Читать книгу The Outrageous Idea of the Missional Professor - Paul M. Gould - Страница 8

In 1997, George Marsden wrote an important book that documents how attempts to integrate one’s faith with one’s scholarship are perceived in the secular university (and by some Christian scholars as well) as outrageous.1 The idea is that it is ludicrous, inappropriate, and even absurd to blend the personal/private/subjective beliefs of a religious academic with the public / openly accessible / objective truths and knowledge of the scholarly enterprise. Marsden expertly argued that there is a place for distinctively Christian views within the secular academy. I concur. Today, the idea of Christian scholarship is not as outrageous as it was when Marsden wrote. Sure, there are those, such as Richard Dawkins and his ilk, who continue to characterize religion and religious folks as delusional, but, by and large, Christianity and Christian scholarship are at least considered somewhat respectable within some, even many, of the academic disciplines.

Today, the truly outrageous idea is that of a missional professor. I shall use the term “missional” to describe a specific posture or identity of the Christian professor: a missional professor is one who understands and lives her life in light of God’s story and God’s mission (the missio dei). As Christopher Wright states, “God himself has a mission . . . And as part of that divine mission, God has called into existence a people to participate with God in the accomplishment of that mission. All our mission flows from the prior mission of God.”2 The God of the Bible is a God on a mission to seek and save the lost, to redeem and restore all of creation. Motivated by love, the Father sent Jesus into the world as an atoning sacrifice for sin (1 John 4:9–10). Jesus is a sent-one. So too are Jesus’ followers: “As the Father has sent me, I am sending you” (John 20:21). As Christians, we are called to be witnesses for Christ (Acts 1:8), pointing others to Jesus as the only hope in this sin-shattered, shalom-violated world.

The central outrageous idea of this book, encapsulated in the phrase “missional professor,” is that God wants to use Christian professors as professors to reach others (colleagues, administrators, students), play a role in transforming the academy, and meet the needs of the world. I’ll flesh this idea out in more detail in the pages to follow, but first a word on the notion of being a faithful follower of Christ as a professor.

What does faithfulness to God look like in this day and age for a Christian professor? Is it regular church attendance? Tithing? Consistent Bible reading? All of these activities are good and ought to be part of the faithful Christian life of a professor, but they don’t get to the heart of the matter. This is why the idea of a faithful professor doesn’t sound as outrageous to my ears as does the idea of a missional professor. In my mind, they are the same concept. But in my experience working with university professors, these two concepts are often seen as distinct. Most Christian professors deeply desire to be faithful to Christ in their vocation. The problem isn’t a lack of desire. Rather, the problem is a lack of understanding and vision. Many Christian professors and graduate students working in the secular academy have not discovered how to locate their lives firmly within the context of God’s great story as articulated in the Bible. And those Christian professors and graduate students who are living missional lives within the academy undoubtedly could use encouragement and a fresh challenge to “excel still more” (1 Thess 4:10, NASB).

The problem isn’t entirely internal to the Christian scholar. Consider Stanley Fish. In his book Save the World on Your Own Time, he argues that the idea of a missional professor is ludicrous and inappropriate:

Remember always what a university is for—the transmission of knowledge and the conferring of analytical skills—and resist the temptation to inflate the importance of what goes on in its precincts . . . Of course one is free to prefer other purposes to the purposes appropriate to the academy, but one is not free to employ the academy’s machinery and resources in the service of those other purposes. If what you really want to do is preach, or organize political rallies, or work for world peace, or minister to the poor and homeless, or counsel troubled youths, you should either engage in those activities after hours and on weekends, or, if part-time is not enough time, you should resign from the academy.3

In Fish’s view, the only legitimate role for the professor within the secular university is one of teaching and research, devoid of any moral, religious, or political values or ideologies. But the illusion that a professor leaves her everyday life behind when entering the pristine halls of academia is wrong-headed. There is no such thing as “value neutral” scholarship. Everyone, whether they like it or not, approaches the academic enterprise with a host of presuppositions, values, and religious commitments that are applied—some consciously and explicitly, others unconsciously and implicitly—in the process of teaching and research.

In this book, however, I am not trying to convince the Fishes of the world. Instead, my intended audience is Christian professors (and future professors) working within the secular academy (some who may be inclined to agree with Fish). A secondary audience is those Christian professors working within Christian universities and colleges, all of whom interact with their broader academic discipline and find occasion to interact with their Christian and non-Christian colleagues within the secular university. I shall write with an eye toward my primary audience, but if you find yourself working within a Christian university or college setting, the necessary adjustments to the discussion should be easy enough to make, and I leave it to you, the reader, to do so.

