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WARNING: The reproduction of any discourse, and indeed the understanding of any discourse, is a fusion of horizons. No reproduction of this kind is solely the product of the speaker or the scribe. It is, rather, the product of the speaker and the scribe and perhaps something more. Consider this your warning these words do not adequately or exhaustively describe what the speaker did or did not say, and assume for the sake of charity that any errors are my own.
Many students come to Professor Wolterstorff to talk about career choices, including whether they should be a professor and of what. He asks them three questions:
- Do you love it?
- Are you good at it?
- Is it worth while?
The love of learning comes in two forms: 1) love of the craftsmanship of scholarship (the research, the gathering of evidence, the writing, the dialogue), which is similar to the poets love of composing a fine poem, and 2) love of the understanding which scholarship yields. It is ultimately the love of understanding which keeps scholarship afloat. Why do we love understanding? Sometimes we love it because it enables it to do certain things, but this certainly cannot be the only reason for prizing understanding. As has been said, “philosophy bakes no bread.” All the secularists can do here is look for the psychological factor within human beings which makes people wonder. The wisdom literature of the Old Testament, however, gives us a very different view. All through the Psalms, we have the theme of creation as the works of God made with wisdom which according to the New Testament is Jesus Christ. The Torah embodies this divine wisdom which looks upon creation, and the response of the devout Jew is to meditate on the Torah as a locus of this divine wisdom. To be animated by this kind of love of learning would be to revel in awe at the works of divine wisdom which we can glimpse through our scholarship. Cell biology, for example, has become a very impressive field not only for its technical application but for the immense insight it gives us into the intricacy of the divine wisdom it opens up to us.
There was a powerful movement in the 19th century which endeavored to remove authors from the humanities (we do not engage with Augustine, but with the Confessions, an impersonal “text”, for example). This has been hand in hand with ever-new reductionist accounts of humanity. A product of human thought and effort like a text or a work of art is so much more than this. It is an embodiment of their creativity and wisdom which is an imaging of that of God himself.
Christian scholars will have this as unique about them: we are not merely about whatever task we choose to be about. We are to be agents of shalom. We are to undue the bonds of injustice, let the oppressed go free, and break every yoke. Wolterstorff tells a story of a recent talk her heard in which a scientist argued that teaching intelligent design must be confined to philosophy courses because it is incompatible by nature with the teaching of the natural sciences. This understanding assumes that both “philosophy” and “natural science” have a sort of static nature. Wolterstorff thinks of the disciplines, instead, as social practices which are constantly changing as a result of elements both within and outside the disciplines. This kind of social practice is a tradition which is handed on to newcomers to teach them how to do what the discipline does. The practices of disciplines belong neither to Christians, nor to naturalists, nor to idealists, but to all who practice it. The Christian will appropriate them differently however (for example, they will not participate in the kind of cruel ridicule so common in the academy). Despite these differences, the goal of a Christian scholar is to learn to speak in a voice appropriate to the discourse of the discipline. This is not an “integrative” process, because that implies two separate things which need integrating. It is not creating a “theology of [one's discipline].” It is not the pointing out of similarities between one’s faith and the results of the one’s discipline, because that is not actually doing the discipline. It is not coming up with different theories than one’s non-Christian peers. It is using the “mind” in a Christian way (using mind in the sense of “the mind of Christ”, with content well beyond beliefs and doctrines). A mind is an interpreting and valorizing formation. We learn to interpret certain formations (music for the music scholar, arguments for the philosopher, etc) and we learn which are praiseworthy and which are not. When we engage with others in our discipline, we find that the “IV-formations” (interpreting-valorizing formations) we have are often different from those of others. The task of a Christian scholar is to be shaped by the Christian faith in this IV-formation. This involves vastly more than a “Christian worldview.” It involves moral and emotional formations, habits of attention, responses, etc. Some Christians’ formations are narrow in scope, not extending far beyond basic beliefs or liking worship songs (and being much less important than, say, their formation as a lawyer or as an American). Engaging in an academic discipline is a matter of obtaining a “mind” proper to that discipline. We learn the habits of attention, evaluation, and delight of that discipline.
Two controversial assumption of this view must be defended:
- The Christian mind is relevant to the engagement with the discipline. There are plausible examples of this. Someone whose Christian mind has been shaped by scripture will see the immensity of the natural world as an instance of the divine wisdom. At one point in the history of art, the mind of many artists distinguished art from the instrumental sciences which were the darling of modernity. A Christian mind will, as a rule, think highly of art without making it an idol.
- There is nothing about a Christian mind or the academic enterprise which obligates the Christian scholar not to participate. Some argue that religion is by definition irrational and should be kept out of the academy. This charge cannot be sustained. Even Rorty later in life called this charge “pure bunk.” Others argue that religion should be confined to the private life because of its private and often intolerant nature. However, much experience contradicts the view that religious people are in any way particularly intolerant. A third critique, of more substance, is that the academic disciplines should be an exercise of our “generic, human rationality” rather than anything religiously or otherwise particular. On this view, we are to move from consensus and toward a hypothetical or counterfactual consensus. This view is basically that we are to base our views on evidence which all competent practitioners of our discipline could interpret in the same way if they thought deeply with the right background information. Wolterstorff calls this the counterfactual consensus requirement. This is a nearly impossible standard to use. It is hard to discern even real agreement, much less counterfactual agreement. This view also makes all view arrogant by saying in all cases that “if you knew all the evidence and thought hard enough about it, you would agree with me.” Suppose a Christian proposes a new theory in his discipline and finds that no one (or very few) will support him in them. Should he leave the discipline, or abandoned his views? No! Disagreements between people within a discipline are basic. We have differences at least largely because of the formations we bring to our disciplines from outside of them (political, social, religious, etc).
