Thinking Faith blogs

This review is reprinted with permission (and some additional material) from The Glass, the journal of the Christian Literary Studies Group (issue 30, Spring 2018). See other selected articles and more information about the journal and Group here: www.clsg.org. 

Why Study? Exploring the Face of God in the Academy (Fellowship of Evangelical Students, Singapore, 2017) 

This short book aims to encourage and equip Christians in a variety of academic fields - in particular undergraduate students, but there will be interest here too for those further on in their own disciplines, as well as accessible introductions to the issues relevant to other fields. An introduction by Vinoth Ramachandra, the IFES Secretary for Dialogue and Social Engagement, is followed by ten chapters, each contributed by a Christian academic or professional and reflecting on their experiences of and framework for living and thinking as a Christian in their field. These range from Denis Alexander on biology, to Priyan Dias on engineering, to Grace Koh on social work.

The rest of this review concentrates on the chapter most relevant to my own field, but of the other chapters I particularly enjoyed Wee-Liang Tan on business - hearing how a Christian thoughtfully and prayerfully navigates an environment very unfamiliar to me was challenging and interesting. Joy L. K. Pachuau's chapter on history was also stimulating and an excellent introduction to the challenges and opportunities available to Christians who study the past.

Maithrie White contributes Chapter Eight, 'Faith and Literature: A Journey'. Like several of the contributors, she reflects on the process by which God formed and guided her into her studies. The journey she describes will be familiar to many Christians who have studied literature: the initial, passionate 'rush of adrenaline' of undergraduate study and the joy of creativity, tempered by challenges such as the darker history of Christianity revealed in postcolonial literature and anxieties about Scriptural interpretation engendered by deconstruction and postmodernism.

'Literature confronted my faith, and turned my world upside down.' White recounts a conversation with a Literature major friend who unashamedly partitioned off these two parts of her life - 'they had nothing in common, she said, so it didn't matter'. Dissatisfied with this neat dismissal, she goes on to describe the struggle and joy of getting to know the Bible's story, of wrestling with the multiple perspectives of literature and theory, and of working towards a personal integration in which 'love of literature was part of my love for God'.

White writes engagingly about the experience of wanting to do full justice to both theological commitments and literary study, and her definition of this endeavour as a 'spiritual discipline' is a helpful one. She mentions several thinkers and writers who have been helpful to her in developing the necessary framework for this discipline - Nicholas Wolterstorff and Carolyn Sharp, among others. While she acknowledges the familiar shortfall between her formation in church and the challenge of academic thinking, she emphasises how the vocational aspect of literary work can and should serve the church. All these aspects of the essay make it a stimulating and challenging read, both for those within the literary academy and those with a non-professional interest, and perhaps especially for undergraduate and early postgraduate students who are beginning to grapple with what it means to integrate faith and understanding in this area.

'My study of literature and encounters with people at university led me to rediscover awe in the mystery of God, who is revealed in Christ.' Literary study is, indeed, uniquely formative of the capacity to appreciate mystery; as White says, while the academy may often be atheistic, literature itself is not, and this useful essay will encourage and inspire those who read it to deepen their understanding both of literary work and of the God whose Word underwrites it.

As part of our ongoing series on academic skills, today’s post is about the skill of asking questions well in an academic seminar (or similar setting). For many postgraduate students and researchers, especially in the humanities and social sciences, seminars focused on a particular interest area are the main way we interact with others in our discipline around academic topics.

Conferences are an intensive forum for this kind of interaction, so most of what I look at below is relevant to that setting too. But the context I have most in mind is a regular, institutionally-based meeting of generally the same group of people, gathering to hear one or two speakers and then discuss their ideas.

So is there a distinctively Christian way to participate in this kind of setting? First of all, I want to highlight the way I’ve framed the topic: ‘asking questions well’, rather than ‘asking good questions’. The latter phrase, I think, focuses on the content of the question – which will vary widely between subjects – and can lead us either to pride or anxiety depending on our grasp of our field. Instead, let’s concentrate on how we ask questions: our motivations and practice, which can either build up or tear down speakers and others in the room.

We’ve all had the experience of being in a seminar where someone asks a question badly:

• The question is too long and/or vague for the speaker to properly engage with
• The contribution is framed as a question, but is really a comment, leaving the speaker little room to respond other than agreeing or disagreeing
• They are clearly using the opportunity to speak to demonstrate their own broad(er) knowledge, or pivot to something which isn’t really the topic at hand
• They disagree aggressively with some point, sometimes with implicit or explicit ad hominem attacks (this is rare in my experience, although this can depend on the culture of a particular discipline or institution).

