An Atheistic Yoke

“Every student who entrusts himself to the university must accept the yoke of the atheistic intellectual starting point as an inescapable necessity. This is a yoke which bends the bearer cruelly, and which is placed on the student apart from conscious choice, by means of the completion of the course of study in a major field—a field dominated by the atheistic starting point. Even Christians who attend the university come under this yoke. They are permitted, to be sure, to have their faith in their private lives by those around them who may view that faith favorably, or derisively, or perhaps even share its convictions. But they are forbidden to retain the living God and his Son Jesus Christ in their academic thinking, or to grant him any material function therein. So they retain Jesus in their feelings, but they deny him daily in their thinking, because this thinking follows atheistic, anti-Christian principles.”

(Etta Linnemann, Trans. by Robert W. Yarbough, Historical Criticism of the Bible: Methodology or Ideology?, Grand Rapids, Michigan: Baker Book House, 1995, 33)