The Outrageous Idea of Christian Scholarship

The Outrageous Idea of Christian Scholarship

Introduction

It is time to face the fact, long suppressed in the highest intellectual circles, that a religiously diverse culture will be an intellectually richer culture. It is time to recognize that scholars and institutions who take the intellectual dimensions of their faith seriously can be responsible and creative participants in the highest levels of academic discourse.

George Marsden (1997) intends The Outrageous Idea of Christian Scholarship to do no less than “take a step toward clarifying what the ancient enterprise of relating faith and learning might mean in the academy today” (preface). How can this be accomplished in a time when the university has lost the ability to have substantive conversation regarding not only religion, but also anything that goes beyond the practical to the larger issues of life? Marsden (1997) boldly asserts that the assumptions of our educational system should be re-examined, in particular our rejection of ancient religious learning and its bearing on what “one thinks about” (p.4).

In this volume, he delineates guidelines for religiously informed scholarship; guidelines that he believes will lead to scholarship that can be accepted as legitimate in the mainstream academy. Now this is quite outrageous! For although it is quite common for Marxists, feminists, gays, post-moderns, African-Americans, conservatives, and liberals to have a voice, the dominant university culture, even in the area of religious studies, trains academicians to suppress reflection on the intellectual implications of their faith. But Marsden adeptly argues that the same tenor of dialogue that enables these interest groups to come to the table provides the rationale for Christians to likewise boldly engage their fields. He appeals both to the skeptics and the religious to accept the role of faith in the vocation of the intellectual by explicating a robust Christian scholarship as a helpful alternative not only to the hollow secularism of mainstream academia but also to simplistic “fundamentalism.”

Marsden's claims

Marsden's first claim

Marsden's argument involves three claims. The first concerns the reigning ethos in 20th-century American universities, an ethos which Marsden calls "a virtual establishment of nonbelief." Scholars who are Christians are trained by the dominant academic culture to keep quiet about their faith as the price of full acceptance in the academic community. As a consequence, "something very much like 'secular humanism' is informally established as much as Christianity was in the 19th century." Marsden would readily grant that there are exceptions, such as Calvin College, where he once taught, or the University of Notre Dame, where he teaches now. But these only prove the rule, which is a surprisingly inflexible and widely prevalent insistence that faith and learning be kept apart(www.leaderu.com).

Marsden's second claim

Marsden's second claim is that this rule is unfair. Universities often make a considerable show of "celebrating diversity," but Christians are not welcome to stand under the diversity umbrella. Feminists, Freudians, Nietzscheans, Heideggerians and many others are admitted to the scholarly community without question, but not Christians. All that can reasonably be demanded ...