Title: The Calling of Christian Postgraduate Students and Academics
1The Calling of Christian Postgraduate Students
and Academics
- Ard Louis
- www.oxfordchristianmind.org
2Biological self-assembly
- http//www.npn.jst.go.jp/ Keiichi Namba, Osaka
- Biological systems self-assemble and evolve (they
make themselves) - Can we understand?
- Can we emulate? (Nanotechnology)
3Self-assembly with legos?
4Science is fun!
5Physics and biological complexity
We share 15 of our genes with E. coli
25 yeast
50 flies
70
frogs 98
chimps
6Ard Louis research group at play
Molecular gastronomy dinner
7OUTLINE
- Academic pursuits as a Godly vocation?
- Could God call you to the life of the mind?
- The scandal of the evangelical mind?
- Odium theologicum and other pitfalls
8Christ as creator and sustainer
- 15 He is the image of the invisible God, the
firstborn over all creation. 16 For by him all
things were created things in heaven and on
earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or
powers or rulers or authorities all things were
created by him and for him. 17 He is before all
things, and in him all things hold together. 18
And he is the head of the body, the church he is
the beginning and the firstborn from among the
dead, so that in everything he might have the
supremacy. 19 For God was pleased to have all his
fullness dwell in him, 20 and through him to
reconcile to himself all things, whether things
on earth or things in heaven, by making peace
through his blood, shed on the cross. Col 115-20
9- no single piece of our mental world is to be
hermetically sealed off from the rest, and there
is not a square inch in the whole domain of our
human existence over which Christ, who is
Sovereign over all, does not cry 'Mine!
Abraham Kuyper (1837-1920)
10Christian vocation
- Christian vocation (Ephesians 41) Lead a life
worthy of the calling to which you have been
called (Eph. 41). The entire life of the
Christiannot just on Sunday and not just church
lifeis a divine vocation, a response to Gods
call to follow Christ. In a world where all
things hold together in Christ, Christians offer
every part of their livestheir time, their work,
their giftedness, their creativity, their wealth,
their recreationto God as an offering of
thanksgiving and obedience - Being Reformed Calvin College
11All your mind
- Hear O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is
one. Love the Lord your God with all your heart
and with all your soul and with all your mind and
with all your strength. - Mark 12
- Do not be conformed any longer to the pattern of
this world, but be transformed by the renewing of
your mind. Romans 12
-- see D. Hay On being a Christian Academic,
available on www.oxfordchristianmind.org
12The point is to praise God with the mind
- The point of Christian scholarship is not
recognition by standards established in the wider
culture. The point is to praise God with the
mind. Such efforts will lead to a kind of
intellectual integrity that sometimes receives
recognition. But for the Christian that
recognition is only a fairly inconsequential
by-product. The real point is valuing what God
has made, believing that the creation is as
'good' as he said it was, and exploring the
fullest dimensions of what it meant for the Son
of God to 'become flesh and dwell among us.'
Ultimately, intellectual work of this sort is its
own reward, because it is focused on the only One
whose recognition is important, the One before
whom all hearts are open.
1994
13(No Transcript)
14Academic pursuits as a Godly vocation?
- Could you be called to a life of the mind?
- Now!
- Longer term?
- If you were given a choice between a job in
Christian ministry or and academic job, what
would you do? why?
15Language about the future
- All our language about the future is like a
set of signposts pointing into a bright mist. - This brings us back to I Cor 1558 once more
what you do in the Lord is not in vain. You are
not oiling the wheels of a machine thats about
to roll over a cliff You are strange as it may
seem.. accomplishing everything that will
become in due course part of Gods kingdom.
Every act of love, gratitude, and kindness every
work of art or music inspired by the love of God
and delight in the beauty of his creation all
of this will find its way, through the
resurrecting power of God, into the new creation
that God will one day make. That is the logic of
the mission of God. N.T. Wright, SBH, p 208
16Christian academic as a dual missionary
Unmasking Idolatry For the church? For the world?
17Seek the welfare of the university
- 4 This is what the LORD Almighty, the God of
Israel, says to all those I carried into exile
from Jerusalem to Babylon 5.. 7 Also, seek the
peace and prosperity shalom of the city to
which I have carried you into exile. Pray to the
LORD for it, because if it prospers, you too will
prosper. - Jeremiah 294-7
- This is an admonition for the faithful to see
themselves as a counter-culture for the common
good. says Tim Keller. In essence, it is an
exhortation to work for the collective benefit of
the culture around you, even if societys norms
and mores are as different from those of the
faith community as they were for the Israelites
living in Babylon Michael Lindsay. A MIGHTY
FORTRESS RELIGIOUS COMMITMENT AND LEADING FOR
THE COMMON GOOD - Academic life as servanthood.
- Exile? (are there other images you can think of?)
- How can we have constructive engagement to seek
the Shalom of your field.
18Why does the life of the mind matter?