To be a missional professor in the secular university, great courage is required. Such a professor is courageous in light of the subtle or not so subtle pressure within the academic community toward conformity in terms of norms, practices, foundational assumptions, and lifestyle. The call to be self-consciously “on mission” within the university requires a boldness to be different—to engage in the scholarly enterprise with one eye toward the gospel and the other toward a lost and needy world.

Moreover, the presence of a missional professor within the secular academy is startling. A missional professor draws people to herself, and through herself to Christ. The subtext of her life is not, “Look how great I am,” or, “Look how impressive my CV is.” Instead it is, “Look how great Christ is.” Such a life lived in the secular academy is truly startling and refreshing. The presence of one missional professor within the secular university causes eyebrows to lift, heads to turn, hearts to awaken, consciences to become convicted, and lives to be challenged.

I fear, however, that such a professor is unusual, even rare. I’ll justify this fear a bit more in a moment. But, if I am right, then the Christian voice and witness within the secular university is weak. If only a scattering of missional professors exist within the secular university, genuine transformation of academic cultures and the culture at large will not take place. Those Christian professors who are missional can be written off as an anomaly and largely ignored. Sure, we will win skirmishes. Debates and articles against the latest claims of Richard Dawkins and Stephen Hawking can satisfy the already convinced. Perhaps we will see a few new converts. But institutional change, where Christianity is seen (once again) as a viable option and the Christian voice within the academy is clear and articulate, will not take place and the Christian witness will be stifled. The idea as well as the embodiment of the idea of a missional professor is outrageous.

I long for a day when the idea of a missional professor is no longer outrageous. What would the secular university look like if missional professors were commonplace? Instead of being an anomaly, easily explained away, the presence of a movement of missional professors both locally (wherever the university can be found) and across academic disciplines (wherever learning can be found) would truly be revolutionary. I write this book as an invitation and challenge for Christian professors to join the revolution.

Isn’t it Enough Just to be a Christian and a Professor?

Imagine the apostle Paul visiting America in the twenty-first century. Further, imagine that he has been commissioned by the church to examine the status of Christianity within the American professoriate. What would he find? Perhaps he would write something like the following letter:

Paul, a “sent-one”—sent by Jesus Christ and God the Father. To the church, the pillar and foundation of the truth (1 Tim 3:15) in America:

The spirit of the Greek academy is alive and well, just as it was in my day. The amount of knowledge that the university has amassed is amazing. What an incredible God we serve. The God of the molecule! The God of Augustine, Dante, Lewis! The God of trains, planes, and automobiles! Wherever the gospel has taken root, learning has followed. Many of the great discoveries over the centuries were made by Christian scholars who were guided by the conviction that God has created an orderly world. Christians now teach and lead and serve within the many great institutions of learning in the land. Praise be to God! Not surprisingly, I’ve also found idols within the university and the hearts of those who work there, just as I did in Athens (see Acts 17:16). They are not as obvious (not carved in stone at any rate), but they are still present. I shall now summarize my findings (forgive the staleness of my writing style, I’ve been out of practice for a couple thousand years and am still learning some of the new language).

It is an empirical fact that there are Christian professors in the secular academy. To be sure, there may be fewer at more elite universities, a few more at so-called research universities, more still at liberal arts colleges, and so on. But Christian professors are present in the secular university—teaching undergraduate and graduate courses, conducting high-quality research and serving on committees in their departments and within the university at large. Moreover, Christian professors are not confined to religion and theology departments. They can be found in every academic discipline—from the theoretical to the practical, the sciences to the humanities. Wherever learning is taking place, Christians and Christianity can be found. This brings my heart great joy as I recall my speech in the Areopagus in which I stated, “in him we live and move and have our being” (Acts 17:28). I was quoting a Greek poet to make the point that God is the answer to life’s fundamental questions. So, it makes sense to me that Christianity and Christians would be found in each academic discipline, since all knowledge somehow points to our great God.

I have found that many Christian professors in the secular academy view themselves as distinctively and self-consciously Christian. They desire to bring honor to God. They faithfully attend church and raise their families to know Christ. They serve in the church choir and in their children’s Sunday school classroom, and participate in a small group within their church. At work, they desire, and often succeed, in being a respected and competent practitioner of their guild. They teach well and make time for students (or at least faithfully hold office hours). They read and sometimes write articles or books that draw connections between their faith and their own academic discipline. They participate in scholarly conferences as members of good standing, and many participate in distinctively Christian scholarly societies as well. They are men and women of character, Christ-like to be sure in moral conviction and practice. There is much to rejoice in as we consider the presence and conviction of many Christian professors within the secular academy.

