The Unnecessary Necessity of Arts Degrees

*This is developed from a recent talk I give.

His divine power has given us everything needed for life and godliness, through the knowledge of him who called us by his own glory and goodness. Thus he has given us, through these things, his precious and very great promises, so that through them you may escape from the corruption that is in the world because of lust, and may become participants in the divine nature. – 2 Peter 1.3

Peter talks about escaping the corruption that is in the world because of desire, and as Christians we’ve been trained to read that as meaning the creation is evil. That is this world, this creation, the thing God said several times over at the beginning of time was good, good, very good, but which Paul's says in Romans has now been subjected to decay.  The world is corrupted; therefore the whole of material existence is evil. But that’s not quite where Peter takes it does he? That has more to do with Gnosticism or Buddhism than with the gospel of the resurrected, embodied, Jesus Christ. The world is corrupted not because of something inherently wrong with materiality, but with human desire and our malfunctioning hearts:

“In sin we divide the good world God has made into two “worlds”, one good and the other evil, and we make our own contingent perspectives the criterion for the division. And this gives a new, negative sense to the term “world”, which we have hitherto spoken of positively as God’s creation. This negative sense is characteristic of the New Testament, and points to the reality a constructed world, a world of our own imagination, pitched over against the created world and in opposition to it.”[1]

The Biblical account holds that God made all things not under compulsion or out necessity, but as a gushing forth of love. God's gracious action in creation belongs from the first to that delight, pleasure and regard that the Trinity enjoys from eternity, as an outward and unnecessary expression of that love; and thus creation must be received before all else as gift and as beauty. God is not grey; and he does not create a grey world. ‘The world is charged with the grandeur of God’ as English poet Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote. Creation wasn't just what needed to be done and no more; it was an excessive and even decadent act. It was more than a bit unnecessary.[2] 

Moreover, we must maintain that God entered into the world, and experienced pain and death to rescue the splendour of what he had made – including you and me. He did not sit idly by as creation was plunged into death and decay, as we fooled about fooling about with drink and sex and ambition, half-hearted creatures like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea.[3] He condescended himself into our decay so that we might share his life.

This theological conviction concerning creation and redemption is, I believe, profoundly connected to the vocation of Arts students. Understanding the world rightly – that it was created by God, who loves his world, who sustains his world, who will one day rescue his world from sin and decay rather than allow it to slide in nothingness – that is what sustains the task of universities generally, and the B.A. more specifically. 

I spend a lot of time in my work with postgrads thinking about the university: what is the university? Why does it exist? Arts students are, in many ways, a relic, a fossil, from a by-gone era. The Arts degree is the remnant of the original degrees awarded by universities (developments of the Trivium and the Quadrivium), deposits of a time when universities where established across Europe by Christians in order to facilitate a depth of knowledge and insight into God and his world. That was the original vision of the university, interested in the pursuit of knowledge for the sake of knowledge because all truth is God’s truth, and thereby holding together the ordered reality of the universe. It was a thoroughly Christian vision – one which has long since been replaced by universities driven by economic rationalism, where universities now exist on the one hand to develop the next generation of leaders of the welfare states which sustain the universities;[4] and on the other to facilitate the kind of research which will make money and fulfill that vague category of ‘being good for the nation’, which mostly equates to science and engineering.

For art students, their mere presence within the university is a constant reminder of the original purpose of universities: towering spires pursuing the knowledge and love of God. You can find slight echos of this even in Sydney University, which has always been secular. The next time you’re in the great hall, look up at the two angels that hover of the dais at the front, and try and make out the Latin on their scrolls. To the left: Knowledge puffeth up, but charity edifieth; to the right: The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom. Arts students are fossils to this vision. But much like the Wollemi Pine or crocodiles, they are living fossils, a very present reminder of a different age.

I want to place the emphasis on the word LIVING fossils. The university has plenty of inanimate sandstone around the place to pretend that it's Oxbridge and Hogwarts. Their vocation as Arts students is not exhausted by just turning up to campus 1-2 days a week. Instead their calling is testify to the goodness this rich and diverse creation by studying it at depth. Whether you study modern philosophy or Aztec philology, whether you research the events of history or the currents of political science, whether you're researching drama or music or gender or sociology, classics or anthropology, there is a dignity and worth in studying each of these things–not because our culture deems them to be economically viable or productive, but because they are each part of God's world. God’s world, which God is not indifferent to; his world, which he has created with complexity and meaning, and has endowed us with the intellect and brains to deliberate, to examine, to study all these things. It’s easy to pay Arts students out, by predicting their future as McDonald’s employees. (I somehow was offered the position of manager at a different fast food store on the strength of being an Arts graduate alone; I declined). 

