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05 / 06
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Being a Christian Academic | Grad Resources

Dr. Craig shares with Grad Resources his thoughts on being a Christian Academic.


Today I want to share some thoughts with you on being a Christian academic. “The Western contemporary intellectual world,” writes the philosopher Alvin Plantinga, “is a battleground or arena in which rages a battle for men's souls.”[1] Christian academics, especially those who teach at secular universities, are the church's front line in this battle. This is a front which is absolutely crucial for the advance of the kingdom of God in our age. Why? Well, simply because the university is the single most important structure shaping Western culture. It is at the university that our future political leaders, our journalists, our lawyers, our teachers, our business executives will be trained. It is at the university that they will formulate, or more likely simply absorb, the worldview that will shape their lives. And since these are the opinion-makers that will shape our culture, the worldview that they imbibe at the university will be the one that shapes culture. If we can change the university then we can change our culture through those who shape culture. If the Christian worldview can be restored to a place of prominence and respect at the university then it will have a leavening effect throughout society.

Why is this important? Simply because the Gospel is never heard in isolation. It is always heard against the backdrop of the cultural milieu in which one is born and lives. A person who is raised in a cultural milieu in which Christianity is still seen as a viable intellectual option will display an openness to the Gospel which a secularized person will not. For the secular person, you may as well tell him to believe in fairies or leprechauns as in Jesus Christ. It will appear that absurd to him. Or to give a more realistic illustration – it's like being approached by a devotee of the Hare Krishna movement on the street who invites you to believe in Krishna. Such an invitation is likely to strike us as freakish, bizarre, maybe even amusing. But to a person on the streets of Mumbai, such an invitation would, I presume, be serious cause for reflection. My fear is that evangelicals may appear almost as weird to people on the streets of Bonn, Stockholm, and New York as do the devotees of Krishna. It is part of the task of Christian academics to help to create and to sustain a cultural milieu in which the Gospel can be heard as an intellectually viable option for thinking men and women.

The great Princeton theologian J. Gresham Machen rightly declared, and I quote,

False ideas are the greatest obstacles to the reception of the gospel. We may preach with all the fervor of a reformer and yet succeed only in winning a straggler here and there, if we permit the whole collective thought of the nation or of the world to be controlled by ideas which, by the resistless force of logic, prevent Christianity from being regarded as anything more than a harmless delusion. Under such circumstances, what God desires us to do is to destroy the obstacle at its root.[2]

The root of the obstacle lies in the university, and it is there that it must be attacked.

We desperately need evangelical scholars who can compete with secular scholars in their own terms of scholarship. If our culture is to be changed then evangelical academics need to exercise a leavening influence for Christ in their respective fields of specialization at the university. It can be done. For example, over the last half century or so there has been an ongoing revolution in the Anglo-American world in the field of philosophy. Since the late 1960s Christian philosophers have been coming out of the closet and defending the Christian world and life view with intellectually sophisticated arguments in the finest scholarly journals and professional societies. The face of Anglo-American philosophy has been transformed as a result.

A half century ago philosophers widely regarded talk about God as literally meaningless, as factually empty. But today no philosopher (no informed philosopher, at least) could take such a viewpoint. In fact, many of America's finest philosophers today are outspoken Christians. To give you a feel for this revolution I want to quote at some length from an article[3] which appeared in the fall of 2001 in the secular journal Philo lamenting what the author called the de-secularization of academia that evolved in philosophy departments since the late 1960s. The author, who is himself a prominent non-theist philosopher, writes the following:

By the second half of the twentieth century, universities . . . had been become in the main secularized. The standard . . . position in each field . . . assumed or involved arguments for a naturalist world-view; departments of theology or religion aimed to understand the meaning and origins of religious writings, not to develop arguments against naturalism. Analytic philosophers . . . treated theism as an anti-realist or non-cognitivist world-view, requiring the reality, not of a deity, but merely of emotive expressions or certain “forms of life”. . . .

This is not to say that none of the scholars in the various academic fields were [sic] realist theists in their “private lives”; but realist theists, for the most part, excluded their theism from their publications and teaching, in large part because theism . . . was mainly considered to have such a low epistemic status that it did not meet the standards of an “academically respectable” position to hold. The secularization of mainstream academia began to quickly unravel upon the publication of Plantinga’s influential book, God and Other Minds, in 1967. It became apparent to the philosophical profession that this book displayed that realist theists were not outmatched by naturalists in terms of the most valued standards of analytic philosophy: conceptual precision, rigor of argumentation, technical erudition, and an in-depth defense of an original world-view. . . . .

