Emily G. Wenneborg

This is Part 5 in a five-part essay series.

This essay series has considered what it means to live with faithful Christian presence in the midst of deep pluralism. I pointed out that faithful presence does not lend itself to simplistic solutions, but rather involves a “precarious dance”[1] of learning to hold in tension seemingly contradictory postures. I then examined three such tensions: affirmation and antithesis, engagement and distinctness, and humility and hope.

In this final essay, we turn our attention to the context of higher education. Christian graduate students and faculty face the challenges of deep pluralism in a particularly acute way, as they seek to undertake scholarship from a faithful Christian position in the midst of a system that multiplies perspectives and viewpoints. Even for those who receive their training or go on to teach and conduct research at faith-based institutions, the project of scholarship still draws them into conversation with the ‘multiversity’ through involvement in an academic discipline, a professional society, peer review, and so on. So all Christian scholars, regardless of what institution they call home, must find a way to navigate the pluralistic university with both presence and faithfulness.

The dance steps of faithful presence will necessarily vary, as different career stages, social positionings, and personal spiritual journeys call forth different emphases and actions. For this reason, what follows is not a list of prescriptions but rather a handful of word pictures, examples of my own attempts at living in the tensions.

Of the three tensions, I have found affirmation and antithesis to be most obviously relevant to my research and writing. In fact, I was able to make use of this tension the first time I presented the idea of affirmation and antithesis at a major conference in my field. At that conference, each paper presentation is followed by a formal response from another scholar in the field. At first I felt unsure about how to reply to my paper’s response, but I realized I could affirm what the response had added to my paper, while offering an alternative interpretation where the response had not quite gotten my original point. In this instance, living in this tension was not too different from sound advice that anyone might give to an early career scholar; the concept of affirmation and antithesis merely helped me articulate that advice to myself.

The social and political context of the modern university also calls for Christian academics to assume a posture of affirmation and antithesis. In this regard, Rebecca McLaughlin’s The Secular Creed is particularly helpful. Although McLaughlin does not focus on higher education specifically, she examines claims and slogans, such as “Black Lives Matter” and “Love is Love,” that undergird many initiatives and causes championed by secular universities. Urging us neither to hammer the secular creed’s signs into our yards nor to hammer them flat, McLaughlin sets out to “disentangle ideas Christians can and must affirm from ideas Christians cannot and must not embrace.”[2] For Christian faculty and graduate students wondering how to respond to diversity and inclusion training, expectations regarding preferred pronouns, controversies regarding speaker events, and more, this little book offers a wonderful first step toward considering how to situate all these matters within faithful Christianity.

I most often find myself living out the tension between engagement and distinctness across different moments of time. From week to week and month to month, days spent directly engaging with my academic colleagues in classes and at conferences alternate with days spent stepping away from my scholarly work to join my Christian brothers and sisters in worship, service, and fellowship. Within each workday, I give a portion of my time to Bible reading and private prayer, and another portion to academic reading and writing. Especially for graduate students and pre-tenure faculty, time can often feel like an all-too-scarce commodity. But that is all the more reason to attend carefully to the choices we make with our time and to intentionally foster rhythms that will cultivate in us the postures of both engagement and distinctness. If all our time is spent either in separate Christian activities (alone or with others) or in engaging our academic field, something is amiss. While I have no desire to prescribe exactly how much of a day, week, or year to devote to each, I do believe that every Christian academic should prioritize weekly, gathered worship with the whole body of Christ (including children, grandparents, stay-at-home moms, and many other non-academics).

Finally, the tension between humility and hope informs all my scholarly activities: in teaching, in research and writing, in networking, I know that God alone can redeem and bring fruit from my feeble and fallen efforts to serve Him. More surprisingly, this tension also directly relates to the content of my scholarship. As a scholar in the interdisciplinary humanities and humanistic social sciences, I am constantly confronted with competing pictures of what it means to be human. Seventeenth-century Christian apologist Blaise Pascal called attention to the intertwined grandeur and wretchedness of human beings. Some of my colleagues tend to emphasize the heights of human capabilities, while others emphasize the depths of human cruelty and oppression. I often find myself pushing back at both sides: as Pascal wrote, “If he exalts himself, I humble him. If he humbles himself, I exalt him. And will go on contradicting him until he comes to understand that he is a monstrous being who passes all comprehension.”[3] My desire is to exhibit in myself a unity of humility and hope that piques my colleagues’ curiosity and draws them to want to know what enables me to live in this tension.

