About
The Gap
The Gospel and Academia Project seeks to strengthen an evangelical contribution to the wider faith-and-scholarship conversation in the UK and mainland Europe by providing a dedicated space for those whose primary confessional commitments are clear but who would like to help each other fill what is often perceived as a ‘gap’ when it comes to an evangelical concentration in this arena.
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In the face of Western secularism and global Islam we are convinced that the renewal of a Christian intellectual vision will benefit the world and glorify Christ.
In the ecumenical ‘faith-and-scholarship’ conversation important contributions are made from scholars drawing on Roman Catholic, Eastern Orthodox and ‘liberal’ theological traditions.
But within this wider conversation, where might a distinctively evangelical contribution be fostered? While we have much in common with the other Christian traditions, how should our shared values sit alongside the evangelical student movements’ historic doctrinal clarity on the gospel and the importance of evangelism?
How can evangelicals partner together in this space, with mutual confidence that we are not pushing anti-intellectual nor post-evangelical trajectories? What does it mean to place the gospel at the centre of our paradigm for academia?
The Project
We are writing, commissioning and collating resources for students and university ministry staff which we will start making available via this website over the course of 2025.
Some of these resources will focus on three foundational questions which are especially relevant to the cultivation of evangelical fellowship among students and university ministries. These questions are:
- Shared Confession: why is a classical, Protestant and evangelical confession both appropriate and credible to undergird our fellowship in a shared mission and ethos?
- Shared Mission: how can we best articulate the both/and of Christian scholarship and academic evangelism, keeping these both integrated and distinct so that we pursue both without confusion?
- Shared Ethos: how can we ensure we are neither anti-intellectual nor liberalising, but that we act with humility under Scripture, being clear on the theological epistemological principles that foster unity around matters of first importance, encourage healthy discussion, and allow for godly disagreement on other matters?
Resources related to these three key questions can be found here: Theological vision and values.
Other resources will focus on issues in particular academic disciplines as well as more practical matters that European evangelical students and academics grapple with in twenty-first century academic life. Those resources can be found in the Library.
Collaborating Partners
The resources generated by each of the collaborating partners through GAP are made available to all the other partners and shared here for the benefit of the wider church.
See here for more about the collaborating partners.
Advisory Group
The advisory group’s first meeting took place at Tyndale House, Cambridge, with a strongly theological weighting in order to focus on first principles. As we now move to the next phase and build on our theological foundations the group’s role is in the process of being reframed and evangelical academics in a broader range of disciplines are being added.
Director of Crosslands Forum, contributing editor of Themelios, former Director, Oak Hill Theological College.
Head of the Department of Pharmaceutical/Medical Chemistry and Clinical Pharmacy at the Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg, Germany.
CEO of Agora Christi Foundation, Founder and Chair of the C.S. Lewis & Kindred Spirits Society for Central and Eastern Europe, and Lecturer at Alexandra Ioan Cuza University of Iaşi, Romania.
Director of the Institut fur Glaube und Wissenschaft, of the Studentenmission in Deutschland (SMD) - the German national movement of IFES.
Professor of Evolutionary Genomics, Queen Mary University of London and a NERC Merit Researcher, Royal Botanic Gardens Kew.
Associate Professor of French Studies at Monash University, Melbourne. Author of a number of books including on Foucault, Derrida, Ricoeur, and Biblical Critical Theory.
Professor of Jurisprudence, University of Bristol Law School and editor-in-chief of the Oxford Journal of Law and Religion.
Visiting Tutor at the Cambridge Christian Study Centre, and formerly L'Abri International chairman
Professor of Theological Studies, Union University, Professor of Philosophy and Theology, Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, chairman of the Tyndale House Scripture and the University Seminar, author of The Gospel and the Mind.
Director of the Kirby Laing Centre in Cambridge, author of many titles including Biblical Hermeneutics and The Drama of Scripture: Finding our Place in the Biblical Story.
Professor of Physics at the University of Oslo, Norway and elected member of the Norwegian Academy of Technological Sciences.
Contact
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