Naturalists passively watched as realist versions of theism, most influenced by Plantinga’s writings, began to sweep through the philosophical community, until today perhaps one-quarter or one-third of philosophy professors are theists, with most being orthodox Christians. Although many theists do not work in the area of the philosophy of religion, so many of them do work in this area that there are now over five philosophy journals devoted to theism or the philosophy of religion. . . .

 

. . . theists in other fields tend to compartmentalize their theistic beliefs from their scholarly work; they rarely assume and never argue for theism in their scholarly work. If they did, they would be committing academic suicide or, more exactly, their articles would quickly be rejected. . . . But in philosophy, it became, almost overnight, “academically respectable” to argue for theism, making philosophy a favored field of entry for the most intelligent and talented theists entering academia today.

The author concludes,

God is not “dead” in academia; he returned to life in the late 1960s and is now alive and well in his last academic stronghold, philosophy departments.

This is the testimony of a prominent atheist philosopher to the change that has taken place before his eyes in Anglo-American philosophy. Now, I think he's doubtless exaggerating when he estimates that one-quarter to one-third of philosophy faculty are theists. But what his estimates do reveal is the perceived impact of Christian philosophers upon this field. Like Gideon's army, a committed minority of activists can have an impact far out of proportion to their actual numbers. The principal error that he makes, I think, is calling philosophy departments God's “last stronghold” at the university. On the contrary, they are a beachhead from which operations can be launched to impact other disciplines at the university for Christ.

The point is that the task of de-secularization is not hopeless or impossible nor need significant changes take as long to achieve as one might think. It is this sort of Christian scholarship that represents the best hope for the transformation of culture envisioned by Machen, and its true impact for the cause of Christ will only be felt in the next generation as it filters down to popular culture.

So it can be done. What is sad, however, is how little support the church gives to its thinkers whom she so desperately needs. It's ironic, I think, that once a person has earned a doctorate, he receives all sorts of invitations for speaking engagements, and people ask him to sign a copy of his book for them. But young men and women, while they are struggling to earn their doctorates, are virtually ignored by the church or even derided as perpetual students. Many of these future scholars and their wives live on shoestring budgets or go deeply into debt during those years in graduate school and face alone and forgotten tremendous stress, anxieties, and an uncertain future. My wife Jan and I considered it a tremendous privilege to set aside a portion of our giving to the Lord's work for certain of these young scholars whom we know personally and who will be the Christian leaders of tomorrow. I would strongly urge that Christians consider allocating a portion of your giving to the support of graduate school students in your local congregation or of graduate student ministries which serve these students. The church cannot go on in good conscience ignoring these people.

What positive suggestions might one offer to help those who are preparing for a career as a Christian academic? Let me make three suggestions.

1. Engage intellectually, not just with your chosen discipline, but with your Christian faith. It seems strange to have to make this suggestion to Christian academics. You would think that as persons who have chosen the life of the mind as their vocation they would be naturally intellectually curious and therefore would be desirous of understanding and exploring Christian theology and apologetics. Of all people, you would expect them to be intellectually engaged with their faith. But I have found that this is not at all the case. I am astonished at what a weak grasp many Christian professors seem to have of Christian doctrine, and how impotent they are when called upon to give a defense for the hope that is in them in accord with 1 Peter 3:15. One would expect non-Christian professors to be largely ignorant of Christian theology. After all, we all specialize in a certain field, and as a result we're ignorant of things in other fields. For example, I know something about philosophy, but I know absolutely nothing about chemical engineering or economics or agriculture or business. What is shocking to me, however, is how many Christian academics seem content to have a profound knowledge of their chosen area of specialization and yet little better than a Sunday School knowledge when it comes to their Christian faith on which they have staked their lives and eternal destiny. I've been stunned by conversations with Christian professors which reveal what little grasp they have of Christian doctrines like the Trinity, the two natures of Christ, or the attributes of God. It also surprises me when I see their loss for words when called upon to explain why they believe that Christianity is true. Though brilliant in their chosen fields, they are like uninformed laymen when it comes to their Christian faith.

My beloved brethren, these things ought not to be – to quote the apostle Paul.Now, obviously I'm not saying that every Christian academic needs to become a Christian theologian. But I am saying that we need to have a fundamental grasp of basic Christian doctrine, church history, Old and New Testament contents, and apologetics. And, really, all this would involve is digesting a few good books in these areas. To be very practical, let me recommend a couple of books to get you started on this. In the area of New Testament introduction, I would recommend An Introduction to the New Testament by Moo, Carson, and Morris. For Christian doctrine, I would recommend Bruce Milne’s book, Know the Truth. And for basic apologetics, I would recommend my own book, Reasonable Faith.

There's simply no excuse for Christian academics who have devoted themselves to the life of the mind to be lazy and ignorant when it comes to the truth claims of the Christian religion. We shall be far sharper tools in the Lord's hands if we engage intellectually, not only with our chosen field of specialization, but with our Christian faith.

