Entering Yale: The Spiritual Context

Most of us would rather not tune into a TV show that’s more than half over, start a new book at page 150, or transfer to a new school over Spring Break. In each case, we’d feel out of step, ill-informed, out of context.

Amid the other briefings you receive as Yale newcomers, our experience suggests you could use some spiritual context, so here is something about your new spiritual context as studies—and life—begin at Yale.

The first basic fact: Yale began and continued for many years as a Christian school. What did “Christian” mean? Founders, presidents and senior faculty for generations heartily entrusted their own lives and the school to Jesus Christ as the “only true and living way of access to God,” to quote Timothy Dwight. The accompanying article, “Revivals Mark Yale’s History,” spans more than three centuries of such testimony.

Although outshouted and outvoted by competing advocacies in recent decades, the testimony of Jesus remains both fervent and unbroken from the founding of Yale to your arrival here.

Although outshouted and outvoted by competing advocacies in recent decades, the testimony of Jesus remains both fervent and unbroken from the founding of Yale to your arrival here.

My personal experience at Yale dates to 1967. (The Yale Standard Bible study itself dates back to about 1963.) Having been on campus weekly for most of the school years since, I think I can give you a sense of what has remained constant and what has been changing.

First, the constants. Spiritually, the Bible portrays this life as a battle for believers in Jesus (Ephesians 6, 2 Corinthians 10). At Yale the battle has always been more intense than most other places. Why?

It represents life away from home and family supports for most students.
Yale is intellectually intense, hurling intellectual challenges, both ancient and intricate, in a younger believer’s path.
Yale is diverse and many-faceted, like a great bazaar of cultural, emotional, physical and spiritual pursuits that cheerfully offer to absorb all comers. Serving God comes in for lots of competition. Matthew 6:33, though, still applies.
The choices freshmen make each year still mark crossroads in many of their lives, especially those with some prior acquaintance with Jesus Christ. By the time 20^th Class Reunion (so far in the future!) rolls around, for every person that has waited until after graduation to serve God vigorously, I guess there will be half a dozen that took their stand during their years at Yale.
There is no such thing as a static believer at Yale. Either you are moving forward and taking fresh steps in faith, or you are losing ground, because the atmosphere is fundamentally antagonistic to faith.

Second, and to me more exciting, here are the changes I have seen in the last twenty years, and even the last two or three years:

Since my senior year, when radical threats to bomb Yale buildings shook the campus, a lot of steam has gone out of the “rebellion for rebellion’s sake” that ruled campus attitudes then. Many of the showcase radical activities seem increasingly to offer only shopworn merchandise to newcomers. That is observable in everything from politics to music to morality.
After radicalism blew over, elite careerism swept Yale, but much of the cocksure career attitude of five and ten years ago seems to have evaporated. Law school, consulting and investment banking are no longer the wildly popular meal tickets they were, and nothing has replaced them. (No offense intended: I applied to law schools, was a consultant for years, and am an investment banker.)
Most important, God has been moving among the students in a more and more prominent way. In 1971, one arriving freshman could only find about half a dozen student believers on campus that year. Last year, there were a number of strongly evangelical Bible studies, prayer meetings and undergraduate organizations. Some were structured and organized, supported by a variety of sponsors; some were wholly impromptu. Overall, God is clearly moving to bring a larger and larger group of believers in Jesus to be His at Yale. Though still few in relation to the total student body, the believers are vital and increasing.
God has a plan for the life and pursuits of each believer that turns to Him. More and more Yalies are reaching out to apprehend that reality.
God intends believers to care for each other: by prayer, by simple friendship, by practical and spiritual support each can give the other. If you are minded to be His, God has others for you to love and care for in Him. That kind of mutual care, too, has been more in evidence in the last five years or so.

Last, let’s extrapolate what the changing elements at Yale mean for your years here. To be sure, the more vehement opposition to Biblical faith will continue to be hostile. But Yale as a spiritual environment hasn’t been static in the four years just now past, and it will keep changing. You can expect more boldness on the part of believers, more desire to put collegiate life on a solid eternal foundation, to reach for the substance of a life shared with God. You will also see more desire to testify to Jesus’ love in public, and that desire will not be denied.

If that prospect stirs you, you may surely have a part in making it so. Welcome to Yale!, and may God bless you thoroughly in His Son, our dear Messiah Jesus.

Phil Chamberlain ’70