Center for Faculty Development

If the tools of Christian scholarship are biblical depth and academic expertise, what are the three most common perspectives on the subject?  Some people believe these two ideas are mutually exclusive; that is, they argue that academic study can receive no insight from religious belief nor can faith be informed by academic inquiry.  Such people would answer Tertullian’s rhetorical question, “What hath Athens to do with Jerusalem?” by saying “Nothing!” The assumption here is that Athens (representing the highpoint of Greek rationalistic civilization) can learn nothing from Jerusalem (representing the pinnacle of Hebraic faith traditions). These people believe there is simply no point of contact between faith and scholarship.  Others believe each is fine in its own place; that is, academic study is worthy of sustained effort and so is a deeply felt relationship with Christ as long as the two run parallel with each other.  These people would probably not be actively opposed to the idea that faith and scholarship could inform each other, but they would not be particularly interested in nor motivated to discover how to bridge the two.

However, a third group, including me and many of you here today, believe faith and scholarship can intersect in powerful ways.  Indeed, I’d put it this way: faith and scholarship are not mutually exclusive, they should inform each other, and Christian faculty members and students should seek proactive ways for such integration to occur.  Faculty and students sympathetic to this view will approach their academic disciplines from the perspective that a Christian worldview informs, supplements, enhances, exposes, comments upon, and enriches the truths they pursue in the academic disciplines.  Such people find this perspective cogently summarized by Dutch theologian, Abraham Kuyper, who at one time also served as the prime minister of the Netherlands.   Speaking at the inaugural convocation of the Free University of Amsterdam, he said: “There is not a square inch in the whole domain of our human existence over which Christ, who is sovereign over all, does not cry ‘Mine!”

For me to give you concrete applications of how Christian scholarship might work in an academic discipline, I’m afraid I will have to begin with my own experience as a teacher of literature.  However, two caveats.  First, I believe that the enterprise of learning how to integrate faith and learning is a lifelong project.  There aren’t simple formulas to do this, so I hope no one will mistake my reflections here today as glib commentary or simplistic “how to.”  I have stumbled quite often along the way, missing golden opportunities in the classroom or working individually with students.  At the same time, I believe I have learned a few things about integration that have made my teaching, writing, editing, and researching mesh effectively with my faith in Christ.  Second, I don’t stand before you today thinking your own college or university is a wasteland with regard to Christian scholarship; instead, I am here today to encourage you who are actively engaged in this enterprise and to challenge others to consider how to go about this enterprise in a more intentional way.

With those caveats behind us, what difference has it made that I am both a literature professor and a Christian?  How has my own Christian scholarship developed? When I first began teaching in the mid 1970’s, having earned my undergraduate and master’s degree from large state universities, I had to decide if I should approach literature as many of my professors had in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s.  They tended to treat literature as holy; literary studies, then, became almost an act of religious devotion.  At the same time my professors divorced literary study from any sense of divine truth and meaning.  Literature may have been holy, but it had no direct connection to God.  Then in the late 1970’s when I began my doctoral studies, again at a large state university, and through much of the 1980’s I had to decide if I should approach literary studies from any number of popular ideological perspectives.  This approach associated literary studies with power/political agendas including Marxism, feminism, sexism, multiculturalism, and so on; often the ideology became the focus of such studies and those things that I most loved about literature—the power of language, the subtle nuances in discovering truth and meaning in life, the orderliness and beauty of literary forms (poetry, drama, fiction), the tender, poignant portrayal of the human condition, including the redemptive nature of human love as well as the destructive force of human selfishness, pride, and deception—all these things seemed subservient to the “cause,” whatever it was.  Still later, through the 1990’s I had to decide if I should approach literature through the lens of postmodernism and deconstruction where the very meaning of the text is called into question.  I reflect back not to disparage or attack (indeed, I have learned valuable things through this literary pilgrimage), but instead I reflect in this way to throw into relief what I believe is one way (not the only way) a Christian professor can go about the task of integrating faith and learning.

    For me this meant literally going back to the very beginning.  As I thought through the implications of integrating faith and learning in the study of literature and read what others had to say, I eventually realized that language, or more properly logos, is the primary way in which God has revealed Himself, as both the beginning of Genesis and the Gospel of John reveal: “Then God said, ‘Let there be light.’” (Gen. 1:3), and “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God” (John 1:1).  In the Genesis passage we see God using logos or language to create the natural world.  In a real sense God spoke into creation all that is.  In the passage from John, a Christian sees an equally wonderful thing:  that is, the Word, literally the Logos, Jesus Christ, is God’s word to us. 

