"The Language and Literature of the Babylonians" The Christian Faith and the Humanities

Why Engage in Worldly Learning?

Christianity versus Humane Learning?

One of the oldest and most direct questions about faith and scholarship came very early in the history of the church. The third-century North African church leader, Tertullian, phrased it in its classic form: "What has Athens to do with Jerusalem, the Academy with the Church? What is there in common between the philosopher and the Christian, the pupil of Hellas and the pupil of Heaven?" Tertullian's answer was that "We have no need for curiosity since Jesus Christ, nor for inquiry since the Evangel." Many of us here, I suspect, have grown up in Christian fellowships where being a scholar was looked on with suspicion. We have heard sermons that put our faith and the world's wisdom in competing camps. The youth pastor of my home church warned us, in the words of the Apostle Paul: "Beware lest anyone spoil you through philosophy" (Col. 2:8). We needed to know His story, not history, he told us. What need was there for exegesis, he said, when we had Jesus? I will never forget the night, at youth camp, when we who felt called of God were asked to come forward and give our testimonies. I said that God was calling me to be a history teacher. The leader tried to be kind, and he said, "Thank you for sharing, Joel." But it was clear that my calling did not compute! How could one be called of God to study human wisdom?

No doubt some of you have heard the same message, and perhaps felt some self-doubts about your calling. These anti-intellectual themes are not simply the distorted products of popular Christianity. Christianity has a built-in edginess about worldly wisdom. Our faith came into being as a people's movement. It was good news to the poor, to the downtrodden, to slaves, to women, to all of the ancient Hellenic world's lesser members. Christianity came to them not as the abstract speculation of Greek philosophers, or from the arcane myths and rituals of the mystery cults, or from the pens of Roman statesmen, or from the learned doctors of Jewish law. It was first the message of the son of a carpenter, from the hill country of Palestine; and its earliest ambassadors were fishermen and a tax collector.

Jesus himself said, "I praise you, Father, because you have hidden these things from the wise and learned, and revealed them to little children" (Matt. 11:25). The Apostle Paul, who was a renegade scholar of Jewish law, exclaimed that "the wisdom of this world is foolishness in God's sight" (I Cor. 3:19), and that the message of the cross was "a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles . . . for the foolishness of God is wiser than man's wisdom" (I. Cor. 1:23, 25). So was Tertullian right? Do Christians not need to study human culture? I don't see it that way. I do not think the Gospel is fundamentally opposed to intellectual work.. Its apparent anti-intellectualism is a strategy, not a statement of principle. The point that our Lord and the Apostle Paul are making is that the Gospel is meant for everyone to understand, not just the philosophers. It is a message that cuts against the conventional wisdom. It is a way of life and of salvation that turns the world's expectations upside down.

Christian Scholarship's Strategic Role in the Church

It is a mistake, to see Christianity as opposed to learning, and opposed to cultural thought and creativity. Jesus was well versed in the Scriptures and Jewish law, and his teaching is in fact a radically new interpretation of them. The Gospel of John begins with an interpretation of the complex Hellenistic concept of truth, or logos. And the Apostle Paul, in combining his deep knowledge of the Scriptures, Jewish law, and Hellenistic philosophy, was the pioneer of Christian theologizing. Christian theology, indeed, is the earliest and most direct form of Christian scholarship. As the faith grew and spread in Hellenic cultures and encountered Greek philosophies and worldviews, Christian leaders saw the need to follow Paul in studying the Hebraic-Christian tradition in its ancient texts, and addressing that tradition to the concerns of the surrounding culture.
The African church historian, Lamin Sanneh, shows us that at every critical point in the history of the expansion of Christianity, as, the gospel encountered another alien culture and needed this kind of intellectual engagement. The message of the Messiah, the Cross and the Living Lord needed to be related to that culture's deepest concerns, affirming its inclinations toward the living God, challenging its rebellion against God's law, and translating its message into that culture's language, its most profound means of expression. That was the task of the front-line agents of the church in new territories. From the very beginning, then, Christian scholarship has been a missionary endeavor. And so it is today. The questions of secular society keep coming back to challenge the Gospel, even in cultures where Christianity had been a shaping force for a long time. Careful study of the culture, therefore, has stayed on the church's list of necessary tasks.

