Vision & Values (old)
Vision
The Gospel and Academia Project seeks to strengthen an evangelical contribution to the wider faith-and-scholarship conversation 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.
Values
The Gospel and Academia Project seeks to strengthen an evangelical contribution to the wider faith-and-scholarship conversation 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.
Mission
Shared Confession
Who are we in the university?
We believe that Jesus is the Christ the Son of God, and that by believing we have life in his name. To those who believed he gave the right to be called children of God. As people of this gospel – or the ‘evangel’ – we find our identity in him who is ‘our representative and substitute’, as our statement of faith puts it. What does this mean? Our doctrinal statement provides our point of reference for unity as the International Fellowship of Evangelical Students. The use of the word ‘evangelical’ dates from the earliest generations of church history, and was used frequently during the time of the Reformation. In some contexts today it is used sociologically or politically and this can be confusing. We are using the word with particular reference to our doctrine.
What our Doctrinal Basis Is and Is Not
Scripture models the use of mini-confessions where key tenets of the faith are listed out in a brief form (cf. John 1:1-18, 20:31; Rom 1:2-5; 1 Cor 15:3-7; 1 Tim 1:15 & 3:16; Phil 2:6-11; Col 1:15-20; Heb 1:1-4). Their points are like tent pegs – they are not the whole tent: they are not expected to set out a full intellectual vision or clarify our mission. But they are the points which together secure the whole. Because they are so important these foundational truths come under significant attack (1 John 2:22; Gal 1:6-10; Phil 3:2; 2 Pet. 3:16; 2 Tim 2:17, 3:13-17). Our evangelical confession is classical, Protestant and non-denominational:
- Being classical it is fully in line with the ecumenical creeds.
- Being Protestant means it includes important clarifications around the gospel and the doctrine of Scripture which were the fruit of the Reformation.
- In this context its being non-denominational means it encourages unity in mission by holding back from taking certain positions on secondary matters such as baptism or church government.
Our doctrinal confession is relevant
Our mission and doctrine are closely linked. While there is much to be learned from other traditions, our own focus is to cultivate the evangelical mind, so that a clear gospel-centred intellectual perspective can contribute to the wider ‘faith and academia’ conversation. In some of those contexts briefer creeds have been chosen, such as the Apostles’ Creed or the Nicene Creed. While we of course affirm these creeds we are grateful that our confession also includes the following key elements:
- Scripture as our supreme authority. Of course we can and should learn from other sources, but Scripture alone is the inspired word of God, and is therefore to function as the supreme means through which God guides us as we carry out our mission by his Spirit.
- Christ’s bearing of the punishment for our sin is central to our mission and ethos. The offence of the cross is foolishness to the unbelieving mind but to us it encourages the intellectual humility we need for good academic work. God’s justice expressed at the cross is Scripture’s clearest signal that we live in a stable and meaningful universe where actions have significance such that divine forgiveness requires Christ’s death.
- Justification by faith alone is directly relevant to the content of the gospel (of God’s free grace, not of works), the way we share the gospel (using words by necessity, because justification is only by union with Christ, who is not physically present in this age), and the positional basis on which we as Christians undertake our royal stewardship over God’s creation (our humanity is restored through his resurrection as the Last Adam).
As the church encounters new questions or challenges – sometimes on topics not included in our doctrinal statement – church history shows that the characteristic response of faithfulness is to work internally together on clarifications which help us to apply our historic confession consistently in a changing world.
Shared Mission
What are we doing in the university?
We turn to the second of three foundational areas over which agreement has proved to be essential for fruitful evangelical partnership together in the academic ministry arena. Although we might agree together in essential doctrine, we are still liable to be working at crossed purposes unless we are clear on what we are trying to achieve together. Referring only to the ‘integration’ of faith and scholarship can be so vague as to result in misunderstandings and even in strained relationships. And if we are talking about evangelism, what does this have to do with the university?
Clarity in our shared purpose
Serving God in the context of our work, we pursue a twofold mission:
- From Christ to our work. The gospel shapes our academic work, so in the light of Scripture we contribute to the university for the common good in this age; and
- From our work to Christ. Our work can help us share the gospel: we trace the way reality points to God, bringing both its praises and our colleagues from our fields of study to the Lord Jesus who is in the age to come.
According to the first part, we are sent out each week from our local church into our studies. Here we pursue creation’s flourishing, working excellently and serving the good of the university under Christ’s Lordship, seeing the world more clearly through the lenses of Scripture, and so working from a Christian worldview. We don’t work in a way which second-guesses our work’s future usefulness for evangelism, and evangelism as such is not part of our work as a university student. On the contrary, we are doing good works which are the fruit of the gospel in our lives, echoing the royal stewardship on God’s behalf given to humanity in the beginning.
