Structuring the Scholarly Imagination: Strategies for Christian Engagement with the Disciplines
M. Elizabeth Lewis Hall
From our vantage point at the beginning of the twenty-first century, the future appears promising for Christian scholarship. While the larger academy continues largely antagonistic to or disinterested in Christian contributions to scholarship, there are some disciplines, such as philosophy, where Christian perspectives are increasingly being taken seriously. In addition, Christian higher education is flourishing. In 2009 the National Center for Education Statistics listed 888 religiously affiliated institutions of higher education; 69 percent were affiliated with Protestant Christian groups, many of them evangelical. Mark Noll’s “scandal of the evangelical mind” appears to be becoming less scandalous. However, there remain a number of challenges to Christian scholarship, including historical, sociological, ideological, and economic factors, many of which have been discussed by other authors. I would like to focus on yet another challenge, a much more pragmatic one: the lack of scaffolding or structure for Christian scholarship.
In my various roles as an academic, I regularly encounter thoughtful Christians who desire to engage their discipline with their faith, and yet have very little concept of how to actually go about doing so. Christians in the academy have largely not been educated and socialized to produce Christian scholarship. In my discipline, psychology, the largely abstract and theoretical discussions about the integration of faith and psychology produce the illusion that education is happening, but may actually inhibit scholarly efforts by making the task seem excessively complicated and controversial. In psychology and in Christian academia more broadly, there seems to be an abundance of books talking in the abstract about Christian scholarship: its foundations, goals, commitments, history, and so on. But many fewer resources exist that come alongside faculty in the daily labor of making connections between their disciplines and their faith.
I am not the first to note this gap. Other Christian scholars have likewise reflected on the vagueness of the task of Christian scholarship. Nicholas Wolterstorff, in a paper written in the 1980s, commented,
I began to be discontent with the ways in which I had been taught to describe the relation between faith and learning. For one thing, I began to think that the words used did not have much content; they remained too abstract. It was said that Christians approach scholarship with a different perspective, and that it shapes their scholarship into something different. Perhaps so; but just how does that take place? It was said that Christians approach scholarship with different presuppositions and that those shape their scholarship into something different. Perhaps so, but how does this shaping by presuppositions work? I wanted more clarity, and more concreteness of insight, on the connection.
Similarly, psychologist Darryl Stevenson, in reviewing fifty years of Christian scholarship in the field of psychology, wrote, “Perhaps more elusive than the what of integration (that is, the task) is the how (the method). Scholars have wrestled with the how, perhaps more frequently than the what, because it appears that is where we need to roll up our sleeves and get to work.”
Lev Vygotsky, the Russian developmental psychologist, suggested that optimal learning occurs in children when assistance is given within the “zone of proximal development.” This zone is the distance between what the child can do by himself or herself, and what the child can do with guidance. So the teacher’s role is to produce a type of “scaffolding” in which the teacher stays one step ahead of the student, providing guidance until the child can accomplish the task alone, while the teacher then encourages the next step. I think you will find that this makes sense intuitively; if you have ever taught someone to do research in your discipline, you will know the kind of progressive learning that occurs from, say, the first statistics course that an undergraduate in psychology takes, to the complex tasks required of an empirical doctoral dissertation. It would be pointless to ask a sophomore to write a doctoral dissertation. Yet we often assume that scholars who have spent most of their education mastering the skills and content of their own disciplines should be fully equipped to do Christian scholarship well. This ignores the fact that Christian scholarship involves, at a minimum, an additional set of theological skills and content, and probably requires yet a third set of skills (e.g., disciplinary translational skills, epistemological bilingualism) to bring the theological piece together with the disciplinary piece.
So I am proposing here to provide a sort of scaffolding or structure for Christian scholarship, in the form of a kind of typology, or menu of options, of ways in which Christians have brought together their faith and their scholarship. The intent is not to be formulaic or prescriptive. Rather, it’s my hope that this will provide some guidance and will spur the imagination of those wanting to more intentionally pursue Christian scholarship. To supplement my own experiences as a Christian scholar, get beyond my disciplinary boundaries, and avoid re-inventing the wheel, I have attempted to identify the major works addressing Christian scholarship in the last twenty years or so, and have looked through them for implicit or explicit modes of engagement recommended by the authors. In what follows, I will first present a broad definition of Christian scholarship, then present my typology of modes of engagement, and finally suggest some factors that regulate the selection of the specific modes of engagement.
What Is Christian Scholarship?
Scholars writing on Christian scholarship appear reluctant to be prescriptive in their definitions of Christian scholarship, preferring instead very broad descriptions that focus on intent rather than product. For example, George Marsden calls it “scholarship by persons who are Christian and who consciously relate their faith to what they say or write” or “pretty simply scholarship that is shaped in part by Christian perspectives.” Wolterstorff says, “Christian learning is faithful learning; learning faithful to faith in the triune God, learning faithful to the Christian community and its tradition, learning faithful to the Christian scriptures.” Drawing on this literature, and with similar intent to describe rather than prescribe, I propose to use the phrase “Christian scholarship” to refer to a variety of ways in which Christians strive to bring together their character, convictions, and practices, as shaped by their faith, and their academic disciplines. I note that, in common with the descriptions provided above, the emphasis is on the process or striving, which may or may not result in overt, detectable markers in the resulting product. My intent in defining Christian scholarship this way is not to provide a set of defining criteria by which one might examine a piece of scholarship and decide whether or not it is, in fact, Christian scholarship. Rather, my intent is to provide the broadest possible umbrella for Christian scholarship, one that will accommodate the work of Christian scholars in a variety of disciplines and work settings, in order to move on to what I think is the more interesting question: What are the modes of engagement that Christians might utilize in order to meaningfully engage their faith and their discipline?
Although most references to Christian scholarship focus on how Christian beliefs or convictions influence scholarship, I also want to briefly acknowledge the role that Christian practices and value commitments play in scholarship. To do Christian scholarship, we have a responsibility to know our Bibles well, but we also have a responsibility to properly form our moral intuitions, as these play a role in some of the modes I will describe, and also affect the practices we will adopt in the process of doing scholarship.
Although I describe my own work as integration, I avoid the use of the phrase “the integration of faith and learning” here. This is not because of personal discomfort with a term that essentially means to bring together things that have been separated, but because I’ve discovered that people have a variety of notions in mind when they use that phrase, and consequently it is often used as a sort of “straw man” agai...