Church history affirms this direct, apologetic, missionary need for Christian scholars in the humanities, then, as aides to theologizing, for the conversion of people and for a transforming witness in society. But is this the only valid reason we have for doing scholarship in the humanities? What does this say to the Christian scholar who takes delight in studying modern languages, or is driven to discover more about the long ago and far away? Does a Christian scholar have any business appreciating the lyrical flow, the delicious turn of a phrase, and the window into the human soul that come in a good story? Should she spend her time studying the colors and composition of a painting? Are these mere vanities? What warrants does a Christian scholar have to engage in such activities? There are warrants, and they come from classic Christian doctrines of Creation, the Fall, and God's Grace.

Creation, Common Grace, and Our God-given Talents

Many if not most of you are acquainted with Reformed theology, so you know that from John Calvin forward, Reformed theologians have started their theological investigations with the nature of God. They ascribe to God the greatest glory and majesty imaginable, seeing the Almighty One as the great creator and governor of the universe. Everything comes into being by means of God's decrees and owes its continued existence to the Creator's governance. The world that we see before us and its many wonders unseen beyond us, Reformed theologians insist, are expressions of God's glory. Exploring the marvels of nature, therefore, is an act of praise to the Creator. As my colleague James Bratt puts it, "Searching out every domain of being, plumbing its beauties and mystery, means no less than serving the Most High God with the due honor of delight, awe and gratitude." Exploring God's creation, then, is an act of praise. This is a point that I am sure my colleague, Dr. Beversluis, will make abundantly clear in her discussion of the sciences.The same goes for us who study humanity. We praise the creator when we seek to discover more about his human creation. We glorify God when we use the intellectual and artistic gifts our Creator gave us. In that wonderful movie, "Chariots of Fire," a young Scottish missionary candidate, Eric Lyddell, who is an Olympic-class runner, is scolded by his sister for running schoolboy races when there is a world out there to be saved for Christ. Lyddell replies: "God made me fast, and I feel his pleasure when I run." Likewise, God gave us minds to analyze and create, and he is pleased when we use them for his glory.

The problem for those of us who study humanity, however, is the next point in the great biblical drama. After the Creation comes the Fall. We are fallen creatures, and our human civilizations are corrupted by sin. People in their fallen condition insult God by their deceit, pride, violence, and distortions of truth and beauty and justice. It is tempting for Christians to want to turn their backs on all that sinful humanity has created. One might think of missionary and apologetic reasons to study the world's ways, in order to convert it, but is there any honest and pure delight to be found there, given the world's rebellion against the Lord?
Again, Reformed theology provides an answer: God continues to govern, sustain and protect this fallen world, and to accomplish divine purposes through the earth and its residents. In God's providence, he enables sinful people to express some genuine knowledge and wisdom, some true virtue and beauty, even if they do not know God's saving grace. All people are made in God's image, and by God's common grace, they are allowed to retain a vestige of that created goodness and order. God's common grace will not save them, but it does protect humanity from the worst that it could do and enables it to do some good things. Again, my colleague James Bratt says it well: "before the face of God, human nature is totally depraved, but on the face of the earth, it is still competent to run life on a fairly respectable level."

This idea of common grace, that God still "shines in all that's fair," as Richard Mouw insists, has serious implications for Christian scholars. First, it cautions them not to turn their backs self-righteously on the rest of the world. The world and its works are still vessels of God's grace. This doctrine stands against Christian intellectual arrogance, for as Jesus reminded his disciples, "the children of this world are in their generation wiser than the children of light" (Luke 16:8). It validates Christians' honest experience of seeing glimmerings of truth, beauty and goodness in the broader reaches of humanity. There is a slogan among evangelical Christian scholars in the United States, made famous by the Wheaton College philosopher, Arthur Homes: "All truth is God's truth." The Christian scholar can expect to find things that are true, fine and fair out in the unregenerate sectors of the world. God graciously enables them, takes delight in them, and offers them for our benefit as well. We should pay them heed, study them carefully, and even enjoy them.