Conversely, as we become familiar with God’s world, we see more clearly how it exists from God and for God, and how it is now in need of Christ. So as we talk about our work – often with friends and colleagues outside and around our seminars and lecture halls – we will want to unfold it organically in a way which draws attention to Christ, both as we praise God for our field of work and as we bring others with us on our weekly return to church. We will want to show how Christianity offers the best explanation for reality as we know it, and humbly encourage our friends to repent in order to find rest in a restored relationship with the one from whom, and for whom all things exist. This evangelistic activity – creatures bringing our fellow creatures back to our Creator – has a priestly character which echoes Paul’s description of his own missionary activity (Rom 15:16).
Our mission in context
Clarity of mission is especially important owing to the fall-out from the modern West’s sacred-secular divide, which means it is not always easy to know how to relate our studies (and work more generally) to our evangelism. These can either become unrelated activities which polarise one another, or they can become confused together, leaving our understanding of both being somewhat amorphous and ineffective.
Understanding our overall mission as a single responsibility with two aspects helps us to remember that both elements share the same reality and should be informed by the same biblical thought-world.
At the same time, the specificity of these two aspects demands that we consider each context carefully. Sometimes it will be more appropriate to focus on implementing a good piece of work, and at other times it will be a great opportunity to speak about that work in its wider context, and how it makes best sense in relation to Christ. It is rare that both outcomes can be achieved in precisely the same moment or activity, and so we prayerfully ask help to use each opportunity wisely, including as we plan activities with particular purposes in mind.
As we serve God from Christ and to Christ, we celebrate his identity as the Alpha and the Omega, the First and the Last, the Beginning and the End, our Origin and Goal, from whom, through whom and to whom are all things.
Shared Ethos
How do we pursue our mission together?
We are committed to learning together with integrity: where our approach and attitude is consistent with our evangelical confession and mission. Christ is our model. As we look at his humble, faithful love to us in the gospel – the Word made flesh – we see the consistency of God’s revelation in both creation and redemption.
This integrity is important because modernity’s sacred/secular divide has not only separated university evangelism from our engagement with the university’s work (cf. our mission), but it has also created the conditions in which it is possible to have affirmed an evangelical statement of faith for years without working through its implications for our academic approaches and attitudes. So when Christianity and our academic work are brought back into conversation we sometimes discover tensions between trajectories which are perceived to be either anti-intellectual or theologically liberalising. A consistently evangelical alternative offers a unifying stance which both advances our pursuit of knowledge and builds trust between us.
Integrity in the way we learn
Our mission and our confession have implications for the way we learn (an evangelical epistemology).
Our mission calls us to relate Christ and our work: so we take our academic field seriously and we take Scripture seriously – moving from one to the other and back again, as each helps us appreciate the other. This positive view of learning arises because God speaks to us through the creation he has made (‘general revelation’) and through Christ in the gospel – now principally held out to us through Scripture and the Spirit’s work in our minds helping us to understand it (‘special revelation’).
Instead of being ‘anti-intellectual’, with a largely negative or fearful stance toward education, we recognise that all our knowledge and our reasoning powers are a gift of God, which he wants us to use in dependence on him. Our “faith seeks understanding” (to quote Anselm’s Augustinian motto, with the emphasis our own). This gives us a humble confidence as we engage in genuine learning, and a willingness to reassess both our interpretation of the world and our interpretation of Scripture, as general and special revelation are mutually informing and mutually interpreting.
Our confession reminds us that this spiral of interpretation is not symmetrical however: it is the gospel which is the power of God for salvation to those who believe. Christ is the Word in creation but the climax of divine communication is he was made flesh. Everything was created through him as an act of God’s self-communication. But while the fall has impaired the effectiveness of this general revelation, God’s special revelation of Christ in Scripture by the Spirit re-opens our blind eyes and changes our hearts. Whereas the creation is fallen, including our own natural minds, we have been born again by God’s word and by the Holy Spirit who is transforming us and our thinking. This faith we confess is a gift from God, and this confession identifies us with Christ and with his church through the ages. It is this “faith” which “seeks understanding”. So just as no-one comes into the world as a blank page, we too have a starting point and an end goal:
- As Christians we have been sent out into our academic fields from the local church, under Christ’s supreme authority mediated by Scripture, through which lenses we are to see and interpret the world.
- Christ is not only our starting point but he is also the ultimate end of his creation. So the signposts, questions and longings of creation find their fulfilment in the gospel of Christ held out in Scripture, which often reframes our questions themselves.
