptions of a academic field, and digging deeper into its conversation and controversies requires that we learn to appreciate the models, applications, and pedagogy that our various academic fields demand. Professorship requires of us a certain examination of the foundations of our subjects, a certain mastery of the content, and a strong sense of how the field is divided into differing schools and approaches. Even this point should not overlook that differing fields and courses and teachers also take differing shapes. There is no one complete metapedagogy, that is no one complete way of teaching everything.

William Hasker in his "Faith-Learning Integration: An Overview" (1992) offers a helpful model for Christian disciplinary engagement, observing that the approach to the field has much to do with how compatible that the scholar perceives the subject in question to be with the teachings of his or her faith. Hasker suggests that a continuum exists between those who feel little tension and those who feel great tension. He gives these positions three names:

1. The compatabilist, at one end of the spectrum, assumes a fair amount of overlap between the ideals of the faith and the claims of the discipline; thus, “[t]he scholar’s task is one of showing how shared assumptions and concerns can be profitably linked." For example, a Christian psychologist might see a large amount of simple compatibility between current models of behavioral addiction and the Christian understanding of bondage. In this case, the practitioner would be more concerned with how best to apply their insights in a way that is faithful to the Christian offices of prophet, priest, and prince regent.
2. The transformationist, however, would go further because while a true or acceptable model is present in the field, it needs to be reworked “into one with a Christian orientation." Our Christian counselor might find in family systems models several key insights worth adopting, all the while recognizing that some of the theories fundamental assumptions are incompatible with Christian teaching on the family.
3. The reconstructionist, Hasker’s third category, must go even further: "the existing disciplines are so deeply permeated with anti-Christian assumptions of secularism, rationalism, and naturalism he has no choice but to reject them and to begin at the beginning in a radical reconstruction of the disciplines on . . . fully biblical foundations." Our psychologist might reject the field of evolutionary psychology as hopelessly built on naturalistic assumptions about human desire and sexuality and in need of an entirely new proposal as to analyzing the sources of said desire.

In each case, some aspect of all three approaches might be necessary.

Nicolas Wolterstorff in his book Education for Shalom has also analyzed how disciplinary engagement can contain potential points of deceit for the Christian scholar (or student), precisely because none of us want to live too long with cognitive dissonance. "Harmonization," Wolterstorff charges, is the temptation to revise the faith to meet the convictions of the discipline. The research specialist, rather than live in the tension between a doctrine of the embodied soul and current models of brain chemistry, revises her faith to a materialist position on personality.

Wolterstorff designates the word "compatibilism" in a different way from Hasker. The compatabilist scholar treats faith and field as applying to two differing areas of life; thus, they have little or no conflict. The same scholar decides now that the scriptures do not really speak to anything like physical anthropology.

"Delimitation," he argues, goes further by actually artificially limiting the scope of faith and field to achieve a similar lack of tension. The scholar, faced with biblical passages that would seem to mandate something like an immaterial, disembodied existence, reworks them as metaphoric language, while insisting that findings in brain chemistry are also only a language describing electrical impulses--a language of measurement rather than human existential meaning .

Any of these methods at times may be a legitimate response to the conflict. For example, the Christian may legitimately come to interpret a biblical passage differently given new findings in science. Delimitation may be justified at some level, and the perceived tension is the means to force us to see that. However, Wolterstorff worries that too often Christian scholars want cognitive relief without doing the hard work of disciplinary engagement. We do not closely examine the field's claims long enough to propose a new research model that outpaces the current ones.

What both Hasker and Wolterstroff want to show is that the relationship between Christian faith and learning and academic fields made up of many non-Christians and some Christians is a complex one. No one size fits all.