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Students and Faculty at 2008 Faculty Ministry Symposium

The final chapter in George Marsden’s The Outrageous Idea of Academic Communities Christian Scholarship [Oops! - Ed.] proposes that even the most impressive work of individual Christian scholars is not enough; Christian scholarship needs “a strong institutional base.”

Scholars, like everyone else, depend on communities. If like-minded academics do not form their own sub-communities, then they will be dependent entirely on the communities that already exist. These, of course, have little place for inquiry concerning faith and learning. If such inquiry is to grow as a recognized part of contemporary academia, it must depend on institutions and networks which can sustain that enterprise. (101)

Before getting to Marsden’s ideas, let me throw out a few discussion question: Have you experienced or witnessed successful communities of Christian scholars? What have been the outcomes? On the hand, have you seen failed or stunted attempts to build communities among Christian scholars? What went wrong?

Recognizing that, for a variety of reasons, evangelical Christians have failed to create research universities that can compete with the best secular universities, and that, to put it mildly, “the obstacles are formidable” to creating such a university, Marsden suggests some other ideas for institutional support. Some of these are already established, while others are just beginning. Marsden’s ideas are after the jump.

Read the rest of this entry »

Are there positive contributions to be offered by a theological context?

George Marsden responds with a hearty yes.  Why?  Because he believes (or should I say thinks, understands, or perceives):

Scholars do not operate in a vacuum, but rather within the frameworks of their communities, traditions, commitments, and beliefs.  Their scholarship, even when specialized, develops within a larger picture of reality.  So we must ask:  What is in that larger picture?  Is there a place for God?  If so does God’s presence make any difference to the rest of the picture? … (p.83).

Marsden warns the Christian scholar not “to reduce our subjects to just their theological dimensions.  (By theology here I do not mean primarily the discipline of theology, but rather any serious thought about God and God’s revelation according to a particular religious tradition)” (p.83).  According to Marsden, when Christians take “theological principles” as “just one point of reference,”

[they] can do the bulk of their academic work according to the standards and perspectives of their discipline, just as long as they are willing to keep in the mind the context of theological concerns and be open to reflecting on their implications for larger questions (p.83).

Any thoughts/reactions?

Marsden devotes the rest of the chapter to developing how “some of the most common Christian points of doctrine” speak into the assumptions and conclusions of academic disciplines:

1. Creation
2. The Incarnation
3. The Holy Spirit and the Spiritual Dimensions of Reality
4. The Human Condition

Any thoughts on how these doctrines speak into the academic world?  Any other Christian doctrines which you would desire to highlight?

Stay tuned for more on how Marsden fleshes out the application of these doctrines. …

In chapter 4 of The Outrageous Idea of Christian Scholarship, George Marsden asks, “What difference could ‘Christian scholarship’ possibly make?” He quotes a critical reviewer who wants to know whether Notre Dame teaches “Roman Catholic chemistry” or if Calvin offers “Presbyterian anthropology”. Marsden answers with two suggestions: the analogy of a gestalt image, and the setting of scholarly agendas.

Quick question: Has your scholarly agenda been shaped by your faith in Christ? Have you been drawn to particular areas of research because of your Christian commitment?

Marsden’s concrete example of the difference made by perspective is a good one, I think. He describes the way that scholarly views of the Battle of Little Big Horn have changed over time.

As long as most Americans looked at the relationships of whites to Indians only through the lens of nationalism, scholars seldom saw the Indian wars from Native American perspectives. Once moral sensitivities to the oppression of minorities became widespread, a new generation of scholars saw the same information through a new set of glasses. The evidence had not changed, but now the advance of the white settlements of America was more often understood as an “invasion.” (62-63)

As far as scholarly agendas go, Marsden cites Robert Wuthnow, who writes about “living the question”:

I have borrowed the much-used phrase “living the question” because it seems to me that Christianity does not so much supply the learned person with answers as it does raise questions. It has been said of Marxists that even apostates spend their lives struggling with the questions Marx addressed. The same can probably be said of Christianity. It leaves people with a set of questions they cannot escape, especially when these questions face them from their earliest years. (65)

Marsden spends a bit more time interacting with Wuthnow’s ideas about Christian scholarship, and grants Wuthnow’s point that “good Christian scholarship may be virtually indistinguishable from scholarship done by anyone else.” Marsden corrects an idea that “distinctively” Christian scholarship means scholarship that is “uniquely” Christian, and that there exists the Christian perspective on any academic discipline. Nonetheless, Marsden notes, it’s difficult to review the titles of Wuthnow’s books and avoid the conclusion that his Christian faith has indeed shaped his scholarship in distinctive ways.

