by Thomas Trevethan

“Light” has a long and varied use as a metaphor among those concerned to advance learning, from the pre-Socratic Greeks until the present. All of us like to think of ourselves as children of the light in the age-long struggle against ignorance and error. Perhaps no more influential use of this metaphor exists for the contemporary academy than the 1784 essay by Immanuel Kant, “What is Enlightenment?” Kant summarized and expressed the powerful interests and views of his generation that had been brewing for much of the eighteenth century in the ideological program of the French philosophes. Aufklärung, “Enlightenment” as Kant understood it, was both a spiritual force and a method of truth that rejects the “self-incurred tutelage” to the deadening hand of the authorities of the past. Out with the dictat of tradition: A mature and wise and free person must think apart from the conventional wisdom of religious dogma and the divine right of kings. “Sapere aude,” Kant insisted. “Dare to use your own reason – that is the motto of enlightenment.” The image of this enlightenment, then, is the rising of the sun that floods a tradition-darkened landscape into a glorious landscape, suffused with brightness and happiness.

Most of the distinctive ideas and energies of early Enlightenment figures have not traveled well through the intervening centuries. The hostility of Diderot, Voltaire, and Rousseau to Christianity strikes most of us as over the top. Perhaps that is because the churches have much less social and cultural power than in the early days of the modern era. Christians just are not such a significant adversary. Still, most do not think enlightenment can only be achieved when “the last priest is strangled with the entrails of the last aristocrat,” and we deplore the violence loosed in the fanatical moments of the French Revolution. Nor have more conservative Enlightenment views about the nature and character of God been very persuasive. The fashionable Deism of the more conservative Enlightenment thinkers, including Kant, is a museum curiosity, a world-view that has been reduced to a footnote in intellectual history. The confidence of the great Enlightenment thinkers, their deep-seated conviction that they were riding the wave of history into inevitable progress, has also receded. The bloody history of the twentieth century has made us all quite cynical about claims of “progress.”

Foundations of the Academy

Still three foundational convictions of the Enlightenment era remain largely unchallenged in the contemporary academy, and it is worth taking a few moments to see how this has come to be. As Alvin Plantinga has observed, the contemporary academy is divided into two contending parties. On the one hand the dominant party are “Scientific Naturalists” or “Modernists,” who optimistically hold fast to the individualistic and totalizing rationalism of the Enlightenment. They tenaciously believe that with enough time the rational operations of independent human minds will bring us answers to all of our legitimate questions, even as our method reduces and narrows what “legitimate” means. On the other hand “Post-modernists,” or “Creative Anti-Realists,” are decidedly pessimistic about the totalizing assumptions of the dominant naturalistic party. They assume that inevitably we human beings, located in particular times and places, will be biased in subtle and profound ways. What we can see and learn will be “partial,” incomplete and in thrall to our cultural environment. Our “knowing” inevitably requires us to engage in social constructions of “reality.” Engagement with difference, however, will enable us with great struggle to grasp something of our embeddedness in time and place and in the best “knowers” ignite a spark of creativity. Glimmers of insight can be developed, so that we can improvise our way quite imperfectly toward a measure of liberation for suffering humanity.

Clearly there is wide disagreement in the academic world about two questions: “What is the light we seek?” and “Just how much light is possible for men and women, limited and biased as we inevitably are?” But these differences should not be allowed to obscure the critical ways in which these two parties agree with one another. Consider, then, three inter-related and mutually intensifying points of consensus:

1. “Naturalists” and “creative anti-realists” both confidently practice “rationalistic individualism.” They are unremittingly hostile to tradition and tradition-based inquiry. This is quite an ironic stance in the case of the naturalists, given the now 300-year history of modernity. “Scientific naturalism” is itself a tradition of inquiry with a controlling mythos of self-correcting progress and a passion for marginalizing and punishing “heretics.” “Post-moderns” have rejected the totalizing mythos of modernism, and aspire to “local” and limited forms of knowledge. But they are notably quite self-assured about the moral status of difference and the darling minorities whose liberation they seek. And “postmoderns” can easily identify a “skeptical” philosophical tradition stretching back to the pre-Socratics, with Nietzsche as its great exemplar. If this looks like a tradition and acts like a tradition and smells like a tradition, then perhaps it is one. Indeed, it seems wisest to admit that rationalistic individualism is an illusion. All inquiry is “traditioned,” is a social enterprise with a history to which contemporary practitioners are beholden, not least when their indebtedness goes unacknowledged. The more interesting questions are “Which tradition?” and “What might we learn from the interaction and, yes, the differences between traditions?”

