LIVING SMART
LIVING SMART
J. P. Moreland
In recent years there has been a growing curiosity among Jesus' followers about “the integration of faith and learning.” This way of putting it already demeans the cognitive status of Christianity's truth claims because what is being integrated is learning (extrabiblical claims assessable to rational assessment) and faith (privatized biblical ideas accepted without argument). But however the issue is labeled, the push toward integration is an important one. The word integration means “forming or blending into a whole, uniting.” We humans naturally seek to find the unity that is behind diversity; and, in fact, coherence is an important mark of rationality. In conceptual integration one's theological beliefs, especially those derived from careful study of the Bible, are blended and unified with important, reasonable ideas from one's profession or extrabiblical subject matter into a coherent, intellectually satisfying worldview. As Augustine wisely advised, “We must show our Scriptures not to be in conflict with whatever [our critics] can demonstrate about the nature of things from reliable sources.”1 One of the goals of integration is to maintain or increase both the conceptual relevance of and rational justification for Christian theism.
But is there more to integration than this? After all, you may think, it's hard enough to get through an average week with some energy left over for family, friends, and church. Now I'm being asked to do extra work—integration, whatever that is—just because I'm a Christian! And even if there are plenty of good reasons to care about integration, what does it look like in detail? How do I go about it in my area of teaching, employment, or interest? In this essay I shall attempt to answer these questions, especially those regarding the importance of and priorities for integration, as well as the goals and methods of integration.
Five Reasons Integration Is Crucial to Christian Discipleship
1. Vocation and the holistic character of discipleship. As disciples grow, they learn to see, feel, think, desire, believe, and behave the way Jesus does in a manner fitting to the kingdom of God and their own station in life. With God's help I seek to live as Jesus would if He were I (e.g., if He were a philosophy professor at Biola University married to Hope and father of Ashley and Allison).
Two important implications flow from the nature of discipleship. For one thing, the lordship of Christ is holistic. The religious life is not a special compartment in an otherwise secular life. Rather, the religious life is an entire way of life. To live Christianly is to allow Jesus Christ to be the Lord of every aspect of my life. There is no room for a secular-sacred separation in the life of Jesus' followers. Jesus Christ should be every bit as much at home in my thinking and behavior when I am developing my views in my area of teaching or employment as He is when I am in a small-group fellowship.
Further, as a disciple of Jesus, I do not merely have a job; I also have a vocation. A job is a means for supporting myself and those for whom I am responsible. For the Christian a vocation (from the Latin vocare, which means “to call”) is an overall calling from God. Harry Blamires correctly draws a distinction between a general and a special vocation:
The general vocation of all Christians—indeed of all men and women—is the same. We are called to live as children of God, obeying his will in all things. But obedience to God's will must inevitably take many different forms. The wife's mode of obedience is not the same as the nun's; the farmer's is not the same as the priest's. By “special vocation,” therefore, we designate God's call to a man to serve him in a particular sphere of activity.2
As I seek to discover and become excellent in my special vocation, I must ask, How would Jesus approach the task of being a history teacher, a chemist, an athletic director, a mathematician, a homeschooling parent? It is not always easy to answer this question, but the vocational demands of discipleship require that we give it our best shot!
Whatever we do, however, it is important that we restore an image of Jesus Christ to our students as an intelligent, competent person who spoke authoritatively on whatever subject He addressed. The disciples of Jesus agreed with Paul when he said that all the wisdom of the Greeks and Jews was ultimately wrapped up in Jesus Himself (Col 2:2—3). For them Jesus was not merely a Savior from sin; He was the wisest, most intelligent, most attractive person they had ever seen. Interestingly, in the early centuries of Christianity, the church presented Jesus to unbelievers precisely because He was wiser, more virtuous, more intelligent, and more attractive in His character than Aristotle, Plato, Moses, or anyone else. It has been a part of the church's self-understanding to locate the spiritual life in a broader quest for the good life (i.e., a life of wisdom, knowledge, beauty, and goodness). So understood, the spiritual life and discipleship unto Jesus were seen as the best way to achieve a life of truth, beauty, and goodness than any other form of life. Moreover, the life of discipleship was depicted as the wisest, most reasonable form of life available so that a life of unbelief was taken to be foolish and absurd. Our discipleship needs to recapture and propagate this broader understanding of following Christ if it is to be thoroughly Christian in its approach to disciple-making.
