For many Christian professors, a huge disjuncture exists between our spiritual lives and our academic lives. Like many other professions, we practice a concrete compartmentalization between what we do on Sunday and what we do Monday through Friday. And that compartmentalization arises in part from faulty thinking.
For example, we might believe there’s little connection between the Music Theory we teach and the Jesus we honor as our Master, Model, and Mentor. Or while we believe that Jesus is Lord, we can’t imagine he has anything to contribute to theoretical mathematics. Many of us wonder if Jesus is even interested in the facts and insights fundamental to the disciplines we live out all week.
Asking the Big "What if?"
One of the secrets to a better connection between our spiritual lives and our academic lives is asking the big “What if?”.
What if Jesus does indeed know music theory and Hilbert space?
What if Jesus knows ____________ (fill in your discipline) better than anyone who ever lived?
What if Jesus is the ultimate particle physicist, physiologist, and political scientist?
If this is true, shouldn’t Jesus impact our teaching, our research, and our service from Monday to Monday?
Now, some of us may accept that Jesus was the greatest teacher who ever lived. We might conclude that our teaching might benefit from emulating his thought-provoking style. We might call him good teacher, but never entertain that in him “are hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge (Colossians 2:3).”
Dallas Willard's Helpful Essay
Recently deceased, Dr. Dallas Willard was for many years Professor of Philosophy at The University of Southern California. He is well-known for helping us understand the role of spiritual disciplines in our discipleship, writing: “Grace is not opposed to effort (which is an action) but to earning (which is an attitude).”
Dallas Willard also wrote a short, but very thought-provoking essay regarding Jesus as the Master of all fields of study. In it, he argued:
We need to understand that Jesus is a thinker, that this is not a dirty word but an essential work, and that his other attributes do not preclude thought, but only insure that he is certainly the greatest thinker of the human race: “the most intelligent person who ever lived on earth.” He constantly uses the power of logical insight to enable people to come to the truth about themselves and about God from the inside of their own heart and mind.
In other words, Jesus was the greatest Professor in every field. And since Jesus is the greatest we ought to emulate Him and learn from Him—looking to Him more than we might even look to the admittedly flawed professors who influence us so strongly.
But how do we make this practical?
As professors, we look up to the heroes in our fields, those Nobel Prize and Pulitzer Prize winners. We envy those nationally recognized for their achievements, and often we want to be associated with those great thinkers. We honor them for their work and rightly so.
But first, the genius of Jesus to our academic lives begins when we’re willing to be associated with Him, with Jesus himself.
Often we do not cultivate, let alone announce our association with Him within the academy, partly because we’ve forgotten Jesus’ prowess in all we do — teaching, research, and thinking. We can, for example, honor Him as we introduce ourselves to our colleagues and to our students.
Second, we can follow the model of Professor Jesus. He, for example:
- Loved his students enough to die for them.
- Challenged them to think and figure out their own answers.
- Spoke what He heard God speaking.
- Did what He saw God doing.
- Challenged us to be unashamed of Him.
- Feared God rather than man.
- Thought eternally rather than temporally.
- Encouraged followers to be “fishers of men”.
But third, and perhaps most difficult, we turn to Him, asking him for help in our disciplines.
Seeking solutions to difficult problems directly from Jesus might seem odd at first. But regular and concentrated prayer about the challenges in our research is not as radical as we think. As the One by whom all things in heaven and on earth were created and hold together (Colossians 1:15-17), Jesus might just long to guide our research and quicken our thinking. And what fun to begin new research by asking Jesus for insight.
If He is the most intelligent person who ever lived, then perhaps he’s worth asking—just as we would in any difficult problem we face.
We will become better professors to the extent that we realize exactly who Jesus really is, particularly in the academy.
Why not give it a try?
Sam Matteson
University of North Texas