Personal Fears and Public Faith

Last week, New York state approved of same sex marriage. Regardless of what you think about that, it is astounding how the general public perception has changed in just 20 years.

In 1991, only about 18% of people in the US approved of same sex marriage. Polls show that 50% approve of it now. The work of a relatively few people who refused to be intimidated into silence by majority opinion has radically changed what two decades ago was an entrenched cultural assumption.

I thought about that as I read a recent study titled “Integrating Religious and Professional Identities: Christian Faculty at Public Institutions of Higher Education" which you can read here.

The study shows how these faculty members are working out how to integrate their faith with their public life which is one of the major values for Grad/Faculty Ministry.

It also gets back to some of the themes in Lesslie Newbigin’s book Truth to Tell, with which I started this blog.

Newbigin rejects what he calls the “false objectivity” sought by the Enlightenment, and he also rejects the “empty subjectivism” that reacts against it “where there are no criteria but anything goes” (p. 56). He calls that an "agnostic pluralism" in that no one claims that anything is true.

Instead, he calls for a “committed pluralism” which follows the lead of how science is done.

A scientist may commit to a theory or view she has come to believe is really true, yet she must present her findings to public scrutiny and testing against other viable theories in order to gain broad acceptance of her work. In the same way, Christians also must “bring our faith into the public arena, publish it, and put it at risk in the encounter with other faiths and ideologies in open debate and argument....” (p.60).

This approach acknowledges the personal, provisional nature of our understanding of what we believe is the truth “out there” and commits to engaging with it in the pluralistic environment of our culture. In doing so, we are open to the critique of others who may help us see the “excess baggage” we are carrying along with our faith, and we also open the way for others for whom religious ideas in general and Christian faith in particular have not had an influence to begin to see reality in a different way.

Unlike those comfortable with an "agnostic pluralism", Newbigin writes that Christians do have a truth to be shared and "we have to proclaim it as part of the continuing conversation which shapes public (life). It must be heard in the conversation of economists, psychiatrists, educators, scientists, and politicians…” (p. 64) in that our faith shapes and influences how we understand and how we do our work and life.

In short, our personal commitment to our faith has a public dimension. The basic Christian conviction is not “Jesus is my Lord” but “Jesus is Lord of all.” The reign of God involves all of life. As the faculty study shows, how we actually engage with this public dimension will differ in light of our personality, circumstances and opportunities, but all the faculty agreed that their faith is not just a private, internal matter.

Back to the same sex movement... At present, the faculty study shows that many academics feel silenced and fearful that their faith will be perceived negatively by peers and thus block their career progress. Perhaps another lesson should be drawn going back to the Civil Rights movement... are we participating in our own oppression by keeping silent??? Even though we are experiencing a major cultural shift regarding something as critical as marriage, do we presume that academic culture regarding its perception of religious faith cannot change???

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I’ll not be posting for a few days as we have two granddaughters visiting with us for a week starting tomorrow!

Laura's Questions

We have a summer fellowship with students from all the various professional and graduate schools. At these gatherings, we have one student share about why they have chosen the program of study they are in, what they have learned about God's work in their life in the process, and how is it challenging them.

This past Friday, Laura Hoover*, a PhD candidate in Chemical and Environmental Engineering shared. It was a very thoughtful and powerful time as she raised some critical issues, like:

Where do we find our identity?

How do we deal (can we deal?) with failure?

What does it mean to operate in a context that requires constant self-promotion?

How do we express our faith in an academic context where many people consider it irrational and irrelevant?

It stimulated a lot of discussion and prayer. Another student shared that the message he gets from his department is that his research is all that matters. The alternatives presented to him are to work 24/7 on the research or be a failure. There is no time to “waste” on developing a relationship with God … or with anyone. Marriage and family are off the table; there is just no time for those things. If your research is not always your #1 priority, someone else somewhere else is going to beat you to it.

Yesterday, I visited with a Yale medical school faculty who told me that just recently (she is in her 40’s) she is coming to realize that being “the best” is not actually all that important. Her realization came when she received the honor of being asked to present her research at a major conference. Her colleagues were congratulatory, but she noted that her internal response was pretty neutral. A short while later she received a note from her high school daughter’s teacher who commented on how much the teacher appreciated her daughter. Her internal response to that note was joy. That’s when she began to realize afresh that it is the relationships in her life that most matter, and that’s where she wants to place priority. She’s still a busy doctor; she’s still teaching, and she’s still doing research, but she’s had an internal re-orientation that plays out in her way of life.