2. Biblical teaching about the role of the mind in the Christian life and the value of extra-biblical knowledge. The Scriptures are clear that God wants us to be like Him in every facet of our lives. He desires commitment from our total being, and that includes the intellectual life. We are told that we change spiritually by having the categories of our minds renewed (Rom 12:1—2), that we are to include an intellectual love for God in our devotion (Matt 22:37—38), and that we are to be prepared to give others a reasonable answer to questions they ask us about why we believe what we believe (1 Pet 3:15). As the great eighteenth-century Christian thinker and spiritual master William Law put it, “Unreasonable and absurd ways of life...are truly an offense to God.”3
Now learning and developing convictions about the teachings of Scripture are absolutely central to these mandates. However, many among Jesus' contemporary followers have failed to see that an aggressive pursuit of knowledge in areas outside the Bible is also relevant to these directives.
God has revealed Himself and various truths on a number of topics outside the Bible. As Christians have known throughout our history, common sense, logic, and mathematics, along with the arts, humanities, sciences, and other areas of study, contain important truths relevant to life in general and to the development of a careful, life-related Christian worldview.
In 1756, John Wesley delivered an address to a gathering of clergy on how to carry out the pastoral ministry with joy and skill. In it Wesley cataloged a number of things familiar to most contemporary believers—the cultivation of a disposition to glorify God and save souls, a knowledge of Scripture, and similar notions. However, at the first of his list, Wesley focused on something seldom expressly valued by most pastoral search committees: “Ought not a Minister to have, First, a good understanding, a clear apprehension, a sound judgment, and a capacity of reasoning with some closeness?”4
Time and again throughout the address, Wesley unpacked this remark by admonishing ministers to know what would sound truly odd and almost pagan to the average congregant today: logic, metaphysics, natural theology, geometry, and the ideas of important figures in the history of philosophy. For Wesley, study in these areas (especially philosophy and geometry) helped train the mind to think precisely, a habit of incredible value, he asserted, when it comes to thinking as a Christian about theological themes or scriptural texts. According to Wesley, the study of extrabiblical information and of the writings of unbelievers is of critical value for growth and maturity. As he put it, “To imagine none can teach you but those who are themselves saved from sin, is a very great and dangerous mistake. Give not place to it for a moment.”5
Wesley's remarks were not unusual in his time. A century earlier the great Reformed pastor Richard Baxter was faced with lukewarmness in the church and unbelief outside the church. In 1667 he wrote a book to meet this need; and in it he used philosophy, logic, and general items of knowledge outside Scripture to argue for the existence of the soul and the life to come. The fact that Baxter turned to philosophy and extrabiblical knowledge instead of small groups or praise hymns is worth pondering. In fact, it is safe to say that throughout much of church history, Scripture and right reason directed at extra-biblical truth were considered twin allies to be prized and used by disciples of Jesus.
In valuing extrabiblical knowledge, our brothers and sisters in church history were merely following common sense and Scripture itself. Repeatedly, Scripture acknowledges the wisdom of cultures outside Israel, e.g., Egypt (Isa 19:11-13), the Edomites (Jer 49:7), the Phoenicians (Zech 9:2), and many others. The remarkable achievements produced by human wisdom are acknowledged in Job 28:1—11. The wisdom of Solomon is compared to the wisdom of the “sons of the east” and Egypt in order to show that Solomon's wisdom surpassed that of people with a long-standing, well-deserved reputation for wisdom (1 Kings 4:29—34). Paul approvingly quotes pagan philosophers (Acts 17:28), and Jude does the same thing with the noncanonical book The Assumption of Moses (Jude 9). The book of Proverbs is filled with examples in which knowledge, even moral and spiritual knowledge, can be gained from studying things (e.g., ants) in the natural world. Once Jesus taught that we should know we are to love our enemies, not on the basis of an Old Testament text but from reflection on God's general revelation: the rain and sunshine upon the just and the unjust reveal a merciful Creator (Matt 5:44-45).