But they are not studying just an Arts degree: their study is one of the most human things one could do [recalling especially Adam's task in Genesis 2.19–20, which was not merely scientific, but required linguistics, hermeneutics, and so on). It’s part of our calling as God’s representative ruling presence in the world. Therefore be people who engage with your mind: read books which no one else in the university will read; read deeply and widely; talk to people across diverse disciplines. Immerse yourselves in your study of God's world. Engage well; Augustine was right I suspect when he said that to know something is to love that thing.

Their challenge is to not rest content with just learning things, but doing the hard, integrative work of connecting what your study with the gospel? How does modern history connect with the gospel? How does sociology, anthropology, or linguistics connect with the gospel? What does the death and resurrection of Jesus have to say about geography, or English? How does the gospel both affirm and challenge the stories my major tells about itself? How are all these things completed in Jesus? How can I use the logic of the gospel re-narrate what my discipline is to my friends in a way that is compelling?  The world is made up of languages and ideas, creatures and events.Study those things. Engage with words and ideas, taking every thought captive for the obedience of Christ. That is not where the problem of sinful desire lies. The problem is not with materiality. Don’t fall into the sub-Christian trap of thinking that God’s going to abandon his creation. As God’s representative ruling presence, and as Arts students, your calling is go about studying and knowing God’s world at depth. As I said a few moments ago, this is a sidebar, a discursive. But engaging with God means engaging him with our minds as well as our hearts, and necessitates engaging the world he has made. 

That God made the beautiful when it was unnecessary to do this is love. To study the logic and rhythm of that world in all its complexity and beauty is the task of the student, and the Arts student especially. 

---

[1] Oliver O’Donovan, ‘Admiring’. http://www.newcollege.unsw.edu.au/newcollegelectures.html.

[2] My thanks to Michael Jensen's second year doctrine lectures for some of these ideas.
[3] Cf. C.S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory: “…it would seem that Our Lord finds our desires, not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased.”

[3] I owe this idea to Dr. Mark Hutchinson.

HGP Reflections

I recently completed a ministry traineeship at Sydney University with the EU Grads Fund and the Sydney University Evangelical Union. Over the next couple of days I'll be posting some of my reflections on the past two years.

Jesus is Building his Church

"...I will build my church, and the gates of hades shall not prevail against it."

Jesus promises to build his church. And he does - in two ways. Sometimes it is like the mustard seed in Mark 4. This tiny, most insignificant of seeds, grows into a tree that is so large that there is room for all the birds of the air to nest in its branches (a reference back to Jeremiah and Ezekiel for the Gentiles coming to nest in Israel). Jesus grows his church as more and more people are brought from death to life. And praise be to God, during my two years we saw over 40 university students put their faith in the risen and reigning Lord Jesus.

Jesus builds his church in both size and breadth. He also grows his church in depth. His church grows as people understand him more and more and live out the implications of knowing him. One of the joys of my two years at Sydney University was being apart if people's lives and helping them in submitting every aspect of their life under the Lordship of Jesus Christ. This may have been in helping students develop a "Biblical worldview" and be shaped by a Christian mind. This sometimes looked like helping students think through how the should think or feel about different things. And sometimes this looked like helping students repent of various deeds and take a different course of action. And though it all people were growing in their faith and conviction.

Jesus is building his church. He's on for church growth; and we should be too. Not even death will overcome his church. Jesus builds his church.

Cautionary Ideas for the Academic Year V

With the start of the new academic year this week at Sydney University, hebel will be publishing some quotes over the coming days about the current state of academia and the place of Christians within it. Following yesterday's post on the formation of the Christian mind comes Stanley Hauerwas' critique that Christians have failed in both understanding what time it is and how to make sense of the world we live in:

“Just to the extent Christians have confused our time, church time, with state time we have failed to provide an alternative to a world, and the knowledges that are constitutive of that world, which is increasingly unable to make sense of itself.”

Can you imagine a world that makes sense of the current time?

As much as we need Christians in academia to make sense of the times (which Matheson Russell described as the time of the Eucharist - of redemption and forward looking to new creation), Hauerwas also has this to say about the search for truth in a secular univeristy:

“Christians can never fear what we have to learn from honest investigation of the world, even if such investigations are undertaken by those who have no identification as Christians… [W]ork done by non-Christians may well reflect a more determined Christian perspective than that done by Christians.”

Does knowing what time it is mean that we have nothing to fear from the university?

Cautionary Ideas for the Academic Year IV

With the start of the new academic year this week at Sydney University, hebel will be publishing some quotes over the coming days about the current state of academia and the place of Christians within it. Here is an old quote from Harry Blamires, who was tutored by C.S. Lewis at Oxford, on developing a Christian mind.

