Our Story, The Institute for Christian Studies

NEWS
ICS Launches Centre for Philosophy, Religion and Social Ethics

INTERDISCIPLINARY
CONFERENCE
TRUTH MATTERS
Toronto, August 18–20

Our Story

The Institute for Christian Studies is a Christian graduate school in the Reformed tradition. Its founders were profoundly aware of the pivotal role universities play in setting directions for culture and society. ICS opened its doors to students in 1967 in a two-storey house on Lyndhurst Avenue in Toronto. There was one professor and no degree programs, but there was the conviction that a Christian graduate school would be vital to generating ideas and developing leaders, and that such a place could enhance the cultural discernment of faithful believers.

Our History [+] [–] 229 College Street

By 1972, ICS had moved to its current location on College Street, had added several faculty and had begun granting master's-level certification in philosophy. In 1980, ICS began to develop a doctoral program in cooperation with the Free University of Amsterdam. In 1983, the Ontario provincial legislature authorized ICS to grant a Master of Philosophical Foundations, and to offer a program of doctoral studies in cooperation with the Free University leading to a Ph.D granted by the Free University. In 1992, ICS was authorized to grant a Master of Worldview Studies degree, and in 2004 ICS was authorized to offer its own doctorate and to change its Masters of Philosophical Foundations degree to a Master of Arts in Philosophy.

For more than four decades, ICS has pursued its calling to train Christian scholars by imparting a radical sense of the scholarly task in philosophy, theology, and related disciplines.

Today ICS is a vibrant place of learning. It combines the advantages of a small graduate school with the expertise of an established and widely-published faculty. ICS is affiliated with the Toronto School of Theology, which allows us a unique, faith-based dialogue between the disciplines of philosophy and theology. With alumni in important leadership roles in both the academy and society around the world, ICS continues to foster the next generation of Christian scholars and leaders.

Our Convictions [+] [–] Lyndhurst Avenue

In the diverse world of contemporary scholarship, ICS emphasizes the integrality of faith and intellectual inquiry. We embrace Christ as the Lord of all learning, and believe that all scholarship is subject to the spiritual struggle spoken of in the Christian scriptures. Trained eyes are needed to spot the traces of spiritual struggle both inside and outside one's own disciplinary expertise.

ICS promotes an interdisciplinary approach. In order to attend to the trace of spiritual struggle, we work to identify the hinge issues in and across the humanities and the social sciences. These hinge issues and ideas are the pivotal questions from which the doors of our understanding hang, swinging open and shut. When exploring these issues in conversation with the leading figures and movements, both contemporary and historical, we can see clearly what ideas shape life in conformity with the Christ revealed in scripture.

Our Hopes [+] [–]

We call our approach to scholarship "reformational".

This means several things. First, we work within the Reformed intellectual tradition but always with an eye for self-critique and further reformation. Second, we seek to engage, with critical fairness, current schools of thought and cultural movements such as postmodernism, liberalism, neo-pragmatism and feminism. Third, we subject our own assumptions to critical evaluation. In these ways our approach aims to open up alternatives to habits of heart and mind that presently dominate the university, and, indeed, our very lives.

ICS continues to prepare new generations of Christians who will birth ideas that move the Christian community toward God, that breathe the air of the Christian scriptures and of the Christ there revealed. Those who come to study here (whatever the tradition they bring) will be challenged, but will also find support within a community of scholars united in serving the God of the scriptures as the Lord of learning.