In valuing extrabiblical knowledge, our brothers and sisters in church history were also living out scriptural teaching about the value of general revelation. As believers, we must never forget that God is the God of creation and general revelation just as He is the God of Scripture and special revelation.
The Christian teacher should do everything he can to gain and teach important and relevant knowledge in his area of teaching. At the level appropriate to one's station in life, the Christian teacher is called to be a Christian intellectual, at home in the world of ideas.
3. The cost of a secular-sacred division resulting from a neglect of integration. While few would actually put it in these terms, faith is now understood as a blind act of will, a sort of decision to believe something that is either independent of reason or that makes up for the paltry lack of evidence for what one is trying to believe. By contrast, biblical faith is a power or skill to act in accordance with the nature of the kingdom of God, a trust in and commitment to what we have reason to believe is true. Understood in this way, faith is built on reason. We should have good reasons for thinking that Christianity is true before we give complete dedication to it. We should have solid evidence that our understanding of a biblical passage is correct before we go on to apply it, and so on.
Unfortunately, our contemporary understanding of faith and reason treats them as polar opposites. A few years ago I went to New York to conduct a series of evangelistic messages for a church. The series was in a high school gym, and several believers and unbelievers came each night. The first evening I gave arguments for the existence of God from science and philosophy. Before closing in prayer, I entertained several questions from the audience. One woman, a Christian, complained about my talk, charging that if I “proved” the existence of God, I would leave no room for faith. I responded by saying that if she were right, then we should pray that currently available evidence for God would evaporate and be refuted so there would be even more room for faith! Obviously, her view of faith utterly detached it from reason.
If faith and reason are deeply connected, then a teacher needs to explore her entire intellectual life in light of the Word of God. But if faith and reason are polar opposites, then the subject matter of one's teaching is irrelevant to one's growth in discipleship. Because of this view of faith and reason, a secular-sacred separation has emerged in our understanding of the Christian life with the result that Christian teaching and practice are privatized. The withdrawal of the corporate body of Christ from the public sphere of ideas is mirrored by our understanding of what is required to produce an individual disciple. Religion is personal, private, and a matter of how I feel about things. Clearly, there is no time like the present to recapture this integrative task. Given the abandonment of monotheism, the ground is weakened for believing in the unity of truth. This is one reason our uni-versities are turning into multi-versities. The fragmentation of secular education at all levels, along with its inability to define its purpose or gather together a coherent curriculum is symptomatic of what happens when monotheism is set aside. At this critical hour, the Christian has something increasingly rare and distinctive to offer our culture, and integration is at the heart of who we are as Christian thinkers/disciples.
4. Integration and the nature of spiritual warfare. Today spiritual warfare is widely misunderstood—briefly, that warfare is a conflict among persons (disembodied malevolent persons, namely, demons and the devil), human beings, and God Himself. Now persons control others by getting them to accept certain beliefs and emotions as correct, good, and proper. This is precisely how the devil primarily works to destroy human beings and thwart God's work in history, namely, by influencing the idea structures in culture. That is why Paul makes the war of ideas central to spiritual conflict:
For though we walk in the flesh, we do not war according to the flesh, for the weapons of our warfare are not of the flesh, but divinely powerful for the destruction of fortresses. We are destroying speculations and every lofty thing raised up against the knowledge of God, and we are taking every thought captive to the obedience of Christ (2 Cor 10:3—5).
Spiritual warfare is largely, though not entirely, a war of ideas; and we fight bad, false ideas with better ones. That means that truth, reason, argumentation, and so forth, using both Scripture and general revelation, are central weapons in the fight. Since the centers of education—schools, publishing houses, media, churches—are the centers for dealing with ideas, they become the main location for spiritual warfare. Solid, intelligent education, then, is part of our mandate to fight in spiritual conflict.