But why does the church, “the pillar and foundation of the truth” (1 Tim 3:15) not commission Christian professors into service? The university is an incredibly important mission field. Ideas are discussed and advanced by professors, and these ideas are often hostile toward Christianity (see my second letter to the Corinthians chapter 10 for more on the importance of ideas). Millions of students and fellow professors study and work at the university each year; many are lost and in need of the Savior. Technologies are being developed in the university that could be used to meet the many needs of the world. Christian professors are strategically placed in one of the most important institutions in your society to be a witness for Christ. But, sadly, there seems to be this great divide between the “secular” and the “sacred”—a divide unfamiliar in my day and age. The result is that often Christian professors have disconnected their jobs (or large parts of their jobs) from their Christianity, no longer measuring their lives in terms of the progress of the gospel. And the church supports this split when they don’t affirm and intrinsically value the calling of Christian professors as professors. My heart breaks.

May Christian professors have the heart of Jesus, who, after looking at the harassed and helpless crowds, had compassion on them and prayed for the Lord of the harvest to send out workers into the harvest field (Matt 9:36–38). I end this report with my last words to the church in Rome: “Now to him who is able to establish you by my gospel and the proclamation of Jesus Christ, according to the revelation of the mystery hidden for long ages past, but now revealed and made known through the prophetic writings by the command of the eternal God, so that all nations might believe and obey him—to the only wise God be glory forever through Jesus Christ! Amen (Rom 16:25–27).

What can we learn from this imaginative exercise? If the findings of this imaginary letter are at all close to the actual state of affairs with respect to Christian professors (and graduate students) within the secular academy, and I submit that it is, then there is much to rejoice over and some challenges to consider. The main challenge before us is to live “a joined up life” where work and play, church and family, head and heart and hands all work together to serve God and man under the banner of the gospel. In short, Christian professors ought to be missional professors.

I offer three reasons to justify my claim that we are falling short in this area.4 First, many twenty-first century Christians scarcely see the world from a distinctively Christian perspective. Instead, our natural patterns of thought, imbibed since we were born and shaped in secular undergraduate and graduate schools, are those informed by the scientific and/or postmodern worldviews. Hence, we need to constantly remind ourselves of the biblical worldview. It is not second nature.

Second, the human heart is rebellious and deceitful. From personal experience, it seems that the propensity of the human heart is to turn toward self. Good intentions, over time, and if we are not careful, turn into ways to advance self-serving agendas; the desire to live faithfully for Christ, over time, and if we are not careful, wanes and needs to constantly be fed or it will be replaced with a desire for self-aggrandizement or self-fulfillment, and so on.

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.

Faithfulness to Christ in this day and age requires savvy, humility, intention, and the community of believers both within and outside the academy. It requires that we live our lives pursuing God’s purposes. That task is difficult for most Christians and doubly so for academics who live and breathe within an academic structure that encourages self-promotion and personal accomplishment. May we together seek to live our lives for the glory of God and the love of man as Christian scholars. The result will be revolutionary.

A Spiritual Revolution

In his book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions,5 Thomas Kuhn describes the history of science in terms of eras of relatively normal science and scientific activities punctuated by paradigm-changing episodes of scientific revolution. A scientific paradigm is “overthrown” when it no longer is able to best accommodate anomalies. Scientific discovery and the uncovering of new phenomena lead to shifts in the way the world is understood: the Ptolemaic paradigm of the universe is overthrown by the heliocentric paradigm; phlogiston theory is abandoned with the discovery of oxygen; caloric theories of heat are replaced with kinetic theories; and so on. As a result, our world (and our view of the world) changes.

Our world has witnessed many revolutions—political, ideological, and religious—over its history. Some revolutions have brought on lasting change while others were short-lived. Some revolutions have had only a local impact while others have been truly global. There is, however, a revolution afoot today that is both global in scope and has the power to change both individual lives as well as society. It is the revolution of the human heart brought on by faith in Jesus. The bent of the human heart is toward self and idolatry. And the only cure for this human condition is Christ. Our world is a world of violence, injustice, and strife. And the only hope for this world is a Savior who redeems and restores. Jesus has called his followers to join with him as agents of change. Imagine a movement of missional professors within every academic discipline and on every secular college and university in the world.

Such a state of affairs would cause, in Kuhn’s terminology, a “crisis” of belief with respect to the two dominant stories within the academy and culture at large: scientific naturalism and postmodernism. Evolutionary explanations for religious belief would appear as they are: ad hoc attempts to avoid a godly explanation for any aspect of reality. Postmodernism (in its most extreme articulation) would be revealed as an unlivable and desperate attempt to find meaning in a world that is meaningless apart from God.

