If you want to know what an academic institution truly believes about itself, don’t start with its mission statement. Open a tenure file. Look at which publications are held in esteem, which grants are praised, and which writings are dismissed as mere filler. Long after we articulate our institution’s vision and mission, it’s those decisions that shape scholars’ understanding of their universities’ purposes. As we think through Professor Hunter’s work on cultural logics, one implication is clear: academic leaders, whether intentionally or not, are already forming scholars not primarily through faculty development programs or strategic plans, but through the ordinary expectations of institutional life.
Hunter has helped us to see why this matters. Institutional crises, or even drift, are rarely the result of bad people or bad intentions. More often, they grow out of unexamined cultural logics that unobtrusively define what we pursue and reward. While we often articulate what a Christian classroom or a campus should look like, we are far less clear about what a distinctly Christian approach to scholarship might be. And so, what I want to suggest today is simple and straightforward: Just as our classrooms are formative, so too is scholarship. A life of the mind shapes a life surrendered to Christ.
Professor Hunter argues that the dominant cultural logic of our time is nihilism—not open despair, perhaps, but not convinced that thinking is oriented toward anything that matters. He reminds us that when meaning disappears, the will to power remains, but detached from any end worth serving.
While Hunter’s analysis covers our current cultural moment, it also captures the nihilism found in higher education. Like the culture writ large, the rise of nihilism as the dominant cultural logic in higher education was not the outcome of some ideological battle. Instead, it filled the vacuum left by higher education’s abandonment of its comprehensive and formative mission. Two academics have described this current state of affairs well. Andrew Delbanco, the professor of American studies at Columbia University, writes that the dominant force shaping higher education has been centrifugal in nature, pushing away from an animating center, leaving us with balkanized communities that lack an overarching sense of truth, no answers to the great questions of life, and, worse still, no desire or way to formulate such questions. Such a vacuum has left academic institutions with little to boast about their purposes beyond technical excellence and the employment success of their graduates.[1]
Likewise, Anthony Kronman, former dean of Yale Law School, contends that universities have largely abandoned their responsibility to help students and scholars ask what kind of life is worth living. This leaves scholars who are rewarded for their analytical skills but are neither prepared nor see it as their responsibility to build on existing knowledge or to nurture the intellectual, emotional, or spiritual formation of students.[2] As a result, critique rather than construction has become the common purpose of higher education.
In this respect, he asserts that power has replaced persuasion as the main form of academic engagement. When confidence in shared meaning erodes, persuasion gives way to assertion and to attacks on those who don’t share one’s perspectives. I experienced this firsthand as a graduate student at New York University (NYU), where my doctoral education placed less importance on knowledge itself and more on our ability to analyze data and to critique the methodology of others. This cultural logic in psychology is not unique to NYU, leading to research published in my field’s top-tier journals that is technical and statistically sophisticated, but whose outcomes are not particularly interesting. It’s the research itself that is the star.
Together, Professors Hunter, Delbanco, and Kronman show that in the absence of a larger purpose, the modern academy now excels at critique and technical mastery while losing confidence that scholarship can advance knowledge tethered to any sort of truth that can undergird and sustain higher ideals of civil life or build toward any sort of shared meaning.
Are Christian institutions different? The good news is that Christian colleges are already anchored to the reality found in God’s redemptive purposes. Scholars who acknowledge God’s providence over his created order participate in a larger epistemological, moral, and theological story. And why does this matter for scholarship? With such anchoring, knowledge and discovery are not ends in and of themselves. Scholarship is in service to meaning and cultural restoration toward the common good. Christian institutions have both the ability and the motivation to shape scholars who have a sense of vocation about the purposes of their research beyond impact scores and professional acclaim, for we occupy a rare position not only to further cultivate valued intellectual traditions but also to articulate a different type of scholarship that is not only robust but also purposeful and formative.
I did not receive that sort of vocational orientation in my graduate training at NYU, but I did as an undergraduate at Wheaton College under the guidance of Professor of Philosophy Arthur Holmes. Harkening back to Origen and Augustine, we are all well-versed in the saying he popularized: “All truth is God’s truth.”[3]
What are the implications of that pithy sentence? First, scholarship is never neutral. There was a cultural logic underlying all scholarship for Holmes. The danger was unexamined assumptions, the cultural logic as it were, that Christians brought to their scholarship. So, he asked, what would it mean if we surrendered all to God’s will, including scholarship? For him, epistemology was not just about knowledge. It was also theological and thus formative. Scholars seeking to know the mind of God while surrendering all allow God to take every thought captive in obedience to Christ. (2 Corinthians 10:5)
Consequently, Holmes, harkening back to the 19th- and 20th-century polymath Abraham Kuyper, advocated for a holistic worldview and lifeview, framing assumptions, methodology, and conclusions in a way that acknowledges God’s sovereignty and, thus, purpose, over all. Holmes made it clear that Christian scholarship was never merely a different set of assumptions and conclusions, but another way for God to shape us in his image—a completely different cultural logic around scholarship than what is at play in the modern academy today.[4]
Accordingly, for the Christian who believes that God is sovereign over the entire created order, scholarship has a formative purpose. The question for Christian institutions, then, is not whether scholarship has a role in shaping its culture, but how and to what end. For example, we readily apply Christian convictions in the classroom and in students’ spiritual lives. But what are those convictions for scholarship?