5. Integration and spiritual formation. Finally, it is crucial that we reflect a bit on the relationship between integration and the spiritual/ devotional life. To begin with, there is a widespread hunger throughout our culture for genuine, life-transforming spirituality. This is as it should be. People are weary of those who claim to believe certain things when they do not see those beliefs having an impact on the lives of the heralds. Among other things integration is a spiritual activity—we may even call it a spiritual discipline—but not merely in the sense that often comes to mind in this context. Often Christians express the spiritual aspect of integration in terms of doxology: Christian integrators hold to and teach the same beliefs about their work or area of reflection that non-Christians accept but go on to add praise to God for the subject matter. Thus, the Christian biologist simply asserts the views widely accepted in the discipline but makes sure that class closes with a word of praise to God for the beauty and complexity of the living world.
Now the doxological approach is good as far as it goes; unfortunately, it doesn't go far enough in capturing the spiritual dimension of integration. We draw closer to the core of this dimension when we think about the role of beliefs in the process of spiritual transformation. Beliefs are the rails upon which our lives run. We almost always act according to what we really believe. It doesn't matter much what we say we believe or what we want others to think we believe. When the rubber meets the road, we act out our actual beliefs most of the time. That is why behavior is such a good indicator of a person's beliefs. The centrality of beliefs for spiritual progress is a clear implication of Old Testament teaching on wisdom and New Testament teaching about the role of a renewed mind in transformation. Thus, integration has as its spiritual aim the intellectual goal of structuring the mind so a person can see things as they really are and strengthening the belief structure that ought to inform the individual and corporate life of discipleship unto Jesus.
Integration can also help an unbeliever accept certain beliefs crucial to the Christian journey and aid a believer in maintaining and developing convictions about those beliefs. This aspect of integration becomes clear when we reflect on the notion of a plausibility structure. People will never be able to change their lives if they cannot even entertain the beliefs needed to bring about that change. By “entertain a belief” I mean to consider the possibility that the belief might be true. If people are hateful and mean to their fellow employee, these people will have to change what they believe about their coworkers before they will treat them differently. But if these hateful people cannot even entertain the thought that their coworkers are good and worthy of kindness, they will not change.
A person's plausibility structure is the set of ideas the person either is or is not willing to entertain as possibly true. For example, no one would come to a lecture defending a flat earth because this idea is just not part of our plausibility structure. We cannot even entertain the idea. Moreover, our plausibility structure is largely (though not exclusively) a function of the beliefs we already have. Applied to accepting or maintaining Christian belief, J. Gresham Machen got it right when he said:
God usually exerts that power in connection with certain prior conditions of the human mind, and it should be ours to create, so far as we can, with the help of God, those favorable conditions for the reception of the gospel. 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 or of the world to be controlled by ideas which, by the resistless force of logic, prevent Christianity from being regarded as anything more than a harmless delusion.6
If a culture reaches the point where Christian claims are not even part of its plausibility structure, fewer and fewer people will be able to entertain the possibility that they might be true. Whatever stragglers do come to faith in such a context would do so on the basis of felt needs alone, and the genuineness of such conversions would be questionable to say the least. And believers will not make much progress in the spiritual life because they will not have the depth of conviction or the integrated noetic structure necessary for such progress. This is why integration is so crucial to spirituality. It can create a plausibility structure in a person's mind, favorable conditions as Machen put it, so that Christian ideas can be entertained by that person. As Christian teachers, our goal is to make Christian ideas relevant to our subject matter appear to be true, beautiful, good, and reasonable to our students.
Current Integrative Priorities for the Christian Disciple
But how does a Christian decide on what to spend his energies in the integrative task? There are so many areas of study. What criteria are there to help one prioritize his efforts? Is there a taxonomy of issues that express some priorities that Christian scholars ought to adopt? I'm afraid I have a lot more thinking to do on this before I am prepared to offer anything approximating an adequate answer to these questions. Any taxonomy here would likely express the interests and biases of the taxonomist, and I am no exception to this rule. Obviously, one's own sense of personal calling and one's own curiosities will and should play an important role here.
