In 2024, Dr. Stan Rosenberg celebrated his 25th anniversary with the Council for Christian Colleges & Universities. Dr. Rosenberg moved to Oxford for the CCCU in 1999 and founded Scholarship & Christianity in Oxford (SCIO) in 2000. SCIO is the CCCU’s U.K. subsidiary, serving to facilitate research and scholarship in Oxford for undergraduate and graduate students as well as faculty members and leaders from CCCU member institutions. Since then, he has led a team in Oxford that has served nearly 4,000 students, 500 faculty and senior administrators, and 80 SCIO staff.

Dr. Rosenberg was also appointed vice president of research and scholarship at the CCCU in 2019. In that position, he oversees the CCCU’s research initiatives, including major faculty and institutional grant projects, the annual Collaborative Assessment Project (CAP) and compensation surveys, and related areas that enhance the capacities of CCCU members.

An active scholar himself, Dr. Rosenberg is a member of the Faculty of Theology and Religion at the University of Oxford, is on the editorial board of several journals, is a fellow of the International Society of Science & Religion, and was recently elected a fellow of the American Scientific Affiliation.

To mark his quarter-century with the CCCU and SCIO, Dr. Rosenberg recently sat down with Dr. Joseph Clair—a SCIO graduate who now serves as associate provost at George Fox University—to discuss Augustine’s applications to Christian and wider culture, student formation, SCIO’s trajectory over the past 25 years, hope for the future of Christian higher education, and more.

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Dr. Joseph Clair: I thought I’d begin with your own scholarly work. You’re really a full-flight administrator and leader, but I know we both have shared passion for theological studies and academic work. Could describe the genesis of your own passion for early Christianity and St. Augustine? How did your own scholarly life begin?

Dr. Stan Rosenberg: Well, my scholarly life in some ways comes from my growing up. My father was a medievalist, so you could say I inherited the family business. My father was a medieval historian at Colorado State, and I grew up around the history department. My father was one of those academics who was really deeply involved in the life of the university. Our table talk at dinner included the academic business.

After attending a year of Bible school, I went to Colorado State, did my undergrad where my dad was a professor, and studied history and philosophy and religious studies. I was in the honors program and wrote my honors thesis on Clement of Alexandria, the first Christian philosopher. That really set me in my path. My earliest sense of vocation that led into graduate school was a sense that evangelicals really need to understand something of the Church Fathers, that our perspective was too narrow, too flat, too thin, and we need to be thickened up by the Fathers. And so, off I went.

I had planned to go to graduate school at the University of Chicago, where I would have been in the early Christian studies program with Hans-Dieter Betz. I visited and realized that was not the place for me, even though I’d been admitted and made my plans. Instead, I went to my fallback school, the University of Kansas, because it was late in the season, and I did not want to put off graduate school. There, I worked with Karl Morrison, a great Augustine scholar. The year there was really revelatory to me…. especially about my lack of needed formation.

Walker Percy has a great phrase about getting As in school, but an F in life. I felt like that was happening with me around the Fathers. I was doing fine on all my academic work, but I didn’t think that I was actually “getting” the Fathers. As you’ll have a sense, perhaps the most important quality of a historian is empathy. If we cannot enter into the thought world of the people we’re studying, we cannot tell their story. I grew up too anti-sacramental, too anti-clerical, too anti-liturgical to really get the Fathers. I didn’t understand them.

It was reading Robert Webber’s book, Evangelicals on the Canterbury Trail, that gave me the language to understand the disconnect I was experiencing. I realized that if I was going to be serious about studying the Fathers, I needed to be under Catholic and/or Orthodox scholarship. I’m not sure everyone does, but I felt I desperately needed that formation if I was going to understand the Fathers.

At the end of that first year, I felt very frustrated and not sure what to do. I had a good graduate teaching assistantship. I was living in a place with a low cost of living. There was a lot that was good about it and some lovely people I worked with. But I went to Washington for the summer to go do an internship at the C.S. Lewis Institute, partly because I wanted to get a sense of what it was to be a public intellectual. I knew instinctively what it takes to be an academic, but I didn’t want to just be a scholar by default.

While I was there, I went up and used the library at Catholic University of America, and I had this epiphany: This is where I need to be. This is the place.