2. Strive to integrate your Christian faith with your area of specialization. As educated Christians, our goal should be to have a Christian Weltanschauung – a world and life view that provides a Christian perspective on the arts, on physics, on literature, on business, and so on. All truth is God's truth. So no area of study lies outside the domain of God's truth. Somehow it is all integrated into the whole which is perfectly known by God alone. Our goal should be to seek to discover how our field of study fits in to the whole scheme of God's truth.

What that implies is that we must be prepared to think Christianly about our area of specialization. Here it is absolutely crucial to realize that in a very self-conscious way the presuppositions which underlie our chosen discipline will have been very largely shaped by secular, naturalistic worldviews. Therefore, as Christians, we have to be prepared to rethink our whole discipline from the ground up in line with Christian presuppositions. For example, I am convinced that virtually the whole of 20th century physics has been derouted by the defective epistemology of verificationism and is therefore drastically in need of being re-thought on the basis of different epistemological assumptions. Verificationism is the view that only sentences which are empirically verifiable are meaningful. Verificationism springs out of a naturalistic worldview which wants nothing to do with anything metaphysical or beyond the physical. On this basis, statements about non-empirical realities such as God or moral values were dismissed as meaningless statements. The central pillars of 20th century physics – relativity theory and quantum theory – are both based on a philosophy of verificationism. It was only on this basis that Einstein could dismiss the reality of absolute time, absolute space, and absolute simultaneity. Since these quantities could not be detected empirically, Einstein brushed them aside as meaningless and substituted in their place operational definitions of these key concepts which issue in a radically different view of the world. Heisenberg's indeterminacy principle was predicated on the same verificationist epistemology. Since the position and momentum of a subatomic particle cannot be simultaneously measured, such quantities were said not to exist and even to be meaningless independent of measurements. When Einstein protested that our ignorance of these quantities doesn't imply that they do not exist, Heisenberg rightly replied that he was only employing the same epistemology that lay at the foundations of Einstein's own theory. Einstein could only retort, “A good joke shouldn't be repeated twice.”

Indeed, from a Christian point of view, verificationism is a joke. For if God exists then obviously he isn't bound by the finite velocity of light signals and so could know what events were occurring absolutely simultaneously with one another throughout the universe. Nor is his knowledge of the subatomic realm mediated by physical measurement procedures so that it's no problem at all for him to know what position and momentum is possessed by every elementary particle in the whole of his creation.

Thus the twin pillars of contemporary physics rest on the rotted timbers of verificationism. What is especially ironic about this situation is that verificationism came under such sustained attack by philosophers of science and epistemology during the latter half of the 20th century that it has now been virtually universally abandoned. And yet the physical theories erected upon these foundations continue on as though nothing had changed. The time is ripe for a radical rethinking of physics from a non-verificationist point of view.

I have been scandalized by the lack of integrative thinking on the part of Christian colleagues. For example, I spoke at length with a Christian professor of literature at one of our state universities who told me that she believed that texts have no meaning. Rather, meaning exists only in the mind of the reader. I was astonished that an intelligent Christian could have bought in to the relativistic postmodern view of meaning that is rampant in departments of English and literature. I asked her what her view implied for the Bible. As a text, does it have no meaning? Is anyone free to give to the Bible whatever meaning he wants to? Is it legitimate to take the meaning of the Bible to be that God is hate and that he will send everyone who believes in Christ to hell? Could the meaning of the Bible be a play-by-play of the 2012 World Cup final? Well, she said that she exempted the Bible from having no objective meaning because it alone was inspired by God. But I pointed out to her that this move was entirely ad hoc. On the level of text, the Bible is just like any other text regardless of who its author was and therefore it should be objectively meaningless. Well, thank God she was enough of a Christian to realize that that conclusion was theologically unacceptable. She was clearly shaken by our conversation. “I'm going to have to rethink everything,” she said. “You see, I've been on the board of a public library which was faced with the question of whether to ban pornographic materials from being available in the library. I argued that since texts have no meaning in themselves, and meaning is only in the mind of the reader, nothing is inherently pornographic and therefore the library should make such materials available. If you're right then I've made a terrible mistake.” To think that a Christian academic infected by postmodernism and insufficiently reflective from a Christian point of view should have thus been responsible for putting pornography in the hands of children and maybe even sexual predators brought home to me as never before the importance of developing a Christian world and life view even if that means rethinking the very foundations of our discipline and reforming them in line with Christian truth.

