5
ON BEING A CHRISRIAN PROFESSOR IN THE SECULAR ACADEMY
WALTER L. BRADLER
I attended the University of Texas from 1961 to 1968, earning a BS in Engineering Science (Physics) and a PhD in Materials Science and Engineering. In the seventy-five classes that I took at UT, I never met a Christian professor, though I met many who were not Christians and some who took the opportunity to ridicule the Christian faith I had embraced as a teenager. I wondered during this critical period of my life whether there was something fundamentally incompatible between education to the level of a PhD and Christian faith. Happily, I met (through their books) a profoundly Christian professor from Cambridge University named C. S. Lewis and a Christian thinker named Francis Schaeffer. These authors opened my spiritual eyes, helping me to see a grand Christian world-view, sustained by the God of the Bible who wants to redeem every aspect of his creation, to be Lord over all.
My goal in going to graduate school was to be president of a large technical company, so I took MBA classes along with my engineering classes to prepare. As I began my final year in graduate school at UT, God began to draw me toward a career in the academy. I wondered during this time if it was even possible to be a Christian professor publicly, having seen no role models of what a Christian professor might be and do. But God continued to give me a longing to be for my students what no professor had ever been for me. I had almost been swept away by the intellectual tsunamis of naturalism and secularism during my undergraduate years. I wanted to be the lighthouse for my students that I had never had, helping them avoid shipwreck in the storms that college life surely brings. And so I decided to try the academy as a two-year experiment, accepting a position as a tenure-track assistant professor of metallurgical engineering at the prestigious Colorado School of Mines. I resolved to be easily identified as a Christian professor to my students and colleagues, recognizing that this might get me fired. However, if I could not be an openly Christian professor, then I was happy to return to my original plans to work in industry.
I did not get fired! In fact I got a teaching award my first year, along with research funding from the National Science Foundation, and was tenured after my third year, two years early. I have seen God’s faithfulness (1 Thess. 5:18) in guiding and directing me through thirty-eight wonderful years as a Christian professor and would like to share with you the highlights of what God has taught me on this journey.
I will first share biblical principles that I have found to be especially important on my journey in the academy. Then I would like to share practical ways I have found to minister to my students and colleagues. Finally, I would like to address “the outrageous idea of Christian scholarship,” a phrase first coined by George Marsden.
Biblical Principles for Christian Academics
This is a very abbreviated list of biblical principles that I have found to be foundational to my journey as a Christian academic. Please excuse my stylizing some of them to read in the way that they might have been written if the intended audience had been exclusively Christian professors.
Godspell: “To see Thee more clearly, to love Thee more dearly, to follow Thee more nearly day by day.” This theme song from the famous Broadway play captures the essence of a relationship with Christ. I have found it impossible to have the courage or wisdom to follow Christ in the academy apart from striving to practice the three action verbs—seeing, loving, and following Christ.
“Let your light so shine before your students and colleagues, that they may see your good deeds and glorify your Father in heaven” (Matt. 5:16). St. Francis of Assisi said, “Preach the gospel always and if necessary, use words.” But, living a life that exemplifies Christian love and compassion is necessary but not sufficient. I want my students to know that the good things that I do are a result of God’s light as it shines through my life. The “necessary words” here are that in some appropriate way I want my students to know that I am a Christian and happy to share more about why with them if they are interested.
“Serve wholeheartedly, as if you were serving the Lord, not your department head” (Eph. 6:7). While I want my life and my work to be pleasing to my department head, my first priority is to spend my time in ways that are pleasing to God, and my department head’s priorities do not always align with God’s priorities for me.
“Whatever you do, work at it with all your heart, as if you are working for the Lord, not for your dean” (Col. 3:23). I find great motivation in seeing each day as a whole series of opportunities to fulfill God’s purposes for me, but I must be listening to let God’s voice trump the many conflicting voices that make demands on my time.
