Recovering Our Christian Mind and Nerve
The second, wider and more extensive dimension in a "passion for truth" recognizes
that our Redeemer God is the creator and sustainer of the world. By his common
grace that "sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous" to sustain life,
we expect to encounter much of great truth and beauty in every culture. "All
truth is God's truth," in that he is its Maker and the one who equips and enables
human creatures to perceive and discover it. So we rejoice in truth wherever
it is found and value the contributions of all to the quest for understanding
and wisdom....
2. An ability to read and study Scripture in a visionary fashion.
What I intend by this phrase can be expressed by taking up Calvin's metaphor
of Scripture as spectacles. Under sin, we are myopic and astigmatic, so that
we cannot correctly perceive the truth of God. Scripture is like a corrective
lens which focuses the knowledge of God for us, says Calvin. [6]
Now extending
the metaphor just a bit, Scripture also focuses all of truth for us not because
it
speaks directly to all concerns, but because it gives us a true stance for
viewing all things. Alas, our habit is to restrict its applicability to churchly
or private
concerns. Much, if not most, preaching we hear suffers at just this point. ...But
if Scripture is the Maker's spectacles, all of life can be focused properly.
Perhaps we need [in
Bible study] steps like formulation ("What truth does this
passage teach and how is it related to other relevant passages?") and integration
("How does that truth fit in with other ideas and issues I am thinking about?").
These steps would lead us beyond a narrowly pietistic use of Holy Scripture
and begin to appropriate its reality-focusing quality as the word of our Creator
and King.
3. A commitment to comprehensive obedience. Because all
reality springs from the Lord's will and plan, we cannot pursue the Christian
mind in our academic work and refuse obedience elsewhere. All of life is interconnected.
My worship life, my sexual life, my willingness to identify with the weak and
needy, my witness to friends and colleagues, are all tied together with my
academic life. Disobedience anywhere leads progressively to distortion everywhere.
4.
When Scripture speaks of the mind of Christ, it associates it with humility.
I can only suggest meditating on a passage like Philippians 2 or Romans 12
to
get the force of this aspect of the mind of Christ. Humility has always been
a difficult virtue. Ancient and modern paganisms regard it as a vice. It has
numerous counterfeits that are destructive. But these factors only make its
recovery more
pressing, not least in our setting [of graduate student ministry].
5. Scripture also associates active
involvement in a Christian community with the mind of Christ. Knowing, like
almost every other characteristically human
function, is socially conditioned. [7]
The give-and-take of informal and thoughtful
discussion is one of life's true pleasures and most certain paths to truth
and holiness. "As iron sharpens iron, so one person sharpens the wits of another" (Prov
27:17, nrsv).
Recovery and cultivation of Christian nerve is no less important.
Soldiers
need courage and a willingness to suffer ([literally,] patience). So also do
we. ...I will comment on just two matters. First, Paul says, "we live in the
world." Obvious!
you say. But is it? Safe enclaves behind the line of battle are more comfortable,
so many seek them out in one way or another. Of course such enclaves are largely
an illusion. But the impulse to withdraw unthinkingly may cause us to ask whether
we have the nerve to stand in the reality of the struggle.
Are we called to work and mission in the university, or is it just a place
to earn a living or to [prepare] to earn a living? My observation of most Christian
faculty on secular campuses suggests exactly this lack of calling. They are fine
Christian women and men in many cases who serve actively in their churches.
But they do not see the university as their God-appointed arena of service
and battle.
[With God's help, we pray that] ministry to graduate students may bear fruit
in raising up men and women with a calling from the Lord Christ to serve the
Kingdom of God in their work lives and in increasing numbers in the university.
Secondly, we must lay hold of God's weapons for the battle. This entails rejecting
mere worldly weapons, for "we do not wage war as the world does." Indeed, our
wisdom, power, and goodness are a recipe for defeat and disaster. Yet this
seems to be so little understood. The temptation is ever-present to meet the
challenge
of the world with the world's own weapons - with human entertainment, with
massive displays of organization. Such weapons fail to make any dent in the
stronghold
of evil. But worse, having adopted the standards of the world, a secularized
church has ceased to fight and is herself over-shadowed by the powers of darkness.
Woe be unto us...if all we can lay hold of are worldly weapons.