Without the clarity of those convictions, Christian institutions risk slipping into a type of functional nihilism when we rely on secular academic expectations to define the purpose of scholarship, standards of excellence, and methods for evaluating scholarship. For example, using the Boyer categories to define scholarship, in which explicitly Christian writing integrating faith and learning does not easily fit, may diminish the value of a piece of scholarship. Similarly, using impact metrics to evaluate quality will, due to their formulas, favor work published in widely circulated journals over Christian-oriented journals with smaller audiences, considering the latter less significant.
Without articulating a different logic, such affirmations form the culture of what is expected and affirmed at Christian institutions in the same way as their secular counterparts. My challenge to leaders of Christian academic institutions today is this: Are we actually applying a Christian cultural logic to scholarly expectations, or have we unintentionally allowed the dominant academic culture to define what counts as scholarly excellence?
To do so, we need not invent a different cultural logic, as one is already available to Christians. As Hunter has argued, solidarity requires shared ends—shared frameworks of meaning, and a shared telos that directs our work in a purposeful manner. There are three aspects of shared meaning found in Christian scholarship that quickly come to mind.
First, God’s sovereignty provides a telos for scholarship, meaning that human history has direction, moving purposefully toward God’s new creation. Knowledge or discovery, as part of that purpose, is never an end in itself. Subsequently, we must recognize that all of the world is redeemable to God’s good purposes—including knowledge.
Secondly, because scholarship is part of God’s redemptive plans, it is purposeful beyond merely being published. As a consequence, deconstruction or any other critical analysis cannot be an end in itself for Christian scholars but serves as a tool for restoring God’s intended created order.
Third, and perhaps most counter-cultural in academia, because all truth is God’s truth, Christian scholars should feel free to work outside their disciplinary focus and engage with different epistemologies to solve real-world problems or address larger questions of meaning and purpose. My favorite examples are the Global Flourishing Project and the Wake Forest Center for Leadership and Character. Both are multidisciplinary and led by Christians focused on outcomes that extend far beyond academia.
By now, some of you may be thinking to yourself, what does any of this have to do with the scholarship created by mathematicians, theoretical physicists, or chemists creating enzymes in the lab? The arguments I have made so far have focused on the purpose and outcome of scholarship for institutional culture and sense of identity. But just as importantly, a cultural logic, whether one grounded in secular nihilism or one that is grounded in the shared meaning of the gospel, will shape what it means to be a Christian scholar within a Christian scholarly community. Scholarship matters not only for its outcome, but because it is profoundly formative. It shapes not only what scholars produce but also who they are in Christ.
Scholarship based in a Christian cultural logic is profoundly spiritually formative because:
It forms habits—shaping how scholars repeatedly think, question, and attend to the larger world.
It forms purpose—shaping how scholars understand the nature of their vocational calling.
It forms loves—shaping how scholars want to be seen by others, which, when left unanalyzed, may become another idol to chase.
It forms epistemology—shaping whether scholars see knowledge as a good gift from God to pursue ethically and under accountability, to give one’s scholarship to others to serve God’s purposes, or merely to serve one’s own grasp for power.
It forms imagination—shaping scholars to envision either a hopeful future worth building toward or one in which critique has the final word.
Scholarship also shapes the kinds of intellectual and spiritual communities that Christian scholars inhabit. Just as scholarship forms academics, so too it forms their institutions. The commitment to scholarly practices will shape interactions with students, colleagues, and the wider communities their work serves. Over time, scholarship either cultivates shared responsibility for Kingdom restoration and flourishing in institutions or finds an impoverished home within our current cultural nihilism.
If I surrender all to God, then as a scholar, I must ask how God uses my scholarship to form me into his likeness. I must ask whether my scholarly habits are cultivating humility or mastery, hope or cynicism, wisdom or intellectual detachment within me. I must ask whether I am part of a scholarly community that is being formed toward the life of the church, and whether its practices, incentives, and rewards are being intentionally identified, cultivated, and affirmed.
Simply put, scholarship is a formative practice for both institutions and individuals, shaping moral, spiritual, and intellectual identities. Because of this, Christian institutions cannot afford to treat scholarship as spiritually neutral. If we fail to attend to the formative nature of scholarship, we should not be surprised when scholars and their communities are formed by secular cultural logics, rather than the hope of the gospel we profess.
This is where Christian academic leadership becomes critical. Through what you reward, affirm, and aspire to, you shape not only what counts as scholarly excellence, but what kind of scholars your institutions form, and ultimately the vision that shapes your institution. In a culture that has stopped caring about meaning and purpose, Christian colleges and universities have the opportunity and the responsibility to cultivate scholarship that is Christ-surrendered, non-nihilistic, and oriented toward a redemptive story that gives it greater purpose beyond academic acclaim.
[1]. Andrew Delbanco, College: What It Was, Is, and Should Be (Princeton University Press, 2013).
[2]. Anthony T. Kronman, Education’s End: Why Our Colleges and Universities Have Given Up on the Meaning of Life (Yale University Press, 2007).
[3]. Arthur F. Holmes, All Truth Is God’s Truth (Eerdmans, 1977).
[4]. Arthur F. Holmes, Contours of a World View (Eerdmans, 1983); Arthur F. Holmes, The Idea of a Christian College, rev. ed. (Eerdmans, 1987).