Summary and Conclusion: It is the calling of a Christian scholar to think with a Christian mind and the speak with a Christian voice appropriate to her discipline. She is to do so out of love for both the craft of scholarship and the understanding it yields (both for its usefulness and for the wonder and love it produces of the creator).
WARNING: The reproduction of any discourse, and indeed the understanding of any discourse, is a fusion of horizons. No reproduction of this kind is solely the product of the speaker or the scribe. It is, rather, the product of the speaker and the scribe and perhaps something more. Consider this your warning these words do not adequately or exhaustively describe what the speaker did or did not say, and assume for the sake of charity that any errors are my own.
Professor Christerson seeks to answer two questions:
- Can social research contribute to the growth and development of God’s kingdom on earth?
- Can social research lead to positive changes in the world?
One of Professor Christerson’s heroes in college was Tony Campolo, a sociologist and preacher and activist. He got into sociology to change the world (part of which, he quips, is the result of being twenty at the time). “Philosophers have only interpreted the world. The point, however, is to change it,” as Karl Marx said.
From the beginning, sociology was geared toward attempting to change the world. Early greats like Marx and Durkheim sought understand the world specifically for the purpose. There have been great failings in the history of the discipline, however. Marx, for example, has had more impact than perhaps anyone else on sociology, but when his theory was implemented the consequences were often greater than the problem. There have also, however, been great successes. The Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education cited the work of several sociologists in support of its decision to desegregate schools. James Q. Wilson’s “broken windows” theory of crime has also done great good by allowing police department to make great strides in the reduction of crime. Another example is William Bielby’s research on “statistical discrimination” and his testimony as an expert witness in the famous Lucky’s supermarket class action.
However, there is a large gulf, typically, between the social sciences and the policy making structure. Most social scientists imagine the process by which their work can make a difference being a trickle-down from them at the top to a policy maker then to various “practitioners.” There are a few problems with this model:
- “Academia incentivizes abstraction and high levels of complexity.” Even well-educated legislators and other policy makers have a hard time deciphering sociological research articles.
- Policy decisions are inherently political, and driven “more by powerful interest groups than empirical evidence.”
- Think tanks are employed by powerful interest groups to justify the policies that serve their interests.
- We all struggle with confirmation bias in research, but on the level of policy-making people are even more prone to seek out information that confirms their pre-existing beliefs.
This is also not a Biblical view of how social change happens. If we understand the role of the church in terms of the kingdom already breaking in but not yet complete, then the kingdom already in the world is the driver of social change. Historically, the Christian movement largely caused great social change through bottom-up work. Is there a role for social science research in that process?
Christerson identifies two current modes of engagement by Christian sociologists:
- “Religion” as an independent variable: What effect does religion have on other social phenomena?
- “Religion” as dependent variable: How is religious belief and practice affected by other social institutions and forces?
Christerson proposes a different way of engaging: participatory action research. This kind of research focuses on enabling action rather than making abstract generalizations. Those who are being researched become partners in the study, helping to define questions, goals, and analyses. The researcher becomes the servant of the community rather than an agenda of his own.
He discussed an example in the paper Elucidating the Power in Empowerment and the Participation in Participatory Action Research: A Story About Research Team and Elementary School Change (Riggs, Langhout 2010). Christerson is proposing this kind of work as a model for working with churches and Christian organizations. He dreams of seeing Biola found a “Center for Action Research” with a multi-disciplinary faculty which partners with community organizations to promote shalom. The organizations will propose the research, and the center will do the research with university students and resources.
WARNING: The reproduction of any discourse, and indeed the understanding of any discourse, is a fusion of horizons. No reproduction of this kind is solely the product of the speaker or the scribe. It is, rather, the product of the speaker and the scribe and perhaps something more. Consider this your warning these words do not adequately or exhaustively describe what the speaker did or did not say, and assume for the sake of charity that any errors are my own.
WARNING: I admit that much of what Professor Yong said was lost on me and is not well represented in my notes here. I do not speak the language of renewal movements well (a fact for which I truly feel culpable).
Professor Yong wishes to address the possibilities of a distinctly renewalist (Pentecostal or charismatic) contribution to Christian higher education.
Renewalist Opportunities for Christian Higher Education
Professor Yong begins by reminding us of the recent internationalization of Christianity, especially within the renewalist movement. For the first half of the twentieth century, the results of global mission were more tentative, but the later half has been a true “Pentecostal century.” Yong opts for the term “renewalist” as the broader term which includes the various forms of Pentecostal and charismatic Christianity. A relatively small number of the modern Christian institutions of higher education are at all affiliated with renewalist movements. The growing number of people in the global south within the renewal movement will result in a higher demand for an education which attends to and explain renewalist religious experience. For a long time, scholars puzzled
Heart and Hands, But Not Heads?: Problems for Renewal Spirituality in Higher Education
Warm hearts and hot hands are stereotypical characteristics of renewal movements, but cool heads are not (maybe cold heads are, in the sense of a great anti-intellectualism). Mark Noll’s critique in The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind placed much of the blame for the rampant anti-intellectualism of the American evangelical mind on historical and theological factors associated with the Pentecostal and broader renewalist movements.
