In April, the Grove City Evangelical Scholarship Conference will be most pleased to welcome Dr. Carl R. Trueman, professor of church history and academic dean at Westminster Theological Seminary (Philadelphia) and council member of the Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals. Below are excerpts of a recent writing by Trueman, in which he offers some very timely and pithy musings on evangelicals in academia, namely their pitfalls.
I, for one, will be very grateful to welcome Dr. Trueman here in a few months and hope that he sheds some light (if not some godly conviction) on us self-appointed academics (and the pomp and arrogance thereof) and cause us to re-think how our efforts are aiding the cause of the gospel or whether they are simply feeding our egos.
From Justin Taylor:
Carl Trueman, writing for 9Marks on The Real Scandal of the Evangelical Mind, writes about the kind of ambition that evangelicals should have:
[T]oo few evangelical academics seem to have much ambition. Perhaps this sounds strange: the desire to hold a tenured university position, to publish with certain presses, to speak at certain scholarly conferences, to be in conversation with the movers and shakers of the guild—these seem like ambitions that are all too common. Yet true ambition, true Christian ambition, is surely based in and directed towards the upbuilding of the church, towards serving the people of God, and this is where evangelical academics often fail so signally. The impact evangelical scholars have had on the academy is, by and large, paltry, and often (as noted) confined to those areas where their contributions have been negligibly evangelical. Had the same time and energy been devoted to the building up of the saints, imagine how the church might have been transformed.
He explains what he is and isn’t saying:
This is not to say that high-powered scholarship should be off-limits, nor that the immediate needs of the man or woman in the pew should provide the criteria by which relevance is judged; but it is to say that all theological scholarship should be done with the ultimate goal of building up the saints, confounding the opponents of the gospel, and encouraging the brethren. The highest achievement any evangelical theological scholar can attain is not membership of some elite guild but the knowledge that he or she has done work that strengthened the church and extended the kingdom of God through the local church.
Then he offers a prediction for the future of evangelical elites:
The day is coming when the cultural intellectual elites of evangelicalism—the institutions and the individuals—will face a tough decision. I see the crisis coming on two separate but intimately connected fronts. The day is coming, and perhaps has already come, when, first, to believe that the Bible is the Word of God, inspired, authoritative, and utterly truthful, will be seen as a sign at best of intellectual suicide, at worst of mental illness; and, second, to articulate any form of opposition to homosexual practice will be seen as the moral equivalent of advocating white supremacy or child abuse. In such times, the choice will be clear, those who hold the Christian line will be obvious, and those who have spent their lives trying to serve both orthodoxy and the academy will find that no amount of intellectual contortionism will save them.
Conclusion:
Years ago, Mark Noll wrote a book, The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind, in which he argued that the scandal was that there was no such thing. When it comes to evangelical scholars and scholarship, I disagree: the scandal is not that there is no mind; it is that these days there is precious little evangel.
No comments:
Post a Comment