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[1] James K. A. Smith, Awaiting the King: Reforming Public Theology (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker, 2017), xiii.

[2] Rebecca McLaughlin, The Secular Creed: Engaging Five Contemporary Claims (Austin, TX: The Gospel Coalition, 2021), 2.

[3] James M. Houston (ed.), From the Works of Blaise Pascal: Mind on Fire: A Faith for the Skeptical and Indifferent (Minneapolis, MN: 1997), 88-89.

This is Part 4 in a five-part essay series. A version of this essay was originally published online and in print as part of “Faithful Presence in the Midst of Pluralism: Three Tensions” at Ad Fontes.

In the previous essays we have considered two tensions of living with faithful Christian presence: affirmation and antithesis and engagement and distinctness. In fact, both of these tensions rest on an even more basic tension: humility and hope. Matthew Kaemingk describes Dutch Reformed theologian and statesman Abraham Kuyper’s approach to life in the midst of pluralism as “humble yet hopeful,”^[1] and this description must characterize all Christians who seek to live in the world with faithful presence. We are humble because we recognize that living together in the midst of deep differences is really, really hard, and that we will often fail to do so well. Indeed, we must remain humble regarding both our own ability to live out the tensions of faithful presence, and the outcome of our efforts to do so, which ultimately rests on factors outside our control. Yet we remain hopeful about the possibility of faithful living in the context of deep pluralism, even if it ends up being messier and on a smaller scale than we might desire.

Just as with the previous two tensions, humility and hope are each subject to distortions when they cease to be held together. The distortion of hope is pride, as we forget the depth of the challenges of pluralistic living and assume that we are capable of achieving our goals easily and straightforwardly. On the other hand, when the challenges loom so large that they overshadow any possibility of hope, we abandon humility for despair.

The tension between humility and hope[2]

Kaemingk finds both humility and hope expressed in Dutch Reformed theologian Klass Schilder’s reflections on the suffering and crucifixion of Christ. When the soldiers come to arrest Jesus in the garden of Gethsemane, his disciple Peter, seeking to defend his teacher, draws a sword and cuts off the ear of a slave. Far from engaging in self-defense or even endorsing it, Jesus instead rebukes Peter and heals the slave. Following Schilder, Kaemingk sees this not as a moment of weakness but as a window into the nature of Christ’s kingly power: “Christ’s sovereign healing and power will not always take the cosmic and revolutionary scale the world so often expects or demands. The royal power of Christ’s sovereign [sic] is often limited, humble, partial, and seemingly small.”^[3] From this moment of small, humble healing, Kaemingk turns to the crucifixion itself, and specifically to Jesus’ nakedness on the cross. He explains that, though respectable Christians may be scandalized by the exposure and vulnerability of one whom they revere as savior and king, his disrobing is in fact their own doing. “For in his disrobing we are fully exposed. We see ourselves for who we truly are — violent, fearful, and selfish. Beholding the naked king, we see our true nature in all its nakedness. Our pretentions of love, tolerance, and peace are laid bare.”^[4] Yet this is not the end of the matter. “While Schilder’s view of human nature is dark indeed, he does not leave his readers naked and shivering in a state of total despair. In fact, it is here at the lowest point of the meditation that Schilder points to a deep hope. This hope is grounded — not in the goodness of humanity — but in the goodness of God.”^[5]

This brings us to a crucial point. For Christians, the tension between humility and hope — much like the other two tensions — is resolved with reference to the divine. We are humble because of how weak and sinful humans are, yet we can be hopeful because God’s power is not limited by human weakness or sinfulness. In particular, the hope that justifies both patient engagement and active waiting is eschatological, tied to the promised return of Christ to rule as king. According to James K. A. Smith, “To worship Christ the King is to be a people with a kingdom-oriented stance, which will sometimes look aloof and will at other times pitch us into the fray. The posture of heavenly citizenship is a posture of uplift, tethered by hope to a coming King.”^[6] This eschatological vision counteracts tendencies toward both pride and despair, taking a posture that is “countercultural to every political pretension that assumes either a Whiggish confidence in human ingenuity and progress or alarmist counsels of despair.”^[7] It is, then, this uniquely Christian hope that equips us to live well with those who reject that very hope.

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[1] Matthew Kaemingk, Christian Hospitality and Muslim Immigration in an Age of Fear (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2018), 155.

[2] Figure courtesy of Luke Herche. Used by permission.

[3] Kaemingk, Christian Hospitality and Muslim Immigration in an Age of Fear, 175.

