The standard format for each issue of Christian Scholar’s Review over the past fifty years has typically begun with three or four peer-reviewed articles, followed by book reviews and occasionally article-length extended reviews. In this issue, we are altering our traditional format to begin with a book review forum curated by our new book review editor, Matt Lundberg, director of the de Vries Institute for Global Faculty Development and professor of religion at Calvin University. Every so often a book appears that contributes to a conversation in a way that becomes a touchstone for the next stage of that discussion. George M. Marsden’s The Outrageous Idea of Christian Scholarship is such a book. It was published in 1997 in the context of several books that were pressing the case for Christian approaches to academic life, in the face of the truculent secularism of the mid-twentieth century.
It was preceded in the 1970s and 1980s by contributions by people like Alvin Plantinga on issues of faith and epistemology, and Arthur F. Holmes on an array of topics related to Christianity and academic life, as well as by pivotal books such as Nicholas Wolterstorff’s Reason Within the Bounds of Religion and Mark Noll’s The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind, to say nothing of Marsden’s own previous book, The Soul of the American University.1 It was followed by other significant contributions to the conversation, such as the efforts of Douglas Jacobsen and Rhonda Hustedt Jacobsen in Scholarship and Christian Faith: Enlarging the Conversation to nurture a more confessionally diverse version of this conversation (i. e., one that reached for resources beyond the Reformed tradition).2
Even more recently it has been enriched by works by scholars such as James K. A. Smith, Perry L. Glanzer, David I. Smith, and others that beckon the conversation beyond questions of theoretical perspectivalism into the role of habits, practices, pedagogy, and student formation beyond the classroom.
But Marsden’s Outrageous Idea seems to have played an especially influential role, one with staying power—across the range of academic disciplines—in making the case for faith commitments having a justifiable role in the academic life while still respecting the legitimate methods and tools of the scholarly guild.
Such has been the book’s staying power that Oxford University Press initiated a second edition of Outrageous Idea that was published in 2024. Opting to leave the book’s original six chapters unchanged, Marsden adds a new chapter in the second edition that reconsiders the book’s argument in the context of the changes in higher education and American culture in the nearly three decades since its original publication. Christian Scholar’s Review is delighted to publish a forum of reviews of the second edition from five scholars who represent varied disciplinary and theological perspectives—Rhonda Hustedt Jacobsen, Karen Swallow Prior, Justin Barrett, Benjamin Wetzel, and Barbara Armacost, followed by a response from George Marsden. Expressing appreciation for the book and its ongoing relevance, the reviewers also urge the conversation forward in different ways, especially in view of the uncertain future of Christian higher education at a moment when it faces complex cultural, political, technological, and financial pressures. It is our hope that this forum will encourage Christian scholars and leaders of their institutions to keep thinking carefully, creatively, and boldly about what the life of the mind—research, teaching, intellectual citizenship, cultural influence—should look like when every thought is taken captive in obedience to Jesus Christ.
We have three articles following the review forum. Like many journals, we take a “first in, first out” approach to publishing articles, bringing pieces to print as soon as the associate editors and I believe they are ready for production. This issue is no different, but each of these three articles asks readers to consider the biblical and theological importance of place as we live out our vocations. We begin with “Mending the Christian Imagination: Place, Race, and Calling in Christian Higher Education” by Karen J. Johnson, a professor of history at Wheaton College. Often, we discuss vocation—God’s calling on our lives—in terms of personal action, emphasizing the expected behaviors that God has called each of us to undertake without considering the time and space in which we perform them. Johnson challenges this unarticulated assumption by stating, “Failure to cultivate a sense of place is detrimental to the lives of individuals and the church, perhaps most significantly because it continues a blindness to and perpetuation of a mangled Christian imagination, plagued by individuals’ isolation and, at the group level, racial separation and hierarchies.” She further argues that actively engaging students in questions associated with “reducing, rooting, and restraining,” which are fundamental to the mission of the Christian Community Development Association, will assist educators and their students in regaining a sense of place. Johnson concludes her piece by stating, “If we lead students to care well for their places and make where we live and how we live there central to our understanding of vocation, we can help ourselves and our students live into the union Jesus won for us on the cross.”