Also related to this theme, a couple weeks ago a student sent me a link to a sermon by Tim Keller, pastor of the Redeemer Church in NYC*. The theme is the Sabbath, and in it there is one line which, while it is not a major point in the sermon, would be heard as hugely challenging – maybe outrageous - in the Yale context. He says something like, “If you want to follow Christ, you may not be able to be at the top of your career.”

Is it that stark?

How do we deal with the desire to do our best and contribute to our field, yet not let that be something that becomes self-destructive?

How do we keep the perspective that the goal in our work to bless the world, not to advance our reputation (or that of our advisor!)?

One thing I know for sure, it is these questions, as well as the others Laura raised, that are part of the “why” behind having Christian fellowships in the grad and professional schools!

* Thanks to Laura for permission to share this story. Info about her work is at: http://www.yale.edu/env/elimelech/People_Page/laura_hoover_page/laura_hoover.html

*The sermon is at http://sermons2.redeemer.com/sermons/work-and-rest

Evelyn's example

I’ve been writing in this blog about living out our faith in the context of our work and academics. Newbigin calls us to learn to do this from the starting point of God’s new creation in Christ which means we will view the world differently than from the viewpoint of the Enlightenment project. That was about objectivity, efficiency, calculations, technology, and cost benefit assessments that all too often has had the effect of marginalizing or oppressing actual people. As Christians, we know that pursuing those values alone can’t be the best way to operate.

Evelyn Lai, a May 2011 alumna from the Yale School of Nursing, gave the student commencement address to her class. In it, I think she models at least one dimension of what pursuing that profession from the perspective of God’s new creation is like. In so doing, she also sets an example that others of us can follow in our disciplines as well. In reflecting on her time at Yale she said:

“We’ve seen a number of infants and teenagers, moms and dads, grandparents and grandchildren, siblings and cousins…friends, best friends, partners. We’ve seen them cry in front of us out of fear and frustration, apprehension and anger,… and we’ve seen them cry with relief, delight, joy. We’ve smiled bravely, put a hand on their shoulder, plunged forward with our days. And gone back to our roommates and friends sniffling and crying over wine or tea.

Because more than assessments and plans, differentials and diagnoses, nursing is about relationships - is it not? It’s not only about health promotion and disease prevention, improvement of patient outcomes, and engagement in clinical research and policy-making. It’s not only about health disparities, hunger, homelessness, poverty. But about people. About communities. Families. Family members. Individuals. A person. You. Me.”*

I think Evelyn’s words apply to all manner of professions. We can and must use the best tools and resources available (using the best work of the Enlightenment project), but we also must go about our life and work in light of our conviction that every person we meet is an image-bearer of God whom we must honor and seek to serve as best we are able. The tools, theories and resources we have exist to serve people; people do not exist to serve them. It's a modern day parallel to Jesus' statement that "The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath." (Mark 2:27)

How might that impact the way grads teach the undergrads entrusted to them, the way lawyers serve their clients, the way managers run their departments, the way ministers relate to their congregations?

“So from now on we regard no one from a worldly point of view.” 2 Corinthians 5:16

*Thanks to Evelyn for permission to use this!

Speaking a new language

“We do not have all the truth, but we know the way along which truth is to be sought and found…” p. 34

“….most of us who are Christians have been brought up bilingual. For most of our early lives, through the accepted systems of public education, we have been trained to use a language which claims to make sense of the world without the hypothesis of God. For and hour or two a week we use the other language, the language of the Bible. But…the incarnate Word is Lord of all, not just of the church. There are not two worlds, one sacred and one secular. There are differing ways of understanding the one world and a choice has to be made about which is the right way, the way that corresponds to reality….” P. 49

Part of really learning the language of the Bible is living in the community of those who seek to live faithfully to the Lord it professes. Just as any language is best learned when one lives in the midst of people who speak that language, so it is with the language of Christian faith. So part of scholarship that seeks to be faithful means a committed involvement with a community of others who are seeking to live faithfully as well. Because of our bilingual existence and because of the dominant voice of the “no-God hypothesis”, we will need to set a priority on cultivating the language of faith in our lives.

Grad/Faculty ministry emphasizes four values: witness and service, spiritual formation, community, and integration of faith and academics. Newbigin would see them as inter-related, flowing into and out of one another, but they require an intentional choice on our part to develop them. Often, people think that matters of faith or spirituality ought to come ‘naturally’ as a response to an overwhelming sense of God. When that doesn’t happen, the assumption is that “I tried Christianity, but it didn’t work for me.” However, there is nothing in the Bible that gives us any reason to think that faithfulness comes easily! It’s not that Christian spirituality is difficult actually; it just calls us to a live by a radically different set of values than the dominant culture practices.