"There is no longer a Christian mind. There is still, of course, a Christian ethic, a Christian practice, and a Christian spirituality. As a moral being, the modern Christian subscribes to a code other than that of the non-Christian. As a member of the church, he understands obligations and observations ignored by the non-Christian. As a spiritual being, in prayer and meditation, he strives to cultivate a dimension of life unexplored by the non-Christian. But as a thinking being, the modern Christian has succumbed to secularization. He accepts religion - its morality, its worship, its spiritual culture; but he rejects the religious view of life, the view which sets all earthly issues within the context of the eternal view which relates all human problems - social, political, cultural - the doctrinal foundations of the Christian Faith, the view which sees all things here below in terms of God's supremacy and earth's transitoriness, in terms of Heaven and Hell.

...To think secularly is to think within a frame of reference bounded by the limits of our life here on earth: it is to keep one's calculations rooted in this-worldly criteria. To think christianly is to accept all things with the mind as related, directly or indirectly, to man's eternal destiny as the redeemed and chosen child of God." Harry Blamires, 'The Christian Mind: How Should a Christian think?', 1963, pp. 3-4, 44.

h/t Trevor Cairney

Cautionary Ideas for the Academic Year III

With the start of the new academic year this week at Sydney University, hebel will be publishing some quotes over the coming days about the current state of academia and the place of Christians within it. Here's a quote which I'd like to know i. whether or not you agree with it, and ii. if so, how you might solve the problem.

“We need to acknowledge that conservative evangelical Christians, as a cultural group, often have difficulty assimilating to the culture of secular colleges and universities. Such difficulties are faced by many groups… It seems to me, however, that conservative evangelical Christians represent a special case in this regard. In the other cases, we are dealing with people who have historically been excluded from academe and are therefore simply unfamiliar with its culture and expectations – a relatively straightforward problem to solve… In the case of conservative evangelical Christianity, however, we are dealing with a group whose leaders have encouraged its members to define themselves over against the secular world and particularly secular academe.” - Adam Kotsko 'Christians in Academe: a Reply' 2010

h/t Caitlin

Cautionary Ideas for the Academic Year II

With the start of the new academic year this week at Sydney University, hebel will be publishing some quotes over the coming days about the current state of academia and the place of Christians within it. Here is Mark Noll's response to the question posed in the first Cautionary Ideas for the Academic Year:

I actually think it's fatal for long-term Christian thinking and fatal for the long-term health of Christianity per se to live under different basic commitments in professional life and church life. To say that I adopt the rules of the game for academic life Monday to Friday, and the rules of church life on Sunday, that's a real problem.

However, what's required for many domains of learning, and I would include biblical studies, is the serious use of the mind while the spirit is fully cast in a Christian foundation. That can be a difficult challenge where much of the formal thinking about something has been dominated by non-Christian influences for some time, as would be the case in biblical study at research universities.

But the way forward is not to split the personality. The way forward would be following the path charted out by the really significant Christian philosophers of the late 20th and early 21st centuries, who have urged more professional abilities, but also more courage in letting Christian foundations dictate how those professional abilities are put to use. I am filled with admiration for people like Robert Adams, Nicholas Wolterstorff, and Alvin Plantinga, who have been thoroughly elite and thoroughly professional, but also foundationally Christian in how they put to use their professional wisdom. That, I think, is the model. They have not divided themselves into an academic part and a believer part.

Thoughts?

Cautionary Ideas for the Academic Year

With the start of the new academic year this week at Sydney University, hebel will be publishing some quotes over the coming days about the current state of academia and the place of Christians within it. To start us off is a question Timothy Dalrymple posed historian Mark Noll in a recent interview. Noll's answer will be published soon.

In Between Faith and Criticism, you say, "a history of evangelical biblical scholarship must heed both the professional community in which scholars willingly adopt a mien of intellectual neutrality, and the community of belief, in which the same scholars embrace a childlike faith."

In my own graduate education, I sometimes heard believing professors and historians say that, "As a historian I believe X, because I am required to operate according to a certain methodology. But as an individual believer, I believe Y." The question is: Is that a stable arrangement? Over the long haul, the more that one practices a methodological naturalism, or something of that sort, will one eventually come not only to practice naturalism as a methodological matter but to accept it as a metaphysical matter? Is it practical to bifurcate ourselves as scholars into one part that draws conclusions according to rigorous methodological criteria and another part that confesses a different set of beliefs?

