ASBCS Williamsburg, VA June 5, 2000 A Call to Serious Christian Scholarship 2 Corinthians 10:5 David S. Dockery, President

We demolish arguments and every pretension that sets itself up against the knowledge of God, and we take captive every thought to make it obedient to Christ. (2 Cor. 10:5)

A Call to Serious Christian Scholarship is a call to "take captive every thought to make it obedient to Christ." Paul's words call us toward a wholehearted devotion to Christ-not just with our hearts but with our minds as well-it is a call to think Christianly. As we enter this new century we need more than just novel ideas and new delivery systems; we need distinctively Christian thinking or as T. S. Eliot puts it: "to think in Christian categories." This means being able to see life and learning from a Christian vantage point; it means thinking with the mind of Christ.

The beginning place for a call to serious Christian scholarship points us to a unity of knowledge, a seamless whole because "in Him all things hold together" (Col. 1:15-18) for all true knowledge flows from the One Creator to His one creation. Thus specific bodies of knowledge relate to each other not just because scholars work together in community, not just because interdisciplinary work broadens our knowledge, but because all truth is God's truth, composing a single universe of knowledge.

Christian scholarship does not mean that we will blur disciplinary boundaries. It means we will take our varying, and at times seemingly conflicting approaches, subjects, and traditions, and seek to interpret and explain our subject matter under the Lordship of Jesus Christ, the revealer of all Truth.

Christian scholarship calls for us to integrate faith thoroughly with our research within our various disciplines. Drawing on the long Christian tradition to do so, we can restore coherence to learning. This will help move us toward the development and construction of a convictional world and life view by which we can see, learn, and interpret the world from the perspective of God's revelation to us.

Serious scholarship often described as the search for knowledge, the quest for truth-phrases so familiar as to be cliches in higher education-must not be described carelessly or flippantly. When we speak of scholarship from a Christian perspective we speak of more than scholarship done by Christians. Rather we speak of a passion for learning based on the supposition that all truth is God's truth. Thus, as Christian scholars related together in a learning community, we are to seek to take every thought captive to Christ.

It is not just the apostle Paul who gives us guidance on the subject of Christian scholarship. Justin and Irenaeus were probably the first in post-apostolic times to articulate the need for faith-informed scholarship. In Alexandria in the third century both Clement and Origin instructed their converts not only in doctrine but in science, literature and philosophy. Augustine in the fifth century, in On Christian Doctrine, penned the thoughts that every true and good Christian should understand that wherever we may find truth it is the Lord's.

This legacy may be traced across the centuries and in almost every culture, for wherever the Gospel has been received, the academy and Christian scholarship have followed. This legacy can be traced through Bernard, Erasmus, Luther, Calvin, Knox, Melancthon, Edwards, Kuyper, and in this century with C. S. Lewis, and Dorothy Sayers and to us as Baptists through Isaac Backus, Alvah Hovey, Francis Wayland, John Broadus and many others.

A Call to Serious Christian Scholarship simultaneously affirms our love for God and our love for study, the place of devotion and the place of research, the priority of affirming and passing on the great Christian traditions and the significance of honest exploration, reflection, and intellectual inquiry. These matters are in tension, but not in contradiction and are framed by a faith-informed commitment.

Some of our friends in the academy may regard such a notion as a medieval remnant at best or in the words of Kris Kristofferson, "a walking contradiction, partly truth and partly fiction." Yet, among an increasing large number of intellectuals there has arisen a deep suspicion of today's thoroughly secularized academy, so that there is indeed a renewed appreciation for and openness to what George Marsden calls "the outrageous idea of Christian scholarship." As Mark Schwenn of Valparaiso University has suggested, it is time to acknowledge that the thorough secularization of the academy is at the least unfruitful. There is even a renewed interest in many places in the relationship of the church to serious scholarship. John J. Piderit, president of Loyola University in Chicago, has called for "the university to be at the heart of the church." Though that call was issued within the Roman Catholic tradition it should nevertheless resound within the congregationally focused heart of every Baptist. Thus the time seems right, even ripe, to join this conversation to think afresh about the significance and the seriousness, of authentic Christian scholarship.