These realizations had profound implications for me as I sought to integrate faith and learning.  Among these was the fundamental truth that human language itself is a reflection of our divine connectedness, the imago Deo; put another way, that we have language and use language and enjoy language intimately and irrevocably link us to God.  On the one hand, God used language or logos to create the natural world, and on the other hand he sent his Logos, his Word, his Son to us.  One part of my task, then, is to explore and discover with my students how language and by extension literature participates in the revelation of God’s natural creation as well as His revelation of his own character as portrayed in the life of Christ. 

I have tried to consider the implications of this with my students when we read and study a novel; that is, in reading the novel we enter into not only the author's world but at least indirectly into God’s.  Although the piece may be fictional and not obviously focused upon God, the means the author uses to communicate, logos, is a gift of God and in itself connects us to the divine image.  An author uses logos as the vehicle to portray his or her vision of life.  For the Christian this means that no piece of literature is “beyond the pale,” even if it is clearly antithetical to Christianity or God.  The Christian finds in such a piece of writing the grand irony that an author uses logos to try to defy Logos, reminiscent of Isaiah 45:9: “Woe to the one who quarrels with his Maker--an earthenware vessel among the vessels of the earth! Will the clay say to the potter, ‘What are you doing?’”  At the same time, realizing this irony will quicken in the Christian not an attitude of self-righteousness but one of renewed commitment to exploring how language and literature link us to the idea of being created in the image of God.

Let me broaden this a bit into other academic disciplines.[i]  Accordingly, a Christian scholar will be committed to the study of the truth of his or her discipline from an informed, biblical perspective.  The Christian scholar knows that the pursuit of truth does not occur in a moral or spiritual vacuum; instead, as I said earlier, knowledge of the Bible, God’s direct logos, will inform all of his or her scholarship.  For example, the Christian scholar will approach the study of biology from a broader perspective than the one who accepts, on faith I might add, that life on earth began some 500 million years ago on a primeval beach when a random ebb tide washed on shore the right combination of amino acids and other building blocks of life.  The Christian scholar's broader perspective will include not only a pursuit for the truth of the “how” of creation but the “why”; thus, the Christian scholar's attitude will be informed by the knowledge that God is the Creator and his hands intimately molded, shaped, and designed the creation.  Far from seeing the natural order as the result of chance or random action, the Christian scholar will know that the creation has meaning, purpose, and direction.

Building on this notion of logos, how might Christian scholarship happen in the classroom?  Over the years I have developed a series of what I call integrative questions that I include in each class I teach; by way of offering kudos, let me add that much of this came into focus for me after Harold Heie came to our campus in the spring of 1996 and led a workshop similar to this one.  Thanks, again, Harold.  To continue, I include these integrative questions in my syllabus and tell my students that while we may not ever directly address the questions in class, they under gird the kind of thinking I hope we will engage in as we study the material.  Here, for instance, are the integrative questions I include in the junior level course I teach on Shakespeare:

1.      How does Shakespeare’s portrayal of romantic love in the early comedies relate to a biblical view of romantic love? The mature comedies? What biblical texts comment upon the idea of romantic love?

2.      In Shakespeare’s “problem comedies,” what is the relationship between law and grace? In what ways does his understanding of this relationship reflect a biblical one? 

3.      What appears to be Shakespeare’s view of the nature of humankind in his histories and tragedies? Are we simply beasts or are we created “a little lower than the angels”?  What difference does this make?

4.      How does Shakespeare’s knowledge of biblical passages, themes, motifs, ideas, and principles inform his plays? In what ways does he draw upon these rich resources as an artist? 

5.      What are the roles of confession, repentance, forgiveness, redemption, and reconciliation in his final plays, the romances? Is Shakespeare's understanding of these principles biblically informed and how so? 

6.      What appears to be Shakespeare’s view of marriage? Do his plays reflect a static view of marriage or an evolving one? How so?  What biblical insights about marriage inform our understanding of how Shakespeare portrays marriage?

Developing a series of integrative questions, regardless the academic discipline, may be an effective way for faculty to tackle proactively the enterprise of Christian scholarship.

