What is Christian Scholarship?

In the preface of The Outrageous Idea of Christian Scholarship, Marsden states that his purpose is to "take a step toward clarifying what the ancient enterprise of relating faith and learning might mean in the academy today." In so doing, he hopes to carve out a place of respect and welcome for Christian scholarship in the academy today.


But what is "Christian scholarship?"


It's a difficult question to answer. But it's an important one, as your answer to that question will color your responses to Marsden's ideas.


Here are a few possibilities:

1. Christian scholarship is scholarship about Christianity.
2. Christian scholarship is scholarship about topics that are of concern to Christians.
3. Christian scholarship is scholarship that seeks the goal of confirming Christian beliefs.
4. Christian scholarship is scholarship that is born out of uniquely Christian beliefs.
5. Christian scholarship is scholarship that seeks to understand the relationships between Christianity and other fields.
6. Christian scholarship is scholarship that seeks to clarify Christian beliefs.
7. Christian scholarship is scholarship that is conducted by Christians.

Do you see how each of these applies a different flavor to the term?


There's a similar problem, for example, in trying to define what physics is. There are many physicists whose work looks a lot like pure mathematics, or chemistry, or biology, or philosophy, or meteorology, or astronomy, and there are the folks who apply the principles of physics to social networks & economic systems. Ultimately, then, we define physics as what physicists do.


Based on that comparison, I'm inclined to support definition #7 above, with the understanding that implies, includes, and encompasses #1-6.

Great Summary of Marsden

The Emerging Scholars Blog today featured a great summary of some of Marsden's key arguments in The Outrageous Idea of Christian Scholarship. If you don't have a copy of the book, read these quotes to whet your appetite.

ESN Book Club Announced

http://blog.emergingscholars.org/2009/09/esn-book-club-the-outrageous-idea-of-christian-scholarship/

The Emerging Scholars Network has announced its second book club. Starting in October, we'll be reading through Marsden's The Outrageous Idea of Christian Scholarship. It's an excellent read, and should start some great discussion!

About Me

“Abraham believed God, traveled to Egypt, rescued Lot, and was the father of Isaac. Now, was that before or after he became the sixteenth President, fought the Civil War and freed the slaves?” –Me, Age 8

I was often very confused as a child. I knew for certain there were two things I needed to succeed at: school and church. And these were both very similar: We read at both school and church, we learned history at both school and church, we were asked questions at both school and church, we moved from one grade to another at both school and church. They were so similar that I thought that they surely must be related.

That’s where the confusion came in, leading to questions like the one I quoted earlier. School seemed to get more serious (requiring more reading and more homework, playing fewer games and getting fewer breaks) while church (particularly Sunday school) didn’t seem to change all that much (never requiring homework, playing games even when we seemed too old for them, and spending as much time in chit-chat as we did opening the Bible). There was also a growing difference in content. In school, we learned more details year after year, had to memorize the years that events happened, had to learn how everything (science, math, American history, the Renaissance, the French Revolution, technology, etc.) fit together. In church, though, no one ever seemed to say in what year the events in the Bible occurred, nor did we really learn how everything fit together; I had the vague feeling that Jesus came after everybody in the front of the Bible, but not much else.

Little did my middle-school-self know, my questions about how the things I learned at school and church related to each other told the story of conflict and estrangement between the church and the academy.

I remember in ninth grade when one of my classmates in Biology who also attended my church asked our Youth Pastor to pray for us, since we were studying evolution. “We’re not studying evolution,” I responded. “We’re just studying taxonomy. Evolution’s not until the next chapter.” It was as if getting even close to evolutionary theory was like looking into the sun for this student, and I didn’t understand why.

I remember in tenth grade in World History, we spent a chapter studying the Reformation. “Luther,” I read in my textbook, “made the radical claim that salvation was based on faith in God, and not on works.” “But,” I responded, in shock, “that’s what I believe!” I then had two questions that have haunted me ever since: 1. What did people believe before that? 2. Why did no one in church tell me about this history? The first question has been more or less settled in my mind. The second question, I have come to realize, is a form of the tension between Christian faith and academic study that has developed over the years.

Experiences like those in Biology and World History have largely shaped me today, leading me to ask questions about how my faith as a Christian relates to my study and teaching as a professor. I’ve received abundant help from other Christian scholars in venues such as the Christian Study Center of Gainesville and in books such as The Outrageous Idea of Christian Scholarship, Habits of the Mind, and The Decline of the Secular University. It’s my hope that this blog will serve as a sounding board for those questions and provide help to others as they wrestle with similar issues. Thank you for joining me.