We are always delighted when we receive a manuscript from outside the United States. In our second article, “All Quiet with Darwin: Animal Suffering and Divine Benevolence in Historical Perspective,” Piet Slootweg, a retired professor of pathology at Radboud University Medical Center in Nijmegen, The Netherlands, demonstrates that “the debate among theologians about the relationship between the goodness of God and the suffering that affects animals only started to play a role from the 1970s, more than a century after Darwin published his theory.” On a somewhat ironic note, he also shows that arguments about nature that today are interpreted as threatening to theism were already subject to debate before Darwin but, in their time and context, did not question the existence of God. Slootweg adds, “When animals suffer it is for a higher purpose intended by God and history shows that Darwinism did not make that belief any less credible. Rather, the current view that animal suffering and Christian faith are in conflict arises from recent changes in the sociocultural climate and changes in our understanding of who God is and what he should do.”
In our third article, Justin Harbin, associate professor of education and director of the Center for Teaching & Learning at Lancaster Bible College, argues that part of the Christian academic vocation is to equip students to faithfully understand the world they inhabit. In his article titled “Making Sense of Christian Learning,” he discusses how the educational concept of enactivism and its “5e” framing of “embodied, embedded, enactive, emotive, and extended” provides a helpful descriptive lens that reveals how humans interact with and make sense of the world. However, he makes it clear that enactivism is not just another cognitive framing in which to shape a worldview. Instead, he asserts that it offers a perspective to see “our students as ‘heart-soul-mind-strength complexes designed for love,’ capable of meaningful action in their local communities, vocations, and society at large.”
We begin our traditional book review section with an extended review of Christopher P. Scheitle’s The Faithful Scientist: Experiences of Anti-Religious Bias in Scientific Training (New York University Press, 2023) by Rachael A. Baker, associate professor of chemistry and biochemistry at Calvin University and director of professional development at the Network for Vocation in Undergraduate Education. Scheitle’s book is the culmination of a research project that collected quantitative and interview data from more than 1,300 graduate students pursuing PhDs in physics, chemistry, biology, psychology, and sociology, focusing particularly on interviewing students who describe themselves as religious. Baker emphasizes Scheitle’s point that the anti-religious bias experienced by religious graduate students is related to social identity rather than conflicts over religious or scientific knowledge. While Baker notes that navigating multiple identities is a reality for all graduate students, the question for religious students is particularly salient because of the strength of their religious identity and because the scientific identity being cultivated in graduate school sometimes excludes or competes with religion. However, she notes that Scheitle argues the data suggests there is space for students to maintain these two identities.
In other reviews:
Nahanni Freeman, professor of clinical psychology at George Fox University, reviews Warren Kinghorn, Wayfaring: A Christian Approach to Mental Health Care (Eerdmans, 2024).
Caleb W. Southern, director of institutional effectiveness at Southern Wesleyan University, reviews Sarah Irving-Stonebraker’s Priests of History: Stewarding the Past in an Ahistoric Age (Zondervan Reflective, 2024).
Paul Oslington, professor of economics and theology at Alphacrucis University College, Sydney, Australia, reviews Christopher Watkin, Biblical Critical Theory: How the Bible’s Unfolding Story Makes Sense of Modern Life and Culture (Zondervan, 2022).
Footnotes
- Nicholas Wolterstorff, Reason within the Bounds of Religion (Eerdmans, 1984 [1976]); Mark A. Noll, The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind (Eerdmans, 1994); George M. Marsden, The Soul of the American University: From Protestant Establishment to Established Nonbelief (Oxford University Press, 1994).
- Douglas Jacobsen and Rhonda Hustedt Jacobsen, Scholarship and Christian Faith: Enlarging the Conversation (Oxford University Press, 2004).