“No matter how much you publish, you are going to perish anyway, so get over it!” (Bradley 1:1). Obviously, this did not make the cut when the Bible was put together, but I think it applies anyway, so take it for what you think it is worth.
“Seek first his kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well” (Matt. 6:33). At many points in my career, I felt the press of a profession that is very, very demanding of my time—tempting me to neglect my family and the Christian ministries to which God has called me. I have repeatedly found God faithful to his promise when I seek him first and don’t just give the time that is “left over,” which is usually not much.
“Let us professors not give up meeting together, as some are in the habit of doing, but let us encourage one another—and all the more as you see the Day approaching” (Heb. 10:25). Christian professors need a support system of other professors who understand their challenges and share their same struggles. Christian professors in the secular academy must proactively seek out Christian colleagues with whom they can meet regularly.
“Professors who sow sparingly reap sparingly, and professors who sow abundantly reap abundantly” (2 Cor. 9:6). There are many ways to sow spiritual seeds with your students and colleagues. With one hundred or more new students each semester, Christian professors are uniquely placed to make a spiritual difference in the lives of their students.
We should see each student as being in our class by divine appointment, wherever they may be in the spiritual journey, and God has placed them there for a purpose. God also places us in our respective departments to be a light to our colleagues.
“In fact, everyone who wants to live a godly life in Christ Jesus will be persecuted (2 Tim. 3:12); Yet at the same time many even among the professors believed in Christ. But because of the deans and department heads they would not confess their faith for fear they would be put out of the academy” (John 12:42–43). Fear of man or the desire for the approval of man can sometimes blind us to the higher priority of pleasing God. We must diligently guard our motives, always seeking first the approval of our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. It is also good to remember that while we don’t welcome the scorn of colleagues, the absence of any persecution as we walk through life is a telltale sign of whether we have in fact lived “a godly life in Christ Jesus.” Just play it to the audience of one.
Practical Ways to Minister to Students and Colleagues
Before moving on to various distinctive aspects of being a Christian academic, I want to mention those things that we share in common with our non-Christian colleagues. Our testimony to our students and colleagues begins with doing the very best we can in teaching, research, and service. Our students will not care how much we know until they know how much we care. Small things that are not time consuming (to be discussed in what follows) can go a long way toward communicating our love and concern for them. We must also be committed to excellence in the research work that we do, not allowing our Christian faith and activities to become an excuse for not providing our employer good value for what we are paid. Being a good citizen in our departments by doing at least our fair share in service is also an important part of my testimony. We must ask God to make us highly effective and efficient in doing “first things first,” as Stephen Covey says in 7 Habits of Highly Effective People and in guiding us to fruitful areas of research.1Since we have other obligations to our churches, and probably spend more time on average with our families than our non-Christian colleagues, we need to be highly productive in the time that we invest in the academy, since we may be either unwilling or unable to spend the inordinate amount of time that is often typical of professors.
Ministering to Students
In Blink, Malcolm Gladwell makes the point that first impressions are often lasting, and little things often make a big difference.2If this is so, then the first class period of each course that we teach is extremely important in many ways. One of the most important goals for my first class is to connect personally with the students. After sharing about the course objectives and reviewing the syllabus, I share with them things that are interesting for them to know about me using photos of my family, me playing tennis, snow skiing, and flying a Cessna 172 that I rent as a private pilot. I then share with them that the most important thing I want them to know about me is that I am a Christian, and by that, I don’t just mean going to church, but rather that my Christian faith is the foundation on which everything else that I do is built. I then add that I hope that they will see that it makes a difference in how I treat them in this class. Finally, I tell the students that if they are interested in more details about how and why I became a Christian as a college student, they can read about my spiritual journey at www.LeaderU.com, under “faculty offices.” By having this information available at the LeaderU.com web site, they will also be exposed to many other Christian faculty and interesting articles on Christian apologetics.