[4] Kaemingk, Christian Hospitality and Muslim Immigration in an Age of Fear, 178.

[5] Kaemingk, Christian Hospitality and Muslim Immigration in an Age of Fear, 178.

[6] James K. A. Smith, Awaiting the King: Reforming Public Theology (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker, 2017), xiv.

[7] Smith, Awaiting the Kingdom, 11.

This is Part 3 in a five-part essay series. A version of this essay was originally published online and in print as part of “Faithful Presence in the Midst of Pluralism: Three Tensions” at Ad Fontes.

In the previous essay, we considered the tension between affirmation and antithesis. Faithful presence further involves living in the tension between engaging the world and remaining distinct from it. In fact, these two tensions depend upon one another: it may be easier to avoid the distortions of engagement and distinctness by keeping in mind the goal of balancing affirmation and antithesis (rather than sliding into either synthesis or negation); at the same time, successfully holding affirmation and antithesis together requires Christians both to engage, and to do so from the fullness of our distinctness as Christians.

Just as we differentiated affirmation and antithesis from synthesis or negation, engagement and distinctness must be distinguished from their distortions. The distortion of engagement, which often masquerades as it but is in fact a perverted form of it, is conformity. This can mean the conformity of Christians to the world, as happens when Christians try to be relevant to the world, but find ourselves gradually becoming more like the world. Or it can mean insisting that the world conform to (a particular interpretation of) Christian principles, so that there is no longer a distinct world to engage. On the other hand, the distortion of distinctness is withdrawal, such as that manifested by various forms of Christian separatism. In the same way as affirmation becomes synthesis when it ceases to be united with antithesis, and antithesis becomes negation when it ceases to be united with affirmation, so too engagement becomes conformity when the engagement no longer comes from a place of distinctness, and distinctness becomes withdrawal when it is no longer oriented toward engagement.

The tension between engagement and distinctness[1]

Christian ethicist Luke Bretherton points out that any given instance of similarity between the church and the world may be a failure to maintain the church’s distinctiveness, but need not necessarily be so: “the church can often be like the world in good and generative ways. It can also be unlike the world in negative and degenerative ways.”^[2] Bretherton calls for a “case by case evaluation” rather than a total dismissal of anything that looks too similar to the world, recognizing that “at the level of social practice, we should expect to see both convergence and divergence of practice; that is, the social practices of Christians will not, of themselves, always be distinctive from the practices of non-Christians.”^[3]

This combination of “both convergence and divergence” results in a tension: “The church is both fashioned out of the world, and hence is like the world, and yet it is fashioned in response to the Word of God, and therefore, is unlike the world.”^[4] In consequence, Bretherton encourages us to pursue specificity (i.e., living in specifically Christian ways) rather than distinctness merely for the sake of being different from our non-Christian neighbors.^[5] And he reminds us that Christians are pilgrims, in but not of the world, and so will experience “both distance and belonging,” rather than either withdrawal or assimilation.^[6]

Like Bretherton, James K. A. Smith recognizes both the difficulty of dwelling in this tension and the importance of doing so well. Referring to the challenges of engaging in Christian formation in the midst of powerful influences from the surrounding culture, he postulates, “it may be the case … that a Christian community that seeks to be a cultural force precisely by being a living example of a new humanity will have to consider abstaining from participation in some cultural practices that others consider normal.”^[7] Such abstention might sound like separatism. But the essential difference, Smith explains, is not in the actions of abstention and separation themselves, but rather in the purpose to which they point:

[T]he abstention would not be primarily negative or protective: it would be undertaken in order to engage in cultural labor otherwise, to unfold cultural institutions that are ordered by love and aimed at the kingdom, cultural practices that are foretastes of the new creation and that, as such, would themselves function as winsome witness to God’s redemptive love.^[8]

Thus, Smith does see a role for cultural engagement, and an important one at that. Even so, he insists that such engagement must be distinctively Christian, and this can only happen by means of selectively abstaining from certain practices and norms of the surrounding culture. Yet such abstention does not serve the end of resistance merely for the sake of being different, but rather creates space for forming alternative, more genuinely Christian practices and habits.

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[1] Figure courtesy of Luke Herche. Used by permission.

[2] Luke Bretherton, Hospitality as Holiness: Christian Witness Amid Moral Diversity (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2006), 106.

[3] Bretherton, Hospitality as Holiness, 107; similarly, Christian teacher educator David I. Smith points out that the story within which Christian educators live matters more than the distinctiveness of the practices in which they engage. See Smith, On Christian Teaching: Practicing Faith in the Classroom (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2018), 129–130.

