How might we bring a distinctive Christian perspective into a pluralistic university setting? In this Missional Moment, we’re offering several questions one might consider for future research and/or teaching opportunities.
These questions have helped me [Heather] and other faculty think about possible areas of study:
1. What is the meta-narrative of my discipline? Does this bring to light possible issues that need to be refuted, or modified, or advanced?
Each discipline has its own narrative, with foundational principles, methodology and even data. It is important for Christian scholars to think deeply about these by asking: What are the specifics of this narrative?
In a personal conversation with Bruce Ashford, he shared that he always recommends that his Ph.D. students study the history of their particular discipline. In doing this we learn a great deal about its presuppositions. Then, once the foundation is understood, we can compare and contrast the deeply held core beliefs of a discipline with the Bible storyline:
- Where do we find agreement?
- Tensions?
- Contradictions?
- Opportunities?
One of my (Rick) friends helps professionals do a similar exercise in their professional occupations. Recently he shared with me about a group of lawyers who met early one morning a week to think through what it meant to be a Christian in the law profession.
He asked them a series of questions to help them uncover the foundational principles, methodology, and even the “end” of their daily work as lawyers. At each morning breakfast, they kept drilling deeper until they agreed on a series of statements which “summarized the true narrative of their occupation.”
With these statements in hand, they then compare and contrast these values with the Bible’s story line. The roots of God’s creational design were evident immediately in some core values, such as “justice,” yet at the same time there was great distortion in others, such as “win at all costs.”
Making a similar observation, Bartholomew and Goheen write:
On the one hand, since God is faithful to his creation, much true insight into God’s world will come to us from the non-Christian academic community; on the other hand, the idolatry that underlies Western scholarship will be at work to distort that insight. The task of the Christian scholar is to embrace and to celebrate true insights into the world from whatever source they come, but also to uncover the idolatry that has twisted them.
In our quest to understand the history of our discipline and its foundations, we should expect to find things that resonate with God’s creative purposes, as well as gross distortions due to sin and idolatry. Both may produce possible writing topics.
2. What is the current meta-narrative of our culture? What needs to be encouraged, corrected, or redirected for the common good?
As we become more astute about the world around us, opportunities often will present themselves, but we sadly tend to be so immersed in our own culture that we fail to recognize the shaping thoughts of the day.
Living at the Crossroads: An Introduction to a Christian Worldview by Michael Goheen and Craig Bartholomew is a book titled around the concept that we live at the crossroads of God’s story and (for those of us in the United States) and the story of Western Culture:
The story that has shaped Western culture for several centuries is a narrative of progress that says we are moving toward ever-greater freedom and material prosperity, and that we are doing so by human effort alone, especially through science embodied in technology, and in the application of scientific principles to our social life, in economics, in politics, and in education.
Clearly the story shaping Western culture is in tension with God’s grander story in significant ways, as we discuss more questions before Christ-following faculty in the next few weeks.
Rick Hove and Heather Holleman