However, beyond the classroom and teaching, the Christian scholar may have opportunities to engage in research.  Christian scholars given such opportunities must be committed to critical learning that is deep, sustained, and biblically informed.  They won’t be satisfied with the facile, the simplistic, or the shallow; instead, they will go to extraordinary lengths to explore all aspects of a subject.  This will include exhausting all avenues of research material as well as thoughtful dialogue with others, both peers and experts alike.  A consequence of this will be the realization that while much is learned, much remains to be learned.  Reading deeply on a subject and faltering attempts at putting into words what has been learned are the “bricks and mortar” of Christian scholarship.  Moreover, meaningful scholarship of this sort is driven by a mind that is curious, not easily satisfied, thirsty for new knowledge, creative, able to integrate and synthesize, and given to playfulness. 

Indeed, I think playfulness is a characteristic of many in the academy I see most absent today.  Scholarship that is playful does not accept the status quo without question; it delights in challenging old assumptions and provoking the established paradigm, not for the sake of being an irritant, but because it sees a new way of dealing with an old issue.  An interesting example of this may be seen in the life of J.R.R.  Tolkien.  Known by many today as the author of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings trilogy, Tolkien was a scholar of Anglo-Saxon literature and language.  As a part of his studies in philology in the early part of this century, he became fascinated with a rather obscure piece of Anglo-Saxon literature about a larger-than-life being who had three separate fights with supernatural creatures of evil.  Before Tolkien’s work, this piece of writing was viewed at best as an archeological artifact of limited interest and at worst as a work of Anglo-Saxon history mutilated by the Christian priest who finally put it down in writing.  Tolkien’s playfulness as a scholar led him to argue in a seminal essay published in 1936 that the work was neither artifact nor Christian propaganda but instead a legitimate piece of literature deserving serious scholarly study.  “Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics” provoked a veritable tidal wave of scholarly reaction; so much so that today Beowulf is a standard text in English literary studies.

So far I have been rather descriptive about the attitude and practice of Christian scholarship touching on things like honesty, integrity, initiative, curiosity, commitment, determination, depth, and playfulness, all in the pursuit of understanding the notion that all truth is God’s truth.  However, there is something more I want to share today.  It is admittedly personal, but I think it has direction application to our topic this morning.  Here it is:  a Christian scholar should be in love with learning.  If you don’t love to learn new things and have your conventional wisdom challenged, you may never find peace as a Christian scholar.  I was reminded of how important a love of learning is by a recent experience in one of the literature classes I taught in our adult program, the School of Professional and Adult Studies.  At the conclusion of the course, EN 211, Masterpieces of Literature, I normally give a comprehensive essay exam.  You know the type:  “Write everything you know about topic X.”  Students usually leave such an exam with writer’s cramp and a secret desire to throttle me.  In this particular case the class had read and studied Sophocles’ Oedipus cycle, Shakespeare’s Othello, Dickens’ Great Expectations, the poetry of Emily Dickinson, and Alan Paton’s moving novel about South Africa, Cry, the Beloved Country.  One student, as I recall a man in his mid- to late ’30’s who works for U. S. Air in Winston-Salem (he has a 160-mile roundtrip drive to class in Charlotte once a week), wrote on the power of words in terms of several of the works I just mentioned.  I wish I could quote his entire essay, but I’ll limit myself to his conclusion:

It is not by accident that these writers use their words to charge our emotions.  Their task is to stir our innermost thoughts to provoke action on our part.  As Paton wrote:  “We believe that God endows men with diverse gifts, and that human life depends for its fullness on their employment and enjoyment, but we are afraid to explore this belief too deeply” (154).  The [literary works] we have studied are examples of works by men and women that have used the God-given gifts Paton is referring to, and we continue to reap in the enjoyment and fulfillment of emotion they can offer.  Like them we should not be afraid to explore our beliefs more deeply.

I was deeply moved by this man’s essay, not only because he writes with grace, but even more so by his last sentence because it reminded me once again of what gives my life as a Christian scholar focus and purpose; his words, “like them we should not be afraid to explore our beliefs more deeply” so ably illustrates a deep love of learning, a love I so much share.  And so it is that I turn to this matter of why I love to learn.

            Why, in my fiftieth year, am I still in college?  Shouldn’t I have graduated and gotten on with life?  Am I developmentally arrested?  Am I hiding in college because I can’t “hack it” out in the so-called real world?  Do I enjoy the notoriously high salaries college professors command so much that I’m not willing to risk a life on the “outside”?  Am I so hopelessly inept that I’m the epitome of the old “saw” that those who can, do, and those who can’t, teach? 