Humane studies, however, is, as Professor Bratt puts it, an "edgy business." Christian scholars need to be alert and discerning of the spirits (I Cor. 12:10) at work in the world of human endeavor. We know of our own frailties, sin and lack of perfection, and we know of the fallen and unregenerate character of humanity more generally, but we know that God has not departed the scene, that his image and attributes have not been fully destroyed. So the Christian scholar has important but sensitive work to do. There is a battle going on, but the battle lines between the divine Creator's love and the rebel destroyer's hate run not between groups of people, but through us all. One can be saddened and repelled, for example, by the grim view of life lurking behind a Hemingway short story at the same time one admires the author's gift as a story teller. And one can glory in the theological wisdom of John Calvin even while wishing he had was gracious toward those who disagreed with him.

Scholarship for God's Shalom

In the great biblical drama, after the creation, then the fall, comes God's plan of redemption and reconciliation. The great story of salvation takes place on the ground, in this world. To save the world, God became human in Jesus of Nazareth, to free humanity from bondage to sin and ultimately to restore creation to its unblemished glory. God's plan of salvation thus goes far beyond the personal rescue of human souls; it involves society, nature, and indeed the entire cosmos. That is the message of Colossians chapter one, for example, in which the Apostle proclaims that Jesus is both the messiah of oppressed humanity and the cosmic lord and savior of the universe:

"all things were created by him and for him. He is before all things, and in him all things hold together. And he is the head of the body, the church; he is the beginning and the firstborn from among the dead, so that in everything he might have the supremacy. For God was pleased to have all his fullness dwell in him, and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether things on earth or things in heaven, by making peace through his blood, shed on the cross" (Col. 1:16-20).

This theology of salvation has important implications for education. Some faith traditions are inward-looking and mystical, but Christianity is world-engaging in its outlook. This world matters, and learning more about it honors its creator and redeemer. People whom God has redeemed, moreover, are called to be divine agents in the great drama of redemption. They serve God's redeeming purpose when they live according to divine law and when their work anticipates the restoration of God's reign of holiness, justice, peace and the full flourishing of nature and humanity-what the Hebrew prophets called God's shalom. Such work in the world, to which Reformed Christians feel called, requires much knowledge-of the world itself, the human civilizations that dwell therein, and of God's purposes for them. It takes much learning.

Challenges and Opportunities for Today's Christian Scholar

It seems like an impossible task to describe the state of the humanities today, and the challenges that face the Christian scholar seeking to work as a faithful servant of God therein. The modern humanities are a loosely related cluster of disciplines, each with its own subject matter, methods of study, interpretive traditions, and internal debates. They began to emerge in their current forms in the late nineteenth century, and their development is an important part of the way in which the modern research university became secular. I want to give you a brief account of the modern humanities, to show why they now challenge the thoughtful Christian.

The Rebirth of the Humanities

Before the new humanities emerged, the classic task of humane studies in the West, much like the Confucian and the Sanskrit intellectual traditions, was to study the ancient languages and their great literature. Students learned to read Greek and Latin, and their texts were the epic poems of Homer and Vergil, the philosophy of Plato and Aristotle, the geometry of Euclid, the civic thought of Pericles and Cicero, the history of Herodotus and Julius Caesar, and the drama of Aristophanes. Students thus gained mental discipline from the linguistics and received the wisdom of the ancients from the literature. Christianity made its peace with this kind of education. The ancient pagans were granted a conditional endorsement for the common-grace wisdom they imparted, Christian voices such as Augustine's were added to the canon, and the ancient pagans' pronouncements on morals and religion that contradicted Christianity were not featured in student texts. By the mid-nineteenth century, a typical American university education also ended with a moral philosophy course that applied Christian ethics to the various fields of work and to vital issues that graduates would encounter.

