Recovering Our Christian Mind and Nerve
On the other hand..., it is very easy for graduate students to be proud people.
Some of this comes from the wider university environment. Already winners in
the game of academic competition, now they are doing advanced work at the most
prestigious and progressive institutions. Associating daily with the best and
the brightest can easily go to your head. Add to this the spiritual reality
that knowledge, necessary and foundational as it is, puffs up (1 Cor 8:1). Knowledge
slips into proud achievement, and graduate students are all knowledgeable folk.
So pride stalks the existence of even Christian graduate students and shows
itself
in an arrogant superiority to undergrads, in an independent and individualistic
spirit, and in the avoidance of foundational spiritual matters. Yet Christian
graduate students as a group do not strike me as having any...obvious advantage
over other groups in the life of prayer, or Scripture study, or fruitful community
involvement, or witness, or obedience and vision related to the lordship of
Christ.
Here, then, are places where the battle is joined on a personal level.
We must
encourage the timid and help the weak without producing pride. And we must
[simultaneously] confront pride without devastating the weak. Proper and appropriate
balance is
no easy matter....
On the professional level, two observations seem crucial. First, the academic
department or school is the central or basic social unit for graduate-student
life and ministry. The first person a new graduate student is apt to meet is
not a roommate (as in undergraduate years), but a faculty member from her department
- or more likely, the department secretary. And a graduate student's social
circle
will draw very heavily, if not exclusively, on the academic setting where his
work is done. So the department must be the central location for basic discipleship
(both personal and corporate) and witness. This social reality, however, needs
to be complemented by interaction and Christian fellowship with people from
outside our academic specialties, lest we fall prey to the university's...
fragmentation
and loss of over-arching vision.
Secondly, we should note that the characteristic activities
of graduate students are study, research and writing, teaching, and some administration.
Each of
these spheres of activity presents a unique challenge and opportunity to bring
every
thought captive and make it obedient to Christ. For example, what is our distinctive
responsibility and opportunity as Christian teachers? Is this an opportunity
for witness, and if so, how should I proceed in a way that is fair to my students
and supervisors? Or again, what demands do the justice and peace of the gospel
make on my involvement in administration? ...How ...do we propose to educate
ourselves [on such problems]? Beyond foundational spiritual realities, I am
convinced that these four characteristic spheres of action should be the focus
of our formation
of Christian graduate students.
If these comments at least begin to describe
our place in the great battle, what will be required of us? Paul's statement
in 2 Corinthians 10 emphasizes two
[requirements]: making every thought obedient to Christ and wielding divinely
powerful and divinely
appointed weapons. For this to happen we must see among us a cultivation and
recovery of the Christian mind, and a corresponding cultivation and recovery
of Christian nerve. [T]hese statements require some considerable unpacking.
First, consider the cultivation
and recovery of the Christian mind. Paul speaks of making every thought captive
to Christ. All of our thinking (which is the wellspring of activity) must be
submitted to Christ's lordship, with no areas or concerns exempt. But it is
clear that this Christ-honoring [ideal] is far from reality for us in the university.
Many have lamented exactly the loss of a Christian mind, a Christ-honoring
view
of all of life. [3]
Almost our whole formal education [system] has proceeded with
the assumption at best of the irrelevance of Christ to learning. At worst,
the secular mind sneers at this idea as mindless superstition. Our vision,
however,
must be of the recovery of the Christian mind to the extent that in every academic
discipline there exist a body of explicitly Christian thought of such high
quality and relevance that it demands to be considered even by unbelieving
students and
faculty.
What this body of Christian thought will look like in a given discipline
is largely beyond my competence to suggest. That it must exist, however, seems
to be demanded
by the gracious realities of creation and redemption. I would like to venture
some [general] observations on how the Christian mind can be recovered. Consider
these five elements which I believe would cultivate and renew the mind of the
Maker in us.
1. A passion for truth. We live in a day when the norm in academic
work seems to be a studied and ironic indifference to ultimate questions. Listen
to how one faculty member from a state university characterizes the situation:
[W]e must be "truth-people." Our rejection of relativism in the name of our
Maker and Lord must cause us to see the eternal significance of what happens
in the lab or the library and lead us to the worship of the Lord, not just
in the church,
but in the midst of our learning and research.
Such a passion for truth involves at least two dimensions. The first and foundational,
more focused, and intensive dimension involves a commitment on our part to
a robust practice of Biblical authority. It is a basic Biblical and Christian
conviction
that God has spoken, using his created gift of human language to tell us the
truth about himself, ourselves, and his will for our lives. Our duty and wisdom,
indeed our joy and bless[ing], arise from adopting a posture of active and
teachable listening to what he has said. And this posture leads us to a lifetime
of learning
and laboring to grasp the message of Scripture, to submit and adjust our thinking
to what God has told us, [4]
to apply its wisdom to the whole range of our lives
as redeemed creatures living in God's creation, and to share its truth with
our neighbors.
The conception that God actually tells us things...is usually
dismissed
out of hand in our times. Even among professing Christians it is often caricatured
and decried in favor of a more "personal" and "love-centered" version of the
faith. Some argue that Biblical authority remains a reality even when revealed
truth has been dismissed or relegated to a secondary, peripheral place. James
Packer artfully analyzes the failure of these proposals:
...To represent biblical
authority in this way, as being functional without being informational, is
to turn God into a warm fuzzy. ...This burns the promise of a personal relationship
with Him to ashes. Denial of the reality of revealed truth thus destroys that
knowledge of God to which the Bible invites us. Paul found the Athenians worshipping
an unknown God. The knowledge of God offered by much twentieth-century theology
is in principle a return to Paul's Athens. We need a theology that receives
all
Bible teaching as God-given information to guide our steps through the dark
mazes of confusion, subjectivist, relativist, and sometimes syncretist, which
are created
for us by theologies that do otherwise. [5]
So, like the Lord Jesus we must allow
[the statement] "it stands written" to
direct us in controversy, in temptation, in determining our life's direction
and vocation. Like our Lord we must say, first and most frequently to ourselves, "You
are in error because you do not know the Scriptures or the power of God" (Matt
22:29), for "the Scripture cannot be broken" (John 10:35).
|