            As I reflect on these and a host of related questions I can only give one answer:  I truly love to learn.  And I suspect a number you do as well.  For whatever reason God has endowed us with this love, and it seems as if nothing can quite quench our thirst to know.  For some of us this love is focused upon learning with a specific goal in mind; perhaps we want to do research that will lead to a medical discovery that will alleviate human suffering; for others, this love drives us to seek answers to age-old problems afflicting governments and economies; for still others, this love is bent upon solving specific social, religious, or environmental dilemmas.  These are wonderful motives that drive love of learning.  They are practical and applied.

But to be totally honest, my own love of learning is not so altruistic.  I confess.  I love learning simply for the sake of learning.  I love to learn.  Now don’t get me wrong.  I’m not saying I love to learn for selfish or egocentric reasons; indeed, one of the things learning shows me is how selfish and egocentric we human beings can be.  Instead, I love to learn because I love to be challenged, stretched, and perplexed.  I love the dissonance that inquiry into a subject throws me.  I love to be totally enmeshed in a reading or writing project, particularly if it involves a pet interest.  Though in depth, detailed study of anything can become tedious, even if we like it, there is nothing like the sense of accomplishment, the rush, if you will, of diving deeply into a subject and coming back to the surface refreshed and renewed for further learning.

What’s the value, though, someone might ask, beyond personal growth and renewal, of such love of learning?  How can others, our culture and society, for instance, benefit?  Such a personal focus on learning can become so much indulgence if left to itself; navel-gazing in pursuit of learning, however idealized, is still navel-gazing.  Perhaps even more formidable are the questions:  “Of what value is learning for the Christian?  After all, shouldn’t our primary calling be to save souls?  Why waste time on a life of learning?”  These are hard ones to answer.  Let me throw out three possible answers.

First, of what value is learning for the Christian scholar?  Perhaps another way to put this is does a life of scholarship or learning have the same kind of value for the Christian as that of being a plumber, an airline pilot, or whatever?  I suppose the best answer to this I can think of comes from 1 Cor. 10:31:  “Whether, then, you eat or drink or whatever you do, do all for the glory of God.”  Paul suggests here that it’s not the job function that is important when determining job value, but the ultimate focus of all that we as Christians do.  Can a plumber plumb to the glory of God?  Can an airline pilot fly to the glory of God?  Can a person learn to the glory of God?  Yes.  After all, He is the one who gave us minds to think with, to reason with, to explore with, to enjoy with.  A plumber can fix a pipe to the glory of God.  A scholar can discover truth to the glory of God.  Neither is necessarily better than the other, for both can reflect a divine fulfillment of living life to the glory of God.  

Second, shouldn’t a Christian be primarily interested in saving souls?  Now there is a sense in which this is true; after all, all of us are ultimately heading toward eternal union with or separation from God, and we should be keenly conscious of that as we interact with those we deal with day by day.  But all of life, whether we like it or not, is not given over to spiritual things.  There are many ordinary human activities that go on without a spiritual mandate; we take showers, cook meals, wash clothes, play sports, and so on.  So it is that our lives are not entirely absorbed by spiritual things.  And a life of learning can actually be an antidote to going the wrong direction with some of these ordinary human activities.  As C. S. Lewis said, “If you don’t read good books, you will read bad ones.  If you don’t go on thinking rationally, you will think irrationally.  If you reject aesthetic satisfactions, you will fall into sensual satisfactions” (“Learning in War-time, 30).  A love of learning is as valid an ordinary human activity as any of the others already mentioned and may even serve to redeem some of them.  Learning, then, can lead to discovery of the beauty and truth God has created, even in ordinary human activities.

Third, is a life of learning a waste of time?  Shouldn’t we as Christian scholars be engaged more in practical things?  Are we lovers of learning like the emperor Nero, fiddling while Rome burns?  I’ll answer this objection in a like manner by asking questions in return.  Is it a waste of time to discover truth?  To find the answers to difficult questions?  To solve problems?  To reflect deeply and christianly on the human condition?  To speak clearly and honestly on matters of values, ethics, and the moral life?  To promote an attitude of stewardship toward the whole of creation?  To encourage an appreciation for what is beautiful, true, and good in the arts and literature?  To promote a genuine critical openness to the ideas and beliefs of others?  To recognize the imago Deo in all human beings? To understand the past and its interconnectedness with the present and the future?  To articulate boldly the implication of God’s sovereignty over all creation and human knowledge?  Are these endeavors a waste of time?  I think not.