The presence of so many anomalies (in the form of missional professors) would cause non-believing professors and students (and society in general) to examine their own beliefs and hearts in light of the gospel of Christ. Listen to the story told by C. S. Lewis of how God moved into his life:

No sooner had I entered the English School than I went to George Gordon’s discussion class. And there I made a new friend. The very first words he spoke marked him out from the ten or twelve others who were present; a man after my own heart . . . His name was Nevill Coghill. I soon had the shock of discovering that he—clearly the most intelligent and best-informed man in that class—was a Christian and a thoroughgoing supernaturalist . . . Barfield was beginning to overthrow my chronological snobbery; Coghill gave it another blow . . .

These disturbing factors in Coghill ranged themselves with a wider disturbance which was now threatening my whole earlier outlook. All the books were beginning to turn against me . . . George MacDonald had done more to me than any other writer; of course it was a pity he had that bee in his bonnet about Christianity . . . Chesterton had more sense than all the other moderns put together; bating, of course, his Christianity. Johnson was one of the few authors whom I felt I could trust utterly; curiously enough, he had the same kink . . . On the other hand, those writers who did not suffer from religion and with whom in theory my sympathy ought to have been complete—Shaw and Wells and Mill and Gibbon and Voltaire—all seemed a little thin; what as boys we called “tinny” . . . There seemed to be no depth in them. They were too simple. The roughness and density of life did not appear in their books.6

Lewis goes on to describe how everywhere he turned God was pursuing, even haunting, him. The most riveting books were written by Christians or those not beholden to atheism. The Christians he met were not unlearned; rather they were fellow students and professors at prestigious institutions of learning such as Oxford and Cambridge.

Eventually, there were too many anomalies to his naturalistic atheism, and Lewis was forced into a crisis of belief:

All over the board my pieces were in the most disadvantageous positions. Soon I could no longer cherish even the illusion that the initiative lay with me. My Adversary began to make His final moves.7

Finally, in the quiet of his own room at Magdalen College, in 1929, Lewis bent his knee and surrendered his will to God.

It is instructive that Lewis’s own crisis of belief was brought to a head as he was confronted (and confounded) at every turn by faithful Christians and the profundity of the Christian worldview. Christians had a depth and settledness that caused him to question his own sense of security. Christianity had the ring of truth to it in a way that revealed the “tinniness” of his atheism. Lewis’s life was forever changed and the world is different because of it.

The university is one of the most important and influential institutions in our world. As professors, you play an important role in shaping the lives and thoughts of the world’s future business leaders, educators, entertainers, and writers. As a Christian professor, God has called you to be a witness for Christ, bringing your expertise to bear on the needs of the world, pointing students, administrators and colleagues to Christ, and involving others in the only revolution that will truly transform a person and society, the revolution of the human heart brought on by Jesus Christ. Some of you are already living missional lives as professors and need encouragement to “excel still more” (1 Thess 4:10, NASB). Many aren’t living missionally and need a clear vision of such a life and role models to lead the way. We all need God’s grace and mercy as we try to faithfully follow Christ. Will you join with God and others in this spiritual revolution of Jesus? On the pages to follow, we’ll consider what such a life looks like.

Questions for Personal Reflection or Group Discussion

1. Do you agree or disagree with Gould that the idea of a missional professor is outrageous—startling and unusual—within the secular university? Why or why not?

2. Discuss the central outrageous idea of this book: God wants to use professors as professors to reach others, play a role in transforming the academy, and meet the needs of the world. What aspect of this central idea is the most challenging to you? Which is most exciting to you?

3. Consider Stanley Fish’s quote. Do you agree or disagree? Why or why not?

4. Gould states that being a missional professor requires great courage. Why? He also states that the presence of missional professors in the university is rare. Do you agree or disagree? Can you point to any examples of missional professors that have been a source of encouragement to you?

5. Discuss the fictional letter from the apostle Paul. Do you think this letter is at all close to the truth with respect to Christian professors, the university, and the contemporary church? Why or why not?

6. Gould argues that the main challenge for Christian professors today is to live a “joined up life.” Do you struggle with living such a life as a Christian professor? How so? What has been helpful to you?

7. How is the revolution of Jesus different than other revolutions?

8. Share your story of how you came to Christ. What was the role of Christians in your journey? What was the role of Christian academics in your journey?

1. George Marsden, The Outrageous Idea of Christian Scholarship.

2. Wright, The Mission of God’s People, 24.

3. Fish, Save the World on Your Own Time, 79, 81.

4. Thanks to Nicholas Wolterstorff for helpful comments regarding the first and third reason. See Wolterstorff, Reason within the Bounds of Religion, 107–8.

5. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.

6. Lewis, Surprised by Joy, 212–14.

7. Ibid., 216.