Admittedly, most of these books are American. They appear to be written out of some American angst in solving the dilemma of having both Christian and secular universities.
One name has repeatedly popped up this year: Charles Habib Malik. A former President of the UN General Assembly, Malik was himself a giant in the mid to late 20th's public forum. Malik was a brilliant thinker who studied under Heidegger and Whitehead; he also possessed a generous orthodoxy in loving and welcoming Catholics and Protestants as well as other Orthodox Christians. Amongst contemporary Christians he perhaps most famous for this quote:
"The University is a clear-cut fulcrum with which to move the world. The problem
here is for the church to realize that no greater service can it render both
itself and the cause of the gospel than to try to recapture the universities for
Christ, on whom they were all originally founded. More potently than by any
other means, change the university and you change the world."
The problem is not only to win souls but to save minds. If you win the
whole world and lose the mind of the world, you will soon discover that you have
not won the world. Indeed it may turn out that you have actually lost the
world.In order to create and excel intellectually, must you sacrifice or neglect
Jesus? In order to give your life to Jesus, must you sacrifice or neglect
learning and research? Is your self-giving to scholarship and learning
essentially incompatible with your self-giving to the scholarship and learning
essentially incompatible with your self-giving to Jesus Christ? These are the
ultimate questions, and I beg you to beware of thinking that they admit of glib
answers. I warn you: the right answer could be the most disturbing
....
People are in a hurry to get out of the university and start earning money
or serving the church or preaching the gospel. They have no idea of the infinite
value of spending years of leisure in conversing with the greatest minds and
souls of the past, and thereby ripening and sharpening and enlarging their
powers of thinking. The result is that the arena of creative thinking is
abdicated and vacated to the enemy. Who among evangelicals can stand up to the
great secular or naturalistic or atheistic scholars on their own terms of
scholarship and research? Who among the evangelical scholars is quoted as a
normative source by the greatest secular authorities on history or philosophy or
psychology or sociology or politics? ...For the sake of greater effectiveness in
witnessing to Jesus Christ himself, as well as for their own sakes, the
evangelicals cannot afford to keep on living on the periphery of responsible
intellectual existence.
6 comments:
Who among the evangelical scholars is quoted as a
normative source by the greatest secular authorities on history or philosophy or psychology or sociology or politics?
Got any suggestions?
Was hoping that you might have some...
None that I can think of, though I'm not working in any of those fields directly.
thanks matt - really appreciated this post. Inspired me to read some Malik
... and I love the photo of the Quad!
I came across your blog randomly and I had some suggestions for evangelical scholars quoted as normative sources: Alvin Plantinga, Nicholas Wolsterstorff, Richard Swinburne, Peter Van Inwagen, Mark Noll, N.T. Wright, and others.
They are out there but that does not lessen the need for more. Anyway, it sounds like we are on the same journey--though in different parts of the world--so i thought it only appropriate to help you along the way and leave you with encouragement to fight on. God Bless :)
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