The rest of the chapter is devoted to four specific ways in which a Christian foundation can make a clear difference in scholarship.

1. Challenging what is taken for granted: here, he provides the example of Harry Stout’s American Puritan studies, which takes the Great Awakening seriously as a “spiritual phenomenon that could not be wholly reduced to naturalistic categories,” which had become the standard academic perspective on the Puritans.

2. Challenging naturalistic reductionism: Marsden contrasts Carl Sagan’s reductionistic dictum, “The [physical] Cosmos is all that is or ever was or ever will be” with John Henry Newman’s “Christian idea of the university,” which sees academic disciplines as parts of the same interconnected truth. J. Joseph Porter has a post today at the fish tank about this very idea of Christians challenging “secular reductionism.”

3. Challenging the transcendent self: Christian scholars, with our foundation in the view that “the heart of human sinfulness is the illusion that we can be our own gods,” are distinctively able to critique academia’s celebration of the human self as an absolute good.

4. Moral judgments: “Moral judgments are not the whole of Christian influence on scholarship,” Marsden writes, but Christians have a foundation on which to base moral judgments, even if that base is often ambiguous, contradicts the judgment of fellow Christians, or seems hypocritical.

Yet all these ambiguities do not add up to an argument that Christian commitments either do not or should not make a difference in the moral agendas that so shape our scholarship. What the ambiguities suggest is that Christian commitments frequently do not make the difference that they can and should. Often part of the problem is the very kind of thing that we have been talking about, that Christians have often been too slow to challenge the conventional wisdom of their age. (81, emphasis added)

My questions for discussion (feel free to ignore them and add your own):

Do you agree with Marsden that Christian scholarship can make a difference in these four areas? Have you seen examples, in addition to Marsden’s, of Christian scholars working in these areas?

What about Robert Wuthnow’s conviction that “good Christian scholarship may be virtually indistinguishable from scholarship done by anyone else”? If this is the case, can Christians make their Christian commitment explicit without corrupting their scholarship? Should they even try?

The Outrageous Idea of Christian Scholarship, by George Marsden

In June, we hosted our first ESN Book Club, an experiment in online book discussion and community based around John Stott’s classic, Your Mind Matters. In October, we’re going to host our 2nd ESN Book Club, this time discussing another classic, George Marsden’s The Outrageous Idea of Christian Scholarship.

In 1996, George Marsden published The Soul of the American University: From Protestant Establishment to Established Nonbelief, which traces the history of American universities from their origins as explicitly Christian institutions to their current secular condition. Marsden ended Soul with a brief “Concluding Unscientific Postscript” to put forth his concern that universities had “overcorrected” in their path toward secularism, and that religious perspectives ought to be given a greater place in the university culture. This postscript generated enough critics, questions, and conversations that Marsden felt the need to write an entire (though short) book about “the outrageous idea of Christian scholarship.” In less than 140 pages, Marsden defends the place of Christian scholarship in the secular academy and proposes a way forward for communities of Christian academics. As you might imagine, The Outrageous Idea is one of the foundational texts for the Emerging Scholars Network.

We’ll be starting to read the book together in October. I hope that you’ll join us. The book is available from Amazon in both new and used condition, and you can also find used copies on AbeBooks.com. The first 17 pages are available for your preview at Google Books. It’s likely that a Christian faculty member or InterVarsity staff on your campus has a copy, too, that they might let you borrow. And, if you’d like to host a face-to-face book club coinciding with our online discussion, a discussion guide for the book can be downloaded from the main ESN website.