Through a series of events, that same day, I met the director of the academic program and ended up having a three-hour interview with him. He transferred me in on the spot. It’s one of the three significant, life-changing directions I’ve taken where I have no regrets and I’m really grateful that I said yes. (The other two were proposing to my wife of 33 years and moving to Oxford.)

Clair: Can you speak to how Augustine’s vision of the world might be particularly important to evangelical Christians today?

Rosenberg: One of the great concerns to me is how perfectionist as a culture we’ve become. Robert Markus, one of my mentors, once said to me that Augustine was the apologist for the mediocre Christian life. My first reaction with that was, really? That can’t be right.

But after three or four years of continuing to work, reading what Robert and others had presented, and deeply reading many of Augustine’s works, I came to realize the deep wisdom of that statement. Throughout his career, Augustine fought the perfectionists, first the fundamentalist, literalist tradition in the North African Church, and he fought the rational perfectionists of the Manichees, then the Donatists and their sacramental perfectionism, then the Roman intellectuals and the Christian naysayers with the City of God, and then of the individual, ethical perfectionism of Pelagius. I think those works present lessons that are worthwhile for us to think about.

We can’t expect the perfect now, and we can’t expect each other to be perfect now. Yet, we have required of each other, our leaders, and of our governmental structures a level of engagement that we can’t actually provide ourselves, a level of follow-through, a level of responsibility. Therefore we decry it when they don’t. Then, we treat those who fail as the enemy.

I think that’s one of the deep lessons for our society: we’ve got to learn how to accept less than perfection from each other and still show grace. The North American social-political culture now is one that is not grace-giving. Social media bears a role in that, and other forms of media exacerbate our disfunctions. As a culture, we have been trained to despise and disparage; these attitudes destroy any society.

This is where Augustine comes in. I use a personal example to convey this to my students: I love cycling. Living in a wet culture here in the U.K., as you do in Oregon, I have kept old cycles for in-town riding, though I hate riding them because they’re all corroded and corrupted. But I can still use them.

For Augustine, evil has corrupted and disrupted life as it should be and life as it could be. And it affects everything. But all things derive from God’s gift of creation and so to some extent are still useful. Everything is tainted, but not so tainted that the thing cannot yet be used. Now there may be things that may be so tainted that I have to stay away from because I personally do not have the ability to use it anymore. You can think of the alcoholic who has to stay away from alcohol.

But Augustine’s lesson is that everything is tainted from me inward out. Everything around me—I’m talking here about moral, spiritual, psychological, social, and political life—is afflicted and corrupted. But it’s all usable in some way, whether it’s the arts, whether it’s the state university, whether it’s George Fox, whether it’s SCIO, it’s all afflicted. But that’s not the end of the story. That’s just part of the story. And the question is not, “How can I get away from affliction?” It’s, “How can I find my way to work well and winsomely and graciously amidst the afflictions and the corruptions that make up our life?”

The lesson for me from Augustine as Christians is that our job is to manage corruption well. Manage our life amidst corruption. This is particularly what I say to the folks I work with, like some of your faculty who are working on the relationships between science and religion—a topic that elicits fear and pushback from many—that one of our key jobs as teachers is to help our students manage fear. And faculty, speaking broadly, don’t always think about that aspect of our vocation. They think we’re here to convey true information, and some realize that we as educators shape students. Better faculty think we’re here to offer formation. But I think the other piece that we don’t commonly think about and discuss as faculty is that a key job of education is teaching those who we educate to manage their fears.

Because what we’re conveying creates fear: it’s different, it’s other, it’s distinct from what the students previously learned. It’s challenging our easy certainties, our easy answers. And that creates fear, so we have to manage fear. Augustine, I think, gives us tools to do that.

Clair: How would you describe that work of student formation now? Has it changed in the 26 years that you’ve been doing SCIO?

Rosenberg: Students are really different in many ways, but I think there’s still an essential key to student formation. We continue to emphasize that scholarship is not a position or career or status but a habit of mind which requires one to honestly ask thoughtful questions, think critically, investigate fully, and respond generously to the answers one discovers. As Christians, we pursue this with a vision of doing this coram deo, that is, with a responsibility to do so as before the face of God. One of the phrases I was taught when I first came here to Oxford by another study abroad colleague from the CCCU is that our job is to help students be less certain, but more committed. Part of the role of education is to help students learn how to set aside those easy, simplistic certainties that don’t adequately represent reality.