At their best, the question times in seminars can be really beneficial for the whole group: they open ideas up to multiple perspectives, clarify and expand the material for the audience, and help the speaker refine their argument. But too often they can be the place where the academic ego is on show at its worst.

How can we, as Christians, ask questions well – for the glory of God, and the benefit of our institutions and colleagues?

1. Listening to and respecting others. We’ve heard before on FiSch about the importance of listening properly to others – and asking questions properly is a complementary skill. To ask a question which opens up something new, you need to pay attention to what the speaker has actually said and what they meant by it.
   This flows out of an understanding that every person is made in the image of God: they are worthy of your respect in engaging honestly with their work, even if you end up disagreeing with them.
    
2. Being sensitive to institutional and situational norms. This includes not taking up more than your fair share of time – both in your initial question, and in the case of follow-up questions (no more than one!). It’s also relevant to the comment-in-disguise type of question: generally, comments are more suitable if framed clearly as such, allowing the speaker to respond in the right way and leaving more time for genuine questions which take advantage of their expertise.
   This flows out of the ideal of ‘seeking the good of the city’ (Jeremiah 29:7) in our academic institutions. When we model appropriate and respectful behaviour, we help foster better understanding and better work as well as encouraging and affirming those around us.
    
3. Practising humility and unselfishness in our questions. Resist the temptation to ask the question that does little more than spotlight your own expertise or wrench the topic around to your own. This doesn’t mean never making links between your sphere of knowledge and another, but often more specific or personal queries are better made one-to-one.
   This flows out of the New Testament command to ‘think of others more highly than yourselves’ (Philippians 2:3). Humility is often counter-cultural in today’s academy, but it’s at the centre of our imitation of Christ and our growth in holiness.

These are only a few ideas and basic principles for Christians who want to honour God intentionally in this area of their academic lives. Feel free to add ideas and thoughts in the comments – questions and comments are both welcome!

Chris R. Armstrong, Medieval Wisdom for Modern Christians: Finding Authentic Faith in a Forgotten Age with C. S. Lewis (Brazos Press, 2016)

From time to time at FiSch we review books that might either help you with the task of integrating your particular work with your faith, or which themselves are the result of that integration. This book, Medieval Wisdom for Modern Christians, falls into the second category. Written by Wheaton professor Chris R. Armstrong, it aims to counter the unhelpful assumptions and generalisations often made about medieval Christianity by evangelicals, and to open up some of the riches which this age of the Church can offer today.

As a doctoral student researching medieval religious literature, of course I’m somewhat biased when I say this book is important! Centrally, though, I think the book is a helpful (though not perfect) example of historical work done for the church, in a way which is well-grounded and researched but still accessible to the non-specialist Christian. Armstrong is explicit, even polemical, in his belief that ‘we must derive lessons for today from the study of history’, and he’s convinced that the view of the medieval Church current in modern evangelical circles, as well as being lacking in historical accuracy, is preventing us learning valuable lessons.

The book begins with a methodological chapter which is perhaps its most academic section. Armstrong discusses (from a chiefly US-based perspective) the reasons why the medieval period gets such short shrift from many modern Christians, taking us through a brief history of the developments that led to the impression, rife among evangelicals, that real Christianity essentially slept between the early church and the Reformation (or even until the eighteenth-century revivals). He also diagnoses the problems caused by the widespread ‘immediatism’ of today’s church – its desire for novelty, for simple solutions to present problems, its reliance on the ‘plain’ meaning of Scripture, and its emphasis on knowing God without mediation.

The body of the book is dedicated to exploring how aspects of medieval theology and practice can speak productively to these problems, describing key figures and institutions as well as lucidly explaining sometimes alien theological and social concepts. The topics covered are:

• Respect for and use of tradition
• Commitment to integrating reason with faith
• Precision when talking about virtue and vice
• Valuing the works of mercy
• Honour for and interest in the physical world
• Emotional engagement in religion
• Emphasis on understanding humanness through the Incarnation

I haven’t got space to go into all the interesting and edifying themes included here, from the invention of the hospital to the intense emotional practices of later medieval devotion: the book covers lots of important ideas, and for me Armstrong is largely convincing in his appeal for their rehabilitation, though you can make up your own mind!