To have a web site/faculty office at LeaderU.com, you need to register at www.facultylinc.com. You can then import your photo and other information into the template, making it very easy to set up your “faculty office,” which will then be displayed at LeaderU.com.
At the end of the first class, I take the students’ pictures in groups of four and bring printed copies to the second class and ask them to print their name on their picture. Using these pictures with names, I can usually learn each student’s name by the end of the third week. This not only shows personal interest in them, but it facilitates classroom discussions when I can call on each student by name.
To continue to sow seeds with my students, my wife and I have a movie night one Friday night per month. We invite the students to come for pizza and for a movie that will both entertain and raise interesting questions about life. Movies we have used include Crimes and Misdemeanors, Groundhog Day, Chariots of Fire, Citizen Kane, Out of Africa, Contact, and Quiz Show. I typically have ten to fifteen students come, and we usually have a good thirty-minute discussion after the movie, centered on the important question(s) about life raised by the movie. These are wonderful times of getting to know the student personally and having an appropriate context to share with them how I view the world as a Christian. A detailed description of how a movie night might be done is available at www.facultylinc.com under “best practices.”
At the end of the semester, I offer my students the gift of a book. This works particularly well in the fall as the semester finishes just before Christmas. I particularly like The Case for Christ by Lee Strobel.3I make these available to the students at the final exam in a box by the door so that they can pick up a copy if they choose. I tell them that Strobel was a famous reporter for the Chicago Tribune with a law degree from Yale who was challenged to explore the validity of the Christian truth claims by the changes that he saw in his wife when she became a Christian. He writes the book as an investigative reporter might, interviewing experts on ten critical questions and posing challenging questions to each expert. About half of my students will take a copy of the book. Some actually read it and become Christians; some already are Christians but are strengthened in their faith.
I also take opportunities where the subject matter permits to include a Christian point of view. Engineering ethics is a good example. Ethical systems may be based on philosophical arguments, humanistic values, or religious beliefs. It is appropriate to be comprehensive when addressing such topics by including a discussion of Christian ethics. Additionally, the universe is finely designed in so many ways, and this provides wonderful examples of God’s fingerprints through his creation that I can point to from time to time in class. Finally, I take the opportunity to bring to students’ attention special events on campus, including events sponsored by various Christian groups on campus (including our Christian Faculty Network).
In the fall of 1999 I did a simple experiment to see how the seeds that I had been planting over the years might be doing. I had one hundred students, evenly distributed between two classes, who produced 150 hits on my testimony at LeaderU.com from Texas A&M University within one week of my invitation to my classes to “check it out,” suggesting that most did and some recommended it to friends. Our three movie nights drew about sixty students in total, although some were repeaters. About half took books at the end of the semester. At the final exam, I told the students that I would e-mail their grade on the final and their final course grade if they would put their e-mail address on their exam. (Before the days of Blackboard and WebCT, these were not so readily available.) When I sent out their grades, I also included an attachment with a personal note, reminding them of my comments at the beginning of the semester and inviting them to join me in a four-week seekers’ Bible study on the gospel of John at the beginning of the spring semester. I was delighted to have thirteen students indicate an interest, and in January I had thirteen come to this study. We had a wonderful time together and several students became Christians, while the rest came to understand more clearly who Jesus claimed to be and what remarkable things he offers us. Paul was a student in my class that semester. Here is a note he sent to me the day after he got his PhD in Biomedical Engineering at Texas A&M University:
You may use these photos wherever and whenever you like. I have shared my testimony with many over the last few years, and I always point to the group discussion at your house (after watching Crimes and Misdemeanors), the Bible study you led on campus covering the book of John, and the letter you sent me while I was in the German hospital as turning points in my belief. Those things that you did, I hope to emulate when I am a professor, because I have seen first-hand the impact a Christian professor can have on bringing his students to a relationship with Jesus. You can quote me on that.