The renewal movement has had an unstable relationship to intellectual and educational institutions in the past, but pietist religion provides a model for the holiness movement to be a religion of the head as well as the heart and the hands. While the anti-intellectualism of renewalism is not acceptable, it is too easy to forget that that anti-intellectualism often arose as a response to equally improper views of reason from other quarters. Is a via media possible?
The Renewal of Christian Higher Education: What difference does the Holy Spirit make?
Even though there has been a recent increase in the role of Christians even in secular universities, Professor Yong is interested more in distinctive Christian efforts in higher education. Mark Noll makes three claims for the centrality of Christ in the task of education: 1) the incarnation gives an explicitly theological rationale to various disciplines, 2) all of the topics we study have the same kind of two-sidedness as Chalcedon tells us Christ has, 3) the incarnation ought to teach Christian scholars humility.
While certainly Christian, Noll’s formulation is not sufficiently trinitarian. The Holy Spirit is, on the whole, a neglected theme in mainstream theology. The work of the Holy Spirit cannot be neglected in this discussion, considering that the Holy Spirit was indispensable even to Christ’s own thinking. How can we have vital Christocentrism without vital pneumatology? Professor Yong suggests it is impossible. What would it look like for a Christian institution to take the spirit into account?
Professor Yong articulates some of the questions his perspective raises as follows:
- “The Holy Spirit is the teacher and guide of all truth.” What are the pedagogical implications?
- “The Spirit empowers life, and this includes teaching and learning.” What does spiritual power and spiritual life involve in the university context? Is it reducible to miraculous signs, or is there something else?
- “The Spirit em-passions followers of Jesus to take up his cause passionately.”
Sketching a Renewal Vision of Christian Higher Education
The first task is a history of Christian educational practices in all eras and the role of the spirit in them. This will yield the pedagogical insights which we need in order to integrate scholarship and education into the fully formed Christian life.
The second task is to build on this historical account to show how Christian higher education and its institutions could be reformed by renewalist understanding. The goal is to engage the head and the heart and the hands with the goodness, truth, and beauty of Christ in our thinking, feeling, and doing.
Professor Yong feels the need to address the charges of triumphalism and elitism addressed often (and sometimes rightly) against renewalist movements. He is not interested in some kind of “new thing,” but rather a recovery of the wisdom of the ancients.
WARNING: The reproduction of any discourse, and indeed the understanding of any discourse, is a fusion of horizons. No reproduction of this kind is solely the product of the speaker or the scribe. It is, rather, the product of the speaker and the scribe and perhaps something more. Consider this your warning these words do not adequately or exhaustively describe what the speaker did or did not say, and assume for the sake of charity that any errors are my own.
WARNING: This talk in particular is done violence by this form of presentation, because the speaker discussed much visual art which I do not have the benefit of providing for you. There was also so much art discussed that I have not managed to include his comments on all of it in these notes. You should talk to him. He’s brilliant.
For a variety of reasons, Christian theology did not fare well in twentieth century art, and likewise twentieth century art has not received an adequate hearing in the contemporary church. Rosalind Krauss said that it had become “indescribably embarrassing to mention are and spirit in the same sentence.” In very recent years, however, there has been something of a return of religion to the art world. But this return has been complex and ambiguous. James Elkins has argued that “It is impossible to talk sensibly about religion and at the same time address art in an informed manner: but it is also irresponsible not to keep trying.” The art journal October has developed the most formidable and comprehensive methodologies of art criticism. There are four main influential methods which have influenced the discourse:
- Psychoanalysis
- Marxian Social Art History
- Formalism and Structuralism
- Poststructuralism and Deconstructionism
Manet’s painting of the nude in many ways is a commentary on the process of painting itself, bringing in all sorts of conventions and drawing attention to them, resulting in a bizarre, self-critical painting. Modernist art, before being about anything else, is about the art itself. These four hermeneutical methods are ways of reading behind or beneath the work. The psychoanalytic would see this painting as about sublimation of desire. The nude is looking at the viewer, surrounded by these “sort of creepy guys” and seems to be asking you what it is you’re looking at and why.
Picasso extends this, by emphasizing the flatness of the painting and the illusion of its representing any three-dimensional thing. Pollock extends this even further by removing any subject matter at all and merely commenting on the form. DuChamp makes this an institutional critique, making in the famous urinal piece a total critique of all art conventions (the point being that it is the social practice of the museum that makes the art). Warhol’s Marilyns is a parody which makes almost exactly this same point.
