Outrageous Christian Scholars Society Fall 1999

Enhancing conversation and deepening understanding of the vocation of Christian scholarship at DBU

Strickland 212, 3:30 - 5:00 pm

“A Calvinist [Christian] who seeks God, does not for a moment think of limiting himself to theology and con-templation, leaving the other sciences, as of a lower character, in the hands of unbelievers; but on the con-trary, looking upon it as his task to know God in all his works, he is conscious of having been called to fathom with all the energy of his intellect, things terrestrial as well as things celestial; to open to view both the order of creation, and the “common grace” of the God he adores in nature and its wondrous character, in the production of human industry, in the life of mankind, in sociology and in the history of the human race.”
—Abraham Kuyper, “Calvinism and Science” in Lectures on Calvinism (Eerdmans, 1931), p. 125.

“I am advocating the opening of the academic mainstream to scholarship that relates one’s belief in God to what else one thinks about. Keeping within our intellectual horizons a Being who is great enough to create us and the universe, after all, ought to change our perspectives on quite a number of things. One might expect it to have a bearing on some of the most sharply debated issues in academia today: How can we find a basis for our most cherished moral judgments? Is power the only means to decide what counts as ‘virtue’? How can we affirm a pluralism that genuinely accepts others, without lapsing into relativism? Can we know anything about reality that goes beyond our own socially determined constructions? Are there any essential traits in the human character? Is there any alternative to the fragmentation of the disciplines? What should be the relationship among research, teaching, and other service. What is the point of an academic career?”
—George M. Marsden, The Outrageous Idea of Christian Scholarship, (Oxford, 1997), p. 4.