The aspect I haven’t mentioned so far is the use Armstrong makes of C. S. Lewis. The second chapter discusses Lewis as one of the author’s heroes, and as a ‘modern medieval man’ who studied and loved medieval philosophy, theology and literature. Throughout the rest of the book, the material on the medieval period itself is intermingled with examples of Lewis’s understanding and uses of it in his writing and thinking.

This is part of Armstrong’s attempt to make his topic accessible and attractive to the average Christian reader, and to some extent it works, bridging the gap to the strangeness of the medieval world with the familiarity of Lewis’s popular theology and fiction. Personally, however, I found it distracting: the description and interpretation of Lewis often falls into uncritical idealisation (so common in evangelical circles), and I usually felt that Armstrong was more engaging and discerning when talking about his medieval subjects than about Lewis. The cynical part of me says that this aspect of the book was mostly intended to get sceptical readers on board with the main topic, but it doesn’t add much to the argument and makes the mistake of taking Lewis’s self-identification as a ‘medieval’ too seriously.

On the whole, however, I would recommend Medieval Wisdom to anyone interested in how the modern church can do its history – explicit and implicit – better. The book concludes with a chapter calling for the cultivation of a more thoroughly incarnational spirituality, countering the gnosticism of modern Western culture with medieval and other resources for integration of the whole person, and perhaps more controversially for the recovery of some kind of monastic ideal for the contemporary church. These are much debated topics today and Armstrong’s book is a readable and thoughtful contribution to that discussion, as well as a good introduction to parts of church history you or your church family may have overlooked.

I'm pleased to announce that the Church Scientific project, which began in Leeds in 2016, is beginning a new phase this month with a series of six workshops about Christian philosophy for scientists.  These will improve on the course that was delivered last year - thanks to input from last year's participants and a number of philosophers of science.

Church Scientific is an independent project with links to FiSch via myself, Dr David Hanson and Prof. Andrew Basden, three of this year's tutors; it also owes a great deal to the reformational philosophy tradition espoused by Thinking Faith Network. So I thought it might be helpful and interesting to preview some of the planned content of the Church Scientific curriculum here, and to bring it into dialogue with other readers and contributors of FiSch.  For example, we're currently part-way through a series by Richard Vytniorgu on the transactional perspective on science, which resonates well with the Church Scientific perspective and may well influence that project.  We also have an ongoing series on Christian perspectives on evolutionary biology, an area that was purposely avoided by Church Scientific last year but may be a little more visible this year.  And the new course will also draw upon Christian philosophy in diagrams - probably prompting some additions to that series.

Three key distinctives of Church Scientific were outlined in a post this time last year, but one of them deserves special emphasis here.  We are attempting to build a Christian philosophy of science, for scientists.  In denial of the memorable view that scientists need philosophy of science as much as birds need ornithology, we assume that scientists can benefit from a kind of philosophy that provides a framework for scientific activity.  This kind of philosophy might be seen as "meta-science": an analysis of what the sciences are and how they seem to work. And it's important to seek a Christian philosophy of science, linked to good theology, because if Jesus Christ is lord of the cosmos which is upheld by the word of God's power, then aligning our thinking with His wisdom should help us better understand its structure and workings.

The validity of this approach will be seen in whether it actually helps any practising scientists with their work.  So - if you know any scientist Christians in Leeds, or you are one yourself, here's an opportunity to be part of this investigation (see the web site for details).  The course overview is as follows:

1. Workshop 1: Christian Faith, Worldview and Philosophy of Science: What is science and why pursue it?

2. Workshop 2: Introduction to Aspectual Relations (an Ontology): What is there to know? How can we understand the complete dependence of the created order on God?

3. Workshop 3: Theorising and its Limits: “Theory” originally means “seeing” - but what can we hope to see without a God's-eye view? What's wrong with reductionism?

4. Workshop 4: Scientific epistemology and methods: What is scientific knowledge? What approach will align us with Lady Wisdom rather than the rebellion of Eden?

5. Workshop 5: Norms and Ethics So what is good science? After all, only God is good...

6. Workshop 6: Communicating christianly: How can we talk about scientific work and scientific beliefs in ways that promote harmony, mutual understanding and fellowship?

We'd welcome comments, connections and ideas about this plan. Further detail is available upon request!