Any artwork is always-already on an interpretive horizon of psychoanalysis because a human viewer is always involved. Likewise, a Marxian critique is always appropriate because there is always a structure of social power around the artwork. Fundamental to each of these methods is a radical hermeneutic of suspicion, examining the idealogical ground behind and beneath the works themselves. This is part of what keeps religion from communicating in art with any kind of specificity. The structures of organized religion are too implicated in the social structures in which are artworks are created, and the religious subject matter cannot truly survive the hermeneutic of suspicion inherent in these four forms of art criticism. It is not enough to appeal to the intention of the author, because it is precisely his intentions which are being questioned. Therefore, the role of religion in law can only be changed by a change in the interpretive discourse about art.
What does it look like for religion to return to the discourse about art? Religion opens another axis of meaning in art: the relationship of world to God. Aquinas defined theology as a unified science considering all things under their relation to God. By opening contemporary art criticism to the theological dimension, the discourse of art criticism can be thickened, enriched, and benefited. Four distinct situations come to mind in which “theologically informed criticism” may or may not be desirable
- Artwork which makes overt religious references: In such a case, it makes little difference whether the author is herself religious. One example is Tim Hawkinson’s work Pentecost (1999) which, in the critical literature, is never discussed as being about Pentecost! This lack of theological informed criticism results in missing important things about works of this kind.
- Artwork by a person of religious faith: Hawkinson claims a specifically Christian faith. One curator has tried to downplay this and say that the work has nothing to do with a specific religious tradition. However, similar arguments are not made about clearly political works, and this is disingenuous. In these cases, as in the political, to do so would be to fail completely in understanding the work.
- Artwork dealing with subjects of interest to a theological tradition: If we answer yes to the question of whether theology has an interest in what art says about theologically relevant subjects, the answer to the fourth category becomes obvious.
- Any and all artwork, just as the four models developed in October: If we are interested, theologically, in any artwork, it only makes sense to be interested in all artwork. All artwork addresses something which, in principle, theology can be interested in.
There are three specific ways forward Anderson proposes:
- “We need deeper, more careful engagements with 20th century art history.” It is not enough to be critical of the elitism and secularity of the discipline without understanding the historical situation of the discipline at this time.
- “We need deeper, more careful engagements with artworks themselves.” Good criticism, as Lewis says, “enlarges our being.”
- “We need deeper, more careful theological thinking.” Specifically, we need more good work on the theology of art but also about bigger subjects like the incarnation (which is often thinned out and lessened by modern Christian criticism).
WARNING: The reproduction of any discourse, and indeed the understanding of any discourse, is a fusion of horizons. No reproduction of this kind is solely the product of the speaker or the scribe. It is, rather, the product of the speaker and the scribe and perhaps something more. Consider this your warning these words do not adequately or exhaustively describe what the speaker did or did not say, and assume for the sake of charity that any errors are my own.
George Hunsinger gives us an account of Barth’s engagement with theological anthropology as an example of how Christian scholarship might proceed.
Barth’s work in Volume 3, Part 2 of Church Dogmatics addresses these questions in the context of the doctrine of creation:
- How should we understand human nature from a theological standpoint?
- How might secular alternatives stack up against it?
- What would a theologically adequate account of human nature look like?
“The real human being is the one who exists in relation to God.” Our central purpose is to know and love God, so there can be no such thing as a truly godless human being. Likewise, there is no such thing as a God without humanity, because he does not will to be without us.
A Christian theological anthropology must meet several criteria derived from a Christological center. Barth elaborates six:
- It must account for the divine presence of God in and through Jesus, God with us, fully God and fully man. “Human creatures must be seen as conditioned by him.”
- It must define humanity in light of the history of God’s deliverance of humanity, which is inseparable from their nature.
- It must explain how it is that God’s divine glory is most fully realized in the redemption of humanity in the undiminished deity within the full humanity of Jesus specifically in his “immersion” in the limitation, sin, and death of humanity. God is never more glorious than in the inglorious self-humiliation of the cross.
- It must account for Jesus’ weakness in face of the sovereignty of God which is the power of salvation and what this means in light of the truth that all other human beings are determined by this Lordship of God as enacted in Jesus.
- It must account for human freedom, which cannot be separated from or placed in competition with divine freedom. This is distinguished from mere freedom of choice.
- It must include the truth that human beings exist not for themselves but for service to God. Only Jesus has ever fully lived for a served God in this way, but all other humans are called to a corresponding form of service.
These six are a kind of irreducible minimum set of criteria, but there are no doubt other phenomena of human nature which must be considered as well.
Barth assesses four alternative types of anthropology by these criteria: naturalism, idealism, existentialism, and neo-orthodoxy. Each has something to be said for it, but each falls shorts.
- Naturalism: The human being is a “rational animal” (Aristotle). This definition, though popular among 19th century theologians, does not necessarily entail any relation to God or existence within a history of redemption. Barth finds evolutionary biology and its theological interpreters worthy of serious attention as far as they go. However, evolutionary biology can only offer us modest and relative certainty, not the kind of certainty “which life demands of us.” An appreciation of human existence in its proper relation to God is, for Barth, a prerequisite to properly interpreting evolutionary biology. Among other problems, biology cannot account for things like consciousness and freedom.