Integrative thinking for most of us will not involve the nuts and bolts of our discipline (I mean the routine day-to-day activities in our field) so much as the philosophy of our discipline. I don't expect all of you to become philosophers. But you really do need to read something about the philosophy of your field. You need to read some philosophy of education or some business ethics or some philosophy of science or some philosophy of history. Virtually every discipline has a philosophical component which you as a Christian academic in that field need to be aware of. This isn't too much to ask. On the contrary, it will make you a better scholar in your field if you understand some of the basic philosophy of your subject.

And what you discover may surprise you. For example, what could be seemingly more neutral than mathematics? How could being a Christian possibly make any difference at all in this field? You'd be surprised. I'm told that most practicing mathematicians are almost unconsciously Platonists. That is to say, they just assume that abstract objects like numbers and sets actually exist as mind-independent realities. But Platonism is, I think, a deeply anti-Christian metaphysic, for such abstract objects are usually conceived to exist necessarily beyond space and time. These objects exist as uncreated entities, and there are infinities of infinities of infinities of them. But what does that imply for the Christian doctrine of creation and for the divine attribute of a aseity? On Platonism God is reduced to but one necessary being among many, an infinitesimal part of reality most of which exists utterly independently of him. Such a metaphysical pluralism seems incompatible with the Christian doctrine of God who alone exists necessarily and eternally and who is the creator of all reality outside himself.

As Christian academics we cannot afford to be unreflective and simply absorb uncritically the common presuppositions of our discipline for these may be antithetical to a Christian Weltanschauung. Nor should we allow ourselves to be cowed by the prevailing views in our field and afraid to march to the beat of a different drummer. We are to seek the praise of God and not the praise of men. And that means thinking integratively as Christians about our chosen field.

3. Be mindful of your personal spiritual formation. In the end, the most important thing is not what you do but who you are. The academic life is inherently an agonistic life; that is to say, it is combative. It involves a struggle of ideas. It tends to promote selfish ambition, arrogance, and competitiveness. I recall one scientist who remarked to me that science is a field where egotistical motivations and the advance of the discipline happen fortunately to coincide. But this is not the kind of wisdom that God treasures. On the contrary, he calls it demonic. Look at James 3:13-15:

Who is wise and understanding among you? By his good life let him show his works in the meekness of wisdom. But if you have bitter jealousy and selfish ambition in your hearts, do not boast and be false to the truth. This wisdom is not such as comes down from above, but is earthly, unspiritual, devilish.

Notice the downward progression: earthly, unspiritual, devilish. This sort of worldly demonic wisdom is personally destructive both to you and to others about you. I recall meeting a scientist in Germany who was separated from his wife and longed to visit his little son. He told us that early on in his career all he could think about was his research. He invested the better part of his energy and time in pursuing his career. It led to the destruction of his marriage and the loss of his family. “I was a fool,” he told us. Some of you may be making this same mistake. I implore you, for the sake of Christ, to repent, to go to your spouse and to ask forgiveness, and to ask if together you might begin anew. But this must be a serious offer involving a readiness to cut back on work or study, to give more attention to personal time together, to be willing to give up academic fame and success for the sake of your spouse.

In general, we as Christian academics are called to the same standards of holiness that all disciples of Christ are called to. It's vitally important that as a public representative of Christ each of us be a person who goes often to his knees to spend time alone with God, who depends daily upon the filling of the Holy Spirit, to lead a life pleasing and acceptable to God. We must seek Christ's glory and not our own. We must be open to criticism and willing to see our own shortcomings, to learn from our critics. We must not place our studies or our career above our spouses, but be prepared to give up our studies and even our career if necessary for the sake of those whom we love. We must guard against sin, especially sexual sin, in thought as well as deed so as not to dishonor Christ. We must learn what it means not merely to do things for Christ but to be the kind of person that God wants us to be. Unless we learn to be who God wants us to be, all of our vaunted academic achievements will be as wood, hay, and stubble. Our spiritual formation is therefore as vitally important as our academic formation as Christian academics.

In summary then, we as Christian academics stand on the church's frontline in this battle; namely, the line of the university. Will you be an effective soldier of Jesus Christ, or will you desert his cause? To be as effective as you can you need to engage intellectually not only with your chosen discipline but with your Christian faith, to think integratively about your field, and to be mindful of your own spiritual personal formation. May God raise up a mighty force of men and women at the university who will begin to make the Christian world and life view able to be heard afresh in all of its life-changing power.

 

[1] Alvin Plantinga, “The Twin Pillars of Christian Scholarship,” Grand Rapids, Mich.: Calvin College and Seminary, 1990.

[2] J. Gresham Machen, "Christianity and Culture," Princeton Theological Review 11 (1913): 7.

[3] Quentin Smith, "The Metaphilosophy of Naturalism" Philo 4/2 (2001).