The Outrageous Idea of Christian Scholarship, Second Edition
The Outrageous Idea of Christian Scholarship became an instant classic when it was released by Oxford University Press in 1997, but I must admit that I always disliked the title. While it is an effective attention-grabber, the text itself is far more nuanced and polite than the title presages. Additionally, the word “outrageous” conveys neither the collegiality nor the humdrumness of the normal day-to-day work done by scholars, whether Christians or not. So, I am glad that Marsden clarifies his intention in the new edition, which is to articulate “principles for Christian scholars to follow . . . so that the presentation of our Christian views may be more winsome than outrageous” (xiv). A gifted and exceptionally productive historian, George Marsden exemplifies that winsomeness, consistently producing work that is empirically sound and generous in spirit.
The Outrageous Idea was written nearly three decades ago, and in the new edition Marsden muses that the book seems a bit out of date, as if it was composed in a bygone era. It was. At the time of the first edition, scholars from different social and intellectual communities of discourse typically saw themselves as representing the perspectives of the groups they identified with, not an individual perspective. It made eminent sense then for Christians to argue, as Marsden does, that Christian views should receive as fair a hearing in the academy as “Marxist, feminist, gay, post-modern, African-American, conservative, or liberal schools of thought” (5). During that time, members of various racial, ethnic, social, and religious groups were prone to reference “our” truth as it contrasted to the perspectives associated with other communal lenses of interpretation. But that age of multiculturalism is now past.
As the second edition of The Outrageous Idea makes its appearance, the United States is immersed in a new intellectual milieu in which personal identity has replaced group allegiance as the intellectual standard. Robert Putnam’s groundbreaking book Bowling Alone, originally published in 2000 and then revised and updated in 2020, uses a huge amount of data to illustrate how group allegiances in American culture have almost entirely dissolved. Today, Americans are much more likely to speak about “my truth” or “my faith” than “our truth” or “our faith.” As part of this transition, the conceptualization of faith itself has changed. In the past, faith was usually associated with the specific beliefs and practices of a Christian denomination or another formal religious tradition. Currently, faith usually refers to the values, commitments, convictions, and life experiences of a single individual, and a person’s spiritual autobiography is presumed to take precedence over any institutionally defined religious doctrines or loyalties.
Marsden’s new preface acknowledges that the American religious and intellectual culture has shifted, and the new final chapter borrows a phrase from Mark Noll to describe the terrain: an “Intellectual Wild West.” To me, the “wild west” concept brings to mind the old-fashioned and often racist cowboys-and-Indians movies and television shows that were popular in the decades after World War II. In those dramas, the wild west was a place where nice people were often treated badly until some gunslinging hero came to town and confronted the bad guys, eventually restoring peace and social order. That plotline is neither a useful nor accurate portrayal of the work of Christians—or anyone else—in today’s academy.
For the most part, the contemporary American intellectual domain is not an academic gunfight with scholars from different camps rhetorically shooting each other. Instead of resembling a shootout at the O. K. Corral, the academy today is more like a crowded party with an excessive number of conversations underway. Switching metaphors, higher education (and intellectual inquiry in general) might be compared to a bustling marketplace of ideas expressing such a rich diversity of views and insights that it is impossible to assess them all. My truth sits alongside your truth, sometimes awkwardly but often quite compatibly or comfortably differently, and that pluralism provides all of us with fresh opportunities to listen to and learn from each other.
Marsden describes the current ethos in the new final chapter, writing that “it is now clear that everyone has a minority viewpoint shaped in part by their various identities” (133). He then counsels Christian scholars to avoid outrageousness and tendentiousness and to live and work alongside other scholars from a posture of “faithful presence,” a term promoted by James Davison Hunter. Marsden says that faithful presence in the academy means humbly “carrying out high-quality work and attending to the work done by others” (138).
Yet Marsden’s original text remains unchanged, and that text counterbalances and sometimes overwhelms irenicism with a sense of worry and fear. His original text tells Christians never to forget “that mainstream academic culture and spiritual virtues are often at odds” (126) and to remember that Christian scholars are engaged in “a great spiritual struggle between forces of darkness and light” (111). Christian thinkers are advised not only to articulate their own views but also to point out the “internal inconsistencies in the belief systems of others” (56), which seems to imply that interpretations supplied by non-Christians are inevitably more flawed than the interpretations provided by Christians.
The unresolved tension between conciliation and confrontation in Marsden’s text stems at least partly from failing to differentiate between two distinctive intellectual tasks, one that focuses on explicitly Christian scholarship and the other comprised of scholarly work undertaken by people with Christian identities. In his earlier book, The Soul of the American University: From Protestant Establishment to Established Nonbelief,1 Marsden seems to acknowledge these two different modes of Christian thinking when he adds an “unscientific postscript” conveying his own “interests” in Christian scholarship after concluding the main body of the text, which presents itself as standard scholarship that happens to be done by a Christian. In The Outrageous Idea, by contrast, Marsden generally treats the two varieties of faith-related scholarly activity as more or less synonymous and shifts back and forth between them almost interchangeably.