2. “Naturalists” and “creative anti-realists” both assume that religion should be privatized. It is all very well for religion to be “personally meaningful” and it is important that we respect private and personal matters of taste, they say. But this is so just so long as religious folk make no substantive claim for their faith in the public domain. Kant expressed the foundational conviction of scholarly engagement with religion as “Religion within the boundaries of Reason.” For university and college faculty the public realm definitely includes the public locales of the classroom, the lab, the seminar, the committee. When this privatized status and place is violated, we are told, violence ensues. Religion distorts inquiry, fosters conflict, and inflames passions. Worse still, religious folk have a need to control and dominate, to the exclusion of alternative views. A good bit of the history of the modern academy has been a struggle to disentangle learning from the tutelage and then from a necessary connection to the Christian church. Christians seem to demand not just intellectual engagement. Their rhetoric suggests that they must be engaged in a hostile takeover. Indeed, religion is the source of bigotry, hatred, violence, and war throughout our tortured history. Best, say the keepers of current consensus, to keep it securely assigned to the “reservation” of the private sphere.

One wonders, however, where those who hold such views have been living. Without denying that religious people have been found with blood on their hands, we ask, “Whose intellectual and social party is bloodlessly innocent?” Consider, for example, the Twentieth Century wreckage of Marxist revolutionary experimentation, not least under the officially atheist tyranny of Stalinist Russia and Maoist China. And compare these blood baths with the non-violent overthrow of the Soviet Empire or Apartheid South Africa through mass movements that spilled out of Christian churches. Perhaps we may be thankful that at least one priest survived the pogrom of the French Revolution. Observe, too, how privatized religion succumbed to the temptation to complicity with the Nazi regime while resistance was left to more theologically orthodox Christians in the Confessing Churches. For believing and practicing Christians, our faith instructs us that no one and no tradition is without the distorting taint of moral evil, our own not least. To quote a famous sage, “Let him who is without sin cast the first stone.”

Our faith also reminds us that its public profession often brings us into conflict with the consensus of our time, and that humility and love for God and neighbor are powerfully persuasive. Knowledge, like most other significant human quests, requires not only avoidance of obvious evil, but it also depends on finely tuned epistemic practices and the motivating force of epistemic virtues. These virtues and practices are formed in the context of traditions, publicly maintained and historically transmitted. (For an extended and persuasive treatment of virtue epistemology see, Robert C. Roberts and W. Jay Wood, Intellectual Virtues: An Essay in Regulative Epistemology (Oxford U. Press, 2007).

3. “Naturalists” and “post-moderns” are dismissive of “faith-based inquiry and scholarship.” Of course this follows logically and naturally from the two points above. “Naturalists” believe that all religion is “superstition,” and as such distorts our attempts to understand reality. “Post-moderns” suspect that religious folk must engage in totalizing understandings of “reality.” Ten years ago George Marsden called it “The Outrageous Idea…” The passage of a decade has done little to mitigate mainstream academic hostility toward such a program, even when it is advanced with academic excellence, humility and love.

The Position of the Christian Scholar

I am reminded of a comment by Garrison Keillor about growing up in Lake Wobegon, where “half the townsfolk were Lutheran, half were Catholic, and we were neither.” We Christians are neither, as well, and find ourselves often suffering the fate of a cognitive minority. Of course we could simply join one of the warring academic sects for vocational purposes (privatizing our faith) or ignore our own heritage of faith and practice for vocational purposes (jettisoning any connection to the Christian intellectual tradition and adopting a rationalistic individualism). That kind of compartmentalization might relieve the social pressure, but it would also deny the most basic Christian confession, “Jesus is Lord of all things.” What, then, should women and men of Christian faith think and do in such an environment?

The staff of InterVarsity Faculty Ministry know that most of the answer to this question will be given by faculty, by those who are the primary stake-holders in the enterprise of academic vocation. One of our responses to this foundational conviction is to make an effort to bring faculty together to discuss these important and often complicated issues. We see ourselves as catalysts, facilitating and speeding the conversation in which faithful faculty will want to participate. This servant role seems fully appropriate to both the Gospel we are called to proclaim and to the way of our Master. It makes us glad!

In Your Light We See Light

We desire to be agents along with Christian faculty of enlightenment. You can see this, we hope, from the design of our website, where light will continue to be an organizing theme in the coming years, God helping us. But the enlightenment we serve will be very different from the one advanced by Kant. Going forward we will attempt to think together about these differences and about how academic vocations draw us into the grace of God. That, of course, will be a long process mostly led by faculty. But I think we can gesture toward our distinctive outlook by considering the image and the motto of the IVCF Faculty Ministry as you find it on our renewed web site.

