Wolterstorff visits Redeemer

This morning we Redeemer faculty were privileged to have Nicholas Wolterstorff speak to us. Wolterstorff is professor emeritus at Yale Divinity School, taught for thirty years at Calvin College, and has written far too many books and articles to list here, including Until Justice and Peace Embrace (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1983) and Divine Discourse (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). He spoke to us on why the notion of integrating faith and learning is not a good model for a christian academic institution. The following is based on my (admittedly fallible) recollection of his remarks.

In laying out his argument he described two prevalent models and argued for a third alternative.

1) Competence plus theology and apologetics. Up until two or three decades ago this was the dominant model at many christian institutions. Faculty were encouraged to develop a competence in their respective fields that would gain them respect among their colleagues elsewhere. Typically the president of the university would teach a capstone course in the curriculum that would draw on the various disciplines for purposes of christian apologetics. However, there was no expectation of an intrinsic connection between one’s faith and one’s academic discipline.

2) Integration of faith and learning. This model presupposes two distinct things needing to be bound together, as if by twine. A variation of this model has people undertaking the “theology of” this and that. Even here there is no inner connection between one’s religious worldview and the field of study. Christian colleges and universities, particularly in the States, adopted this around a generation ago, mostly under Reformed influence.

3) Academic disciplines as social practices. This is Wolterstorff’s favoured model. It assumes that the various disciplines are on-going enterprises within which the individual scholar takes up his or her place. The fields of study are hardly neutral but presuppose the presence and activity of religious worldviews affecting their development over time. Christians should have no illusions about remaking the disciplines from scratch, but should be engaging these worldviews in the course of their work. The implications of this engagement are that Christians need to keep alive a rich christian intellectual heritage and to tell the stories of the disciplines rightly. The real test of christian learning is fidelity, and not difference as such. Sometimes the results of christian scholarship will be different, but often they will be the same. When they are the same, we properly thank God that unbelievers are doing something right.

Wolterstorff will be speaking at our graduation ceremony tomorrow afternoon.