Amy read Strobel’s book and came to Christ directly over the summer. She came back in the fall so excited, wanting four additional copies of the book to give to the various members of her family. Jason is a National Merit Scholar whose spiritual interest was pricked during the semester he was in my class. He came back to discuss his interest in Jesus Christ two semesters after he took my class as God continued to water the seeds that I had sown. As we studied Strobel’s book and the gospel of John, Jason came to faith in Christ and was baptized.
In summary, by creating a web site at LeaderU.com, taking a couple of evenings to have students over for a movie, offering a free book, or reaching out to your students in other ways with which you are comfortable, you can be a blessing and witness for Christ to your students. In turn, you will be blessed by what God will do in their lives and in your life as you take these steps to be faithful to the opportunities God so abundantly provides in the academy.
Furthermore, imagine what might happen on your campus if each Christian professor were willing to spend the small amount of time described above sowing. At Texas A&M University, we had 2,500 professors, with at least 10 percent or 250 who were Christians. If each professor teaches two hundred students per year, then fifty thousand students each year would be impacted by a Christian professor, or essentially the entire student body of forty-five thousand students. Each student would likely have four such professors during their four years at TAMU. If their results were similar to mine, then they would collectively generate 6,500 (250 x 13 x 2) excellent prospects for seeker Bible studies each year, enough to swamp all of the student Christian groups on campus with students whom God has touched and who are interested in learning more about the possibilities of a personal relationship with Jesus Christ.
Ministering to colleagues may be divided into two areas: colleagues who are already Christians and colleagues who are not but might be open. What are some ways that I might reach out to all of my professional colleagues?
Ministering to Christian Colleagues
I previously mentioned that getting together regularly for sharing, prayer, mutual encouragement, or the study of the Bible or a relevant book is essential if Christian professors are going to not just survive, but thrive. Inviting a small group of friends from your area of the campus to get together for lunch can be a very rewarding experience, for them and for you.
A next step might be to find several Christian professors who would like to pursue a discipleship program designed especially for Christian faculty. Rae Mellichamp and Bill Hager have put together just such a program (see “Best Practices” at facultylinc.com). I took a group of five colleagues from across the campus at TAMU through this discipleship program, meeting every Monday morning for breakfast. These smiling faces at 6:15 a.m. at Denny’s are testimony to the special grace that God gives when we are willing to follow his calling. It was an extremely rewarding experience for each of us, trying to live our lives with a set of priorities that more consistently reflected our Christian values (1 Thess. 5:24), growing in our relationship with Jesus Christ, and being equipped to sow broadly in our areas of influence on campus.
Many other excellent ideas for ministering to Christian colleagues may be found at facultylinc.com under “Best Practices,” such as Rae Mellichamp’s new book, Go Fast, Turn Left on living out of your priorities.4
Ministering to Non-Christian Colleagues
I think our ministry to our non-Christian colleagues begins with taking a genuine interest in them as people and avoiding the trap of seeing them as targets for evangelism. Taking advantage of opportunities to be helpful to them and to serve them builds bridges across which God’s love can be taken. Being patient and waiting for God to open doors of opportunity is also essential.
Facultylinc.com has excellent resources on how to be a great teacher, how to make tenure, and how to manage your time, all topics that are of keen interest to new, tenure-track professors. Try them yourself and then share them with colleagues. While department head of Mechanical Engineering at Texas A&M University, I took the training to become a certified Franklin-Covey facilitator for 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, one of the best programs available on getting into focus and staying there. I then offered this twenty-four- hour-long workshop each semester for about thirty to forty professors as a service to the university. It was extremely well received by Christian and non-Christian professors alike, from Mechanical Engineering, the College of Engineering, and from across the university. It was a wonderful way to provide a very valuable service to these professors and establish a friendship with them, which often led to opportunities to discuss spiritual things—especially when they where trying to prepare their mission statements.