In the new era of identity, however, recognizing the difference between the two forms of scholarship has become a necessity. “Christian scholarship” involves the intentional introduction of theology (specific Christian doctrines or beliefs) into one’s academic reflection. Marsden himself describes such efforts as exploring “the ways in which a context of theological beliefs can change the way we value other things” (95). Christian scholarship expresses views that are explicitly Christian, and in the broader academy it often assumes an apologetic or evangelistic tenor. This work is frequently undertaken on behalf of a particular Christian community. For example, Christian scholars who are Lutheran may take up the task of formulating a Lutheran perspective on a selected topic by drawing on explicitly Lutheran ideas and practices. In addition to explaining Lutheran views to the broader academy, their work helps Lutherans better understand the theological, intellectual, moral, and political implications of their own tradition.
Understood in this way, Christian scholarship operates in a space where the university (or college or seminary) and the church (and often society and public life as well) intersect. Individuals who do this kind of work are sometimes called public theologians or, more generically, public intellectuals. In his new final chapter, Marsden credits Christian colleges and universities, along with the Christian study centers that have recently been established at many top-tier universities, as “leaders in developing Christian scholarship of the sort this book is about” (139). Christian Scholar’s Review is itself an indispensable outlet for individuals doing Christian scholarship.
The second type of intellectual work refers to scholarship by persons who identify as Christian that seeks only to contribute to a more accurate and complete understanding of humans and the world around us. It does not aim to produce something distinctively Christian. However, in this age of identity-driven thinking, faith is unavoidably involved in this kind of reflection, as well. Faith, in this context, rarely takes the form of specific dogmas or doctrines but instead it is embodied in the values, commitments, convictions, hopes, fears, and dreams of a lived faith that shapes one’s authentic, heartfelt identity. Today, few people in the academy claim that their views are objective, and no one expects either consensus or conformity. What’s more, the shift from group thinking to individualized searching makes it hard for any new idea to be perceived as “outrageous” rather than merely fringe, and the vast majority of scholars have little interest in becoming either public intellectuals or social influencers.
Christian scholarship is important intellectual work, but so is the work of scholars in the mainstream academy who identify as Christian without focusing on theology. Most scholarship produced by individuals with a Christian identity is not broadcast as a Christian perspective nor does it rely on theologically particular methodologies. Yet the wholeness of who we are as people influences everything we think and do, and there is an implicit presence of Christianity in the scholarly work of every Christian. Furthermore, Christianity has played such a pivotal role in shaping Western culture and its general approaches to understanding the world that the fingerprints of Christianity are discernable in many of the methodologies and practices enshrined in the academic enterprise. Rather than operating in opposition to each other, Christian values often overlap with the highest ideals of the academy.
Later this year, Oxford University Press will publish Christianity and Intellectual Inquiry: Thinking as Pilgrimage, which I wrote with my husband Douglas Jacobsen, a church historian. In that book, we trace the progression of Christian thinking in higher education and propose using the concept of intellectual pilgrimage as the optimal approach to scholarship in the era of identity. Scholars who adopt a pilgrimage posture are aware that they view reality through the lenses of their own current identities, life experiences, and personal faith, but they intentionally leave their intellectual homes from time to time in order to explore new vistas of knowledge and to interact with people who see the world differently from themselves. They do not proceed as intellectual missionaries who are intent on advancing their own views. Instead, they operate as fellow travelers, as intellectual peers who hope to improve their own thinking while serving as constructive dialogue partners for other pilgrims.
There is no question that Christian scholarship, understood in the sense of connecting Christan theology with the insights of one’s discipline, remains a necessary task for many Christian intellectuals. It is a high calling to help people understand Christianity and its implications for all domains of life, but Christian scholarship does not represent the entirety of what scholars who are Christians may be called to do. Most researchers who are Christians pursue greater knowledge about some specific non-theological segment of reality through dialogue, debate, and cooperation with other scholars. When asked about their perspectives and the experiences of faith and life that have shaped them, Christian academicians should be ready to explain “the hope that is in you,” (1 Peter 3:15, ESV) but their scholarship is not intended to outrageously (or even winsomely) convert or convince anyone of the superiority of their particular Christian worldview.
Marsden himself has produced both kinds of scholarship, and both of them are evident in The Outrageous Idea. Most of the original text is concerned with explicit links between theology and academic study (Christian scholarship), while the new introduction and final chapter contain broader advice for Christians who are practicing scholars in the contemporary academy. Read in this way, Marsden’s Outrageous Idea remains relevant today even though it was written in a different age, and it is precisely that dialectic—the book’s historical message repositioned in the present—that makes this second edition so meaningful. In the reissued book and in the author himself, we see the personification of Christian intellectual pilgrimage at its best: the ability of an accomplished Christian thinker to faithfully change and nuance his thinking in light of changing circumstances and emerging insights.
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