Thoughts? h/t Caitlin

Saying No To The HUP

No, it's not a new disease or government initiative known only by abbreviation. The Homogenous Unit Principle - or the HUP amongst it's hipster friends - is the missiological idea that "people like to become Christians without crossing racial, linguistic or class barriers" (McGavran and Wagner 1970). And to a certain extent, it works. So as you look around the contemporary church scene, you'll find a church for almost every social and cultural group in Australia. Armed with pragmatic, 'missional' ecclesiology, churches have been started that minister to artisans, entertainers, etc. "Homogenous churches are those in which all the members are from a similar social, ethnic or cultural background. People prefer to associate with people like themselves – ‘I like people like me’. And so we should create homogenous churches to be effective in reaching people" (Tim Chester).

The only problem with the HUP is that's questionable just how biblical actually is. According to Tim Chester:

"The main criticism of the homogenous unit principle is that it denies the reconciling nature of the gospel and the church. It weakens the demands of Christian discipleship and it leaves the church vulnerable to partiality in ethnic or social conflict. It has been said that ‘the homogenous unit principles is fine in practice, but not in theory’!"

A central picture in New Testament of the church is of Jews and Gentiles with one voice glorifying the the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ (cf. Romans 15). In Christ two peoples become one; Christian Jews and Gentiles become one new people of God, part of the one body of Christ. So then "there is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is no male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus" (cf. Galatians 3.28-29). Or again in 1 Corinthians "For in one Spirit we were all baptized into one body—Jews or Greeks, slaves or free—and all were made to drink of one Spirit" (1 Cor. 12.13). And according to Ephesians 3, it is the unity of the church "across barriers that have hitherto divided humankind is the sure sign to the powers that their time is up, that they are not masters of the world and that Jesus is" (NT Wright). The very fact that "Greek and Jew, circumcised and uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave and free" (Colossians 3.11) can praise God together in and of itself declares that Jesus Christ is Lord.

So this year, at Sydney Uni in the eu postgrads & staff faculty, we've said no to the HUP. Campus life is already segmented enough as it: between arts and science, staff and students, academics and support staff. According to Alasdair MacIntyre this results in:

“the graduates of the best research universities tend to become narrowly focused professionals, immensely and even obsessively hard working, disturbingly competitive and intent on success as it is measured within their own specialized professional sphere, often genuinely excellent at what they do; who read little worthwhile that is not relevant to their work..." (MacIntyre 1999).

Instead of organizing our groups by schools and faculties, this year our small groups, prayer groups and reading groups will be organised by broad geographical terms, i.e. Darlington, Fisher, Manning, etc. So in 2011 we're making the English and Physics postgrads sit down and read the Bible - together. We are convinced that they have great things to offer each other, and by talking to each other they'll become more rounded academics. But more importantly, we are convicted that the gospel tears down whatever barriers people place between themselves. We are convicted that what defines as people isn't our academic disciplines (and the expectations these entail) but our identity in Christ. And we are far more united than the academy would have us believe.

We don't do this to ignore the different academic disciplines. The Physics postgrads will still need to support and talk to each other as the live out the Christian life in their school. We're not intending to force people to blandly assimilate. Rather, as we acknowledge the wealth of diversity across eu postgrads and staff, we realise that their is more that unites us than divides us. "...[F]or the same Lords is Lord of all" (Romans 10.12).

The Brain Drain?

In case you missed it, Southern Cross (the Sydney Anglican mag) ran a two page feature this month on higher education and the Wesley Institute. Bryan Cowling argued that the newly envisioned Wesley Institute might help fill the gap of "well-informed Christian educators in the university". What Cowling imagines for the university is very similar to what I've come to see this year as I've served alongside Christian academics at Sydney University:

"We need lots of intelligent, mature articulate Christian philosophers of education who are equally skilled and knowledgeable in their academic discipline as in applied biblical doctrine and theology. We need hundreds of these academics in our public universities and colleges to nurture the next generation of visionary educational leaders (you could say the same about about each of the gatekeeping, public-policy shaping professions)." - Bryan Cowling, The Hole in Higher Education, Southern Cross: November 2010, pp 28-29.

As I've argued elsewhere, the university offers a unique opportunity to affect the world. I do have some misgivings about Cowling's conclusion (which you might like to ask me about in the comments), but I'm genuinely glad that I'm not alone in praying that the hearts and minds of academics would be shaped by Christ.

However, there is one sentiment in particular that I do find concerning. After calling for a hundred of thought-out academics in the university, Cowling goes on to argue:

"There needs to be career paths in public universities and colleges in this country if we are to avoid losing our best Christian minds to leadership positions in other countries."

