Shaping a Christian Worldview

The Foundation of Christian Higher Education

David S. Dockery, Gregory Alan Thornbury, David S. Dockery, Gregory Alan Thornbury

• Publisher: B&H Academic
• Year: 2002
• Print ISBN: 9780805424485
• eBook ISBN: 9781433670725
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

Shaping a Christian Worldview presents a collection of essays that address the key issues facing the future of Christian higher education. With contributions from key players in the field, this book addresses the critical issues for Christian institutions of various traditions as the new century begins to leave its indelible mark on education.

PART I

BUILDING A FOUNDATION

CHAPTER 1

THE AUTHORITY OF SCRIPTURE

GEORGE H. GUTHRIE

AMONG THE ISSUES facing Christians involved in academic life, who seek to integrate faith with learning their academic disciplines, none is more fundamental or vexing than the question of authority. Complex in its formulation and vast in both its scope and its implications, our answer to the authority question, in its broadest sense, molds how we think about data and interpretation, how we think about life's moral framework, even how we think about thinking. Thus it presents the point of departure for how we address all questions of truth and reality.

The authority crisis faced by Christians in the academy, moreover, is an extension of (and at times an impetus for) the crisis in the church and draws its force from currents of thinking in the cultures of the world at large. Rather than “our crisis,” grappling with the issue of authority has become the elemental struggle of modern, or perhaps more appropriately, postmodern life.¹ Thus, the pressures on Christian thinkers to consider carefully their approaches to authority will not abate anytime soon.

The current volume is an apologetic, primarily through modeling, for “shaping a Christian worldview.” The implied “shapers” in the title are those involved in educating others in thinking from the perspective of a Christian worldview as they engage all aspects of life and thought. That the worldview espoused here is “Christian” means that it is grounded in a form of the Christian religion (for us an evangelical form), and this brings us to the question of the specific role of the Christian Scriptures for believers involved in academic life, since, for most Christians, their general belief system rests in some way on the Bible.²

The chief query of this chapter concerns the nature of the Christian Scriptures as authoritative for a Christian scholar or university. That is, how can an academic community, such as the one behind the writing of this volume, work within a confessional context, based in some way on ancient literature of a specific religion, and carry out academic work with rigor and integrity? Can the Christian worldview, in part, form the very axis around which a thoughtful life of research might revolve?

The canons of most academic disciplines, learned by Christians in the secular graduate programs of the world—the “tools of the trade,” if you will—normally do not address biblical thought and material. Chemists learn the fundamentals of chemistry, not theology; students of literature study Dickinson and Melville, not Daniel and Matthew; and business students study organizational behavior, not the organization of the early church—and rightly so. Our proposal here is not that the Bible addresses all the necessary technical aspects of modern inquiry. In the Bible we do not find specific research procedures to track chemical reactions, for instance. Yet the Bible does offer a view of reality and principles for interacting with that reality, that is, a general framework for how one thinks about life, thought, inquiry, and the implications of research.

In other words, the Bible has much to say to a Christian immersed in any of the academic disciplines at the level of presuppositions. Thus, we suggest there is a basis for a specifically “Christian” approach to higher education and academic life in general. Such an approach seeks proactively to integrate the Christian worldview with the wide variety of disciplines in the academy.

Of course for the vast majority of our colleagues who do not hold to a Christian worldview, a specifically “Christian” approach to academics is an exercise in “masks and moonshine.” For example, in 1988 “a subcommittee of the American Association of University Professors proposed that the AAUP declare colleges and universities that have placed academic freedom within the bounds of religious commitment to have forfeited ‘the moral right to proclaim themselves as authentic seats of higher learning.’” In response to the suggestion that Christian perspectives might have some relevance to academic scholarship generally, Bruce Kuklick, a historian, labeled the idea “loony.”³ The presupposition here is obvious: for one to come at the task of academic life from within the framework of a specific, authoritative worldview is to forfeit the necessary freedom to do credible academic work.

FIRST THOUGHTS ON THE NATURE OF
SCRIPTURAL AUTHORITY AND THE ACADEMY

Let's begin by being clear that adherence to what might be called “authority structures” is a universal human phenomenon among those who have the ability for any kind of volitional activity. Authority structures are the network of dynamics by which one makes decisions of any kind—from what clothes to put on in the morning, to what to eat for lunch, to which chemical to include in an experiment. Why do we make the decisions we do? Why do we think about things the way we do? What drives us? Our authorities do. Thus even a person claiming to eschew all authority has gone with the authority of their own antiauthoritarian perspectives. Of course here we are using the term authority very broadly rather than technically.

Thus our emotions at a given moment, our presuppositions learned in a psychology class during freshman year at university, cultural mores, and even the television commercial with an especially catchy jingle that plays in our heads as we choose a cereal at the grocery—all constitute forms of authority.

As we approach academic life and specific academic disciplines, we all come with presuppositions, “authoritative” principles, processes, and propositions that we embrace as appropriate to processes of thinking, researching, interpreting, and communicating the topic under consideration. However, it should be acknowledged that whether a person approaches research as pragmatist, hedonist, naturalist, behaviorist, Marxist, Christian, or one with no readily identifiable worldview, presuppositions are in place and have a profound effect on the way one thinks about research and conclusions. We may think this is not the case for the so-called “hard” sciences, but every form of science has its theoretical framework. What Thomas Kuhn pointed out in his The Structure of Scientific Revolutions is that there is no completely objective science; all of us are influenced by social and psychological factors in the way we approach our disciplines, in our cultures and eras.⁴

As one scholar has put it, “There is no such thing as an ‘immaculate perception.’”⁵ Our Vorverstandnis, our “preunderstanding,” plays an important role in our interpretations of data and our interpretations of others‘ interpretations of data. Scientific frameworks of all stripes embody views of the world, and these views always color outcomes in interpretation. Of any approach to academic discipline—not just a specifically Christian one—we could ask, “Why do we understand and interact with our disciplines the way we do?” and “How does our worldview affect our interpretation of data?” This book is an attempt to bring a confessed worldview front and center, not that it might proactively “mold” or “guard” the data uncovered in whatever research is at hand, but that the presuppositions at play might be acknowledged as authoritative, in terms of a general view of the world, and engaged in processes of investigation.

