Last week I began to introduce myself and my understanding of the Christian scholar’s vocation by briefly outlining the controversy which marked my time as a student at Westminster Theological Seminary. (You can read last week’s post here.) This week I would like to share what I think were some of things I learned about the challenge of Christian scholarship from my time at Westminster. I should make it clear that my interest is not specifically in the challenge of doing serious scholarship within a confessional institution like a Westminster or a Wheaton. Nor is my interest (in this post, at least) in the peculiar challenge of doing serious, faithful Biblical scholarship. While confessional institutions and the field(s) of Biblical studies both present unique challenges for Christian scholars who venture into them, my purpose here is to share some of what I have learned from my experience at Westminster about being a Christian scholar in general:
1. Now we see through a glass, darkly. Christian scholars in any field must be prepared for their studies to transform not only their conceptions of the world, but of God. When I arrived at Westminster I thought I more or less already had all the answers and that I was there to learn how to better articulate and defend what I already “knew.â€Â I thought Christian scholarship was simply a matter of bringing my theological assumptions to bear upon the study of a particular field. I did not expect to have those assumptions challenged by my studies, much less for me to undergo the theological equivalent of what Thomas S. Kuhn calls a paradigm shift. Nevertheless, shortly after my arrival at Westminster I began encountering information and evidence for which my working theological theory simply could not account—I encountered “anomalous data,†to again put it in a Kuhnian idiom. [Read more…] about Why You Must Be Dying to be a Christian Scholar (2/2)