Lose our best Christian minds to other countries? I find this to be unbelievably short-sighted and parochial. Instead of worrying about a brain drain, we should be encouraging our best Christian minds to use their opportunity in the academy to leave. For eu postgrads and staff, our vision is that when Christian academics finish at Sydney University, they'll go to other universities in less reached and less resourced parts of Australia in the world. Our vision is that they'll be people who - with all the energy that God powerfully works within them (Col 1.29) - will be shaping peoples lives in Christ. They'll be academics who can engage and speak the gospel into public policy and discourse. They'll be academics who know how to support campus ministry. And if they find themselves in a university where there is none, then they'll know how to start it.

Hording our academic minds is not the right response to the "marginalising of respectable Christian thinking in Australian society."* Taking every thought captive to obey Christ can't stop at the Australian coastline.

__*Is marginalisation the problem? For more thoughts on marginalisation see this from Chris.

A Model Academic

Dietrich Bonhoeffer is a lot of things. A martyr. A resistance fighter. The hero of a fallen leader. He is an inspiring writer who cared about Christ and his church. Yet for all this, we rarely see Bonhoeffer as a model academic. Unless of course you are Marilynne Robinson.

Robinson's Bonhoeffer is more than this of course. But to understand Bonhoeffer you need to understand him as an academic. Earning a doctorate in theology by the age of 21, Bonhoeffer started to lecture in the University of Berlin by the time he was 22. He would go onto to teach in some of Germany's finest academic institutions of the time. And yet, unlike so many other academic contemproaries, Bonhoeffer understand the danger posed by Hitler's National Socialism. As a Christian in academia, Bonhoeffer was prepared to let his beliefs shape every part of his life, even if it lead him to the hangman's noose. Having read Robinson's homage to Bonhoeffer in The Death of Adam, I want to suggest three reasons why Bonhoeffer stands out as a model academic.

1. Christ at the Centre. The central focus point of Bonhoeffer's academic career, and indeed his life, was the Lordship of Jesus. He is the one with full authority. He is the one who is to be obeyed and trusted - in life and in death. It was his commitment to Christ at the centre that lead Bonhoeffer to shape everything around this reality. It was this reality that prevented Bonhoeffer from submitting to any other authority.
2. Religionless Christianity. I have to admit that although I've heard this phrase thrown around quite a bit, it's baffled me. Until I realized what it actually means. Often used as an excuse to stop 'stuffy, anachronistic liturgy' etc. Bonhoeffer used this phrase to challenge his culture. In a nation where everyone and everything assumed Christianity, Bonhoeffer used his place as an academic - in the university and the seminary - to call the assumed a priori of god in German society hypocrisy. His vocation as a scholar was to call Germany to denounce the Fuhrer and follow the true lord.
3. Christ at Gethsemane. These two points made Bonhoeffer an academic who was well thought-out and integrated in his faith and study, and willing to let this shape his dialogue with the world.

   "By this-worldliness I mean living unreservedly in life's duties, problems, successes and failures, experiences and perplexities. In so doing we throw ourselves completely into the arms of God, taking seriously, not our own sufferings, but those of God in the world - watching with Christ in Gethsemane...How can success make us arrogant, or failure lead us astray, when we share in God's suffering through a life of this kind?"

   The scion of German aristocracy and one of the greatest minds of his generation, Bonhoeffer could have stayed quiet in the ivory tower of academia. He could of, but he didn't, because Christ went to Gethsemane. He would be an integrated scholar who would get involved in the world's mess. As a disciple of Christ, Bonhoeffer would stay true to his convictions. "When Christ calls a man, he bids him come and die."

A brilliant mind, Bonhoeffer lived and died for what he believed in. He loved the world like his master did, and was prepared to speak up and act against injustice. And he did all this without going flaky on what lay at the centre of his life. Bonhoeffer has been an inspiration to me for over seven years now. And Robinson's reading of him has only solidified this for me. I look forward to carrying on part of his legacy in the postgrad ministry at Sydney University.

Christian Academia: Books

Working alongside the eu postgrads this year, I've read a couple of books to help me understand the challenges and opportunities of Christian academia. What I've found is that they has been several books published in the last 20 years about the place of Christian academics. But for the most past they seem to be largely isolated from each other. Furthermore, most of the books are American and are written for the American context (i.e. having secular and faith-based universities). Here are some of the books I've found helpful:

• The Two Tasks of The Christian Scholar, ed. William Lane Craig & Paul M. Gould, 2007. Published as a festschrift to Charles Malik, The Two Tasks has some interesting papers by Lane Craig and others. But the cash value in this book is Malik's The Two Tasks, an address he gave in 1980. It was this address which reignited a vision for university in the American evangelical scene.