- To honour God
- To serve humanity and his creation
- To serve the church
19OUTLINE
- Academic pursuits as a Godly vocation?
- The scandal of the evangelical mind?
- Cultural barriers to a life of the mind
- Odium theologicum and other pitfalls
20Scandal of the Evangelical Mind?
- Taken together, . evangelicals display many
virtues and do many things well, but built-in
barriers to careful and constructive thinking
remain substantial.
Not all doom and gloom The Opening of the
Evangelical Mind P. Berger Emerging
Evangelical Intelligentsia Project
1994
21Scandal of the Evangelical Mind?
- These barriers include an immediatism that
insists on action, decision, and even perfection
right now, a populism that confuses winning
supporters with mastering actually existing
situations, an anti-traditionalism that
privileges ones own current judgments on
biblical, theological, and ethical issues
(however hastily formed) over insight from the
past (however hard won and carefully stated), and
a nearly gnostic dualism that rushes to
spiritualize all manner of bodily, terrestrial,
physical, and material realities (despite the
origin and providential maintenance of these
realities in God). In addition, we evangelicals
as a rule still prefer to put our money into
programs offering immediate results, whether
evangelistic or humanitarian, instead of into
institutions promoting intellectual development
over the long term.
22Scandal of the Evangelical Mind
- a Scandal because
- "If evangelicals are the ones who insist most
aggressively that they believe in sola scriptura,
and if evangelicals are the ones who assert most
vigorously the transforming work of Jesus Christ,
then it is reasonable to hope that what the
Scriptures teach about the origin of creation in
Christ, the sustaining of all things in Christ,
and the dignity of all creation in Christ-about,
in other words, the subjects of learning -- will
be a spur for evangelicals to a deeper and richer
intellectual life "He is before all things, and
in him all things hold together" (Colossians
115-17)."
23Scandal of the Evangelical Mind?
- What about the UK? or Europe? or
Africa/Asia/South America? - Scandal is really a description of popular
thinking .... - Barriers to thinking Christianly about science
- Immediatism
- Anti-traditionalism
- Populism
- Gnostic dualism
24Immediatism Newton and the planets
25Immediatism Leibnitz objects
- For, as Leibnitz objected, if God had to remedy
the defects of his creation, this was surely to
demean his craftmanship
26Immediatism Leibnitz objects
- And I hold, that when God works miracles, he does
not do it in order to supply the wants of nature,
but those of grace. Whoever thinks otherwise,
must needs have a very mean notion of the wisdom
and power of God
27ImmediatismLaplace and Napoleon
- Mécanique Céleste (1799-1825)
- Napoleon Why have you not mentioned the creator?
- Laplace "Je n'avais pas besoin de cette
hypothèse-là.
28Immediatism Chaos and the planets
- Our understanding of the Solar System has been
revolutionized over the past decade by the
finding that the orbits of the planets are
inherently chaotic. In extreme cases, chaotic
motions can change the relative positions of the
planets around stars, and even eject a planet
from a system. - The role of chaotic resonances in the Solar
System, N. Murray and M. Holman, Nature 410,
773-779 (12 April 2001)
2930 years of thinking?
Nigel Biggar
- http//www.oxfordchristianmind.org/2011/02/nigel-b
iggar-what-are-universities-for/
30Scandal of the Evangelical Mind?
- Immediatism
- Anti-traditionalism
- that privileges ones own current judgments on
biblical, theological, and ethical issues
(however hastily formed) over insight from the
past (however hard won and carefully stated) - Populism
- Gnostic dualism
31Community of Scholars?
- When you are a Bear of Very Little Brain, and
you Think of Things, you find sometimes that a
Thing which seemed very Thingish inside you
is quite different when it gets out into the open
and has other people looking at it. - -- A. A. Milne,
- The House at Pooh Corner
32The fall, research community of scholars
- what we find people like Boyle advocating is
that we manipulate the natural world, that under
special conditions we observe whats going on,
and its only under these contrived conditions
that we actually see, or get insight into, the
various processes. This involves communal
observation, it involves accumulation of all
sorts of observations under different conditions.
Eventually, we come to some conditional
conclusions on the basis of this long complicated
experimental process. This is a radically new
approach to observation. - ... there is a fundamental difference between
the Aristotelian assumption that our sensory and
cognitive apparatus are designed in such a way
that theyll give us a veridical account of
nature, and a Calvinist view that says our
cognitive apparatus and our faculties of
observation are fallen, imperfect, that they give
us the wrong knowledge, they persistently mislead
us, ... - Peter Harrison (Cambridge 2005)
- http//www.st-edmunds.cam.ac.uk/cis/Harrison/Pete
r20Harrison20-20index.htm - We see through a glass darkly (I Cor 13)
33Community of Scholars
- The first principle is that you must not fool
yourself--and you are the easiest person to fool.