- Idealism: Barth both considers what can be known by reason alone and how reason is informed by divine revelation. On the basis of reason alone, human freedom from their environment is apparent even while they are situated within it. Humans exist within two spheres: one of natural causation and one of freedom. Fichte was Barth’s example of idealist thought. John Searle and Thomas Nagel, in our day, share Fichte’s insistent resistance to naturalistic reductionism. Searle holds that consciousness is a real subjective experience and a result of physical processes in the brain. Nagel, similarly, posits two valid viewpoints: an objective third-person perspective and a subjective and transcendent first-person. All three take the subjective seriously and still profess to grasp the reality of the human by reason alone. Barth critiques Fichte for his embrace of natural determinism and human freedom at the same time. Barth believes Fichte has succeeded in finding, on the basis of pure reason, the phenomenon of the human from an ethical perspective. However, returning to his six criteria he critiques Fichte: Fichte’s God is Fichte’s man and Fichte’s man is Fichte’s God.
- Existentialism: Barth’s discussion rises to a new level in interaction with the philosophy of Karl Jaspers. “Human existence is now seen as a history that is open to the transcendent.” Emmanuel Levinas and Jacques Derrida have more recently engaged in this form of anthropology, allowing for a fully transcendent and unnameable god. Both Levinas and Derrida, however, would fall short of what Barth saw in Jaspers. Barth grants that Jaspers, through reason alone, has grasped the phenomenon of human existence as open to and dependent on the transcendent other. However, Barth breaks from Jaspers when Jaspers argues that the transcendent breaks in through “boundary situations” such as suffering, death, conflict, and guilt. Barth accuses Jaspers of having no place for a phenomenon which truly connects to a God who is fully other than man himself. His internal critique is that Jaspers cannot sufficiently establish the reality of that transcendent as distinct from the human. His external critique again relies on his six criteria. He believes the short-coming of Jaspers is the failure to connect the transcendent with the history of its unfolding in redemption.
- Neo-Orthodoxy: Taken in sequence, the prior three views represent a progressively more penetrating analysis. But at best this is an abstract picture of the phenomena of humanity as attainable by reason alone. Barth then turns to Emil Brunner to break out of the “closed circle” of existentialist anthropology. Barth insight on Brunner may also apply to the later work of Reinhold Niebuhr and H. Richard Niebuhr. Brunner was, to be sure, more christocentric and trinitarian than either of them, however. Barth’s quarrel with Brunner is the distinction between formal freedom and substantive freedom. Formal freedom would be merely freedom of choice. Substantive freedom would be a freedom which is given and then fulfilled by grace in history. Real human existence for Barth is existence as fulfilled in relationship to God. “Sin is a possibility alien to our true creaturely being, not one that is integral to it.” Barth defines the real not by sin but by grace. Our being has no reality apart from its redemption and fulfillment in Jesus Christ. We are condemned to abstractions as long as we focus only on other human beings or on humanity in general. The humanity of Jesus is “the one Archimedean point” we have by which to understand the human. “He is the one creaturely being in which we have to do immediately and directly with the being of God also.”
Barth’s scholarship is interesting in how he critiques views he once expounded. Three quick lessons:
- Barth develops a set of normative criteria first. This distinguishes the phenomenal from the real.
- Barth always begins with descriptive criticism before moving to evaluative criticism. This allows him to find the good in views which he finally rejects as insufficient.
- Barth thinks everything through from a center in Christ.
WARNING: The reproduction of any discourse, and indeed the understanding of any discourse, is a fusion of horizons. No reproduction of this kind is solely the product of the speaker or the scribe. It is, rather, the product of the speaker and the scribe and perhaps something more. Consider this your warning these words do not adequately or exhaustively describe what the speaker did or did not say, and assume for the sake of charity that any errors are my own.
Professor Brycko wishes to draw our attention to the enormous impact and influence of J. Gresham Machen (one of the “great protagonists of the fundamentalist-modernist controversy”) on the modern Christian academy. Brycko believes Machen successfully overcomes the anti-intellectualism of fundamentalists as well as the triumphalism of Reformed cultural-transformationists.
Marsden gives two causes for the decline of Machen’s influence: 1) his lack of broad interaction with non-Presbyterians coupled with 2) the rise of the Reformed, Kuyperian perspective to greater prominence.
Machen was a Democrat with a strong libertarian streak (opposing prohibition, fighting for the rights of small sects, and opposing the centralization of public education). He was a Southern gentleman, and in many ways he can be described theologically as a fundamentalist. However, he explicitly rejected the term (unless the choice was fundamentalist or modernist) and preferred to call himself a “Calvinist.” He declined the offer to be president of a non-denominational university (named after William Jennings Bryan), preferring to be associated with a specific confessional tradition. He had turned down a request by Bryan to testify at the Scopes trial, because he saw that battle as non-essential to the real controversy with the modernists. He believed that “both chemistry and theology” involved the same task: acquiring and organizing truth. For that reason, the two could not rightly be opposed. He was alarmed by the fundamentalist insistence on literal six-day creationism as a litmus test for Christian orthodoxy. He believed this attitude minimized the importance of the true fundamentals: such as Christ’s divinity, his virgin Birth, his bodily resurrection, the inspiration of scripture, and so on. He was also wary of the revivalism and pietism of the evangelical movement.
