This article appeared in BreakPoint's Findings Journal.

Christianity in the academy is a topic worthy of serious reflection, and this issue of Findings explores this topic from a variety of perspectives. Harry L. Poe, the Charles Colson Professor of Faith and Culture at Union University, has provided a brilliant and engaging essay based on his recent volume, Christianity in the Academy (Baker, 2004). The second contribution in this issue comes from Arthur Holmes, retired professor at Wheaton College. Many of us first started to engage serious Christian thinking through the writings and influence of Professor Holmes. Once again he has offered us a most substantial piece for our reflection.

This issue of Findings also contains an insightful interview by T. M. Moore with one of the premier Christian historians of our day. George Marsden’s prolific pen has recently produced the finest biography of Jonathan Edwards, perhaps America’s greatest Christian thinker of all time. Marsden’s two volumes on Christianity in the Academy, The Outrageous Idea of Christian Scholarship (Oxford, 1997) and The Soul of the American University (Oxford, 1994), have become classics. Finally this issue of our journal includes T. M.’s review of the new work Faithful Learning and the Christian Scholarly Vocation, edited by Bob Agee and Doug Henry, which includes some of the finest Hester Lectures delivered to the Association of Southern Baptist Colleges and Schools. This volume is an enormously helpful contribution to the essence of church-related education.

Our readers might be asking why an entire issue should be devoted to this topic. I think the answer is obvious, due to the expanding secularism and essential disorder in larger sectors of the academy. We are called as Christ-followers in the academy to sanctify the secular, to seek to reclaim the great intellectual tradition, and to demonstrate the unity of knowledge, recognizing that all of these things are tied to the historical reality that Jesus Christ came to this earth in space and time.

The disorder we observe around us evidences the brokenness of ideas in the arts, in the sciences, in philosophy, and in literature all across the academic spectrum. Much of this incoherence is the result of pluralistic worldviews influenced by a smorgasbord of options from naturalism, supernaturalism, premodernism, enlightenment, and postmodernism viewpoints.

Today’s academy characteristically rejects a naïve unbounded confidence in reason, science, and progress. But then it moves further and declares that there is no such thing as universal truth; that all so-called truth is purely subjective, being culturally conditioned; and therefore we all have our own truth, which has as much a right to respect as anybody else’s. In this context we need Christian faculty and students who can bring mature reflection on what the Christian faith means for every field of study. Our task in this regard is to engage the academy by minds renewed by God’s Spirit.

We need a new generation of Christian faculty and students whose thinking will be shaped by Scripture, by a Christian worldview, who can think Christianly about subject matter across the curriculum. Please do not hear this call for the renewal of minds as merely a call for more Bible courses. Rather it is a call to recognize that so-called “neutrality” in the academy is not enough.

We need a more effective response to secularized thinking, one that denies the Enlightenment ideal of autonomous reason, recalling Augustine’s model of “faith seeking understanding.” In doing so we can begin to follow the admonition of the apostle Paul, seeking “to take captive every thought to make it obedient to Christ” (2 Cor. 10:5). Such a lofty calling can take place among Christians in the academy only as the minds of believing faculty and students are renewed by God’s Spirit (Rom. 12:2).

Some will no doubt fear such an approach to education, thinking that it represents a kind of closed-mindedness. But this is not the best of Christian thinking as exemplified in the Alexandrian or Antioch schools in the fourth century, with Augustine, Bernard, or Thomas Aquinas in the medieval period, or even with Erasmus, Luther, Edwards, Kuyper, and others. Indeed such an approach is intentionally and unashamedly Christian, even “outrageously so,” in the words of George Marsden. Still, Christian thinking and Christian scholarship recognize the place of serious debate and engagement, of testing hypotheses and considering challenges, of changing one’s viewpoint or developing new syntheses. Such thinking values exploration and struggle while wrestling with the ideas of history and the significant issues of our day, but it does not apologize for doing so with faith commitments or presuppositions. Simultaneously we need a renewing of our minds to discover and expound God’s truth wherever it is found, and an accompanying humility that acknowledges that God, the source of all truth, knows all things and we do not.

Christians in the academy must live as citizens of two worlds: citizens of the kingdom of God and citizens in the academy. Sometimes this citizenship is a challenge to keep in balance. C. S. Lewis provides a helpful guide reminding us that a continual focus on the kingdom of Godis not, as some modern people think, a form of escapism or wishful thinking, but one of the things a Christian is meant to have. It does not mean that Christians are to leave the present world as it is. If you read history you will find that the Christians who did most for the present world were just those who thought most of the next. It is largely since Christians have ceased to think of the other world that they have become so ineffective in this one. Thus Lewis exhorts us to aim at the Kingdom and you will get earth thrown in; aim at earth and you will get neither.

We must confess that God is sovereign over the Church and the academy. As Christians we belong to both spheres. We must avoid the tendency to confuse, commingle, or divorce these different spheres. Thus we can and should gladly encourage Christian students to pursue any and all morally upright vocations. This means encouraging them to neither escape culture on the one hand nor identify with it on the other. Instead Christians in the academy must engage society and culture through Christian thinking and Christ-like service with the goal of influencing the academy ultimately for God’s glory.

This approach magnifies not only the doctrine of redemption, but also the doctrine of creation by suggesting that God as Creator is sovereign over all that has been made. Christians in the academy need a responsible realism: responsible to be in the world and to work responsibly in it, seeking to engage and influence the world, while realistic about the truth that this world is not all there is. In fact, we must recognize that this world will remain sinful, affected by the Fall until the restoration of all things. As we study those areas most closely related to society at large—economics, philosophy, political science, ethics, sociology, psychology, social work, nursing, and biology, to name a few—we must remember that we are followers of Christ in truth arrayed, serving a world impacted by sin. Thus the issues are sometimes messy and the answers murky as even now we see through a glass dimly.

Thus in the tradition of the apostle Paul, Augustine, and the Reformers, we are suggesting that we live in two worlds: the academy and the kingdom of God; the society and the Church. The goal of Christians in the academy is to influence society in a redemptive way without imposing a Christian viewpoint through worldly power. We do so in the world of higher education by participating in the academy as Christian scholars, and as George Marsden has exhorted us, we must do so without an inferiority complex.

While analyzing the fallen ways of society is one way to engage the academy, we believe that we need to concentrate our efforts in a more constructive fashion. We need to encourage excellence in producing quality art, outstanding literature, great music, serious scholarship, and first-rate research, while developing Christian scholars and students who can be salt and light in the academy. Such is the emphasis modeled in the contributions of Poe, Holmes, Marsden, and Agee and Henry. May God multiply their efforts through hundreds and thousands of other faithful Christ-followers in all aspects of the academy. We trust you enjoy this significant issue of Findings.