Christian scholarship is not just piety added to secular thinking, nor is it merely research that takes place in a Christian environment. Thus being a faithful Christian scholar involves much more than mere piety. As Chuck Colson says, "True Christianity goes beyond John 3:16-beyond private faith and personal salvation." History shows that a commitment to piety alone will not sustain the ideal of a Christian university. The Christian intellectual tradition calls for rigorous thinking, careful research, and thoughtful publication. Christian scholarship is far broader than biblical and theological studies, though they help provide the framework for serious intellectual wrestling with literary, philosophical, scientific, historical, technological, and social issues.

Such a Christian worldview provides the framework for Christian scholarship in any and every field. This worldview, which grows out of the exhortation to take every thought captive to Christ, begins with the affirmation of God as Creator and Redeemer, for the dominating principle of Christian scholarship is not merely soteriological but is cosmological as well. We thus recognize the sovereignty of the triune God over the whole cosmos, in all spheres and kingdoms, visible and invisible.

Such an initial reference point avoids the error of a spiritualized gnosticism on the one hand and a pure materialistic metaphysic on the other. This premise forms the foundation for our affirmation that all truth is God's truth-truth that is both revealed and discovered. Thus we respond on the one hand with grateful wonder at what has been made known to us and on the other with exerted effort to discover what has not been clearly manifested. In such exploration we dare not misconstrue our previously stated premise so as to wrongly deduce that all scholarship or all research even if carried out by Christians is necessarily God's truth. No! We want to affirm the Christian intellectual tradition that recognizes that all scholarship, all invention, all discovery, all exploration which is truth-is God's truth.

In the large majority of our institutions it is teaching that is rightly prized and prioritized, but we also need a complementary place for Christian scholarship. Rightly understood Christian scholarship is not contrary to either faithful teaching or Christian piety. Christian scholarship provides a foundation for new discovery and creative teaching, as well as the framework for passing on the unified truth essential to the advancement of Christianity.

Can we then describe this serious Christian scholarship for which we are calling? I believe we can and I would like to suggest six overarching characteristics:

1. It is derived from the unifying principle that God is creator and redeemer.
2. It seeks answers through curious exploration and serious wrestling with the fundamental questions of human existence.
3. It aspires to be internally consistent and flows from a comprehensive worldview.
4. It recognizes the need to be aware of contemporary cultural, social, and religious trends.
5. Serious Christian scholarships lives in tension, by reflecting a (worldview) outlook while simultaneously having a particular discipline-specific focus-which means it will at times reflect an engagement mindset and while at other times it needs to take on an antithetical, perspective from the avenues of thought pursued by others in the academy. This approach will not entirely please those who see truth as a battle in which it is perfectly clear who stands with the forces of light or darkness. Sometimes the issues with which we wrestle are filled with ambiguities. For at this time, even with the help of Scripture and Christian tradition, we are finite humans who still see as through a glass darkly.
6. Ultimately, Christian scholarship grows out of a commitment to "sphere-sovereignty," whether in the arts, sciences, humanities, education, business, healthcare or social areas.

Thus Christian scholarship must surely subordinate all other endeavors to the improvement of the mind in pursuit of truth, taking every thought captive to Jesus Christ. At three places in the Book of 2 Corinthians Paul reminds us that we cannot presume that our thinking is Christ-centered. For in 2 Cor. 3:14 we learn that the minds of the Israelites were hardened. In 4:4 Paul says that the unregenerate mind is blinded by the god of this world. In 11:3 the apostle says that Satan has ensnared the Corinthians' thoughts. So in 10:5 he calls for all of our thinking to be liberated by coming under the Lordship of Christ.

So today like in the days of the Corinthian correspondence our minds and our scholarship are ensnared by the many challenges and opposing worldviews in today's academy. Like Paul and Bernard of Clairveaux several centuries after him we must combine the intellectual with the moral and spiritual expounded in Bernard's famous statement:

--And that is the essence of serious Christian scholarship-bringing every thought captive to the Lordship of Jesus Christ in order to serve and edify others. That is a high calling indeed as we move forward and faithfully into the 21st Century.