[4] Bretherton, Hospitality as Holiness, 108.

[5] Bretherton, Hospitality as Holiness, 109–110.

[6] Bretherton, Hospitality as Holiness, 111–112.

[7] James K. A. Smith, Desiring the Kingdom: Worship, Worldview, and Cultural Formation (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker, 2009), 209, emphasis original.

[8] Smith, Desiring the Kingdom, 210, emphasis added.

This is Part 2 in a five-part essay series. A version of this essay was originally published online and in print as part of “Faithful Presence in the Midst of Pluralism: Three Tensions” at Ad Fontes.

The call to faithful presence in the midst of deep pluralism, in and beyond higher education, requires us to learn to learn to live with certain unresolvable tensions. The first of these tensions is affirmation and antithesis.^[1]

Affirmation involves explicitly recognizing and celebrating whatever is good, true, and beautiful in human cultural activity, regardless of its religious, spiritual, or ideological orientation. For example, a Christian might read a Zen Buddhist haiku as a window into “God’s marvelous creation and the glories inherent in each moment,”^[2] while recognizing that Zen Buddhism and Christianity are not, ultimately, fully compatible with one another.^[3] To acknowledge this final opposition is to engage in antithesis. Yet antithesis goes beyond simply analyzing the opposition between incompatible worldviews: more importantly, antithesis highlights the alternative interpretation that Christianity offers, as when we resituate a Zen haiku in the context of the glorious work of the Creator God.

The practice of affirmation rests on the theological concepts of creation and “common grace,” meaning the many good gifts of God that are shared by Christians and non-Christians alike.^[4] Common grace includes natural goods, such as rain and sun; relational goods, such as children and friends; and especially cultural goods, such as science, the arts, government, and education. The concept of common grace opens Christians up to affirm the goodness of many aspects of cultural activity, including the efforts of non-Christians. Furthermore, it leads us to see all aspects of human creativity as enabled by God the Creator.

Yet affirmation leads directly and necessarily to antithesis. In almost the same breath as Christians affirm that the world and human culture are good, we also acknowledge that the world is fallen and humans are sinful. The Reformed tradition in particular emphasizes the doctrine of “total depravity,” which means not that everything humans do is evil, but rather that the taint of sin touches every aspect of human existence. As James Davison Hunter says, “Antithesis is rooted in a recognition of the totality of the fall.”^[5] Although it is individuals, not cultures or ideas, who are depraved, the effects of that depravity can be felt in all that humans do. For this reason, many aspects of cultural and intellectual activity — including certain artistic expressions, philosophical assumptions, and political arrangements — are fundamentally at odds with Christianity. So we cannot affirm everything about human culture, but will seek to reveal the antithesis between Christianity and other competing systems of belief, value, and practice.

Yet Hunter emphasizes that “antithesis is not simply negational. Subversion is not nihilistic but creative and constructive.”^[6] Therefore, antithesis involves not only showing the conflict between Christian and non-Christian worldviews but also developing the Christian worldview as an appealing alternative to other patterns of thought and behavior. In this way, antithesis leads back to affirmation, recognizing much that is praiseworthy in non-Christians’ pursuit of art, scholarship, justice, and other areas of human culture. Similarly, affirmation always leads directly to antithesis: it does not merely recognize the goodness in non-Christians’ cultural activities, but also resituates that goodness in the context of God’s gracious gifts. Thus, these two attitudes cannot exist independently of one another, but each must continually feed into the other.^[7]

Both the interconnectedness of and the enduring tension between affirmation and antithesis can be seen more clearly by means of contrast with two other attitudes which often masquerade as affirmation and antithesis but are in fact perversions of them. These are negation and synthesis. Hunter explains that antithesis is “constructive opposition, representing a contradiction and resistance but with the possibility of hope.” In contrast, “the concept and practice of ‘negation’ have become expressions of nihilism. It offers nothing beyond critique and hostility. It is antagonistic for its own sake. This, it would seem, is contrary to the gospel.”

Just as negation is the distortion of antithesis in the absence of affirmation, so also the distortion of affirmation in the absence of antithesis is synthesis, which “is problematic because it presupposes a blending and an accommodation with that which it opposes.” Hunter reconnects affirmation with its essential counterpart antithesis, reiterating that affirmation “does not require assimilation with its opposition to validate actions or ideas generated by the opposition of which it approves.”[8] Thus, as the figure below illustrates, affirmation and antithesis can only truly be affirmation and antithesis when we pursue them both together. As soon as we neglect affirmation in favor of antithesis, we no longer even have antithesis, and vice versa. It is for this reason that faithfully living out this tension is a “precarious dance.”[9]

The tension between affirmation and antithesis^[10]

[1] Those who are familiar with the Neo-Kuyperian stream in Reformed Christianity may recognize similarities between this tension and that tradition’s distinction between structure and direction.