So, I love to learn for all these reasons.  In learning I find the realization of my particular calling as a Christian scholar who is seeking to bring God glory.  When I read a book, write a paper, teach a class, serve on a committee, meet personally with students, research in the bowels of some dusty library, or edit the Christian Scholar’s Review, I’m so very privileged to live out this love.  To all my fellow “learnophiles” I hope this love strikes a familiar chord; we are kindred spirits when it comes to this passion for learning.  Together we learn the old truth that the more you learn, the less you know.  Perhaps it is the realization that there is still so much to learn that drives us on to more learning.  Though we may live seventy or eighty years, we realize all of our learning is just scratching the surface of all there is to learn about ourselves, others, the natural world, and God.  But far from defeating us, this truth humbles us and pushes us ever on.  As Tennyson’s Ulysses puts it:

Tho’ much is taken, much abides; and tho’

We are not now that strength which in old days

Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are,-- 

One equal temper of heroic hearts,

Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will

To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.

May God grant you and me many years to devote to this love of learning.

            I could go on and on, but let me bring this to a close.  At your institutions I modestly submit Christian scholarship is basic to your statement of purpose.   Again, C. S. Lewis is helpful.  First, in his essay, “Christianity and Literature,” he considers, in part, the question of whether or not there is such a thing as a Christian novel or poem or play.  Another way to put this is that he considers the question of how the faith of a writer should connect with his practice as a writer.  He begins by saying: 

The rules for writing a good passion play or a good devotional lyric are simply the rules for writing tragedy or lyric in general: success in sacred literature depends on the same qualities of structure, suspense, variety, diction, and the like which secure success in secular literature . . .  Literature written by Christians for Christians would have to avoid mendacity, cruelty, blasphemy, pornography, and the like, and it would aim at edification in so far as edification was proper to the kind of work in hand.  But whatever it chose to do would have to be done by the means common to all literature; it could succeed or fail only by the same excellences and the same faults as all literature; and its literary success or failure would never be the same thing as its obedience or disobedience to Christian principles. (reprinted in Christian Reflections, 1-2)

To this he very wisely he adds, however, that “the Christian [writer] knows from the outset that the salvation of a single soul is more important than the production or preservation of all the epics and tragedies in the world” (10).  Second, in his essay, “Learning in War-time,” written during England’s darkest WWII days, Lewis affirms the legitimacy of faith and learning:

If our parents have sent us to Oxford [read your institution], if our country allows us to remain there, this is prima facie evidence that the life which we, at any rate, can best lead to the glory of God at present is the learned life . . . I mean the pursuit of knowledge and beauty, in a sense, for their own sake, but in a sense which does not exclude their being for God’s sake.  An appetite for these things exists in the human mind, and God makes no appetite in vain.  We can therefore pursue knowledge as such, and beauty, as such in the sure confidence that by so doing we are either advancing to the vision of God ourselves or indirectly helping other to do so . . . The intellectual life is not the only road to God, nor the safest, but we find it to be a road, and it may be the appointed road for us. (33-34)

Christian scholarship is a life-long process, not a matter of simplistic biblical proof texting, nor shallow, Sunday school moralisms. At the same time, faith in Christ should serve as a guide as we work through intellectual challenges, personal conflicts, and real-world decision making.  To neglect faith is to cut learning adrift on a sea of relativism; to neglect learning is to set sail on faith issues buffeted by conflicting winds of pietism and legalism.  For you see, isn’t this focus really your institution’s distinctive as a Christian college or university of higher learning?  Isn’t the intersection, interaction, and integration of faith and learning what makes your CCCU institution different and unique in the higher education landscape in America?  Where else is this kind of intersection happening?  In your state colleges and universities?  In historically religious colleges and universities?  Indeed, your CCCU institutions stand in contradistinction to these because your missions invite, encourage, and promote genuine Christian scholarship.  Accordingly, what we need in CCCU institutions are faculty members and students who combine proactively their passion for learning with their passion for Christ.  They will not see the two as mutually exclusive nor will they see faith and learning as simply running parallel to each other.  Instead, they will explore how their faith can inform their learning and how learning can inform their faith.  Perhaps they will even answer the question “What hath Athens to do with Jerusalem?” by saying “Everything!”   May the number of such professors and students increase.[ii]

© Don W. King
Montreat College
Montreat, NC 28757
dking@montreat.edu
1-828-669-8011, 3655

Works Cited

Lewis, C. S.  “Christianity and Literature.” In Christian Reflections.  Ed. Walter Hooper.  Grand Rapids:  Eerdmans, 1989.

-----------.  “Learning in War-time.”  In Fern-seed and Elephants and Other Essays on Christianity.  Ed. Walter Hooper.  Glasgow:  Collins, 1975, pp. 26-38.