By the late nineteenth century, however, this kind of study was losing favor in the United States. The position of honor was going to the natural sciences, and the kinds of thinking they engendered, and the sciences began to make the old educational system seem ineffective and irrelevant. Natural sciences and their empirical, experimental, fact-finding methods began to take the lead. The sciences offered the promise of advancing the frontiers of knowledge, not just imparting the wisdom of the past. Scientific researchers were making discovery after discovery, and excitement grew about the power of this new form of investigation. Before long, some of the sub-fields of moral philosophy, such as political economy, psychology, and sociology, began to take up the scientific methods and were transformed into the modern social sciences.

The scientific way of learning, its champions argued, taught students mental discipline, independent thinking, open-mindedness, skepticism about unproved claims, problem solving, and a love of finding the truth. Scientists claimed they could find determinate, verifiable answers, and they criticized theology, philosophy and literary studies for favoring speculative and deductive approaches to truth-seeking. The new research universities in late-nineteenth-century America were built on this new spirit of inquiry. The humanities responded by saying that they could be rigorous and empirical

What emerged by about 1920 was a new and different version of the humanities. Alongside the ancient classics, humane studies now also included modern languages, modern literature, history, art history and criticism, non-Western cultural studies, comparative religions and philosophy. These topics first developed into modern disciplines in the universities of Germany, according to the concept of Wissenschaft, or the scientific study of texts, languages and documents, and their cultural contexts. There were two fundamental principles behind this new approach to the humanities: first, the cultural context shapes every text; and second, all human creations are products of history; all arts and thought are shaped by the flow of change over time.

The Secularizing Influence of the New Humanities

When the new humanities first appeared in the late nineteenth century, they were thought to be a unifying and spiritually edifying force in the university. The natural and social sciences had become ever more specialized in their research topics and they seemed to fragment knowledge. Perhaps the new humanities, could provide some integration to a university education. They would provide not the vertical integration of the older moral philosophy, which emanated from the idea of the great Creator and Moral Governor of all things, but they would offer a horizontal integration instead, as the broad flowing river of human experience. Study of the humanities, its advocates said, would help the modern university student broaden her sympathies, deepen an understanding of what it means to be human, stimulate the imagination, and enrich both heart and mind, essentially by reliving the great unfolding of Western civilization.

Even though the new humanities were secular in their integration, many thought they were religion-friendly, because they cultivated the spiritual and moral imagination of young people by studying the great Western works of beauty, goodness, and truth. The new humanities seemed friendly to Christianity, but they were perhaps more destructive of Christian belief than were the new natural sciences. The historicism of the new humanities insisted that everything of human experience, including religion, is a historically determined product of its times. One of the most critical questions was how to study the Bible. If the Bible, was to be understood and studied in the same way as all ancient Near Eastern literature, then why would scholars not see Jewish and Christian beliefs as just another transient product of history, and not as objective, transcendent truth? The principles of Wissenschaft were anthropocentric. They encouraged humanities professors to exclude transcendent beliefs from their lectures and writings. So for all of their claims of strengthening morality and spirituality, the humanities were more secularizing than the sciences. Science's empirical method tended to exclude religion from its toolkit of research methods, but the historicism of the humanities tended to explain religion away.

Eventually, the modern humanities' claim of being able to provide an integrated vision of the human condition and prospect broke apart. Their founding doctrine, that each human artifact is radically shaped by its surroundings and its particular history, eventually drove great wedges of dissimilarity between human cultures worldwide and destroyed the idea of there being some single, unified field of human understanding. Was there even such a thing as one set of human values, or commonly known truths? Was there any objective human standard of beauty or goodness that could be applied to all? Such questions provided the basis for the rise of postmodernism, and the radical relativism that accompanies it.

Modernism versus Post modernism

So that, my friends, is the state of the humanities today in the contemporary American university. There are dozens of disciplines and interdisciplinary fields, and no coherence. Contending modernist and postmodernist views are at war with each other. Postmodern anti-realists claim that there is no fundamental structure to be found in humanity or in the universe itself; rather, humans create all of the categories; they construe all knowledge. Both they and the scientific modernists seek a way of living without reference to a divine Creator and Lawgiver-the modern naturalists by saying that Nature is self-creating and self-regulating, and the postmodern anti-realists by saying that humanly created order is the only order there is.