Second, it should not be assumed that a Christian approach to the authority of Scripture necessarily conflicts with many of the general models and fruits of research in the broader academy.⁶ While it is true that forms of fundamentalist Christianity in the past century were and are antiintellectual, other branches of the Christian movement have embraced honest intellectual pursuit as both a worthy vocation and an act of devotion to God. Many insights gained in academia through scientific investigation, historical research, or reflection on the humanities, by both Christians and non-Christians, can be embraced by Christians as aspects of general revelation, that is, God's revelation of truth through the created order, history, or the makeup of human beings. This posture holds that for a Christian there is no real division, in the search for truth, between “secular” (i.e., nonreligious) and “sacred,” since “all truth is God's truth.”⁷

Thus, a Christian approach has nothing to fear from sound research in any branch of the sciences and, in fact, celebrates excellent work done with rigor and sound tools in any field of inquiry. A truly Christian perspective celebrates excellent work being done in chemistry, literary analysis, or music theory, for example, regardless of whether the research question has to do with a specifically biblical or religious theme, because we celebrate the discovery of truth. As this book demonstrates, in all branches of the academy, Christians are doing good work with tools used generally in their various disciplines. Rather than constituting a conflict of interest, this use of sound tools for historical, philosophical, linguistic, scientific, or literary inquiry fits the Christian commitment to truth in its many expressions—a commitment which itself is based on Scripture's authority.

Although it is true that a Christian might skew the data uncovered in, for instance, a sociology research project or a physics experiment, is this not a danger with any person regardless of the worldview in play?⁸ Yet, there is another factor that should be important from the Christian perspective: integrity. In the warp and woof of the Christian worldview, there exists a commitment to an honest approach to life. Thus, Christians are under obligation to allow their perspectives to be molded by genuine insight offered by good research. This does not mean, of course, that those outside the Christian worldview cannot do research with integrity, nor that all Christians do their research with integrity, but rather that integrity is a specific mandate within the Christian worldview rightly understood.

Third, the process of integrating the Christian view of the world with academic discipline—that is, working out how the authority of Scripture works with other forms of authority in the academy—has been neither simple nor simplistic. For millennia Christian academics have wrestled with how a God-oriented view of the world integrates with nontheological aspects of learning. In the Middle Ages, young men training for ministry were taught the classics, especially Aristotelian logic, and classical languages alongside Paul and Augustine, since the classics were considered important for a well-rounded education. Yet the perennial challenge was how to wed the pagan authorities with the teachings of the church.⁹

The Reformation, with its models of education that evidence, among other influences, the impact of Renaissance humanism, demonstrates a continuance of grappling with integration of faith and learning. It was the Reformation that formed the immediate backdrop to the establishment of the first universities in America. Most of the major universities of North America started as institutions committed both to education in the liberal arts and to a Christian worldview. Yet, with the coming of the Enlightenment and the rise of modernity, these eventually would transition to institutions fostering “a culture of unbelief,” as George Marsden has shown.¹⁰ The twentieth century witnessed numerous unsuccessful attempts at maintaining a Christian worldview among church-related institutions.¹¹ Thus, the endeavor to shape a Christian worldview, on the basis of scriptural authority and within the context of academia, is neither new nor easily sustained.

As this book attests, there exists a vibrant movement built around integrating Christian faith and learning among modern evangelicals, and the movement is beginning to draw some attention from those in the broader academy.¹² We focus our attention on evangelicalism in order to delimit the study and because it is the broader community context of which the writers of this volume are a part. Regardless of the exact expressions of evangelicalism in this movement, all forms in some way confess a specifically biblical worldview as foundational for their institutions. Thus, the Bible is held to be authoritative.

Our goal in the following pages is not to deal exhaustively with various positions on the nature of revelation or the inspiration and infallibility of Scripture. For that the reader may look to the systematic theologies referred to below. Rather, our task is to provide a brief introduction to recent arguments for Scripture as an appropriate authority for shaping one's worldview.

EVANGELICALS AND
THE AUTHORITY OF SCRIPTURE

Historically, evangelicals, as exemplified in such institutions as the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association, Christianity Today magazine, and Wheaton College, have held to a high view of Scripture, meaning that they hold Scripture to be inspired by God and, thus, normative for all aspects of life. Mark Noll states, “When examining the evangelical study of Scripture, everything hinges upon a recognition that the evangelical community considers the Bible the very Word of God.”¹³ Evangelicals insist that sound historical investigation reveals this to have been the position of Jesus and the early church (as reflected, for example, in the manner in which the Hebrew Scriptures are quoted), the church fathers, the Reformers, and orthodox believers to the present day. T...

Table of contents

• Foreword, Charles Colson
• Preface
• Introduction: Shaping a Christian Worldview — David S. Dockery
• PART I: BUILDING A FOUNDATION
• PART II: APPLYING A CHRISTIAN WORLDVIEW
• Conclusion: Shaping the Academic Enterprise: An Interview with Carla Sanderson, Provost, Union University
• Afterword — David S. Dockery and Gregory Alan Thornbury
• Endnotes
• Contributors
• Index