But besides this, I think the following three criteria are not too wide of the mark. First, integration should be focused on those areas of study that seem to be intrinsically more central or foundational to the Christian theistic enterprise. The deeply imbedded metaphysical, epistemological, and axiological commitments that constitute mere Christianity should be preserved. Second, integration should be focused on areas that are currently under heavy attack. A third and, perhaps, less important criterion is this: integration should be focused on those areas of study in which such activity is underrepresented relatively speaking.
It is up to Christian teachers in each discipline to decide how these criteria inform their intellectual work. However, I think points one and two converge so as to yield an integrative mandate for contemporary Christians, especially those who work on the interface between science and Christianity. Christians must face an important cultural fact when they undertake the task of integration: There simply is no established, widely recognized body of ethical or religious knowledge now operative in the institutions of knowledge in our culture (e.g., the universities). Indeed, ethical and religious claims are frequently placed into what Francis Schaeffer used to call the upper story, and they are judged to have little or no rational authority, especially compared to the authority given to science to define the limits of knowledge and reality in those same institutions. This raises a pressing question: Is Christianity a knowledge tradition or merely a faith tradition, a perspective which, while true, cannot be known to be true and must be embraced on the basis of some intellectual state weaker than knowledge?
I agree with those who see a three-way worldview struggle in academic and popular culture among ethical monotheism (especially Christian theism), postmodernism, and scientific naturalism. As Christians seek to promote Christianity as a knowledge tradition in their academic discipline, profession, or area of intellectual interest, they should keep in mind the impact of their work on this triumvirate. Both space considerations and my own view of priorities forbid me to say much about postmodernism here. I recognize it is a variegated tunic with many nuances. But to the degree that postmodernism denies the objectivity of reality, truth, value, reason (in its evidentiary if not psychological sense); to the degree that it rejects dichotomous thinking about real/unreal, true/false, rational/irrational, right/wrong; to the degree that it takes intentionality to create the objects of consciousness; to that degree it should be resisted by Christians.
Scientific naturalism also comes in many varieties; but, very roughly, a major form of it is the view that the spatiotemporal cosmos containing physical objects studied by the hard sciences is all there is and that the hard sciences are either the only source of knowledge or else vastly superior in proffering rationally justified beliefs compared to nonscientific fields. In connection with scientific naturalism, some have argued that the rise of modern science has contributed to the loss of intellectual authority in those fields like ethics and religion that, supposedly, are not subject to the types of testing and experimentation employed in science. Rightly or wrongly, science has in three ways been perceived as a threat to the intellectual credibility of Christianity:
1. Some scientific claims call into question certain interpretations of biblical texts (e.g., Gen 1—2) or certain theological beliefs (e.g., that humans have souls or are made in the image of God).
2. Some scientific claims, if correct, demote certain arguments for the existence of God (e.g., if natural, evolutionary processes can explain the origin or development of life, then we do not “need” to postulate a Creator/Designer to explain these things). There may be other reasons for believing in God, but the advances of science have robbed Christians of a number of arguments that used to be effective.