According to the Christian philosopher, Alvin Plantinga, both parties misplace the role of humanity. Scientific naturalism reduces human beings to the status of complicated machines, with no real creativity. The postmodern anti-realists, by contrast, substitute human beings for God by making human consciousness the source of all reality. Christian scholars may be tempted to cheer for one side or the other: for the modern naturalists, for defending a real world that exists outside of ourselves; or for the postmodern anti-realists, who point out the failures of science to bring a just order to our world. Christian thought, however, points to a third way. With the naturalists, it points to a real world that exists independently of our ordering of it. With the anti-realists, it has long insisted that there are no such things as purely objective facts and theories. But against both, Christian thought insists that our world only makes sense when we acknowledge the Almighty, the God of the Bible.

These debates are not merely intellectual war games. They matter out on the street, where they shape the directions that societies take, the ways that people behave. Both naturalism and anti-realism feed the moral relativism that plagues North American civilization today. Naturalists do not believe that life can have a transcendent purpose or norms; we are driven by the blind forces of nature. Anti-realists insist that everyone structures reality differently, so it is my reckoning versus yours. They see no higher court to which one can appeal.

Let me give one recent example on the international stage. The 1993 Vienna Conference on Human Rights featured a major debate between human rights absolutists, who argued that there is a set of universal rights that all people should enjoy, and pleaded with all nations to uphold them. On the other side were some of the most notorious offenders of human rights, such as the People's Republic of China and Saudi Arabia. These strange bedfellows pursued a rather postmodern, relativistic argument. They insisted that rights were culturally determined, and they necessarily differed from one nation to another. Any attempt to impose universal human rights was an act of Western imperialism. So the squabbles of academics become life and death issues for millions in the world today.

These two intellectual parties offer little help: "What values?" the modern scientific naturalist cries. "Whose values?" responds the postmodernist. Here is an open door for Christian scholars and the Christian citizens they educate. We believe that there is a moral law; it is graven in its largest letters on the hearts of all of humanity, and societies ignore it at their peril. Christian academics have a major opportunity to contribute this wisdom to our present age. There is a hunger in the world today for right relationships. People yearn for peace, good order and human flourishing of every kind, for what the Bible calls shalom. We are called to seek the shalom of the civilizations where we have been planted. May we seize the opportunity and put our scholarly talents to work, for Jesus' sake.

Christian Humanities Scholarship: What Is It? What Does It Look Like?

There is plenty of important work today for Christian humanities scholars. In George Marsden's book, The Outrageous Idea of Christian Scholarship, he shows many dimensions of what it means to conduct one's work as a Christian. I will not rehearse them all for you, since our time is limited, but instead will focus on the three aspects of a Christian worldview that have most influenced me as a historian. Then I will suggest three strategies for Christians to make a difference in contemporary scholarship.

Three Christian Presuppositions

Human Nature

The humanities, especially in their popular presentation, are filled with lavish celebrations of human spirit. Public television series on the history of the arts and the life of the mind, or on the rise and achievements of modern science, ascribe godlike powers and potential to humanity. Even in the wake of the twentieth century, in some ways one of the most cruel and disaster-filled centuries of all time, we still hear these modernist hymns to human potential. It is not difficult, then, to have some sympathy for the post-modernist critique, which exposes such metanarratives as the creation of the established powers in order to justify their control of us. Yet as we have seen, postmodernists, for all their irony and cynicism, also try to turn us into gods. They say that reality itself is a human construct. For good or for ill, all that is comes from the hand of human creators.