It’s not that to be certain of something is wrong. I’m not saying uncertain; I’m saying less certain, but more committed.

I can remember myself when I was 18. If you asked me to identify the essentials of my faith, I would have filled a long scroll; it would have dropped and rolled across the floor, every line in tiny print. If you ask me today, what do I think are the essentials? I still have essentials, but they would fill a smaller space.

But that smaller space I believe I hold with much greater conviction and commitment and engagement. I’ve got a smaller list that has a higher degree of integrity and integration, because I can see the interconnections. I can see that if I loosen up in this area, on this commitment, if I release it, here are the implications. When I had the long list, my ability to integrate those was shoddy.

A core job of an educator, working with college students, is still to manage fear. We do that through the quality and the depth of our relationship with them. We have to win the right to speak hard truths. We do that through speaking truths we’ve gained. But it’s also listening to the students to find out what that looks like in their life today. I think of the students I have now—the issues that they feel strongly about are often very different than students I had 10 years ago and 20 years ago.

Clair: As you look back on the 26 years with SCIO, what are a few bright spots, whether it’s a person or event? What are the high watermarks as you reflect?

Rosenberg: Well, first off, it’s having been able to play a role directly or indirectly in the lives of the many amazing students who have come through SCIO, and to see what they’re doing now. Many have gone on to graduate school, gone into serious roles within government and society and public education, private education. I know of one recent alum from a few years back who is now in the secret service, using the skills he developed as a researcher.

Just amazing connections. I’ve had almost 4,000 students come through the program during my time and about 500 faculty. We’ve had multiple faculty who have come through the faculty projects we do who, through this, have really grown in their roles on campus and have become deans and other senior leaders, and so it’s been a way to really help advance individuals and build our institutions.

I think core to my vision is helping to create resources and resourcing. And I really see my vocation much more around this sense of building capacity elsewhere. My role here reflects dual hats I wear, running a study abroad program, contributing to the Oxford faculty of theology and religion, and being vice president of research for the CCCU, which involves investing in colleges like yours to help you build your capacity.

One of the great delights was the most recent large, grant-funded project we had, Supporting Structures, which was funded by both the Templeton Foundation and Murdock Trust. Leading up to that grant, I had spent years trying to think through how we build up the science faculty at our member institutions when they’re lab-based and labs are so expensive? How do I help our colleges build that?

With this last grant program, we devised an approach to provide funding and a mechanism to really help make it possible, but not by building our own bespoke faculty research labs. Rather we focused on making use of such labs already built.  To participate, institutions had to establish a relationship with the local research university for their faculty to use their labs, to take advantage of the resources there.

Many of these labs are understaffed and they’re really delighted to have another qualified, competent researcher come in and contribute. We did this as part of this grant—all the faculty involved, 24 faculty, nine colleges, all took great advantage of it. It worked brilliantly. All nine colleges conveyed that the relationship they formed as a part of the grant will continue beyond the life of the grant. We helped create the initial spur, but it’s taken on a life of its own. And that’s the best!

Clair: What was the origin of SCIO? How did it come about?

Rosenberg: Back in the early 1990s, the CCCU started offering a joint summer school with the Centre for Medieval and Renaissance Studies. Then in the mid-nineties, a group of honors directors from a number of colleges came to the CCCU and said, well, you’re doing study abroad in Latin America and Russia, etc. Can you do something specifically for honors students?

The decision was to create a semester-long honors program in Oxford, working with the organization that they’d already been working with. The Centre then had a significant number of problems. It had quite a toxic set of relationships and other problems, as organizations sometimes have. I want to hasten to add, that’s no longer the case. The Centre is still around. It’s a good place and run by people I respect.

In 1999, I was in Washington running graduate programs for Trinity Evangelical Divinity School and worked with the CCCU. Rich Gathro recruited me to come work with the Oxford program because they needed somebody who was close to medieval studies, and that’s patristics, who was an administrator, who loved students, and who knew the CCCU. They wanted somebody who, because of the problems, they knew they could trust and with whom they could enjoy a good relationship.