Together with his insistence on the education of clergy, Machen argued that even if clergy are not all to be scholars they are reliant upon scholars to help keep their message straight. His objection to the anti-intellectualism of the fundamentalists was partly rooted in the fact that one of the major flaws of the liberalism they were fighting was its anti-intellectualism. He believed that fundamentalists degraded religion by excluding science from it and that modernists degraded science by excluding religion from it. Before the outbreak of World War II, he argued that science was behind the “fiendish wickedness” which Hitler was working in Germany.
Education as Intellectual
Machen deplore the modern obsession with pedagogical method over content and truth. Modern education, he argued, sought to equip a man “to live, but not to give him those things which make life worth living.” He predicted that churches would degenerate into social clubs and that future generations of students would be shallow and uninterested. Machen argued that rather than long study of methods of teaching, what a teacher really needs is a passionate love of the subject.
Education as Christian
Many early Christians supported public schools and generalized education rather than a distinctly Christian education. The Dutch Reformed movement, however, under the influence of Abraham Kuyper, developed a large network of Christian Schools. After the Second World War, many Dutch intellectuals immigrated to America where they established a tradition of Christian scholarship (two great heirs of which are in this room with us: Plantinga and Wolterstorff). Kupyer’s Stone Lectures at Princeton were during Machen’s time as a student there, and the early Machen is influence by the Kuyperian ideal. Later, however, Machen developed strong doubts about whether the Twentieth Century would indeed by a Christian Century (beginning with his experience during the First World War and culminating in his observation of the rise of Nazi Germany). His political activism in later years was more influenced by his libertarian than by his theological sensibilities.
Machen’s view of Christian scholarship eschews the optimism of the Kuyperian tradition. He is basically pessimistic about the world, preferring militant metaphors about Christian interaction with the world. He believes the Christian church is basically exclusionary and intolerant and cannot fill the role Kuyper would have for it without losing something of that character. The only hope in this battle is commitment to Biblical truth and serious scholarly engagement, not just by theologians but to some extent by all academics, provided that they keep in view the truth taught in scripture. “Christian education is not so because it is done by Christians, but because of its content.”Both the church and the academy have need of great Christian scholars, because neither can live healthily without the other.
Concluding Quote from Machen: “Christian religion flourishes not in the darkness but in the light. Intellectual slothfulness is but a quack remedy for unbelief; the true remedy is consecration of intellectual power to the service of the Lord Jesus Christ.”
WARNING: The reproduction of any discourse, and indeed the understanding of any discourse, is a fusion of horizons. No reproduction of this kind is solely the product of the speaker or the scribe. It is, rather, the product of the speaker and the scribe and perhaps something more. Consider this your warning these words do not adequately or exhaustively describe what the speaker did or did not say, and assume for the sake of charity that any errors are my own.
Christian philosophy must accommodate the subversive message that the outcast Galilean is Lord, and that God’s authority is properly ascribed to him. The story of the gospel is rarely given serious credence by philosophers who are presumably seeking wisdom, but Paul provides in Colossians an account of wisdom in which all is to be found in Christ and only philosophy which exists in subordination to Christ is adequate. Wisdom for Paul is specifically guided an empowered by the Holy Spirit. It is not merely theoretical and intellectual, because such wisdom would not guide the life intentionally. Thus, Paul speaks of “spiritual wisdom.” Without this central reliance upon the Spirit of God, any philosophical speculation is doomed to ultimate failure.
If, according to Paul, Christ is preeminent in everything. Then he must also be preeminent in philosophy and in every other discipline. This means that Christian philosophy is about being a Christian philosopher. We gain access to Christ’s wisdom by the union with Christ which Paul describes in Colossians. Critically, this union is not one which eradicates distinction, rather it is an indwelling in which Christ remains distinctly supreme and the believer distinctly still an individual.
No account of this indwelling is sufficient apart from some understanding of the “flood of agape” experienced as a results of the spirit’s indwelling. This is evidence, though not an argument, for the truth of the Christian faith. To the extent that we resist this inward love, even love for one’s enemies, we are pushing away God and not cooperating with God in Gethsemane.
Paul is very aware of false spirits which could confuse this understanding of God, so he is clear in his insistence that the Spirit of God as he is discussing it is the Spirit of Christ. This is distinct from talk about Christ. “The inward Christ is an intentional agent, mere talk is not.” This is the danger of talk about Christian virtue and Christian ethics: it can so often neglect talking about the inward Christ as a personal and real agent who is the animating power behind any Christian virtue.
It is crucial for us to understand the union of all Christians in the reality of Gethsemane, in that surge of love even for one’s enemies. Without the proper focus on this union, the cross often becomes merely a juridical pronouncement or doctrinal affirmation rather than a lived reality. This is an insistence of the active appropriation of God’s gift of salvation, but this is not to say it is a “work” because Paul defines works as things which are earned or merited. It is not the case that everything which involves a human act somehow infringes upon grace.
One type of diversion into which Christian philosophy can fall is not emphasizing the importance of Gethsemane union with Christ. The inward union with Christ is as much the proper subject of reflection as any other topic in any academic discipline. There is a whole epistemology which can be derived from Gethsemane. Besides being in continuity with the good news of Christ, Christian philosophy must also be anchored in Christlike motives and prayer, seeking the further glory of God rather than simply the expansion of knowledge or the honing of critical thinking skills.