The Christian scholar will work from a quite different set of assumptions about human nature. Human beings are the crowning glory of God's creation, but they have acted in deeply evil ways as well. A Christian view of human nature will be a sober and measured one, not assuming that humans can solve all problems, but not cynically concluding that they are hopeless, either. Human beings are complex; they do things for a variety of motives. We must not reduce them to their biological nature and make the struggle to survive and reproduce the overriding reason for human actions. Neither can the economic aspects of human nature be our only driver. People do act for reasons of economic gain, and they do act out of contexts of class struggle and competition. But they are more than economic creatures alone. Humans are sinful as well; they have the freedom to make moral choices, and they choose evil, repeatedly. Their sinfulness, Richard Niebuhr said, is the one empirically demonstrable item of Calvinist doctrine. Said his brother, Reinhold Niebuhr, human fallenness brings an ironic quality to human history, so our virtues become our vices as well. Technological achievements bring environmental destruction. Economic power brings the exploitation of laborers. The development of sophisticated governments has brought tyranny and bloodshed. The height of human achievement is indeed awesome to behold, but it often marks the beginning of a downfall. This, said Reinhold Niebuhr, is a common pattern to civilizations, since the Tower of Babel. Christian scholars know this about human nature.

Causation

Modern scholarship is deeply shaped by scientific naturalism, the idea that the best way to know anything with certainty is by means of observation and experiment. This view also favors the quantifiable, measurable, weighable qualities of nature. It assumes that natural systems of cause and effect are the most real aspects of human experience and understanding. Scientific naturalism suggests, furthermore, that intuitive and speculative thinking are less real. Science is not just one path to knowledge, the naturalist says, it is the only reliable method for knowing anything. Religion, says the naturalist, is the mystification of some underlying physical reality. As we have seen, every field of inquiry, even the humanities, which feature the more intuitive, imaginative, emotional and spiritual qualities of human experience, was shaped into a scholarly discipline under the iron hand of scientific method.

We have found that this methodology is a very useful one. It has brought us great advances in our understanding of how nature, humans and society operate, and in our power, through technology, to shape and order our environment. As a historian, I would never give up the empirical techniques I have learned for assessing documents, examining evidence, and weighing the importance of various forces, human and natural, at work in human events. Yet Christian scholars have come to see that scientific naturalism is not a neutral technique. It has an ideology to it, based on an unproven premise: that empirically gained knowledge is the only knowledge there is; that the natural world is the only dimension of reality there is.

Christian scholars use empirical methods, but they see the limits of those methods. They understand that there is a spiritual world as well, and that what they learn by means of empirical method is always partial and contingent; it is not the whole picture. Postmodernists criticize naturalists at this point as well, stressing the idea that there is no such thing as objective neutrality on the part of the observer. Knowing is participatory, says the post modernist; all facts are theory-laden; all knowledge is socially situated; all truth-claims are inherently political. But all the leading postmodern intellectuals are still naturalists at heart; they do not see language, experience and belief actually referring to anything beyond ourselves and our self-built environment.

Christian scholars, who know there is a Creator God, a pervading Holy Spirit, and a warfare among spiritual powers, will not rule out their human subjects' beliefs as a strong factor in their thought and action, or that spiritual forces participate in shaping the outcome of events. Even as they use the empirical methods of their disciplines, they will remain open to other workings, to mystery, miracle, religious motivations, and divine and demonic engagement with the course of human events. Such matters are mysterious and usually not very clear; but they cannot be ruled out, and neither can our human subjects' accounts of them.

A case in point: with two weeks to go before the scheduled elections in South Africa in 1994, it looked as though several main political parties would not participate. Of critical concern was Zulu Chief Buthelezi's Inkatha Freedom Party, a chief rival of the ANC and its opponent in hundreds of violent clashes. If Inkatha did not join the election, there was sure to be a bloody civil war in Natal Province, and then some of the white supremacists probably would start a rebellion of their own. Lord Carrington of England and Henry Kissinger of the United States led a diplomatic mission to open negotiations with Inkatha and the ANC. Both sides were intransigent, however, and the leading delegates left and warned of a coming bloodbath. But thousands of Christians were praying for peace, and one African Christian diplomat, Dr. Washington Okumu, from Kenya, was urged to stay behind and keep working for peace. There were several days of secret talks, including one taking place deep inside the Durban rugby stadium while up on the field, 30,000 Christians gathered for a Jesus Peace Rally. Inkatha, the ANC and the Nationalists came to terms, and Inkatha agreed to join the election. Millions of new ballots were printed, the election took place peaceably, and South Africa entered into a new, multiracial democracy, without the curse of civil war. It was a miracle, said the Johannesburg newspapers. A careful investigation of the event may show all the players involved in this scenario, and the sequence of events leading up to the breakthrough, but events could well have gone the other way. Empirical study alone cannot dig out the exact reasons why the decisions were made for peace. A miracle? With the eyes of faith, this Christian historian thinks so.

