“The really important thing is to try and make opinion increasingly responsible to the facts. There can be no liberty for a community which lacks the information by which to detect lies.”

—Walter Lippmann, Public Opinion

Despite our culture’s negative associations with the word, doubt is not something to be simply avoided. Doubt plays a key role in detecting truth, among other things, providing the impetus to identify falsehoods. The process of research, which is foundational to learning, actively involves creating and pursuing doubt. This is especially true in the context of Christian higher education where we seek both common truths that can and should be shared by all, as well as the particular truths that come via revelation.

In other words, doubt is central to our mission as Christian educators. To fulfill our mission, we must embrace the role of doubt in the educational process, teaching students to both invite and manage doubt for the sake of a high-quality education, deeper student formation, and the pursuit of our goals to have and convey an authentic understanding of our world.

Research stems from questioning, which I contend is itself an act of piety. Piety? Certainly, as its impetus is rooted in the very beginning of scripture: “God created the heavens and the earth.” This would be an unexceptional affirmation in most any church. But such an affirmation presents several follow-on consequents that are not so readily accepted: since God created the heavens and the earth, God therefore works in and through the natural world. If this is true, then God works through natural processes. This invites us to ask questions about the natural world and about God Himself. Many are conditioned to only see God at work in a miraculous, instantaneous overpowering of nature, and this view has worked in parallel with and fed into the anti-intellectualism that has marked so many cultures. Despite what some would tell us, such a view is not a hallmark of a mature, Christian-formed culture but a blatant rejection of the divine mandate. It is arguably a form of impiety.

To take seriously God as creator of nature requires a commitment to studying natural processes, whether physical and biological or human and relational. By investigating the processes of the world, we not only probe the book of nature, but we also develop the habits of mind and vision for understanding the work of God. While it is not incumbent for all to engage in these investigative activities, it is incumbent for that part of the body of Christ called to education; it is incumbent for educators who believe they should seek God and pursue a life with divine purpose.

When considering how we discover the work and nature of God, earlier traditions of Christian thinkers distinguished between God’s essence and His activity. It is not within our ability, they maintained, to understand much of the essence of God, except those small bits illuminated in His revelations to us through scripture, the first book. And even our understanding of revelation is of course limited, as God is infinite and beyond our imagination. Our reading of that book is clouded by the inexactitude of human language, the inability of human writers to fully fathom divine mysteries, and yet God’s revelations in scripture are nonetheless true and valuable, leading to a fuller unveiling of truth.

But we can also know something more, complementary and additional, through attention to God’s activity or “energy.” This requires skill, sensitivity, scrutiny, and the like. To reject the study of God’s activity is tantamount to a rejection of a substantial part of God’s gift to us, the tools He has given us by which we can know Him and carry out His purposes. To suggest that God only works by instantaneous miracle and not by the natural processes He instituted is in fact a form of impiety!

At its core, Christian higher education seeks to understand and communicate the natural processes while offering formation to those who study these processes. This is why research is an essential activity—not an optional add-on when convenient. Our mission depends on research. Our commitment to investigating the world is a central formative activity for the students, alongside the vital work that takes place in chapels and through student life. Simultaneously, research is formative for faculty and the broader community—the families of our students, their churches, our denominations, and the common good.

In a society that currently questions and undermines the value of pure and, increasingly, applied research, and where support for research is therefore diminishing, it is incumbent for leaders of Christian higher education to step up to prophetically challenge the impiety of rejecting God’s work in and through nature. Investment in the leadership of Christian higher education requires the formation of leaders who deeply understand the doctrine of creation and hence possess a commitment to cultivating a research-minded culture. These essential leaders of the future will recognize the qualities of character that inform healthy research and its role in student formation. They will share their confidence in divine providence, which plays out through a commitment to training researchers. Here, I’m not strictly speaking of training professional researchers—future academics—though some leaders will surely do so, and it has been my pleasure to contribute to the development of academics here in Oxford. Instead, I am concerned with the broader student community who would deeply benefit from training in research, but who may never go on to advanced education and professional teaching.

Why is this training so essential? Learning to ask good, answerable questions and developing a commitment to truth, a commitment to honestly assessing one’s own findings—despite one’s predilections, comfort, and easy certainties—is essential, both to being fully human and to establishing a healthy body politic. It is central to authentic faith in Christ. These skills are vital in service of the entire body of Christ. In a culture that increasingly values assertions over evidence, dismissiveness over persuasion, and power over service, casual cruelty seems more evident than self-sacrifice and generosity of spirit. A healthy attention to the formative role of research solves this, too. It encourages and teaches empathy, recognizes the uncertainty that attends our perceptions and the provisionality of many of our commitments. Hence, practiced well, research is a path to both knowledge and humility. Recognition of the two books—Scripture and Nature—enriches our apprehension of the divine and develops habits of mind that vitally impact and shape the character of people and institutions.

This leads to a counterintuitive affirmation: Christian higher education should lead to the affirmation of (certain kinds of) doubt! Doubt? Can the faithful Christian entertain doubt? Surely not… look at Thomas, after all! Yes, indeed, let’s look at Thomas and his doubts. Let’s look at Moses, Job, David, Hosea. For these faithful followers and countless other figures throughout the Bible, doubts ultimately enabled them to recognize that God worked in ways well beyond their expectations and their own human limitations.

We are not called to doubt God, or to be cynical, but doubt has an important role to play in our lives. We should be among those who doubt our institutions, our culture, our communities. We should especially live with a dose of self-doubt. We should, without cynicism, apply the benefit of doubt to the secular as well as the more sacred elements of our society. If one doubts, one begins to ask serious questions—questions that can orient us to seeing the work of God in new and expansive ways. In this way, doubt is not a simple enemy. It can be the opportunity. For the future of Christian higher education, and the world beyond, we need leaders who can invite and model healthy doubt, in order to support the essential investigations that doubt will produce.

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Stanley P. Rosenberg, Ph.D serves as the vice president for research and scholarship at the CCCU.