So you have to be very careful about that. After
you've not fooled yourself, it's easy not to fool
other scientists. You just have to be honest in a
conventional way after that. -- R.P. Feynman,
Cargo Cult Science (1974) - http//www.physics.brocku.ca/etc/cargo_cult_scien
ce.html
34Scandal of the Evangelical Mind?
- Immediatism
- Anti-traditionalism
- Populism
- that confuses winning supporters with mastering
actually existing situations - Gnostic dualism
35Populism
- Who does the church turn to on multi-disciplinary
issues like creation/evolution? - Some justified skepticism of Academia
- One has to belong to the intelligentsia to
believe things like that no ordinary man could
be such a fool. - George Orwell, Notes on Nationalism 1945
- A Magesterium?
- Obtaining reliable knowledge is hard
36OUTLINE
- Academic pursuits as a Godly vocation?
- The scandal of the evangelical mind?
- Odium theologicum and other pitfalls
- Common traps we can fall into
37Potential personal pitfalls
- Pride
- Isolation
- Compromise
38Pride
- "Young men, in the same way be submissive to
those who are older. All of you, clothe
yourselves with humility toward one another,
because, 'God opposes the proud but gives grace
to the humble. - 1 Peter 55 - It is possible -- and laymen have a very exact
perception in regard to this -- that theology
makes the young theologian vain and so kindles in
him something like gnostic pride. The chief
reason for this is that in us men truth and love
are seldom combined. - --- Helmut Thielicke
39Odium Theologicum
- Majoring in minors (odium theologicum), the
pettiness of little men who care too much about
big issues) - Exploring ideas abstractions
- Talking about things that really matter as if
they dont touch you - critical minds, not critical spirits
- Pride can lead to isolation
40Isolation
- There is perhaps hardly a theological student who
has not been earnestly and emphatically warned by
some pious soul . against casting himself into
the arms of that omnivorous octopus, the
unbelieving professor - Helmut Thielicke
- You may wonder why is what I do of any use?
Others may wonder that too ..
41Isolation
- Do not quit meeting together, as some people are
in the habit of doing Instead, encourage one
another even more, since you see the day coming
closer. Hebrews 1025 - Local spiritual community
- Global intellectual community
42Isolation and Compromise
- Warping epistemology into ontology
- Underlying presuppositions
- Corrosive sub-disciplines
- Unquestioned truisms
First, it isn't just in philosophy that we
Christians are heavily influenced by the practice
and procedures of our non-Christian peers. The
same holds for nearly any important contemporary
intellectual discipline history, literary and
artistic criticism, musicology, and the sciences,
both social and natural. In all of these areas
there are ways of proceeding, pervasive
assumptions about the nature of the discipline
(for example, assumptions about the nature of
science and its place in our intellectual
economy), assumptions about how the discipline
should be carried on and what a valuable or
worthwhile contribution is like and so on we
imbibe these assumptions, if not with our
mother's milk, at any rate in learning to pursue
our disciplines. In all these areas we learn how
to pursue our disciplines under the direction and
influence of our peers. (Plantinga Advice to
Christian Philosophers)
Al Plantinga
43Isolation and Compromise
- Excellence and second hand arguments
- Some Christian and Islamic writers seem
unwilling to examine deeply held beliefs,
presumably because they are afraid that this kind
of thing is bad news for faith. Well, maybe it
is -- for intellectually deficient and half-baked
ideas. But it doesnt need to be like this.
There are intellectually robust forms of faith --
the kind of thing we find in writers such as
Augustine of Hippo, Thomas Aquinas, and C.S.
Lewis. They werent afraid to think about their
faith, and ask hard questions about its
evidential basis, its internal consistency, or
the adequacy of its theories - Alister McGrath in Finding Dawkins God,
Blackwell (2004) - Quickly, naturalists found themselves a mere
bare majority, with many of the leading thinkers
in the various disciplines of philosophy, ranging
from philosophy of science (e.g., Van Fraassen)
to epistemology (e.g., Moser), being theists. The
predicament of naturalist philosophers is not
just due to the influx of talented theists, but
is due to the lack of counter-activity of
naturalist philosophers themselves. God is not
dead in academia he returned to life in the late
1960s and is now alive and well in his last
academic stronghold, philosophy departments. - The justification of most contemporary
naturalist views is defeated by contemporary
theist arguments - The Metaphilosophy of Naturalism, by Quentin
Smith, Philo 4, vol 2 (2000) - Compare this to Dawkins etc... The professional
and popular debates are very different
44 Compromise
- Self image and identity
- How smart is X?
- e.g. internal academic hierarchies .
- Where does my value come from?
- Conformity and rewards
- Whatever you do, work at it with all your heart,
as working for the Lord, not for men, since you
know that you will receive an inheritance from
the Lord as a reward. It is the Lord Christ you
are serving. - Colossians 323-24
45OUTLINE
- Academic pursuits as a Godly vocation?
- The scandal of the evangelical mind?
- Odium theologicum and other pitfalls