Founded in 1967, Christ College is known for its distinctive emphasis on interdisciplinary education that incorporates the best of liberal education with the virtues of charity, humility, and courage inspired by Christian faith. As a superb liberal arts college, Christ College is dedicated to the study and practice of the basic arts of inquiry and committed to an educational process that enables students to achieve a measure of intellectual independence. By grounding its curriculum firmly in the best works of human thought and culture, Christ College seeks to develop in its students the intellectual skills and the arts of sound judgment that enable them to become generally educated human beings with the capacity to sustain the life of the mind beyond the day of their graduation.

But Christ College is more than a liberal arts college. Although it neither requires nor seeks to inculcate any confession of faith, the college's name suggests its compatibility with Valparaiso University's tradition of scholarship, freedom, and faith. Some within Christ College describe this tradition as a healthy tension between faith and knowledge, some see it as a union of high learning and high religion, some as liberal learning informed by the Christian faith, still others as an attempt to articulate the meaning of Christian Humanism. The college is firmly committed to the practice of the liberal arts and the search for knowledge within the context of the Christian tradition.

These collegiate goals, commonly embraced by both students and faculty alike, are visibly embodied every day in the communal life of the College. Christ College endeavors to develop among its members a sense of community, a community of restless seekers of knowledge and truth, a community within which free inquiry is encouraged, a community of scholars engaged in preparing themselves for active participation in the larger human community. Much of the curricular structure of Christ College and many of its co-curricular activities are devoted to nurturing this sense of community.

By establishing an academic community that operates outside as well as inside the classroom, Christ College promotes a particular set of educational values and actions among its members. Among these are direct and personal relationships between students and faculty, a spirit of cooperation and mutual growth through free exchange of ideas, a willingness to challenge and scrutinize ideas and beliefs (including one's own), and a concern for the integration of academic learning into a responsible and meaningful life.

While stressing intellectual excellence and the fullest use of one's own mental gifts, the college also attempts to develop within its members moral and spiritual virtues like humility, charity, hope, and civility, and a sense that the more knowledge is gained, the more it is to be used wisely in the service of others. To the extent these values are actually realized in its members, Christ College considers them prepared for responsible vocations in society and leadership in the Christian community.