So the challenge to us on the level of Christian nerve comes in whether we
are prepared to trust in God-empowered weapons and, finally, in the God who
empowers. It would be fruitful for all of us to take the fuller account of
the weapons
of the Christian soldier in Ephesians 6 and to think on them deeply. Consider
how each answers to the need of the university and how different it is to embrace
and advocate them in open public view. We spoke of truth [Eph 6:14] in discussing
the Christian mind [above], so now consider righteousness [Eph 6:14]: What
would Amos, the Old Testament prophet of righteousness par excellence, have
to say
to our universities, to our boards of regents, to our administrators, to our
department chairs? What might he say to our relativism, amorality, greed, sensuality
and sexual perversion, elitism, racism, to our client status that makes us
hopelessly beholden to the powers of business and government? What would a
university look
like where justice rolled down like a river [Amos 5:24]? Then how might we,
powerless as we are to be agents of this sort of righteousness, act to be agents
of change
in the university world?
Mention must also be made of the "gospel of peace" as
a weapon of God [Eph 6:15]. All of us ought to ponder why it is that so relatively
few graduate
students
are converted to Christ. True, they are a harder, more sophisticated audience,
more settled in their convictions than undergraduates. So we need to sharpen
our weapons with a more thoughtful apologetic and a more academically relevant
exposition of the Christian mind. But when all is said and done, my fear is
that graduate students are not being converted because they are simply not
hearing
the gospel from us. Here is a topic worthy of investigation. How do we proclaim
the gospel to graduate students, and how do we train graduate students to communicate
to their peers?
Further, this is the gospel of peace, of a reconciliation with
our Maker that reconciles us to one another. Absence of the horizontal dimension
sheds doubts on the vertical. So what have we to say to issues of social class
and race within our universities? What action can we take? [T]hese are the
questions, I believe, we must begin to ask if we are to wield the Lord's weapons
in the
power of the Spirit.
I conclude by noting that prayer is the last weapon mentioned,
not because it is least but because it is the means by which we cast ourselves
on the grace
and power of the Lord to activate all the other weapons. Says Paul to the Ephesians
[6:18]: "And pray in the Spirit on all occasions with all kinds of prayers
an requests. With this [the battle and our weapons] in mind, be on the alert
and
always keep on praying for all the saints." So I must ask how we are doing,
as fellowships of graduate students, faculty, and Interffarsity staff, in the
life
of persistent, alert, comprehensive, Spirit-led prayer? May God give us the
grace so to pray for the recovery of the Christian mind and Christian nerve
in our
universities.
Notes
1. Paul Griffiths, "Why We Need Interreligious Polemics," First Things 44
(June/July
1994): 31.
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2. See George Marsden, Fundamentalism and American Culture: The Shaping
of Twentieth-Century Evangelicalism, 1870-1925 (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1980); and perhaps Richard Hofstadter's classic, Anti-Intellectualism
in American
Life (New York: 1962). —Ed.
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3. See, for starters, Mark A. Noll, The Scandal of
the Evangelical Mind (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1994); Mark Noll, Alister
McGrath, Richard Mouw, and Darrell
Bock, "What Scandal? A Forum on the Evangelical Mind," Christianity Today 39,
9 (Aug 14, 1995): 21-27; and George M. Marsden, The Outrageous Idea of Christian
Scholarship (New York: Oxford, 1997). —Ed.
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4. "The hallmark of an authentic evangelicalism
is not the uncritical repetition of old traditions but the willingness to submit
every tradition, however ancient,
to fresh biblical scrutiny and, if necessary, reform" (John Stott, quoted by
Roy McCloughry, in "Basic Stott," Christianity Today 40, 1 (Jan 8, 1996):
28.
—Ed.
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5. James Packer, "Theology and Bible Reading," in The Act of Bible Reading,
ed. Elmer Dyck (Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 1996), 85.
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6. "Just as old
or bleary-eyed men and those with weak vision, if you thrust before them a
most beautiful volume, even if they recognize it to be some sort
of writing,
yet can scarcely construe two words, but with the aid of spectacles will begin
to read distinctly; so Scripture, gathering up the otherwise confused knowledge
of God in our minds, having dispersed our dullness, clearly shows us the true
God. This, therefore, is a special gift, where God, to instruct his church,
not merely uses mute teachers [of nature and conscience] but also opens his
own most
hallowed lips" (John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, 1.6.1;
cf.
also 1.14.1). —Ed.
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7. For a particularly helpful discussion of this idea from
a Christian viewpoint, see Mark R. Schwehn, Exiles from Eden: Religion and
the
Academic Vocation in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993),
esp.
chaps. 2 and 3, "Communities of Learning" and "Spirited Inquiry." —Ed.
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