On Being A Christian Academic

By William Lane Craig
Research Professor
Talbot School of Theology

This excerpt is based on a paper given by Dr. Craig at the Christian Faculty Leadership Network meeting in July 2003 and a plenary address delivered at the National Faculty Leadership Conference in Washington, D.C., June 2004, sponsored by Christian Leadership Ministries.

“The contemporary Western intellectual world,” writes the noted philosopher Alvin Plantinga, “is a battleground or arena in which rages a battle for men’s souls.”1 Christian academics, especially those who teach at secular institutions, are the Church’s front-line in this battle.

This is a front which is absolutely crucial for the advance of the Kingdom of God in our day. Why? Simply because the single most important institution shaping Western culture is the university.

The Gospel is never heard in isolation. It is always heard against the background of the cultural milieu in which one lives. A person raised in a cultural milieu in which Christianity is still seen as an intellectually viable option will display an openness to the Gospel which a person who is secularized will not. For the secular person you may as well tell him to believe in fairies or leprechauns as in Jesus Christ! Or, to give a more realistic illustration, it is like a devotee of the Hare Krishna movement approaching you on the street and inviting you to believe in Krishna. Such an invitation strikes us as bizarre, freakish, even amusing. But to a person on the streets of Bombay, such an invitation would, I assume, appear quite reasonable and be cause for reflection. I fear that evangelicals may appear almost as weird to persons on the streets of Bonn, Stockholm, or New York as do the devotees of Krishna.

The Need for Christian Scholars

It is part of the task of Christian academics to help create and sustain a cultural milieu in which the Gospel can be heard as an intellectually viable option for thinking men and women. The great Princeton theologian J. Gresham Machen rightly declared:

False ideas are the greatest obstacles to the reception of the gospel. We may preach with all the fervor of a reformer and yet succeed only in winning a straggler here and there, if we permit the whole collective thought of the nation to be controlled by ideas which prevent Christianity from being regarded as anything more than a harmless delusion. Under such circumstances, what God desires us to do is to destroy the obstacle at its root.2

The root of the obstacle is to be found in the university, and it is there that it must be attacked.

We desperately need evangelical scholars who can compete with secular scholars on their own terms of scholarship. Charles Malik, the late Lebanese statesman, in his address at the inauguration of the Billy Graham center at Wheaton College, warned American Christians of the danger of neglecting the mind. He asked pointedly:

Who among evangelicals can stand up to the great secular scholars on their own terms of scholarship? Who among evangelical scholars is quoted as a normative source by the greatest secular authorities on history or philosophy or psychology or sociology or politics? Does the evangelical mode of thinking have the slightest chance of becoming the dominant mode in the great universities of Europe and America that stamp our entire civilization with their spirit and ideas?3

Malik went on to say:

It will take a different spirit altogether to overcome this great danger. . . . For example, I say this different spirit, so far as philosophy alone--the most important domain for thought and intellect--is concerned, must see the tremendous value of spending an entire year doing nothing but poring intensely over the Republic or the Sophist of Plato, or two years over the Metaphysics or the Ethics of Aristotle, or three years over the City of God of Augustine. But if a start is made now on a crash program in this and other domains, it will take at least a century to catch up with the Harvards and Tübingens and the Sorbonnes—and by then where will these universities be? For the sake of greater effectiveness in witnessing to Jesus Christ, as well as for their own sakes, evangelicals cannot afford to keep on living on the periphery of responsible intellectual existence.4

These words hit like a hammer. Evangelicals have for the most part been living on the periphery of responsible intellectual existence. Where are the Christian historians, literary critics, physicists, sociologists? As Christian academics, we need to examine ourselves to see if we are contending effectively for the faith in our arena. If the university and, as a consequence, our culture is to be changed, evangelical academics need to exercise a leavening influence for Christ in their respective fields of expertise.

Endnotes.

1 Alvin Plantinga, “The Twin Pillars of Christian Scholarship” (Grand Rapids, Mich.:  Calvin College and Seminary, 1990).

2 Address delivered on September 20, 1912, at the opening of the 101st session of Princeton Theological Seminary.  Reprinted in J. Gresham Machen, What is Christianity? (Grand Rapids, Michigan:  Eerdmans, 1951), p. 162.

3 Charles Malik, “The Other Side of Evangelism,” Christianity Today (November 7, 1980), p. 40.  For Malik’s entire original address see The Two Tasks (Wheaton, Ill.:  Billy Graham Center, 2000).

4 Ibid.

William Lane Craig has authored or edited more than thirty books. He currently serves as president of the Evangelical Philosophical Society. Craig is well-known internationally as a lecturer on philosophy and apologetics and is considered to be one of the foremost debaters among evangelicals. His speaking schedule and many of his articles can be found at his virtual office: www.leaderu.com/offices/billcraig.

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