In both of these core activities Scripture functions as our supreme authority, as described by our confession. So just as we are not anti-intellectual (see above), neither are we post-evangelical or theologically liberalising. We do not relate ‘academia’ or ‘science’ and ‘religion’ as if they are just two equal sources which offer complementary voices to one another.
The danger of presenting ‘academia’ and ‘religion’ as two symmetrical sources is not only one of category confusion but also that it does not do justice to the impact of the fall and the power of the gospel. It is liable to result in a circle of interpretation which, ironically, becomes asymmetrical in the other direction, led by the culture around us.
Integrity in the way we learn together
This integrity also has implications for the way we learn together (an evangelical ethic).
Humility: The insight that all knowledge arises from God’s revelation carries ethical implications, especially a distinctive humility against academic arrogance where ‘knowledge puffs up’, and a desire to make more of Christ and less of ourselves. It will also include a confidence in God’s gifts and work which contrast with the scepticism or despair which results from a purely naturalistic account of knowledge. Working with others in our wider task under God, we will risk sharing our own research while also giving credit where it is due. We will also recognise the limits of our own field and, when asking bigger questions, seek deliberately to pursue interdisciplinary thinking, especially with evangelical theology.
Faithfulness: This humility calls us to do full justice both to God’s general revelation and his special revelation. We have long-term confidence that there will be no final conflict between them when all the facts are known. But in the near-term we might be unsure whether something requires us to revise our academic model, our theological model, or both. In such cases integrity demands that we do not rush to adopt or propound inadequate answers, and that we should be willing if necessary to suspend our judgement. But this is not a mandate for agnosticism because the history of the church has shown that significant questions will result in the helpful clarification of our teaching. In the meantime we continue to hold to our faith, giving priority to what we believe Scripture teaches as it has been passed down to us through the ages, and we humbly admit that our faith continues to seek understanding.
Love: We also seek to ascribe this desire for faithfulness to other Christians as we seek to relate Christianity and scholarship.
- When as scholars we propose our own creative academic ideas we will serve others by flagging anything which may seem to raise question marks as to its consistency with the historic teaching of the church.
- When describing others’ ideas we will describe them at their best, avoiding ‘straw man arguments’.
- Where we disagree we will not exaggerate in order to write them off. Rom 14:10 warns us not to ‘judge’ our brother or sister, nor to ‘treat them with contempt’. Instead, we will reaffirm points of agreement, including where appropriate, our common biblical methodology. Wherever possible we will allocate disagreements to the level of localised judgement calls being made further down the decision tree, rather than allow them to be magnified as evidence that someone is either characteristically anti-intellectual or theologically liberal.
- We will interpret another’s work as their act of worship ‘to the Lord’ (Rom 14:6). Not that we should refrain from being good academics: it is right for us to scrutinise one another’s work. But our shared gospel shapes the way we go about the exercise in certain contexts, as Scripture teaches us to treat one another with gentleness and warns us not to let our knowledge or conduct to destroy ‘the one for whom Christ died’ and who is seeking to be faithful to his conscience for the Lord’s sake (1 Cor 8:11, Rom 14:15).
Doctrine
Our initial priorities concern three foundational questions which are especially relevant to the cultivation of evangelical fellowship between academics and university ministries.
We are inviting and commissioning theologically-weighted contributions for Christian scholars around the following starting points:
Common Mission:
how best to articulate the both/and of Christian scholarship and academic evangelism, keeping these both integrated and distinct so that we pursue both without confusion.
Common Ethos:
neither anti-intellectual nor liberalising, but 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.
Common Doctrine:
exploring why a classical, Protestant and evangelical confession is both appropriate and credible to undergird our fellowship in a shared mission and ethos.
Ethos
The Gospel and Academia Project seeks to strengthen an evangelical contribution to the wider faith-and-scholarship conversation 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.
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?
Research & Development
Our initial priorities concern three foundational questions which are especially relevant to the cultivation of evangelical fellowship between academics and university ministries.
We are inviting and commissioning theologically-weighted contributions for Christian scholars around the following starting points:
Common Mission:
how best to articulate the both/and of Christian scholarship and academic evangelism, keeping these both integrated and distinct so that we pursue both without confusion.
Common Ethos:
neither anti-intellectual nor liberalising, but 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.
Common Doctrine:
exploring why a classical, Protestant and evangelical confession is both appropriate and credible to undergird our fellowship in a shared mission and ethos.
Advisory Group
Our advisory group’s first meeting took place at Tyndale House, Cambridge, in 2018 with a strongly theological weighting in order to focus on first principles. The group’s role is in the process of being reframed and evangelical academics in a broader range of disciplines are being added.