For example, in Luke 6:27-28, Jesus tells his followers to “love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who mistreat you.” This is “how much more” rhetoric in that if we are to treat even these sorts of people in this manner, how much more are these qualities to mark the way we live in general?

Using this as a guide, Christian faithfulness is not very complicated to describe: love, do good, bless, and pray. Yet choosing to live in this way will lead us along a path that will be markedly different from that which places top value on things like efficiency, power, financial success, and prestige.

Living Jesus’ way will deeply impact the way we relate to those with whom we work, the career choices we make, the priorities we set, the way we view the purpose of business, etc. Our starting point that the new creation has begun in Jesus guides us in this direction. The community of faith can help us live it out more and more faithfully. Living this way – personally and especially as a community - is what will offer to the world an example of an alternative way of life that reflects the light of Christ.

Living on the edge

When Newbigin talks about the need we face now to think in new ways in light of the demise of the Enlightenment agenda, he reminds us that past eras have presented similar situations and that Christians provided the intellectual resources to re-vision reality. His example is the classical Roman period in the 4^th century. Its internal conflicts had imploded such that cynicism and skepticism were the predominant approaches to life. Although the Classical period had generated much that was good in science, art, and philosophy, it no longer provided a coherent way to understand and live in the world. Newbigin credits St. Augustine as the person who opened the way for the Christian faith to become the new “plausibility structure” that would shape the future centuries of Western thought. Augustine, trained as a Classical scholar, did not reject classicism, but planted it in the new soil of his Christian faith. The tools of reason and rhetoric, so developed under classicism, were now put to the service of Augustine’s Trinitarian faith, the new starting point.

In the same way, Newbigin sees that the Enlightenment project has run its course. It too was the environment in which great gains were made especially in science, but it’s inability to speak meaningfully about the purpose of humanity and the abusive use of technological gains against the environment and against humanity itself has shown that The Age of Reason does not provide sufficient resources to produce a society that people actually want to live in. According to Newbigin, Christianity, with its starting point of God’s fresh creation through Christ, can incorporate the great gains of the Enlightenment without being bound by its limitations. The new starting point of the gospel opens the way for these gains to be rooted in new soil, just as had happened with Augustine.

That means that Christian scholars today live “on the edge;” we are living at the end of an era just like Augustine experienced. Given the widespread acknowledgement of the limits and failures of the Enlightenment project (even more recognized now then when Newbigin spoke 20 years ago), the way is open for Christian scholars to be like Augustine as we think afresh about how the story of the gospel opens the door for us to think and live that in a way that, while using the good tools and insights of the Enlightenment, moves beyond the limits of the stifling philosophy that marked it.

Perhaps the fact that we are at the end of an era is one reason the backlash of the “new atheism” has sprung up in the past half-decade. Richard Dawkins and company are concerned that the reaction against The Age of Reason is leading people to incredulous superstitions and an anti-intellectual way of life that will hamper scientific and social advancement. Of course, they see Christian faith as one of the most popular (and therefore most dangerous) of these superstitions and so especially weigh in against Christianity.

But as Newbigin writes, the way forward is not by becoming anti-intellectual or anti-science. Thoughtful Christians are right to share the new atheists concerns about religion and spirituality when used as a rationale for believing whatever one wants to believe about the world. One of the good things about Enlightenment science is that is rooted in the conviction that there is reality “out there” to be discovered; we are not left with simply subjective ideas. The Christian is likewise committed to the conviction that other sorts of truth about reality are also “out there,” truths in the realm of the spiritual dimension, of morality, and philosophy which today are widely considered to be hopelessly subjective and simply a matter of social conditioning. So, how do we live out our conviction about this truth “out there” without being written off as either being mindlessly subjective (“I feel it in my heart…”) or bound by dogma (“my church teaches….”)?

Living in the mix

" The various modes of worship which prevailed in the Roman world were all considered by the people as equally true; by the philosopher as equally false; and by the magistrate as equally useful.” Edward Gibbon, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, vol. I, ch. II:

Leslie Newbigin alludes to this quote as reflective of the situation in Western culture in our own day as well.

Spirituality is quite popular and accepted as long as it’s about how one attains some measure of interior, personal peace in a chaotic world.

The academic culture studies religion as a human phenomenon but is skeptical of the intellectual integrity of anyone who actually shapes their life by a particular faith. As one humanities professor at Bates College told me as he reflected on his conversion at the age of 50, “To acknowledge to my peers that I was now a Christian felt like I would be wearing a big sign on my forehead that said ‘I am stupid!’”

