This summer, we reached a milestone of over 550 manuscripts submitted to Christian Scholar’s Review since we introduced our online manuscript management system five years ago. It seems incredible (and a lifetime ago) that we were tracking manuscripts, reviewers, reviews, revisions, decisions, and correspondence with a very wonky spreadsheet.
I offer that number with some humility as a testament to our journal’s quality. While it is sizable, we only publish about 25 percent of submissions. We have three fairly equal groups of manuscripts that don’t make the grade. About 25 percent of the documents are not academic manuscripts—their authors are seeking a publication outlet for very personal work, but it’s unlikely they have read our author guidelines or any of our articles. I wish them all the best in finding an appropriate venue for their writing.
The second 25 percent are too narrowly focused, with authors writing from an insider’s point of view in their field, dropping names and obscure terms that scholars outside their area are unlikely to understand, much less care about. The third 25 percent consists of scholarly works that need a firm hand in editing to shape their scholarly argument more clearly. The ratio of words to ideas is often unnecessarily high. Everyone needs a trusted colleague who is willing to tell them when they aren’t making sense. I’ve been blessed to have Denise Daniels (Wheaton College), Shirley Mullen (Houghton University), and Susan Van Zanten (Valparaiso University) save me from myself on numerous occasions. Chat GPT has nothing on these good friends and colleagues.
The final 25 percent move on to peer review. Those that reach publication tend to have three key attributes. First, they are engaging to a wide audience of Christian scholars. Our readers believe in God’s special revelation in the Bible. They are also interested in God’s general revelation through scholarly works. They are curious Christians eager to read more broadly and think more deeply about topics that may seem unrelated to their field, aiming to expand both knowledge and wisdom. At best, our articles and book reviews provide readers with opportunities to grow in their spiritual formation.
Secondly, I look for originality in the ideas being presented. As a writer, I’m mindful of the time I’m asking readers to give up. Is what I’m offering worth precious minutes of their lives? We want to publish pieces that are truly worth their readers’ investment—articles with big ideas, fresh perspectives, or unexpected combinations of familiar concepts that make readers pause and think, “I’ve never thought of it that way before.” The highest compliment for our journal is when a reader shares an article with a colleague or students to spark further conversation.
Third, I value not just the absence of clunky writing that muddles ideas, but the presence of writing that delights: a turn of phrase, an apt metaphor, a just-right bon mot that will linger with readers. In an era of increasingly sanitized prose from AI bots, I’m looking for human writers crafting language for other humans.
The articles and reviews in this issue meet the criteria for being broadly interesting, original, and well-written.
We start with Ryan West, associate professor of philosophy at Grove City College, who writes “Read Aloud!—For Edification: Pedagogical Reflections Inspired by Kierkegaard.” Having “pedagogy” linked to “Kierkegaard” in its title piqued my interest from the get-go. This article, using several writings of Kierkegaard, makes the argument for the spiritual benefits of reading out loud. West’s writing is exquisite. Early on in the article, he quotes a section of Kierkegaard’s discourse known as “The Mirror,” and then adds this modern insight:
Readers’ minds are noisy. We are what we eat; and a steady diet of hastily produced, agitation-inducing rubbish renders a reader so inwardly harried, busy, scattered, distracted, and otherwise preoccupied that she lacks the inner quiet and unity of will that characterizes a spiritually serious reader. In this way, noisy reading not only differs from morally earnest reading, but also undermines it. By hurriedly filling one’s hours and consciousness with noise, one lacks the time, peace, and spiritual appetite necessary to seek and read edifying texts in an edifying way. And, if the noisy reader is presented with an edifying text, “it cannot be heard,” for her cultural catechesis will have shaped her mental habits in such a way that she’ll read it like she reads noisy “literature”—quickly, distractedly, and with readiness to discard after use.
Drawing on Kierkegaard and others, West argues for the value of having students read passages aloud to one another in class. The practice invites them into the narrative—moving beyond detached, technical analysis to an engagement shaped by transformative pathos.
I like to think that at its best, Christian scholarship is a dialogue that engages differing sources of knowledge—not to force agreement, like misaligned gears, but to deepen understanding, strengthen our knowledge structures, and perhaps even lead to wisdom. In our second article, Clement Yung Wen, an assistant professor of systematic and historical theology and the Howard and Shirley Bentall Chair in Evangelical Thought at McMaster Divinity College in Canada, tackles such an engagement head on by digging further into the modern, individualistic, and action-oriented view of vocation in his article “Election to Community unto Maximizing Shalom as the Heart of Vocation: Wolfhart Pannenberg and Stanley J. Grenz in Dialogue with John G. Stackhouse, Jr.” In this piece, he examines the writings of German Lutheran theologian Wolfhart Pannenberg (1928-2014) and his student, American evangelical theologian Stanley J. Grenz (1950-2005). As the title indicates, Wen references Pannenberg’s reflections on the nature of God’s kingdom and Grenz’s concept of election to community to argue that vocation extends beyond individual calling and work. He then uses Stackhouse’s writings as a foil—not to dismiss the significance of individuals or the active role of vocation in fulfilling God’s purposes, but to present a more nuanced perspective that emphasizes both communal and individual dimensions, particularly in light of shalom. He ends his piece by writing,
Stackhouse’s desire for vocation to include every aspect of life in a manner that fulfils both the permanent human and temporary Christian tasks unto maximizing shalom is of course to be upheld. Yet rather than focusing primarily upon vocation as ‘task,’ a reframed emphasis upon the broader and more expansive basis of election to a new communal identity reorients who we are and are for while also determining both the generalities of and general context for what we are then specifically called by the Caller to do. At the same time, whereas Pannenberg’s and Grenz’s ‘election to community’ encapsulates who we are called to be and be for, Stackhouse’s parsing of vocation as ultimately being about “maximizing shalom” helpfully brings greater clarity and much needed specificity to the implicit vocational imperative that “election to community” entails. Along all the above lines, I hereby propose that election to community unto maximizing shalom is the heart of vocation.
Speaking of big questions: Do business profits belong in God’s kingdom, or are they remnants of unredeemed human fallenness? In our third article, “Why Seek Profits?: A Missional Perspective on Business,” Jooho Lee, associate professor of business ethics and law at Seaver College of Pepperdine University, offers a more affirmative view. Drawing on the theology of the missio Dei, Lee argues that profit-seeking can play a meaningful role in God’s redemptive work. As he writes, “By pointing the market process and its participants toward better relationships with the material and social world, profit-seeking can be a way to participate more fully with the mission of God and thus with the divine nature itself.”
However, Lee is not totally sanguine about business profits, writing toward the end of his article,
Money cannot serve as the ultimate end of our actions. Only God can serve as our ultimate end. But it is also easy to fall into the trap of focusing solely on the value of profits when we talk of business. Profits can be used for a variety of good purposes, but how we go about seeking profits matters as well. Our work must reflect the reality of the divine nature. Prioritizing profits above our calling to participate with the missio Dei—treating each other as disposable inputs, honoring all preferences in the market even if they deny the reality of God, etc.—is a recipe for disaster, even if we do great things with the profits that we generate.
All three of these articles offer “aha” moments and are accessible reads for curious individuals in any academic field.
In tomorrow’s blog, we will introduce our book review selections curated by our book review editor, Matt Lundberg.