Our logo contains the image of a lamp post, a source of light shining in the darkness that allows travelers to find their way. The light Christians have to offer in not blinding and totally illuminating. It is set against the prevailing dimness and darkness with just sufficient illumination to enable us to see in part and find our way forward. We seek to sound a note of humility in our view enlightenment. One day the sun will dawn, but until then we stumble like others and rejoice as we are given light. We are not the light that illumines. There is a corresponding note of grace, too, in this image. We are confident in the luminous goodness of our God.

Which brings us to our motto, “In your light we see light.” As you note, this is not a clever marketing theme, but a quotation from Holy Scripture, from Psalm 36. This whole psalm is worthy of a close reading. For the present, however, we print the psalm below for you to read and offer just three brief comments that will serve to introduce how we understand its bearing on academic callings.

Psalm 36

1 Transgression speaks to the wicked
        deep in his heart;
  there is no fear of God
        before his eyes.
2 For he flatters himself in his own eyes
        that his iniquity cannot be found out and hated.
3 The words of his mouth are trouble and deceit;
        he has ceased to act wisely and do good.
4 He plots trouble while on his bed;
        he sets himself in a way that is not good;
        he does not reject evil.
5 Your steadfast love, O Lord, extends to the heavens,
        your faithfulness to the clouds.
6 Your righteousness is like the mountains of God;
        your judgments are like the great deep;
        man and beast you save, O Lord.
7 How precious is your steadfast love, O God!
        The children of mankind take refuge in the shadow of your wings.
8 They feast on the abundance of your house,
        and you give them drink from the river of your delights.
9 For with you is the fountain of life;
        in your light do we see light.
10 Oh, continue your steadfast love to those who know you,
        and your righteousness to the upright of heart!
11 Let not the foot of arrogance come upon me,
        nor the hand of the wicked drive me away.
12 There the evildoers lie fallen;
        they are thrust down, unable to rise.

First, we are not the first movement to adopt Psalm 36: 9 as a motto. We see ourselves as heir of a stream of intellectual life that runs from the Solomonic Enlightenment through the Church Fathers to Augustine on to Anselm and to contemporary exponents like George Marsden, Alvin Plantinga, and a host of others. This is a tradition, and we count ourselves blessed to be motivated and guided by it. This tradition through all its wide diversity adopts the posture of “faith seeking understanding” (Fides quaerens intellectum). In the light that is our Creator and Savior God we are directed toward and eagerly seek to understand everything that He has made and will redeem.

Second, “light” as a metaphor in Scripture is used to help us think about four great matters: purity, clarity, truth, and joy. Evil lodged in human hearts, our own hearts not least, motivating us to act not so much as atheists but as people who live as if God is of no account, is the great enemy of the light of God and the understanding of creation it inspires (vv. 1-4). The key to overcoming the drag of this heartsickness, Psalm 36 urgently wants us to recognize, is not found in us, but in the majestic reality of our God (vv. 5-9), his unsearchable (heavens, clouds) love, his impregnable (mighty mountains) righteousness, his unfathomable (deep seas) justice, his priceless intimate and personal loving care and covenant fidelity. As Derek Kidner notes, the light that is God is “too great to grasp (v.5) and too good to let slip (v. 7).” In this unsurpassable light are disclosed to us and formed in us the purity, clarity, truth, and joy we need to be seekers of truth, beauty, and goodness. Understanding is through and through a matter of grace. It is a matter of “walking in the light of God.”

Third, of the four ways the metaphor of light is used in Scripture the one most emphasized here in Psalm 36 comes as a surprise to academics, I suspect. Light in v. 9 is mostly joy. Notice the parallel lines of the Hebrew poetry here, “feasting on the abundance of your house,” “drinking from the river of delights,” “the fountain of life.” Light here is about delight. Those who have most thoroughly inhabited this great intellectual tradition are those who take their delight first in their God and his great works of creation and redemption. To walk in the light is to delight in the light and in its Great Source. This light and delight can transform all work, including academic work, into a happy calling.

Nothing reminds me of this truth that joy is found in the light of God more than singing and listening to the great Zulu freedom anthem “Siyahamba.” It was born of the dark days of the Apartheid struggle as the ordinary music of faithful Christian women and men. Outsiders anticipated a blood bath ignited by racist oppression and resentment. But the transformation of South Africa was inspired by the simple, day-by-day Christian faith of ordinary South Africans, walking even under the burden of Apartheid in the light of God. Below are two links to performances in the public realm of Siyahamba by children’s choirs. Take a moment to listen. Take it as an exposition of the IV Faculty Ministry motto. Better still, let it be an exposition of your academic life.

Siyahamba by the Tapiola Choir (from Last.fm)

Sisters and brothers, in our struggle to understand, to flourish and be a redeeming influence in the university, we are walking in the light of God. And a joyful calling it is, indeed.