[2] James W. Sire, Naming the Elephant: Worldview as a Concept, 2nd ed. (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2015), 174.

[3] Sire, Naming the Elephant, 172.

[4] Common grace is distinguished from special or saving grace, which belongs to Christians alone. For a discussion and critique of the language of common grace in Reformed Christian circles, see James K. A. Smith, Awaiting the King: Reforming Public Theology (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker, 2017), 122–124.

[5] James Davison Hunter, To Change the World: The Irony, Tragedy, and Possibility of Christianity in the Late Modern World (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 234.

[6] Hunter, To Change the World, 235.

[7] In Hunter’s words, affirmation and antithesis are two movements in a single dialectic. See Hunter, To Change the World, 231–236.

[8] Hunter, To Change the World, 332n7.

[9] Smith, Awaiting the King, xiii.

[10] Figure courtesy of Luke Herche. Used by permission.

This is Part 1 in a five-part essay series. A version of this essay was originally published online and in print as part of “Faithful Presence in the Midst of Pluralism: Three Tensions” at Ad Fontes.

How should we as Christians, with our distinctive beliefs, practices, and values, live faithfully in an increasingly pluralistic age? In his widely influential work To Change the World: The Irony, Tragedy, and Possibility of Christianity in the Late Modern World, Christian sociologist of religion James Davison Hunter calls Christians to reject the dominant paradigms of defense, relevance, and withdrawal and instead embrace lives of faithful presence in their various callings and places, including higher education.^[1] Hunter provides an inviting picture of what faithful presence looks like in both theory and practice.

The realities of pluralism and the “cross-pressures”^[2] that we all experience as we seek to live faithfully while loving others mean that certain tensions characterize our attempts to be faithfully present. Christians who recognize the inevitability of these tensions are not necessarily unwilling to make hard choices, nor have they succumbed to compromise – accusations that may be raised by those who do not themselves feel the weight of the tensions. Rather, to live in the midst of these tensions means to recognize that we are not God, but serve One Who sees the bigger picture and is able both to forgive and to redeem all our failings. According to Hunter,

the call “to be in the world but not of it” is a call to abide in the will and purposes of God in the present world disorder with integrity, and the only way to reach for that integrity is to recognize the tension and to reside within it knowing that failure is inevitable, forgiveness is ever available, and the work of the Holy Spirit to transform and sanctify our efforts is always inscrutably at work.^[3]

Christian philosopher James K. A. Smith concurs that living with tension is an inescapable aspect of Christian faithfulness: “the call to bear Christ’s image complicates our lives because it comes to us in the midst of our environments without releasing us from them. The call to discipleship complicates our lives precisely because it introduces a tension that will only be resolved eschatologically [that is, when Christ returns].”^[4]

Smith further observes, “Faithful witness is a precarious dance.”^[5] That is, faithfulness in the midst of pluralism is never a settled thing, but looks different in different times and places and for different individuals, families, schools, and churches. Any step of faithfulness in the present, any attempt to correct the excesses of the previous generation, may itself prove in hindsight to be an overstep in the other direction, itself in need of correction. Yet faithfulness resists the search for settled positions and final solutions. So we cannot avoid the dance, but can only seek to dance more wisely and more faithfully, in full recognition of its precarity.

This essay series describes some of the steps of the dance. In the next three essays, I identify three tensions that are characteristic of Christian faithfulness in the midst of pluralism: affirmation and antithesis, engagement and distinctness, and humility and hope. Christian faithful presence tries to live in the midst of these tensions, rather than accepting easy resolutions of them that result in an abdication of faithfulness. In the final essay, I consider what it might look like to live in the midst of these three tensions in the context of higher education.

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[1] James Davison Hunter, To Change the World: The Irony, Tragedy, and Possibility of Christianity in the Late Modern World (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010).

[2] Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2007); see also James K. A. Smith, How (Not) to be Secular: Reading Charles Taylor (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2014).

[3] Hunter, To Change the World, 183–184.

[4] James K. A. Smith, Awaiting the King: Reforming Public Theology (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker, 2017), 192.

[5] Smith, Awaiting the King, xiii.