Professor of Physics at the University of Oslo, Norway and elected member of the Norwegian Academy of Technological Sciences.
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 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.
Visiting Tutor at the Cambridge Christian Study Centre, and formerly L'Abri International chairman
Professor of Jurisprudence, University of Bristol Law School and editor-in-chief of the Oxford Journal of Law and Religion.
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 Evolutionary Genomics, Queen Mary University of London and a NERC Merit Researcher, Royal Botanic Gardens Kew.
Director of the Institut fur Glaube und Wissenschaft, of the Studentenmission in Deutschland (SMD) - the German national movement of IFES.
Seven Key Biblical Themes
Introduction
A difficulty for Christian students
Students can find it hard to know how to connect their Christian faith with their academic work. Some undergraduates might wondering if they should do only the bare minimum required to pass their degree, and spend the rest of their time on church and organising evangelistic events with their local Christian student group? Or should they really commit themselves to their studies? But if so, where does evangelism fit in? Other students might easily feel discouraged by the difficulty of their academic work. How should we encourage a doctoral student who struggles with feeling their research is futile? Does their work have any value or significance in the context of God’s wider purpose for the world?
We may know intuitively that both academic work and sharing the gospel are important to God, but why is this, and how can we explain the relationship between them to students?
When it goes wrong
Evangelism and academic work can sometimes be positioned as wholly separate endeavours, which simply compete for time. This leads to a range of problems. On the one hand, an approach to evangelism which takes no account of what it means to be human (including our culture-shaping vocation, which chiefly, for students, is the work of the university) is likely to come across as irrelevant and unpersuasive, making claims and providing answers which seem not to be grounded in our shared reality with our fellow-humans. Conversely, a view of academic work which is not considered to be part of our service to God, under his authority, is likely to be pursued in a way that is shaped primarily by secular assumptions rather than by a Christian worldview.
Some may respond to this sense of polarisation by seeking to fold one activity into the other. So we may feel that it is by doing good work, shaped by the Christian intellectual tradition, that we fully discharge our responsibility to God within the university, allowing this to be our witness to Christ, with no need to intentionally share the gospel. Conversely, others, especially undergraduates, may somehow believe that the best way to do God’s work at university is to do as much evangelism as possible, and to sacrifice ‘worldly’ things like academic excellence.
Rejecting these extremes, we might seek to hold a both/and approach – seeking to affirm both good scholarship from a Christian worldview, and a clear evangelistic witness at university. But we may still find ourselves lacking the categories or language to keep these appropriately integrated in practice. Ironically, in the world of Christian ministry among academics, the word ‘integration’ has sometimes been used as a shorthand to refer to the practice of pursuing one’s academic work from a Christian worldview, without integrating a clear account of how this activity relates to our responsibility for evangelism.
Where we want to get to
We want to pursue terminology and practices which reject the language of ‘either/or’ and speak of ‘both/and’. We want to do it in such a way that enables our evangelism and our academic work to enrich one another while remaining clearly distinct. One way of summarising this aspiration is found in the earlier part of this booklet, under the statement of our ‘shared mission’:
“Serving God in the context of our work, we pursue a twofold mission, moving:
- From Christ to our work. The gospel shapes our academic work, so in the light of Scripture we contribute to the university for the common good in this age; and
- From our work to Christ. Our work can help us share the gospel: we trace the way reality points to God, bringing both its praises and our colleagues from our fields of study to the Lord Jesus who is in the age to come.”
But some problems run much deeper than the simple need for a mission statement.
A deeper problem
The problem we have outlined is symptomatic of a deeper challenge – applying not only to Christian students but, ultimately to all those in the workplace, whether they are Christians or not. What is the purpose, value and significance of our work under the sun? Those of us who are Christians may not have received much teaching on the subject. Many of us still live with the hangover of modernity’s impact on the church, where we have too often allowed our lives and teaching to be divided between the ‘sacred’ and the ‘secular’, as if God has nothing to say about our work from Monday to Friday. Indeed our difficulty might be compounded by the awareness of our ‘sacred’ duty to share the gospel with colleagues: how does this duty relate to our work itself?
Given the universal character of the problem we have outlined, our service to students must begin with a broader and deeper conversation about work and evangelism, and in a way that speaks the theological language of the evangelical churches that our students attend.
Plotting the co-ordinates of a biblical response
Our conviction is that the whole counsel of Scripture is relevant to the questions raised here – from the doctrine of God through to the role of the local church. This is not a time for one text of Scripture taken in isolation from the whole teaching of the Bible, or from the history of the church’s organised reflections on it. But we are also confident that nothing ‘new’ needs to be said. Our task consists in laying out what is already familiar from faithful Bible teaching but arranging it in a way that shows its relevance to the problem at hand.
