Transcript Crossing Cultures - University of Oxford

The Calling of
Christian
Postgraduate
Students and
Academics
Ard Louis
www.oxfordchristianmind.or
g
Biological self-assembly
http://www.npn.jst.go.jp/ Keiichi Namba, Osaka
• Biological systems self-assemble and evolve (they make
themselves)
• Can we understand?
Self-assembly with legos?
Science is fun!
Physics and biological complexity
We share 15% of our genes with E. coli
“
“ 25% “ “
“
“ yeast
“
“ 50% “ “
“
“ flies
“
“ 70% “ “
“
“ frogs
“
“ 98% “ “
“
“ chimps
what makes us different?
Ard Louis research group at play
Molecular gastronomy dinner
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
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 1:15-20
Abraham Kuyper
(1837-1920)
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!
Christian vocation
Christian vocation (Ephesians 4:1) “Lead a life worthy of the
calling to which you have been called” (Eph. 4:1). The entire
life of the Christian—not just on Sunday and not just church
life—is a divine vocation, a response to God’s call to follow
Christ. In a world where all things hold together in Christ,
Christians offer every part of their lives—their time, their
work, their giftedness, their creativity, their wealth, their
recreation—to God as an offering of thanksgiving and
obedience
“Being Reformed” – Calvin College
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
The point is to praise God with the mind
1994
“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.”
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?
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 15:58 once more: what
you do in the Lord is not in vain. You are not oiling the
wheels of a machine that’s about to roll over a cliff…
You are – strange as it may seem.. – accomplishing
everything that will become in due course part of
God’s 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
Christian academic as a dual
missionary
Unmasking Idolatry
For the church?
For the world?
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 29:4-7
• “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 society’s 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.
Why does the life of the mind matter?
• To honour God
• To serve humanity and his creation
• To serve the church
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
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.
1994
Not all doom and gloom:
“The Opening of the Evangelical Mind” –P. Berger
“Emerging Evangelical Intelligentsia Project”
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 antitraditionalism that privileges one’s 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.
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 1:15-17)."
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
•
•
•
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Immediatism
Anti-traditionalism
Populism
Gnostic dualism
Immediatism: Newton and the
planets
Immediatism: Leibnitz objects
“For, as Leibnitz
objected, if God had to
remedy the defects of
his creation, this was
surely to demean his
craftmanship”
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”
Immediatism:Laplace and Napoleon
• Mécanique Céleste
(1799-1825)
• Napoleon: Why
have you not
mentioned the
creator?
• Laplace: "Je n'avais
pas besoin de cette
hypothèse-là.”
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)
30 years of thinking?
Nigel Biggar
http://www.oxfordchristianmind.org/2011/02/
nigel-biggar-what-are-universities-for/
Scandal of the Evangelical Mind?
• Immediatism
• Anti-traditionalism
• that privileges one’s 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
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”
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 what’s going on, and it’s 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 they’ll 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/Peter%20Harrison%20-%20index.htm
We see through a glass darkly (I Cor 13)
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_science.html
33
Scandal of the Evangelical Mind?
• Immediatism
• Anti-traditionalism
• Populism
• that confuses winning supporters with mastering actually
existing situations
• Gnostic dualism
Populism
• Who does the church turn to on multidisciplinary 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
OUTLINE
• Academic pursuits as a Godly vocation?
• The scandal of the evangelical mind?
• Odium theologicum and other pitfalls
• Common traps we can fall into
Potential personal pitfalls
• Pride
• Isolation
• Compromise
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 5:5
• 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
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 don’t touch you
critical minds, not critical spirits
• Pride can lead to isolation
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 …..
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 10:25
• Local spiritual community
• Global intellectual community
Isolation and Compromise
•
Warping epistemology into ontology
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•
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Underlying presuppositions
Corrosive sub-disciplines
Unquestioned truisms
Al Plantinga
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)
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 doesn’t 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 weren’t 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
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 3:23-24:
OUTLINE
• Academic pursuits as a Godly vocation?
• The scandal of the evangelical mind?
• Odium theologicum and other pitfalls