Politicians are glad to make alliances with religious movements that support their agenda with no intention whatsoever of actually endorsing the religion as uniquely true or becoming a committed member of that religion.

This is the mix in which we live. Many of us have a rich prayer and worship life and find strength, guidance and comfort from that. Yet we study and work in an environment that denies the reality of that core experience, or at least our understanding of its reality in terms of an actual relationship with the Living God. In light of the questioning we might receive when we speak of this experience, Newbigin writes, “What is really being asked is that we should show that the gospel is in accordance with the reigning plausibility structure of our society, that it accords with the assumptions which we normally do not doubt; and that is exactly what we cannot and must not do. ….we have to offer a new starting point for thought. The starting point is God’s revelation of his being and purpose in those events which form the substance of the Scriptures and which have their center and determining focus in…Jesus.” P. 28 Truth to Tell

So it is a question of where we ultimately place our trust. Will we lean on the current assumptions of our social and academic environment as expressing what is really true about the world and try to somehow fit our faith into that framework? Or will we lean on the assumption that in Jesus the new creation of God really is at work in the world and makes all things – even our approach to academics - new? As Newbigin says, we are not the first generation of Christians to face that sort of choice! Next time… a 4^th century cased study…

The New Creation

“….the opening words of the ministry of Jesus include the word metanoete. At the very beginning we are warned that to understand what follows will require nothing less than a radical conversion of the mind.” p. 9

“Some happenings which come to our notice may be simply noted without requiring us to undertake any radical revision of our ideas. The story of the resurrection of the crucified is obviously not of this kind… the simple truth is that the resurrection cannot be accommodated in any way of understanding the world except one of which it is the starting point… for a new way of understanding and dealing with the world.” pp.11-12

Truth to Tell, Leslie Newbigin

Professional and Graduate school programs live within a closed system. They all have a set of assumptions which they embody and pass on.

The sciences assume a purely naturalistic reality. As Newbegin writes, they focus on the matter of causes, but have no categories to talk about purpose.

Economic theory is based on entrenched assumptions about markets, the validity of which are questioned even from within the discipline itself (see http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=the-economist-has-no-clothes).

Evidence based medicine isn’t interested in stories of healing prayer, ruling them out of bounds since there is no way they can be measured or tested.

Even divinity students live in a world where the miraculous and supernatural are by and large rejected as plausible categories. Thus the feeding of the 5000 becomes not a story showing Jesus to be the one who provides manna in the wilderness, but a moralistic tale about how the little boy who offered his loaves and fishes is a model for sharing.

But we are called to live life from a different starting point. Our starting point of understanding reality is not the closed system of naturalism, but the in-breaking of God’s new creation, demonstrated in the first place by the resurrection of Jesus. Paul writes that in Christ, “…the new creation has come: The old has gone, the new is here!” (1 Corinthians 5:17). We often read this individualistically, but the point is not that the former sinner has now become a new creation, but that the fact of the sinner’s conversion is yet another sign of God’s new creation at work.

So what does it mean to go through graduate or professional school with a belief in God’s in-breaking presence in the world as our starting point for life? How will that impact why we study? How will that shape the way we approach our work? Those are questions I hope we explore.

Starting from “new creation” does not negate the insights of science, economic theory and the like that we inherit from the “old” way of life, but it places them in a new context. Just as Revelation 21:24 says that the kings of the earth will bring the splendor of the nations into the City of God, so too we now offer these disciplines to God in worship. The “closed system” of naturalistic assumptions becomes open to God. Who can tell what new life his Spirit may breathe into our work as a result?

This blog is about why...

It's about reminding and encouraging us to remember why we are here and why we are involved (as students, faculty, ministry staff, financial partners, or prayer supporters) in ministry on campus, specifically ministry at the level of graduate, professional, post doc and faculty.

I've been involved in campus ministry for almost 40 years, but only started with Grad/Faculty ministry this year and it's pushed me to think a lot about the "why" question. I hope these occasional postings will help us all keep that question alive and motivate us to keep "moving on" in the calling God has given to us. In the next couple of weeks I will be posting some reflections on this question as a result of reading a brief book by Leslie Newbigin titled "Truth to Tell: The Gospel as Public Truth," a collection of four talks he gave 20 years ago which are powerfully relevant for why we go about campus ministry today.

Why do we have Christian fellowships at the professional and graduate schools at Yale? Why try to form a faculty fellowship? Newbigin's insights suggests we do this because the gospel must address the public spheres of education, science, politics, law and business. Our default position is often that that fellowships are mainly for personal encouragement and mutual support during a stressful academic program. They do serve those roles, but God calls us to be about far more than that!

More next time...