Book Review: Scholarship and Christian Faith: Enlarging the Conversation, by Douglas Jacobsen & Rhonda Hustedt Jacobsen
In September 2004, some 150 faculty and administrators attended the "Faith in the Academy" conference at Messiah College in Grantham, PA. Featuring nationally prominent speakers like Lee Schulman and Robert Wuthnow, that conference used Scholarship and Christian Faith, edited and partly written by Douglas and Rhonda Jacobsen, as its reference point. This book is the product of three years of collaboration among the Messiah College faculty, and consists of five essays by the Jacobsens, each followed by an essay by a Messiah College faculty member.
This book and the 2004 conference represent a certain "maturing" of the vision for the integration of the Christian faith with the world of scholarship. It seeks to replace a simplistic approach to Christian scholarship with a broader and more nuanced one. More to the point, Scholarship and Christian Faith seeks to correct the perceived weaknesses in the "integration of faith and learning" as it is expressed within evangelical higher education. Noting that the most widely read proponents of the integration of faith and learning-Holmes, Wolterstorff, Plantinga, etal.-address it from a Reformed theological perspective, the contributors to this volume effectively challenge limitations of this approach. The essentially Reformed perspectiveon Christian scholarship is variously criticized for being too "tidy," too philosophical, too "forced," and too impersonal.
A number of useful ways are identified that might supplement or replace the Reformed approach. Following the lead of Ernest Boyer, the authors suggest that "the primary task of Christian scholarship is not to defend Christian truth against secular learning. . . .Instead. . . the power of Christian faith is best seen in the way faith motivates scholars to observe the world in all its interconnected wholeness and to offer their skills and insights" in service to the world. The Jacobsens illustrate the breadth of the approaches to faith and learning in their brief survey of the classic and current approaches to faith and learning among Roman Catholics, Lutherans, Wesleyans, Pentecostals, and Anabaptists, among others. Acknowledging that "our personal piety deeply affects our work as Christian scholars", they feel that Christian scholars should be "more self-conscious of their own spirituality and its relationship to the academic work they pursue."
If there is one point that resounds throughout this book, it is that our understanding of the role of Christian scholarship in the academy needs to acknowledge more of the complexities and nuances of both the Christian faith and the world of scholarship. The authors distinguish, for example, between three modes or styles of academic reflection: analytic scholarship (seeking to construct metal maps or models of the way reality is put together); strategic scholarship (focusing on understanding the world in order to reshape it); and empathetic scholarship (using the approaches of poets, artists, and others to try to narrow the gap between the knower and the known). Each of these has the potential to relate to the Christian faith-or rather, to one or another of the Christian traditions-in a different way.
This volume is an excellent example of Christian scholarship at its best: carefully documented, broadly informed, and willing to advance innovative approaches to conceptualizing the relationship between faith and the academy. It provides excellent examples of creative new ways that Christians can be faithful to their own faith traditions and yet effectively engage with and participate in the so-called "secular" academy. It will be most useful to scholars, administrators, and laymen who are conversant with some of the issues in the relationship between faith and learning, especially as it has taken place within the evangelical higher education community.