Direction

One of the key formal corollaries of modern naturalist thought has been that life has no transcendent purpose. There is no meaning, intention or definite direction to the natural forces at work. Throughout modern history, however, there has been a sort of secular millennial optimism at work. It supposes that these forces, for example in the form of biological evolution, and human discovery and achievement, are leading toward a better state of affairs. This idea of progress is powerful, and durable as well, in spite of all the humanly sponsored tragedies of our age. Postmodernists generally have a grimmer outlook; they are sensitive to the ways in which modern science and human initiative have rained down violence and destruction in our age. They push us to return to the ideas of there being no truth, no purpose, and no progress in nature and in human existence. They see no common norms or language to establish a common concern or common goals.

Christian scholars believe that the Spirit of God is at work in history and the natural world, and that we are in the midst of a great spiritual struggle. They believe that the Creator God has a universal law to order our common existence, and that God-fearing people have a duty to seek the good of the earth and all who dwell therein. They have not become cynical about ideas or values. In an era that scoffs at big questions and treats intellectual debate like a power game rather than a search for truth, Christians can excel at taking the scholar's duty seriously. As the Princeton Christian sociologist, Robert Wuthnow puts it, they "live the question" of what it means to do their work before the face of God, and they see the questions they struggle with as having a larger significance. Christian scholars know that there is a purpose to the human existence, and that there is a direction to history as well. This general understanding does not give them a blueprint for tracing God's particular moves, for in these last days, as the biblical prophets put it, there is a mystery of iniquity afoot in the world. There is a mysterious quality to God's grace and will as well. God's reign advances at the same time that the forces of evil rage. Yet Christians know the eventual outcome.
They also know that the powers that be on earth right now are contingent. They will not have false expectations of salvation by human government, as have the modern liberals. Neither will they be postmodernly cynical about human institutions and their role, either. They will recognize, following St. Augustine, that God has a mandate for human insitutions, but our allegience to them is partial. Our deeper citizenship is in the City of God. That goes for academic institutions and establishments as well, as George Marsden put it. Academe, like government, can, by God's common grace, find methods and practices to accomplish much, but the academy should not assume that it has the ability to address matters of ultimate concern or give totalistic accounts of reality. Like other human institutions, however, the house of intellect does try to absolutize the relative; it makes idols, or shall we call them ideologies. So, Marsden continues, the Christian scholar, who knows that human nature and destiny ultimately belong to God, will be a critic of the idols or "isms" of our day.

Three Strategies for Christian Scholars

All right, you may be thinking, those are some good general aims and values to keep in mind. But I want something more concrete. What, more specifically, should we be doing as Christian scholars? Can you give me some real-life examples of what Christian scholarship can accomplish, so we can try to make a difference? I would be foolish to try to give you a pointed agenda for what you should be doing as Christian scholars in Korea; I plead ignorance of the details of your situation here. But I will try to get a little closer to the ground by showing three strategic moves that Christian scholars are making in North America, which might be amenable to your adaptation here.

Emphasize the Religion Factor

One of the most important contributions that North American scholars in the humanities have made is in taking religion seriously as a factor in their fields of inquiry. There is a huge blind spot in modern scholarship when it comes to religion, largely because secular scholars do not experience religion as being important, or interesting. Christian scholars, by comparison, can come up with some strikingly original works that probably would not have been written otherwise, because they know religion matters and they take it seriously as a cultural factor. So Susan Felch, of Calvin's English Department, recently organized the work of a group of scholars who discovered a deep and explicit religious strain in the prophetic Russian literary scholar, Mikhail Bakhtin, something that a generation of Bakhtin scholars missed. Christian scholars do not dismiss the religious impulses and inclinations of the people they study as uninteresting, irrelevant or false consciousness. So Daniel Bays, an eminent historian at Calvin of Chinese Christianity, writes on indigenous Chinese Christian churches and movements, an important topic that secular scholars, especially from China, were almost embarrassed to treat. Christian scholars also may see religious allusions and themes that others miss, and they can treat religion with more nuance because of their own knowledge of it and sensibilities toward it. Hence former Calvin professor Dale Van Kley wrote a highly original work on the religious influences on the French Revolution, and Calvin music professor Calvin Stapert published a magisterial work on the spiritual artistry of Johann Sebastian Bach. A great deal of such work is being produced by Christian scholars in the humanities, at Calvin and elsewhere in North America, and in a few years' time, I think this work will begin to make a difference in contemporary humanities scholarship.