• Finding God at Harvard, ed. Kelly Monroe Kullberg, 2007. A celebration of the ministry of the Veritas Forum at Harvard, FG@H is a collection of short essays and testimonies from Christians in the Harvard community. Contributors include Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Nicholas Wolterstorff, Charles Malik and others. A great insight into one of the most interesting ministries to post grads and staff in the US.

• The State of the University, Stanley Hauerwas, 2006. A collection of Hauerwas' thoughts on the university and Christianity. Although the essay's become repetitive in the middle, Hauerwas has some gold in this book, and I appreciate the way he pushes back against the usual American angst about the university. There are also some beautiful chapters about tradition and institutions, and Rowan Williams.

• Shining Like Stars, Lindsay Brown, 2006. Although not specifically about Christian academics, Brown has some inspiring stories about the Christians working in the university.

• Until Justice & Peace Embrace, Nicholas Wolterstorff, 1983. This book is also not specifically about academia. However Wolterstorff has some insightful things to say to Christian post grads and scholars, and I know some people who have found him helpful.

• Christian Academia? Matheson Russell, 2010. Originally a talk given at the Post Grad day at AnCon this year, it was later republished in VERITAS. This article lays out what the university is and how it fits into the Christian worldview.

• 10 Things We Wish Someone Had Told Us When We Started Graduate School, Anna Blanch, Goanna Tree, updated 2010. Helpful advice from a Christian academic.

There is also several American and British websites with some resources on them. And Kelly Monroe Kullberg has another book, Finding God Beyond Harvard, which I'd like to read at some point. Oh, there are also some theologians like O'Donovan and McGrath who have things to say about academia in several places.

Know of any other books which have something to say about the university? I'd love to know. And at some point I should share some ideas I've had about university and the doctrine of creation...

The Periphery of Intellectual Existence

Is there such a theology of the university? Or does the university fit into the Christian worldview? One of the things I've found myself doing this year as I work alongside the EU's Post Grad faculty is to read books that try to answer these questions. As I've prayed and dreamed about where this growing ministry might go in the future, there have been a number of books I've found helpful in imagining the vocation of Christian academia.

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."

I've recently been reading Malik. Like most of what I've read about Christian scholarly witness, what I've found in Malik is a love for the God and Father of Christ Jesus that is displayed in part through a love for the university, and more generally for knowledge and learning. He had a great vision for the university as a place that is captured for Christ. He prayed for a university that would use it's wisdom that would serve Jesus. Malik believed that it would be Evangelicals who had the most opportunity to make this happen. Here is his charge to them:

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.

Malik offers a caution against the anti-intellectualism that had the potential to characterise evangelicalism in the 20th century. And if we truly believe in lives transformed by Christ, we need to seek not just the conversion of souls, but the conversion minds, hearts and hands (on which see here). As I reflect on what this might look like for EU's Post Grads, my hope is that they will bring every part of their lives under the Lordship of Christ. In him are hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge. My hope is that they will be the best post grads in the university, because they're using their intellect to serve Jesus and his church and his world; because they're engaging with other academics from across the university; because they want take every thought captive to obey Christ.

The Value of Being Integrated

Working in Christian ministry at a university, I'm becoming increasingly convinced of the importance of being integrated in your faith. There is a real depth and maturity in Christians who do this. Part of this involves connecting what you believe with your actions. Chris has posted a quote on this that I also find challenging and exciting.

[T]here is no question in my mind that Christians would be considered even more odd than they are today by virtue of what they believe and the morality by which they live, and yet because they are fully engaged in each sphere of life as individuals and communities of character, they would serve as a credible and creditable conscience of the overlapping communities they inhabit. Odd, to be sure, but no one would deny that they do extraordinary good in the world. Neither would anyone doubt that they serve the cities and communities in which they live very well." - James Davison Hunter, The Other Journal.

You can read more here.

Also, this isn't really connected, but I think it is worth reading anyway: The Problem of Joy: A Review of Sufjan Stevens’s All Delighted People EP

IFES and Evangelicalism

Several church history books I've read recently have commented on the remarkable resilience of the worldwide evangelical movement. The notice that evangelicalism was particularly strong following World War Two, but was predicted to die out by the 1980's with the rise of western/liberal culture. Instead, evangelicalism seems to have grown and strengthened. The historical commentators usually give several reasons for this, but one that is often overlooked is IFES, the International Fellowship of Evangelical Students.

IFES is the global association of national movements which in turn are constituted by groups like the EU. IFES was formed by 10 national movements in 1947; it now has more than 150 national members. According to Billy Graham:

"Everywhere I go I meet Christian leaders whose lives have been touched by IFES' emphasis on biblical evangelism and discipleship.”