When I was teaching in Colorado, we set aside one night per month to have various non-Christian couples over for dinner. This was a simple but effective way to get to know my non-Christian colleagues and for Ann to get to know their spouses. Ask God to help you see creative ways that you can serve your colleagues at your university.
Once you develop some meaningful relationships with your nonChristian colleagues, there are many creative ways to engage them in discussion of the bigger issues of life and their spiritual journey. The Journey by Peter Kreeft is a wonderful book for discussing whether truth can be known by exploring the “isms” of the twentieth century such as skepticism, cynicism, and relativism.5One year, I invited eight non-Christian friends to go on this “journey” with me in search of truth. Each read the first chapter in the book I gave them, and found it so intriguing that all but one came to the lunchtime discussion. This led very naturally into a study of the gospel of John. Three people from the group became Christians, and the others finished the study well on their way. Some of my very best friends, Christian and non-Christian, were formed from that experience.
A Discussion/Dessert series is also a great format for engaging non-Christian friends in discussions about God and life. Six couples or singles cohost the four week series and invite five non-Christian singles or couples using invitations prepared by the group but distributed personally. This provides a group of twenty to thirty for the discussion, with more non-Christians than Christians. A fifty-nine minute discussion utilizing questions posed by the guests is followed by dessert and great discussion spring boarding off of the fifty-nine minute larger group discussion. There can be great sowing during the series and often some subsequent reaping. I had a colleague offer to buy my lunch at the faculty club to discuss two pressing questions that he had: why do you have to believe that Christ is God to be a Christian and how and why did I become a Christian. What a double treat, a free lunch and the opportunity to discuss these two very important questions. Many more ideas are available at facultylinc.com under “best practices,” so check it out.
A Christian Perspective on Research and That Outrageous Idea
Why publish or perish? Research and the resulting scholarly publications have become a normal expectation at most universities today, with the demands growing rapidly at some universities. Let me share three perspectives professors might have as they view the opportunity and obligation to produce research results and publish them. The first view should be avoided while the second and third views should be happily embraced by Christian professors. First, the cynical view sees publishing as a meaningless game required in the academy to avoid perishing. Second, the Christian stewardship view sees the time (and sometime money) made available to academics for their scholarly pursuits as bringing an obligation to discover seminal insights in our respective fields and to make these ideas available to the public who ultimately pays, either directly or indirectly, for us to have the opportunity to engage in scholarship. Publishing in archival journals is one way to fulfill this obligation. Third, the Christian love view suggests that as we engage in research, God will give us significant insights that are to be shared with other people to make their lives better and their appreciation of God and his goodness greater. I am highly motivated if I think of my research and writing as an integral part of how I can serve God by serving his people and helping them to see God more clearly.
How to Find a Golden Research Topic
By far the most important step in being successful in research is the selection of a problem to be studied. I think the analogy of gold mining is most helpful. Mining a “tapped out” gold mine with great skill and diligence will not produce a significant amount of gold. Prospecting to find a mine rich in gold ore is critical to being a good steward of the time and resources we consume doing research. But prospecting takes time, patience, and skill. The path of least resistance in the short run is to just keep mining where you have been, whether or not it is still a productive mine.
Let me share a few suggestions on prospecting for a good claim where the mine you find is rich in gold. First, pray! It is amazing how we often forget the obvious. God sees my field, my talents and abilities, my best opportunities. Who better to guide and direct me to fruitful areas where I might invest my research time? I encourage my Christian graduate students to pray daily about their selection of a PhD topic and then about the journey of discovery that they will be taking, that God will guide and direct their steps along the way and lead them to significant discoveries.
Second, search out every nook and cranny of your field for emerging ideas and trends. Being early to engage in a developing area means you get to harvest the low hanging fruit; coming later means you get to harvest the high hanging fruit, which is much more time-consuming. Read broadly, brainstorm with colleagues, visit potential collaborators or sponsors, and learn to be a good listener. Too often we are too eager to talk and not sufficiently interested in listening during such meetings. However, we learn little or nothing when we are talking. I think it is no accident that God gave us two ears and one mouth; it is at least twice as hard to listen as it is to talk (and also to make our hearing more bi-directional).
