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Title: The Calling of Christian Postgraduate Students and Academics


1
The Calling of Christian Postgraduate Students
and Academics
  • Ard Louis
  • www.oxfordchristianmind.org

2
Biological 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)

3
Self-assembly with legos?
4
Science is fun!
5
Physics and biological complexity
We share 15 of our genes with E. coli
25 yeast
50 flies
70
frogs 98
chimps
6
Ard Louis research group at play
Molecular gastronomy dinner
7
OUTLINE
  • 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

8
Christ 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)
10
Christian 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

11
All 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
12
The 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)
14
Academic 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?

15
Language 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

16
Christian academic as a dual missionary
Unmasking Idolatry For the church? For the world?
17
Seek 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.

18
Why does the life of the mind matter?
  • To honour God
  • To serve humanity and his creation
  • To serve the church

19
OUTLINE
  • 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

20
Scandal 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
21
Scandal 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.

22
Scandal 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)."

23
Scandal 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

24
Immediatism Newton and the planets
25
Immediatism Leibnitz objects
  • For, as Leibnitz objected, if God had to remedy
    the defects of his creation, this was surely to
    demean his craftmanship

26
Immediatism 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

27
ImmediatismLaplace and Napoleon
  • Mécanique Céleste (1799-1825)
  • Napoleon Why have you not mentioned the creator?
  • Laplace "Je n'avais pas besoin de cette
    hypothèse-là.

28
Immediatism 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)

29
30 years of thinking?
Nigel Biggar
  • http//www.oxfordchristianmind.org/2011/02/nigel-b
    iggar-what-are-universities-for/

30
Scandal 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

31
Community 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

32
The 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)

33
Community 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

34
Scandal of the Evangelical Mind?
  • Immediatism
  • Anti-traditionalism
  • Populism
  • that confuses winning supporters with mastering
    actually existing situations
  • Gnostic dualism

35
Populism
  • 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

36
OUTLINE
  • Academic pursuits as a Godly vocation?
  • The scandal of the evangelical mind?
  • Odium theologicum and other pitfalls
  • Common traps we can fall into

37
Potential personal pitfalls
  • Pride
  • Isolation
  • Compromise

38
Pride
  • "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

39
Odium 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

40
Isolation
  • 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 ..

41
Isolation
  • 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

42
Isolation 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
43
Isolation 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

45
OUTLINE
  • Academic pursuits as a Godly vocation?
  • The scandal of the evangelical mind?
  • Odium theologicum and other pitfalls
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