I've been preparing a prayer meeting for IFES at AnCon. The more I've read about IFES, the more I've realised that they have a strong claim for a growing and influential evangelical movement. There are over 500,000 students connected to IFES groups. According to the 2008 IFES Annual Report:

World Vision estimates that up to 90% of their leaders worldwide have been formed through an IFES affiliated movement. In some countries in French speaking Africa, for example, up to 80% of church leaders say the same.

If you want to know more about IFES, I recommend you read the short and accessible book by Lindsay Brown, Shining Like Stars.

Resurrection and Science

"By its light will the nations walk, and the kings of the earth will bring their glory into it..." Rev. 21.24

I studied an Arts degree at Sydney Uni. To be more precise, I majored in Ancient and Modern History. So, as I'm back at uni now serving alongside the postgrad/staff faculty of the SUEU, I don't pretend to know much of what the science guys I meet with are saying when they start talking physics. An I'm often annoyed and frustrated by the arrogant, modernist faith placed in scientific knowledge and achievement. It's a mean metanarrative right?

However, a fascinating thought was explained for me tonight as a talked to a friend. Is the resurrection's affirmation of creation (c.f. Oliver O'Donovan's Resurrection and Moral Order) also an affirmation of scientific inquiry into creation? My friend has written a 2000 word paper on this topic, which I'm yet to read, but if anyone else has thought more seriously about this than I have, I'd love to hear what you think. Especially if there are any scientists out there.

Publish or Perish

One of the challenges for Christian post grads and academics is academia's culture to 'Publish or Perish'. One American academic shares her experiences of this culture:

When I was in graduate school, I was taught by a number of excellent limnologists. The mental model we were given of the academic life was that of a cohort of fish, something called “young of year.” As a fish cohort, we were supposedly thrown into a lake with resources where we had to compete. The best would get more resources, work harder, grow faster, and eventually be the fittest. These would succeed and get the best academic jobs, get the best grants, and become leaders in their professional societies.

One professor declared in a seminar, “In the end, what stands is your publication record. Jobs may come and go, spouses may come and go, but at the end, what you have is your publication record.”

This astonished me at the time and does not at all reflect my worldview. Although this person was an eminent scientist whom I highly respected, I felt empowered to strongly disagree. I disagree with his statement and with the “young of year” metaphor. I am not in competition with my cohort of fish friends, trying hard to be the one with the most papers at the end of my life. In fact, I suspect that one of the reasons many women drop out of the scientific world after getting their Ph.D.s is that they often do not accept that as a life goal.

- Dorothy Boorse, In Focus: Asking the Right Question: Reflections on Life Teaching at a Small College.

Instead, Boorse offers an alternative approach:

I do not look at scientific productivity as the only measure of success. Rather than asking, “Am I doing everything I thought I would do?” or “Am I doing as much in my field as other people?” I suggest we ask, “Am I contributing to the world?” and “Does my life work?” A Christian can ask, “Am I doing what I think God is calling me to do with my talents and abilities?”

Do you pray for Christians in academia, that their 'attitude would be the same as Christ Jesus...' (cf. Phil 2.5 ff).

h/t Goannatree

Disciples in the University and the Church?

"We know that the universities which set a pattern for all other universities were all founded on Jesus Christ, and we know that foundation has now in practice become a relic of the past. A Christian critique of the university raises the question of why this has happened. Is it a natural phenomenon? Was it an inevitable development? What were the ultimate spiritual causes behind it? Does it really signify progress? Progress from what, to what? Is it reversible? What are its consequences upon the whole destiny of man?

Is it a necessary condition for these great universities becoming so overwhelmingly leading in all domains of research, learning, scholarship, discovery and invention that they unmoor themselves altogether from Jesus Christ? Are scientific progress and the worship of Jesus Christ incompatible? Could a saint earn a Nobel Prize in science, and could a Nobel Prize winner in physics or chemistry or medicine or economics fall on his knees and say the Credo and mean it exactly as Athanasius meant it and as the church means it today? Is it a mere matter of division of labor, so that the university will attend exclusively to matters intellectual and scientific and the church exclusively to matters moral and spiritual? Does this division of labor make no substantive difference to the very process of science and thought to which the university dedicates itself, and to the truth value of its findings?"

- Charles Habib Malik, A Christian Critique of the University, 1982. Dr Malik had a PhD in Philosophy from Harvard, and over fifty honorary doctorates from such universities as Yale, Princeton, Columbia, Notre Dame, and Freiburg. He was also the President of the United Nations General Assembly in 1958-59.