Attending national meetings is a way to also spot trends. Don’t just camp out in sessions that are focused on what you already do. Take time to visit a variety of venues and especially the plenary sessions, where the speakers are often selected because of new groundbreaking work that they are doing. I also have found that attending smaller meetings formatted to allow longer, invited presentations of cutting-edge work in progress with significant time for discussion following the presentations to be the best way to identify significant, emerging areas. Gordon Research Conferences held at small colleges in the summer or early January are the best example in my field. The conferences include three informal meals each day with colleagues from across the country, allowing stimulating discussions of new ideas that often surpass the formal presentations in value.
Finally, read widely outside of the technical literature in your field. Some of your most brilliant ideas will come from the most unexpected places. In 1977, I read in the Wall Street Journal (not technical literature for materials scientists) that Ford Motors hoped to make its automobiles almost entirely out of plastics and composites by the year 2000. It was this article that caused me to make a major career move toward engineering plastics and composites, ramping down my work in metals and alloys. I was fortunate to be early into this emerging field and became established as a major player, which meant I was able to get an abundance of research funding for the next twenty years with a minimum of effort.
During my tenure as department head of Mechanical Engineering at Texas A&M University, I had the occasion to do annual reviews for sixty-seven professors. Success was not simply correlated with either raw intelligence or diligence. The choice of a fruitful research area and the willingness to change as that area became mature were the dominant factors. Don’t let fear of change or laziness keep you mining a secure but empty gold mine. Become a prospector.
Extending Your Reach with the Outrageous Idea of Christian Scholarship
The previous discussions of ministry in this chapter focused on approaches that will have an immediate impact on your campus. However, scholarship has the potential to reach a much larger audience and greatly increase the impact that you can make for the kingdom. George Marsden’s book, The Outrageous Idea of Christian Scholarship,6is excellent background reading as you consider how your scholarship might be used of God to make “not just an impression but an impact,” to quote my good friend, Dr. Rick Rigsby.
What is scholarship? It is the pursuit of truth. There are at least two ways that our Christian worldview should impact our scholarship. The first way is well stated by C. S. Lewis: “I believe in Christianity as I believe that the Sun has risen, not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else.”7Christianity provides a different kind of light that will give us insights that we will not find by just “poking” around, much like black light (ultraviolet wavelengths) will cause a display that is sensitive to ultraviolet light to radiate, allowing one to see things that simply are not visible within the normal visible spectrum of radiation. A second way that our Christian worldview should impact our scholarship is in the questions that we find most interesting. For example:
Dave Larson’s studies of the relationship of religious beliefs to physical and emotional health;
Byron Johnson’s studies of the effect of Christian conversion with Bible study on prison recidivism;
David G. Myers’s studies of what makes a person happy;
Ev Worthington’s study of forgiveness;
Jan Swearingen’s study of how pulpit oratory shaped the language of the Declaration of Independence;
Ralph Wood’s study of the literature works of Flannery O’Connor and J. R. R. Tolkien;
Bradford Wilcox’s study of the institution of marriage.
On a more personal level, one might ask how this applies in engineering; for example, how does a Christian bridge differ from the usual bridge that one might build? My answer is found in a bridge that our engineering students and professors helped Harmon Parker, the founder and director of Bridging the Gap Africa, build in Kenya. The design of this pedestrian bridge is not unique, but our interest in designing and building it in a very remote location in Kenya was motivated by our Christian concern to help people on the far side of the river. This bridge will save approximately two million miles of walking per year at a price of $5,000.
