Missional Professors: The Need for Theological and Philosophical Maturity

 * From Paul Gould's The Outrageous Idea of the Missional Professor...

"Finally, while experts within their own particular fields of study, Christian professors often possess a Sunday school level of education when it comes to matters theological and philosophical.  A missional professor, however, must be competent, even well-versed, in such matters.  Sadly, this is rarely the case, and the result is a patchwork attempt to integrate one's faith with one's scholarly work and an inability to fit the pieces of one's life into God's larger story.  Christian professors who are seeking to be faithful witnesses for Christ within the secular academy face immense challenges." (p. 7)

Christian Academics and the Temptation of Compartmentalization

Paul Gould on Christian academics and the temptation of compartmentalization.

 “The impulse of modern society is to compartmentalize our lives.  Public/private, sacred/secular, work/play, and so on.  Modern man and modern society has lost its spiritual center, becoming fragmented and hurried—but only God know what for!  In this cultural milieu, the Christian scholar who bravely resists this impulse toward fragmentation finds the situation exacerbated due to two countervailing pressures that often pull in opposite directions.  On the one hand, the secular ethos of the university presses Christian scholars to conduct their research and teaching in purely secular terms and motifs.  If Christian scholars want a place at the table, they must play by the rules of the academic game.  A strict wall of separation between church and states exists, and any effort to tear down the wall is looked on with either suspicion or outright incredulity.  On the other hand, the Christian scholar is committed to a particular view of the world that is often quite antithetical to the established secular ethos.  The Christian universe is a God-centered universe.  If Jesus is Lord, he is Lord of all areas of thought and life.  In fact, the Bible claims that in Jesus ‘are hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge’ (Col. 2:3).  Thus, the Christian scholar himself often becomes disintegrated, compartmentalizing his ‘scholarly life’ from his ‘spiritual life’ as he attempts to navigate between the Scylla of religious fundamentalism and the Charybdis of accommodationism.  Any attempts to invoke a Christian perspective to science (for example) in the university are quickly labeled as fundamentalist attempts to promote religion masquerading as science.  Any attempts to utilize non-biblical conceptual schemes erected by thinkers such as Plato, Aristotle, or Kant in order to shape and guide research and teaching are (sometimes) viewed by the church as selling out to accommodationism.  The net result of these opposing pressures is that the Christian scholar is left in a sort of ‘no-mans land’—viewed with suspicion by both the church and the university.  And within the secular academy, religion is relegated to the sidelines.  Religion is reserved for the scholar’s personal life: meaningful to either the individual or one’s own religious community only.

 

“It is possible to live an integrated life within secular academia today?  Can a Christian scholar integrate his faith with his chosen discipline in such a way as to avoid the charge of either fundamentalism or accommodationism?”  --Paul Gould

 

·      Paul Gould, “The Two Tasks Introduced: The Fully Integrated Life of the Christian Scholar,” in The Two Tasks of the Christian Scholar: Redeeming the Soul, Redeeming the Mind (Wheaton, Ill.: Crossway, 2007), 17-18.