3. The progress of science vis-à-vis other disciplines like philosophy or theology justifies scientism, either the view that science and science alone offers true, justified beliefs (strong scientism) or that while other fields may offer true, justified beliefs in general, the degree of certainty in science vastly outweighs what these other fields offer (weak scientism). As evolutionary naturalist George Gaylord Simpson put it:
There is neither need nor excuse for postulation of nonmaterial intervention in the origin of life, the rise of man, or any other part of the long history of the material cosmos. Yet the origin of that cosmos and the causal principles of its history remain unexplained and inaccessible to science. Here is hidden the First Cause sought by theology and philosophy. The First Cause is not known and I suspect it will never be known to living man. We may, if we are so inclined, worship it in our own ways, but we certainly do not comprehend it.7
Now Christians must respond to these three problem areas. One solution is the complementarity view according to which propositions, theories, or methodologies in theology and another discipline may involve two different, complementary, noninteracting approaches to the same reality. On this view theology and science interact much like the color and shape descriptions of an apple. Theology and science (or, for that matter, any discipline besides theology) interact in an additive way such that the whole truth is the sum of the contributions of both; but neither has direct, straightforward implications for the other. In my opinion the complementarian approach is inadequate as a total integrative model because, among other things, it contributes to the widespread philosophical naturalism that dominates much of the contemporary academy and broader culture. As Philip E. Johnson has pointed out:
Politically astute scientific naturalists feel no hostility toward those religious leaders who implicitly accept the key naturalistic doctrine that supernatural powers do not actually affect the course of nature. ...The most sophisticated naturalists realize that it is better just to say that statements about God are “religious” and hence incapable of being more than expressions of subjective feeling. It would be pretty ridiculous, after all, to make a big deal out of proving that Zeus and Apollo do not really exist.8
Elsewhere, Johnson observes:
The conflict between the naturalistic worldview and the Christian supernaturalistic worldview goes all the way down. It cannot be papered over by superficial compromises. It cannot be mitigated by reading the Bible figuratively rather than literally. …There is no satisfactory way to bring two such fundamentally different stories together, although various bogus intellectual systems offer a superficial compromise to those who are willing to overlook a logical contradiction or two. A clear thinker simply has to go one way or another.9
Johnson's remarks serve as a reminder that Christian complementarians run the risk of achieving integration between science and Christian theism at the price of placing the epistemological authority and certain important metaphysical claims of Christianity in some private, upper story. Whether intentional or not, when employed too broadly, the complementarity approach contributes to the scientism that controls contemporary culture. Thereby, it inadvertently fosters a separation of the secular and sacred because careful biblical exegesis does little intellectual work in the areas of study where complementarity is employed. The effect of this is to marginalize Christian doctrine in the marketplace of ideas.
In my view Christian complementarians give up too much intellectual ground too quickly in light of the pressures of philosophical naturalism. I am neither a sociologist nor the son of one, but I still opine that philosophical naturalism is sustained in the academy and broader culture by sociological and not distinctly rational factors. In my discipline, philosophy, signs indicate that important figures are finally acknowledging this. For example, naturalist Thomas Nagel has recently written:
In speaking of the fear of religion...I am talking about...the fear of religion itself. I speak from experience, being strongly subject to this fear myself: I want atheism to be true and am made uneasy by the fact that some of the most intelligent and well-informed people I know are religious believers. It isn't just that I don't believe in God and, naturally, hope that I'm right in my belief. It's that I hope there is no God! I don't want there to be a God; I don't want the universe to be like that. …My guess is that this cosmic authority problem is not a rare condition and that it is responsible for much of the scientism and reductionism of our time. One of the tendencies it supports is the ludicrous overuse of evolutionary biology to explain everything about life, including everything about the human mind.10
Along similar lines, in his 1996 presidential address for the Pacific Division of the American Philosophical Association, Barry Stroud noted that
“Naturalism” seems to me in this and other respects rather like “World Peace.” Almost everyone swears allegiance to it, and is willing to march under its banner. But disputes can still break out about what it is appropriate or acceptable to do in the name of that slogan. And like world peace, once you start specifying concretely exactly what it involves and how to achieve it, it becomes increasingly difficult to reach and to sustain a consistent and exclusive “naturalism.”11
In light of these statements, it is time for Christians to be bold and courageous in rejecting the authority of science to dictate in monologue fashion to theology what it can and cannot rationally affirm. Christians must regain a respect for the cognitive authority of theology on the same par as our culture respects science.
Intellectual Aims of Integration
As noted earlier, the word integration means forming or blending into a whole, uniting. One of the goals of integration is to maintain or increase both the conceptual relevance of and epistemological justification for Christian theism. To repeat Augustine's advice, “We must show our Scriptures not to be in conflict with whatever [our critics] can demonstrate about the nature of things from reliable sources.”12 We may distinguish three different aspects of the justificatory side of integration: direct defense, polemics, and Christian explanation.