We are designing a 420-foot pedestrian bridge to cross the second largest river in Kenya. We have found a few examples of pedestrian bridges this long, but they cost more than $500,000, use composite materials that are not available in Kenya, and would require construction equipment that cannot reach the remote location where this bridge is desperately needed. My students’ challenge is to design a bridge that can be built for $100,000 using materials that are readily available in Kenya, without the assistance of large construction equipment. This is a much more challenging design project than designing such a bridge for construction in the United States with a budget of $500,000.
My work on designing and building bridges is one aspect of a larger research initiative that I have started at Baylor on appropriate technology for developing countries. I have sensed God leading me to focus my engineering research to serve the poorest two billion people in the world who live on less than two dollars per day. Rather than helping to make the most comfortable billion people a little more comfortable, God wants me to help the poorest of the poor have a better shot at survival, with their most basic human needs being met.
I began this initiative collaborating with my former student and dear Christian brother, Dr. John Pumwa, the first person from Papua New Guinea to earn a PhD in engineering and currently the department head of Mechanical Engineering at UniTech, the only engineering school in Papua New Guinea. Coconuts are an abundant, renewable resource that grows within 20o of the equator. Within this band, only Singapore is a fully developed country. Our goal is to use coconuts to provide electricity, building materials, fuel for cooking, and other value-added products using technology that is suitable for rural villages. Electricity will in turn make possible the storage of medicines, the use of old computers in schools, clean lighting in the evening, and the inexpensive production of sodium hypochlorite for water purification. It will also open new doors of opportunity for other kinds of economic development, creating jobs and economic opportunity, which are desperately needed in the developing world. But how is this possible?
Through our research we have learned that coconut oil has the best chemical properties of the more than fifty vegetable oils that have been studied for making bio-diesel. We have made coconut bio-diesel, and it burns beautifully in standard diesel engines. We have also demonstrated that pure coconut oil preheated to 90ºC can be burned in a diesel engine directly without first converting it to coconut bio-diesel. We have found that we can make binderless particle board from the husk by just hot pressing at a suitable temperature and pressure. The coconut shell can be finely ground and used as reinforcement in engineering plastics or it can be used for simultaneously cooking and making charcoal. With an initial investment of six cents, we can convert coconuts into products worth sixty cents. We will be doing our first proof-of-concept project in Papua New Guinea in 2007 to demonstrate how the quality of life and economic opportunities can be dramatically improved in rural villages where coconuts grow, simply by using appropriate technology.
If this proof-of-concept project, which is receiving financial support from the United Nations, is successful, then my research group at Baylor can help rural villages around the world where coconuts are abundant to get World Bank loans and start similar enterprises. We will work with Christians in these villages to be sure that the economic opportunities and benefits are as fairly distributed as possible and that the project is part of a larger kingdom-building activity.
Especially exciting is the invitation I recently received to attend a planning workshop sponsored by the National Science Foundation, which is interested in research that would foster sustainable, global development. If the NSF begins to fund activities in this area, it will provide more resources. It will also make it a more academically respectable area in which to conduct research, which is not my concern as a tenured, distinguished professor who is sixty-three years old, but is certainly of concern to my younger colleagues.
One final personal example of how my faith has impacted my research has to do with my studies of the origin of life. As a scientist who is a Christian, I have always been interested in issues at the interface between faith and science, including such topics as whether scientific discoveries strengthen or undermine belief in God and how one might properly interpret the first eleven chapters of Genesis. God could obviously have worked in his customary way (as described by the laws or patterns in nature) or in some extraordinary way (usually described as miracles). But it is the question of how God brought life into being that has always been a particularly fascinating question for me. My professional work in polymer science and engineering (I served as the director of the Polymer Technology Center at Texas A&M University for ten years) provided me with the necessary tools to do original work in the origin of life. My research insights in this area have been published in The Mystery of Life’s Origin: Reassessing Current Theories,8“A Statistical Examination of Self-Ordering of Amino Acids in Proteins,”9“Origin of Life and Evolution in Biology Textbooks—A Critique,”10“Entropy, Information, and the Origin of Life,”11 “Is There Scientific Evidence for the Existence of God?”12and “Information and the Origin of Life.”13Several of these have been posted at my web site at LeaderU.com, where they get a total of 50,000 hits per year. What a wonderful way to extend my reach!