The outline that follows does not address students themselves but seeks to help the theologically-educated around them navigate the problem using seven familiar evangelical teaching as co-ordinates of a roadmap. Space is limited: the aim is not to teach theological points but to relate them, and to provide a conceptual overview to help us structure and clarify our thinking – within which it may be valuable for individuals to be helped through specific biblical passages on work, wisdom and witness. Its mode is not pastoral but it provides a broad systematic overview in order to integrate the wide sweep of the Bible’s teaching. But this does make it especially relevant to those working in the university institution, which by definition seeks to relate and arrange material across the whole scope of human research and experience. While this material draws on the riches of the Christian theological tradition we have chosen not to add quotations or cite individual theologians to illustrate the material as it would have been difficult to know when to stop!
This is a consultation exercise. Our aim is to serve the unity of the church by laying out the way seven essential theological categories fit together underneath our ‘shared mission’. In short, it could be seen as an extended reflection of what it means for Jesus as Son of God and promised Christ to be both Alpha and Omega to those who study the alphabets of this world. As we review the seven familiar categories we find that three themes make a particular contribution in our context: (i) the meaningful character of God’s creation, (ii) the way humanity’s role within it flows from our position between God and creation, and (iii) how we think biblically about our weekly working cycle as move between our local church and our workplace.
1. The Son Within the Trinity: Communicating God’s glory
Our contemporary cultural moment has been profoundly impacted by modernity’s fact-value dichotomy, where valueless facts (associated with what we know) are perceived as objective – as what simply is – in contrast to factless values (associated with what we love) which are perceived as subjective. Where moral order is placed in the subjective realm, there is no foundation for a coherent, agreed upon value system. As society wrestles with this, truth is contested, and meaning appears to be evasive.
In Scripture, however, we encounter a God of truth and meaning, who creates and sustains the universe, weaving a moral order into the fabric of creation. Our understanding of the world around us, of ourselves, and of this moral order is rooted in what God is like and how he acts.
The way we can know what God is like is by looking at Christ, who is the Son of God. “No one has ever seen God, but the one and only Son, who is himself God and is in closest relationship with the Father, has made him known” (Jn 1:18). This is also what we see when we look at the rest of the introduction to John’s Gospel (1:1-18), as well as, for example, Colossians 1:15-20 and Hebrews 1:1-4, which are two other high-profile, carefully structured passages that tie together who God is in eternity, and how he has revealed himself in creation and redemption.
The reason the Son of God can make God known is because he is God and has been eternally begotten by God. In other words, he has always been God’s “image” (Col 1:15), his “exact representation” and the radiance of his glory (Heb 1:3), his Word (Jn 1:1) or the “logos” in whom God has eternally communicated himself. And because the Son is the one in whom God has made himself known in eternity, he is also the one in whom God makes himself known in creation.
So what can we learn about God by looking at the Son? Scripture makes clear that the Son is one who is loved by the Father and that the Son is likewise in a permanent relationship of love toward him. In this relationship of love, the Father, Son and Spirit enjoy perfect mutual knowledge (Matt 11:27; 1 Cor 2:11). While God’s life in himself is to a certain extent beyond our understanding, this indicates that before the beginning, in the darkness of this mystery, God communicated himself in his Son, and in God, the categories of knowledge and love were wholly entwined.
The wonder of the gospel is that through the Son, we are drawn into the same relationship of love and knowledge that he himself enjoys. According to John’s Gospel, the Word’s work to make God known is secured as we become “children of God” (Jn 1:1, 12-13). At his victorious ascension he returns “to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God” (20:17). For him and for us, eternal life is to know God and his love (17:3, 23-24).
So in our consideration of the Son of God based on Jn 1:1-18, Col 1:15-20 and Heb 1:1-4 we have seen – albeit briefly – that knowledge and love are entwined in the Trinity and in God’s redemptive work.
Sandwiched between these is the last remaining theme which our texts integrate by means of the Son: God’s work in creation. Should we expect to find knowledge and love entwined here also? Put differently, modernity would view “the Trinity” and “redemption” as religious themes which inhabit their own thought world, to be handled separately from our scholarly engagement with the visible world around us. So when we study creation, we need to ask the question: is God still in view in some way?
"Our initial priorities concern three foundational questions which are especially relevant to the cultivation of evangelical fellowship between academics and university ministries."
"I want to wholeheartedly endorse this exercise"