Conclusion: The reality of God pouring his “enemy-love” into our hearts, bringing us into union with Christ in Gethsemane, is sui generis. No other agent is capable of this task, and this “divine corrective reciprocity” of conscience challenges us to move toward greater love of our enemies rather than our natural human tendencies. “Christian philosophy depends ultimately on Christian spirituality.” We must make Christ’s prayer, “not my will, but yours,” our own daily prayer.
WARNING: The reproduction of any discourse, and indeed the understanding of any discourse, is a fusion of horizons. No reproduction of this kind is solely the product of the speaker or the scribe. It is, rather, the product of the speaker and the scribe and perhaps something more. Consider this your warning these words do not adequately or exhaustively describe what the speaker did or did not say, and assume for the sake of charity that any errors are my own.
Christian scholarship has always been a collaborative enterprise. The disciples in their groups of two, even Jesus in his context as part of the broader Jewish discourse, give an example of collaborative “scholarship.” This heteroglossia was directed toward corrupt social structures and largely took the form of dissents against those structures.
Edmund Burke distinguishes the sublime and the beautiful. The division is extreme and binary, and Burke dismisses anything which falls between the two binary poles as vague and indefinable. The sublime is greater, the beautiful smaller, the sublime rough, the beautiful smooth, the sublime dark, the beautiful light. In his theological commentary on his distinction, he makes the sublime out to be powerful and terrible and just and the beautiful weak and comforting and loving. It is the difference between solitude and friendship, which he takes to be the difference between the Old Testament and the New Testament. He valorizes the sublime God of the Old Testament and implicitly denigrates the more “feminine” New Testament.
In Acts 3, beside the “beautiful” gate (a “feminine” adjective), Peter heals the paralytic man and fills the crowd with “wonder and amazement” (thaumazo and ecstasis, words denoting sublimity, fear, wonder, awe). In the wake of this ecstatic moment, the early disciples teach the people about the prince of life, and the Pharisees immediately try to quash that dissenting teaching.
This aesthetic mode of dissent can be a guide for Christian scholars today, following the model of the great Dissenters as well as of movements such as the Bible Institute movement which were constituted by both a dissent against established structures which had marginalized them (especially in the case of the dissenting women writers, who were doubly marginalized) and a recovery of the aesthetic of the beautiful and of community (in distinction to the solitary, inevitably male, solipsistic scholar). The ideal we should embrace for Christian scholarship going forward is not an individual of either gender but a dissenting community united in a quest for further understanding, engaging in corporate worship together.
Some Helpful Models
Anna Barbauld, in Thoughts on Devotional Taste, among other writers and works, sought to ground speculative thought not in abstractions alone but in shared practices and shared experiences.
M.A. Schimmelpenninck created a different theory of sublimity and beauty from Burke in her Theory on the Classification of Beauty. She uses “Beauty” as the genus, and delineates between the terrible sublime, the contemplative sublime, the sentimental, and the sprightly.
There is a great tradition of Christian reflection on theology, aesthetics, and social ethics, including for example the art of Lorna Simpsons (as, for example, in Cloudscape). Professor Duquette played two such pieces for us (again, this is a shortcoming of social media, I cannot pass them along to you because I have no access to them).
WARNING: The reproduction of any discourse, and indeed the understanding of any discourse, is a fusion of horizons. No reproduction of this kind is solely the product of the speaker or the scribe. It is, rather, the product of the speaker and the scribe and perhaps something more. Consider this your warning these words do not adequately or exhaustively describe what the speaker did or did not say, and assume for the sake of charity that any errors are my own.
The issue Professor Hall wishes to address is the “lack of scaffolding” for Christian scholarship. Lev Vygotsky, developmental psychologist, suggested that the role of the teacher is to create this scaffolding which bridges the gap between what a student can currently do and what they should be able to do (which is why academic progress must begin where the student actually is). There is an abundance of abstract conversation about Christian scholarship, but mostly the Christian academic community expects people to become credentialed in their discipline and then begin immediately producing richly Christian scholarship. But this is not the way learning works. There is, at a minimum, a set of theological skills which Christian scholars also need, and perhaps more.
Descriptive Section: What ways are there for Christians to be distinct in the scholarly realm?
Motivation: Christian scholars have proposes Christian hope, love, understanding, knowledge of Christ, submission to Christ, and gratitude as motivations for Christian scholarship. This suggests that a heart shaped by spiritual practices is critical to Christian scholarship.
Epistemological Assumptions and Methods: Within particular fields, assumptions which are pretheoretical often implicitly shape the discourse. The Christian must at times resist the socialization processes which reinforce these assumptions.
Content of Scholarship: Often, Christians in a discipline have different concerns which determine which research they pursue. Furthermore, religious values provide direction and determine which questions we ask within our discipline. There is a heuristic value to Christianity, in that it shapes a rationality and an order of desires and emotions which shape the inquiries pursued by Christian scholars and also confirm or provide grounds to evaluate or critique the results of that inquiry. Also, the interpretation of scriptural and theological content can be clarified and elaborated by the conclusions of various disciplines of research. There is also a complementary function in which research provides further understanding of a thing partially explained by the faith. Furthermore, since moral judgment is implicit in much scholarly work, the Christian faith provides moral guidance which is necessary. Also, the Christian metanarrative contextualizes the things we all study in a total picture of reality. This “basic” or “foundational” narrative is like the outline of a puzzle and enables us to put the puzzle together.