Conclusion
As I reflect over my past thirty-nine-year journey in the Academy, I am amazed at how God has so exceeded even my wildest expectations of what he might be able to do through my life. I was diagnosed with chronic lymphomatic leukemia (CLL) in 2006, and so my future is uncertain. This makes me all the more thankful that I did not wait until late in my career to give God his rightful place in my professional life and my personal life. I took my first university position to be a Christian professor, not just a professor who happened to be a Christian, and I am still learning each year more of what that implies. I look forward to reaching heaven where I will have my final “Post-tenure Review” and where I will learn the full impact that I had in the lives of my students and colleagues. I can hardly wait!
Acknowledgment
I want to take this opportunity to acknowledge my partner and the love of my life in this journey through the academy. There is nothing that I have accomplished that has not been made possible, either directly or indirectly, through my wonderful travel partner for life, Carol Ann Bradley. She has been as involved as I have been, leading student Bible studies, opening our home to a whole host of events from Friday night movies to Discussion/Dessert series, even living in a dorm as a dorm grandparent for one year. Her love for Jesus and for people has been a constant source of inspiration and encouragement to me and many others and a key ingredient in what God has done through our ministry together. She is God’s greatest gift to me after Jesus.
Discussion Questions
1. What are some other biblical principles you have found helpful as a Christian professor?
2. Share some other ways you have ministered to students.
3. How can something like a “faculty office” at LeaderU.com be a helpful tool in ministry?
4. Discuss ways you can identify yourself to students as a Christian on the first day of class.
5. Was there a Christian professor who made a profound impact in your life as a student?
6. What are some other ways you can minister to your colleagues?
a. Christian?
b. Non-Christian?
7. What was helpful in Dr. Bradley’s discussion regarding finding a research topic?
8. What are some possible ways that God could use your specific discipline and the scholarship generated from within for kingdom building?
1. Stephen Covey, 7 Habits of Highly Effective People (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1989).
2. Malcolm Gladwell,Blink (New York: Little, Brown, 2005).
3. Lee Strobel, The Case for Christ (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1998).
4. Rae Mellichamp,Go Fast, Turn Left (Addison, TX: Lewis & Stanley, 2006).
5. Peter Kreeft, The Journey (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 1996).
6. George Marsden,The Outrageous Idea of Christian Scholarship (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997).
7. C. S. Lewis, “Is Theology Poetry,” in The Weight of Glory (San Francisco: Harper Collins, 1980 ed.), 140.
8. Walter Bradley, Charles Thaxton, and Roger Olsen, The Mystery of Life’s Origin: Reassessing Current Theories (Dallas: Lewis & Stanley, 1984).
9. Walter Bradley, Randall Kok, and John Talyor, “A Statistical Examination of Self-Ordering of Amino Acids in Proteins,” Origin of Life and Evolution of the Biosphere 18 (1988): 135–42.
10. Walter Bradley, Gordon Mills, and Malcolm Lancester, “Origin of Life and Evolution in Biology Textbooks: A Critique,” American Biology Teacher 55 (1993): 78–83.
11. Walter Bradley, “Entropy, Information, and the Origin of Life,” in Debating Design, ed. William Dembski and Michael Ruse (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004).
12. Walter Bradley, “Is There Scientific Evidence for the Existence of God?” in Science: Christian Perspectives for the New Millennium, ed. Stan Wallace, Paul Copan, and Scott Luley (Addison, TX: CLM & RZIM, 2003).
13. Walter L. Bradley and Charles B. Thaxton, “Information and the Origin of Life” in The Creation Hypothesis, ed. J. P. Moreland (Downers Grove, IL: Intervarsity Press, 1994).