1. Direct Defense. In direct defense one engages in integration with the primary intent of enhancing or maintaining directly the rational justification of Christian theism or some proposition taken to be explicit within or entailed by it, especially those aspects of a Christian worldview relevant to one's own discipline, work, or area of study. Specific attention should be given to topics that are intrinsically important to mere Christianity or currently under fire in one's field of teaching. Hereafter, I will simply refer to these issues as “Christian theism.” I do so for brevity's sake. “Christian theism” should be taken to include specific views about a particular area of study that one takes to be relevant to the integrative task.
There are two basic forms of direct defense, one negative and one positive.13 The less controversial of the two is a negative direct defense where one attempts to remove defeaters to Christian theism. If you have a justified belief regarding some proposition P, a defeater is something that weakens or removes that justification. Defeaters come in two types.14 A rebutting defeater gives justification for believing ¬P (“not P”)—in this case, that Christian theism is false. For example, attempts to show that the biblical concept of the family is dysfunctional and false or that homosexuality is causally necessitated by genes or brain states and that, therefore, it is not a proper object for moral appraisal are cases of rebutting defeaters. An undercutting defeater does not give justification for believing ¬P but rather seeks to remove or weaken justification for believing P in the first place. Critiques of the arguments for God's existence are examples of undercutting defeaters. When defeaters are raised against Christian theism, a negative defense seeks either to rebut or to undercut those defeaters.
By contrast, a positive direct defense is an attempt to build a positive case for Christian theism. Arguments for the existence of God, objective morality, the existence of the soul, the value and nature of virtue ethics, and the possibility and knowability of miracles are examples. This task for integration is not accepted by all Christian intellectuals. For example, various species of what may be loosely called Reformed epistemology run the gamut from seeing a modest role for a positive direct defense to an outright rejection of this type of activity in certain areas (e.g., justifying belief in God and the authority of Holy Scripture).
2. Philosophical Polemics. In philosophical polemics, one seeks to criticize views that rival Christian theism in one way or another. Critiques of scientific naturalism, physicalism, pantheism, and normative ethical relativism are all cases of philosophical polemics.
3. Theistic Explanation. Suppose we have a set of items xi through xn that stand in need of explanation, and we offer some explanation E as an adequate or even best explanation of those items. In such a case, E explains xi through xn, and this fact provides some degree of confirmation for E. For example, if a certain intrinsic genre statement explains the various data of a biblical text, then this fact offers some confirmation for the belief that the statement is the correct interpretation of that text. Now Christian theists ought to be about the business of exploring the world in light of their worldview and, more specifically, of using their theistic beliefs as explanations of various desiderata in the intellectual life. Put differently, we should seek to solve intellectual problems and shed light on areas of puzzlement by using the explanatory power of our worldview. For example, for those who accept the existence of natural moral law, the irreducibly mental nature of consciousness, natural human rights, or the fact that human flourishing follows from certain biblically mandated ethical and religious practices, the truth of Christian theism provides a good explanation of these phenomena. And this fact can provide some degree of confirmation for Christian theism.
Models Employed in Integration
When problem areas surface, there is a need for the Christian educator to think hard about the issue in light of the need for strengthening the rational authority of Christian theism and placing it squarely within the plausibility structure of contemporary culture. Let us use the term theology to stand for any Christian idea that seems to be a part of a Christian worldview derived primarily from special revelation. When one addresses problems like these, a number of different ways will emerge that theology can interact with an issue in a discipline outside theology. Here are some of the different ways that such interaction can take place.
1. The Two Realms View. Propositions, theories, or methodologies in theology and another discipline may involve two distinct, nonoverlapping areas of investigation. For example, debates about angels or the extent of the atonement have little to do with organic chemistry. Similarly, it is of little interest to theology whether a methane molecule has three or four hydrogen atoms in it.
2. The Complementarity View. Propositions, theories, or methodologies in theology and another discipline may involve two different, complementary, noninteracting approaches to the same reality. Sociological aspects of church growth, certain psychological aspects of conversion may be sociological or psychological descriptions of certain phenomena that are complementary to a theological description of church growth or conversion.