Over the course of the next several years, we wrestled with what to do and ended up concluding the best way to solve the problem was to leave the Centre, sadly, but it was the right and wise decision to make. And so SCIO was set up as our own base, as a subsidiary of the CCCU.

For corporate reasons, we had previously needed to create a charity here in the U.K. So SCIO actually was born on July 4, 2000, as CCCU-UK. The name Scholarship & Christianity in Oxford, or SCIO, came along a little bit later, because the CCCU name was not a great name here. In the U.K. parlance, college either refers to a subsidiary, a subset of a university, like the colleges around Oxford, or it means the final two years of high school. Additionally there’s not a Christian liberal arts tradition here in the same way as the U.S., so the CCCU name just didn’t work in this context.

We needed to come up with a different name. The name SCIO was born over an Italian dinner with Andrew Moore, a friend on the theology faculty here. He gets the credit for the name. I get the credit of having bought him a good meal and recognizing a great name when I heard it!

Clair: Augustine wrote a lot about the virtue of hope, and hope has temporal and eternal extensions. As you look to the future of scholarship and Christianity, in Oxford and broadly, the church, higher education, what’s giving you hope?

Rosenberg: I see a really good movement in three areas that I think give hope.

First off, there’s some really good work going on in Christian education at places like Oxford and Cambridge. I often ask our students at orientation, “How many people back home, family, friends, pastor, faculty, warn you not to come to Oxford and lose your faith?” Each term, between 20% and 80% of students raise their hands. And then I say, well, I go to a large evangelical church where, if you throw a stone, you’re as statistically likely to hit a world-class scientist as you are anyone else. That’s a bit of rhetorical overstatement, I suppose, but it conveys that there is a great tradition of faith and scholarship here at Oxford.

Secondly, and these are in no order, our colleges can be a beacon of hope, particularly in the midst of disarray, as we see the Department of Education dismantled, as we see NHS and NSF grants being canceled, which is impacting scholars from our campuses.

A typical CCCU campus employs, on average, maybe 150 full-time faculty. Most any one of our colleges is relatively small, and so you might envision a relatively small reach compared to, say, the University of Berkeley or Michigan State. But if you look at across the ca. 130 U.S. institutions that are part of the CCCU, we employ some 33,000 full- and part-time faculty. That’s a massive size. Together, we actually have a broad range and depth available and offer some really capable scholars who are committed and deep Christian thinkers. That can be a great source of hope.

Part of my role as VP of research is to keep thinking about and working on ways that we can capitalize on and strengthen what we do to consolidate the effort of 33,000 people, not just individual campuses. In this season where there is so much disarray and discontent and confusion, this is a time for us as Christian colleges and faculty both to step in to the disarray and to work together.

Amongst leadership, I see a real will for that, which I don’t think was as evident 10 or 15 years ago; there was not then much thinking along those lines. Now, in my estimation and experience, our members see each other less as competitors, and more as complementing institutions.

More than that, per your question, hope is both for the here and now but also it is eschatological. What we do here now matters, but it is not the whole show… in fact, it is only a tiny smidge of the big show! Hope does not rest on our potential laurels now.

The third source of hope is outside of our movement, and I think it’s really important: the rise of the Christian study centers at the big secular universities like the University of Virginia and University of Michigan, the state and private universities. These centers are doing much work, often working with our Christian colleges and faculty. They are working on developing coursework and formation that is complementary and voluntary for students, which is akin to what we think about in terms of the integration of faith and learning. In a number of instances, they’re drawing upon our CCCU faculty to support and strengthen that. I think those are all things for us in our industry to be hopeful about and understand as ways that we can in our work enhance the broader, common good.

Clair: Well, Dr. Rosenberg, thank you for the fruit of your teaching, your work as a scholar, your administrator, and for building an institution that has formed so many, including myself. Thank you for your time.

Rosenberg: Thank you, my pleasure. What a great time to be together. This interview itself has got to be a highlight for me in my 25 years!

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Joseph Clair, Ph.D. is the associate provost, division of humanities, honors, and education and professor of theology and culture at George Fox University in Newberg, OR.