Matheson Russell will be talking about a life of discipleship in the University and the Church a the Post Grad day at AnCon.

Registration closes on Wednesday 16 June. If you haven't registered yet, head to www.ancon.org.au.

The Need for Christians in University

“The story is told of a conversation between two of the most celebrated German liberal Protestant theologians of the nineteenth century, Albrecht Ritschl and Adolf Hamack. The more conservative sections of the German Protestant churches had recently gained some significant political victories. Ritschl's advice to Harnack is reported to have been something like this:

‘Never mind about the politics; get on with writing the books that will change the way people think. In the long term, that is what will be of decisive importance.’

As one looks at the sustained gains made by liberalism in German Protestantism up to the eve of the First World War, the wisdom of Ritschl's advice is clear: to win the long-term victories, you have to influence the way in which a rising generation thinks...

[W]hat if we were able to look ahead to a day when we would have financiers who knew as much about the Christian faith as they did about economic theory? And more than that: not simply that they knew about both, but were able to relate them, and bring them together in such a way that we could talk about ‘evangelical economic theory’? You can extend this list as long as you please. My point is simply that we need to make connections with what is going on in the real world, and allow the gospel to bear on the issues that are facing those who live and work in our complex modem culture. We cannot allow the gospel to be squeezed out of that culture because it is seen to be of no relevance on account of our failure to make those connections in the first place.”- Alister McGrath, The Christian Scholar in the 21st Century

...mens eadem...

"Don't be conformed to this present evil age, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind..." - Romans 12.2

"The word of God was the sweat of [Paul's] brow, but it was also the life of his mind. Our juncture of history is rather like Paul's in one respect: it requires a Christian preacher to come to the defence of the life of the mind. As Universities daily conform themselves more closely to the school of wizardry in children's fiction, a repository of magic techniques to get startling effects, who else is left to care for how people, as individuals, think for themselves about the coherence of understanding, principle, and purpose that makes the difference between living in freedom and living in servitude? As the young flock in ever greater numbers to our Universities and colleges, who is there to talk to them seriously, and with all the resources of refined scholarly culture, about the meaning of their human existence, about how vast quantity if scatted or organised information can be distilled into something worth a humans being's while to be occupied with in his or her one and only venture in life? Of course, we shall be told that virtue cannot be taught, that the existential dimension of wisdom is something each person must discover for him or herself, not a topic for inclusion in a syllabus, to be "covered" in a tutorial. All of which is perfectly true. Yet wisdom can be present or absent as a goal and a horizon, before which everything covered in a syllabus can begin to assume its real importance. But this requires teachers who believe that learning is not simply perfecting a performance, but has to do with the terror and hope that is due to existence itself. It requires teachers who believe in the human reality of salvation and loss, who live out their academic roles as those who continually ask how they may be saved?" - Oliver O'Donovan, No End to the Word, The Word in Small Boats, 2010.

Cash Cows?

Alison and I are both involved in ministering to International students at our church. We are really thankful for the opportunities we have to share Jesus and our lives with people. But it has made us really aware of how poorly treated international students are. They are charged an incredible amount of money come here and study, and then receive no financial assistance in terms of travel insurance or medicare. International students will often work long hours each day, and are usually underpaid. Unaware of their rights, I've heard too many stories from students in the past three years who have been taken advantage of by the employers.

Michael Spence, reflecting on the racial violence against overseas students that has made world headlines for the past year, has this to say:

"...[W]e need to get serious about the services we provide to overseas students. Each student we welcome into Australia is a person with complex needs and aspirations, unlike the volumes of coal and iron ore that have traditionally dominated our links to Asia. Students should not be perceived as cash cows to be milked at every opportunity. Sure, overseas students make a huge economic contribution but why shouldn't state governments recognise this by, for example, treating them like other students and providing travel concession cards?" - SMH

Dr Spence argues that a way forward is for universities to provide more on site or local accommodation for international students. He also notes that "our education links are often as strong as, if not stronger than, our diplomatic links." I think that I agree with him. However, I want to take it further; because it is not only institutional change that is needed. It's not only our governments and universities that see overseas students as "cash cows", but employers who work international students on 12 hour shifts and pay them a pittance. Our landlords who charge students $200 a week to share a two bedroom apartment with seven other people. What is need ultimately is a change of heart. As agents and victims of sin and evil, what we need is to be set free.

That's why I'm thankful for being involved in the overseas students ministry at church. Because as Australians and Chinese (and one Colombian guy), we can say "yet for us there is one God, the Father, from whom are all things and for whom we exist, and one Lord, Jesus Christ, through whom are all things and through whom we exist. (1 Cor. 8.6.)