3. The Direct Interaction View. Propositions, theories, or methodologies in theology and another discipline may directly interact in such a way that either one area of study offers rational support for the other or one area of study raises rational difficulties for the other. For example, certain theological teachings about the existence of the soul raise rational problems for philosophical or scientific claims that deny the existence of the soul. The general theory of evolution raises various difficulties for certain ways of understanding the book of Genesis. Some have argued that the big bang theory tends to support the theological proposition that the universe had a beginning.
4. The Presuppositions View. Theology tends to support the presuppositions of another discipline and vice versa. Some have argued that many of the presuppositions of science (e.g., the existence of truth; the rational, orderly nature of reality; the adequacy of our sensory and cognitive faculties as tools suited for knowing the external world) make sense and are easy to justify given Christian theism but are odd and without ultimate justification in a naturalistic worldview. Similarly, some have argued that philosophical critiques of epistemological skepticism and defenses of the existence of a real, theory-independent world and a correspondence theory of truth offer justification for some of the presuppositions of theology.
5. The Practical Application View. Theology fills out and adds details to general principles in another discipline and vice versa, and theology helps one practically apply principles in another discipline and vice versa. For example, theology teaches that fathers should not provoke their children to anger, and psychology can add important details about what this means by offering information about family systems, the nature and causes of anger, etc. Psychology can devise various tests for assessing whether one is or is not a mature person, and theology can offer a normative definition to psychology as to what a mature person is.
In sum, we have looked at the importance of and priorities for integration, as well as the goals and methods of integration. It becomes clear that Christian disciples need encouragement to sustain a self-understanding of their vocation as an intellectual calling, among other things. Moreover, it also becomes clear that Christians will need to think more creatively as to how to develop an integrated Christian worldview that can penetrate secular currents of thought shaping our culture. Will it be difficult? Indeed. It is hard to think of something more challenging. Is it worth the effort? The question answers itself.
1 Augustine, De genesi ad litteram 1.21. Cited in Ernan McMullin, “How Should Cosmology Relate to Theology?” in The Science and Theology in the Twentieth Century, ed. Arthur R. Peacocke (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981), 20.
2 Harry Blamires, A God Who Acts (Ann Arbor, Mich.: Servant Books, 1957), 67. Not everyone agrees that there is such a thing as a special vocation. While I am on the side of those who accept such a calling, my presentation to follow does not require acceptance of a special vocation. All my points require is that one agrees with the idea that a Christian should try to live and think Christianly in every aspect of life, including what he or she does forty or more hours a week.
3 William Law, A Serious Call to a Devout and Holy Life (1728; repr., Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1966), 2.
4 John Wesley, “An Address to the Clergy” in The Works of John Wesley (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1972), 481.
5 John Wesley, A Plain Account of Christian Perfection (London: Epworth Press, 1952), 87.
6 J. Gresham Machen, “Christianity and Culture,” Princeton Theological Review 11 (1913): 7. This article was originally an address delivered on September 20, 1912, at the opening of the 101st session of Princeton Theological Seminary.
7 George Gaylord Simpson, The Meaning of Evolution (New York: Bantam Books, 1971), 252.
8 Phillip E. Johnson, Defeating Darwinism (Downers Grove, Ill.: InterVarsity, 1997), 100—1.
9 Ibid., 111.
10 Thomas Nagel, The Last Word (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 130-31.
11 Barry Stroud, “The Charm of Naturalism,” Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association 70 (1996): 43-44.
12 Augustine, De genesi ad litteram 1.21.
13 See Ronald Nash, Faith and Reason (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1988), 14—18.
14 For a useful discussion of various types of defeaters, see John Pollock, Contemporary Theories of Knowledge (Totowa, N.J.: Rowman & Littlefield, 1986), 36—39; Ralph Baergen, Contemporary Epistemology (Fort Worth, Tex.: Harcourt Brace and Company, 1995), 119—24.