Seek the Shalom of the City

Much of scholarship in the humanities is open to moral judgement and prescriptive uses. It can ask "how ought things to be?" sorts of questions. Christian scholars are called to care deeply about the welfare of the societies in which they live, and of human well-being more generally. At a time when detachment, irony, and cynicism in the humanities tend to erode moral commitment, Christian scholars can search instead for what is good, wise, and constructive. I think, for example, of Calvin political theorist Bill Stevenson's recent work on the concept of liberty in John Calvin, in which he argues that Calvin was a pioneering theorist of human freedom. Likewise Calvin theologian John Schneider has developed a Christian alternative to the two extreme positions today on wealth, poverty and material possessions. Both glorifying greed and demonizing wealth are wrong, he says. Schneider calls instead for responsible stewardship as the Christian norm. The fine arts have become a matter of public debate in recent years. Calvin philosopher Lambert Zuidervaart and his colleague in art history, Henry Luttikhuizen, organized a team of scholars to examine the roles and responsibilities of art in the public sphere. Scholarly work like this, which aims at how we might live together with justice, equity and good will, is eminently worthy of the time and effort of Christian scholars.

Restore Our Humanity

A biblical view of the human condition, as we have seen, insists that men, women and children are made in God's image, and are "crowned with glory and honor," as the Psalmist puts it. Yet given their fallen state and the contemporary myths about human existence, we live in a culture with deeply distorted views that bring untold suffering, much of it self-inflicted. Christian scholars in the humanities can put forward understandings of what it means to be human that are faithful to the biblical vision. We can write deeply insightful imaginative literature, such as Calvin English professor Gary Schmidt's award-winning novel, The Sin Eater, in which a young man learns important lessons about forgiveness. We can tease out the implications for the way we conduct our work and build relationships, as Calvin German professors Barbara Carvill and David Smith did in their book on language teaching and cross-cultural hospitality. We can find ways to appreciate the common-grace themes of human goodness in contemporary mass media while also pointing out its idolatries, as communications scholars Quentin Schultze and William Romanowski did in their recent books. And in a day when there is much confusion and distortion in our culture's understanding of what it means to be a woman, books reflecting on childbearing by communications scholar Helen Sterk and English professor Debra Rienstra add some eloquent and profound perspectives. Such efforts are "minority reports" in the midst of many perspectives, but as Christian scholars find each other and build networks of encouragement and critical support, contributions like these can accumulate, and in God's grace, begin to make a difference.

Conclusion

Christian scholarship in the humanities is a very old occupation-as old as the church-and an honorable calling. It has a strategic, missionary role to play in the contemporary world, showing what God's shalom can mean in our cultures' imaginations, memories, and commitments. Humane studies are warranted by our great Creator God, and wired into our beings as God-gifted creatures. They can be inspired by our living Savior and imbued with the freshness, wisdom and power of the Holy Spirit. Such scholarship must take place in the Earthly City, under our necessarily dual and divided allegiances. But if done with God's help and under his wisdom and mercy, humane studies can point to the city yet to come. We work in the secular house of intellect, with our own doubts and confusion, under adverse conditions that all too often come from the hands of our fellow believers. But if God has called you to this work, and by his grace has brought you this far, Jesus will surely bless and multiply the offering you make.

Joel A. Carpenter
Provost
Calvin College
Grand Rapids, Michigan, USA
jcarpent"at"calvin.edu

Last updated Wednesday, April 9, 2008