Outcomes of Scholarship: Christian scholarship leads to service to the kingdom of God, clarification and extension of an overall Christian worldview for the benefit of the whole Christian community, and worship in awe of the God who created the objects of study.
Factors which influence the mode of scholarship include the difference between various disciplines (such as the difference between more data driven hard sciences and the more meaning driven social sciences), the level of specificity of the particular scholarship (larger questions will involve more questions of meaning and thus be more impacted by faith), and the audience (distinguishing strategic integration, which attempts to play by the rules of the discipline).
Prescriptive Section: The “Is” and “Ought” of Christian Scholarship
Many Christians consciously try to keep their Christian convictions from being explicit in their work. But it seems clear that, when we are addressing areas in which there is overlap of content between the Bible and the discipline, direct interaction should be preferred (i.e. the maximal rather than the strategic mode of engagement).
It may be the case that no one scholar is properly equipped for maximal Christian engagement with a discipline, which may mean that we have a serious need for collaboration within and across disciplines.
WARNING: The reproduction of any discourse, and indeed the understanding of any discourse, is a fusion of horizons. No reproduction of this kind is solely the product of the speaker or the scribe. It is, rather, the product of the speaker and the scribe and perhaps something more. Consider this your warning these words do not adequately or exhaustively describe what the speaker did or did not say, and assume for the sake of charity that any errors are my own.
Professor Slane’s question is this: Should we deemphasize the “Christian” in Christian Scholarship because, as Hauerwas points out, it implies the bad habits of Christendom? The problem is not the adjective, but that the adjective has so often been bound up with power and empire rather than “the way of Jesus.”
Professor Slane begins with several pictures (this is one of the tragedies of live blogging, I have no access to them to post them for you). The pictures are of horrific lynchings of blacks in which the white onlookers can be seen, in some cases, to be prominently smiling. He evokes the image of the lynching (and the callous belief of the onlookers that they are in the right) as a salient example of the violence of exclusion. “By exploring what the cross means anthropologically, Christian scholars may reduce their susceptibility to justify theologically practices of exclusion and expulsion.” We have paid attention since Paul to what God was doing in the cross, but we forget what Jesus was doing in the cross.
Professor Slane is urging a reconsideration of Justin Martyr. The standard interpretation posits deep continuity between the best of Greek philosophy and John’s logos (see, for example Henry Owen Chadwick). This impression has intuitive persuasive power, especially in light of the dialogue with Trypho. But are we reading him through the lens of Augustine and Aquinas? Writing before Constantine, Justin’s motivation for his thinking about continuity is the cultural opposition to Christianity (when the scandal of the cross was still vividly remembered). Justin’s view of continuity is the corollary of his insight that within creation there is a stubborn resistance to reason (see Second Apology, §8). This is connected to his theory about pagan mythology: myth obscures logos. In First Apology §5, he asserts that the demons pulled off the greatest deception of all time, making those who are patriotic serve the demons in the keeping of their secret (Mu, the root of Muthos, meaning to keep secret). Those who align with logos against myth are likely to meet with violence and expulsion. ”Precisely as the rejected and expelled Logos does Christ connect meaningfully with certain of those who came before.” This points up a defect in the order of human reason. The continuity Justin expresses is based on the consistently hostile treatment of logos by the world when it attempts to unveil the secret (muthos). Jesus ordeal is “like the midday sun, blazing directly overhead, leaving no shadows,” he has fully revealed the concealment by the demons and their suppression of those who sought truth before him. Think of what Justin is doing as like a philosophical version of what Stephen did in his speech about the suffering of the Hebrew prophets being in continuity with Jesus’ suffering. ”Justin does not seem to appreciate that expulsion is [sic] participates in a formidable rationality–a logos that conserves (violently if need be) the order of human institutions by fending off the Logos that deconstructs that order.”
This violent rationality continues to exist and play a prominent role today. There is a cultural logic, NOT the same as divine logic, by which violence is considered necessary and generative of culture. The victim may see it as chaos, but not the survivors. Iphegenia, who was sacrificed to allow the Greeks to proceed with their attack on Troy, is an example of this kind of ritual victimization. Christ appears, at first glance, to be such a victim, but then there is the resurrection. The sacrifice has gone terribly wrong.
“Conclusion: The expulsion of the Johannine Logos fits a pattern of human behavior structured by sin. As an expelled Logos, Christ maps Socrates and others along a trajectory of progressive revelation, but that does not constitute harmony between Christianity and Greek philosophy. What is reveals most cearly is how entrenched opposition to the divine Logos can be…Awakened to expulsion as a characteristic mark of sinful existence, Chrsitian scholars should exercise caution when providing theological justification for expulsion. In his failure vis-a-vis Jews, Justin became a prime example of how easily Christians can defect from the Johannine Logos to its competitor. Expelling Jews from the Christian narrative, Justin repeated the very mistake he accused Jews of making in regards to Christ. In a striking way, Justin’s sin encapsulates the bad habits of Christendom.”
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