The Christian Scholar as a Poet

A Tale of Two Emersons

In the little New England town where I grew up, two roads were named after Ralph Waldo Emerson—different roads sharing one name. Our split-­level home sat on a half-­acre plot by a meadow; while I lived on this quiet Emerson Road, there was another Emerson Road less than a mile away, near Thoreau Road. As a girl, it was confusing to tell friends that I lived on Emerson Road only to hear the refrain, “Which one?” Our mail was occasionally delivered to the other road; out-­of-­town guests opened their paper maps and navigated to the wrong Emerson. To a ten-­year-­old, Emerson was the road where I rode my bicycle to flute lessons and played with the children of the Greek Orthodox family who lived across the street. A brook ran through the nearby woods where wild blackberries grew. Now, on hindsight and by happenstance, I ponder these two roads as an appropriate metaphor for Ralph Waldo Emerson’s public and private spheres as an American intellectual—the celebrated philosopher and “thought leader” yet a poet in solitary retreat, one who was acquainted with Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth.

How did my family end up settling in this little wooded town? Both of my parents immigrated to the United States from Taiwan in the 1960s. My father studied engineering. My mother, a homemaker-­turned-­library archivist, was an avid gardener who planted bok choy by our maple and crabapple trees. The town was lush and green in the summertime. When the moon rose at night, while lying still in my bed, I tried to recall the syllables of rhymed verse memorized for Chinese school, the lines composed by poet-­scholars centuries ago. When I was about twelve years old, a real estate developer bulldozed the woods at the other end of our road to make way for new homes—gabled, three-­car garage luxury homes. The meadow of tall grasses and crickets had long given way to a condominium complex. Over the years, tensions arose between the historic town of the annual Battle Green re-­enactments of the American Revolution to geographical transplants with nouveau sensibilities—nature preservationists, software engineers, climate change activists, and yes, university professors.

Our road acquired a prefix, “East,” to distinguish our Emerson from the other one crossing north of the brook, off Adams near Grant, intersecting with Thoreau by Alcott Road. Nestled among tree-­lined lanes, these two roads—each one named Emerson—confused town residents. When I was a girl, I explained that I lived on the Emerson Road by the rock road, near the brook and meadow—obviously, a response that carried no meaning to people other than my immediate neighbors. In turn, this led me to believe, subconsciously, that names were floating signifiers. To confuse matters further, when I was older, I learned about North Emerson Road by Turning Mill Pond and Willard’s Woods where my father took us to see Halley’s Comet—alas, on a cloudy night—and Emerson Gardens, a brick condominium complex built in the mid-­sixties. What I didn’t realize was that the naming and re-­naming of public, municipal roads and private residences after Ralph Waldo Emerson was partly a commodification of his venerated status as a transcendentalist in the Lexington-­Concord area where he lived.

As a wayfaring pilgrim on my own dusty road to the Christian academic vocation, my day job as an English professor morphed into a host of responsibilities for a full-­time administrator, the provost. How does a poet also serve as a provost? What does a provost do, and why or how is she different from other cabinet members? Is she a paragon of the academic enterprise, the first among equals? Is she our enforcer, an advocate, or both? Is the opposite true—is a provost also a poet? How does she fit into the Christian academy, and vice versa—where is there space in the academy for a poet? Where do poets dwell in the liminal spaces of American society? What is the value-­add of a poet’s labors—not only in the operational and economic realm of the bottom-­line, but in terms of the academy’s ideals and aspirations?

At the nexus of these questions, I was delighted when my colleague, Todd Ream, shared a project idea drawing from Emerson’s “The American Scholar” as a point of embarkation for today’s Christian scholar in the academy.¹ On this collegial journey of thoughtful exchanges over the fall semester, our quintet of provosts discussed Christian scholars as fully educated persons cultivated through whole-­person education. Our churches and American society need the positive influence of thoughtful Christian scholars who bear God’s truth and love to neighbors; more than social influencers or watchdogs, Christian scholars serve as loving, humble prophets of this age, speaking biblical truth into today’s ever-­changing contexts and shifting worldviews. Christian scholars teach interactively, mentor holistically, critique ideas constructively, and breathe life into knowledge discovery through the lens of Scripture. As wise healers and counselors who stand prayerfully in the gaps and fractures of this age, Christian scholars bear witness to Jesus Christ and the timeless message of the gospel.

As our dialogues progressed through the fall semester, Kenneth Sacks, an American historian on faculty at Brown University, joined our conversation during the Advent season.² I was particularly intrigued to hear his description of “two Emersons.” According to Sacks, during the ebb and tide of Emersonian reception history, not just one, but rather, two Emersons existed. One was the individualistic, self-­reliant Emerson who preached soul-­searching independence; this Emerson chose solitude and Nature over a crowd, and his legacy is evident in the pragmatists, William James and John Dewey.³ The other Emerson was a celebrity intellectual who delivered 15,000 lectures over his lifetime in front of many audiences—this Emerson’s “personal brand” was fashioned into a commodity, thanks to Emerson’s celebrity status. “The business of Emerson” was a phrase that Sacks used to describe Emerson’s wide-­ranging, lucrative circuit of lecture activities. Sacks characterized this lecture circuit as Emerson’s version of Bob Dylan’s “Never Ending Tour.”⁴

In this tale of two Emersons exists the tension between the actual man and audience perceptions; what was the road he traveled—was it the solitary, private lane trodden by an earnestly truth-­seeking, independent-­minded naturalist who composed poems? Or was it the public street that Emerson’s audiences expected him to travel—while selling tickets to admiring crowds? The non-­conformist ethos of the poet-­seer ran directly counter to the avid consumption of his public persona. Moreover, Emerson looked to dear friends and family members for resources and moral support; he was far from self-­reliant in this regard. For these two Emersons, a revelation during a “forest bath” existed adjacent to a paying audience of admirers and the promise of financial solvency. In these contradictory roles, how did Emerson remain faithful to his non-­conformist principles of independence?

Perhaps today’s Christian scholar demonstrates a stereoscopic balance of two prototypical Emersons—a public intellectual through one lens, and a profound spiritual reliance on God through the other lens. The Christian scholar nurtures a life of the mind formed through individual discipleship and communal spiritual practice—as well as rigorous academic research or creative productivity. A Christian academic scholar is expected to participate in a community of shared inquiry. However, her journey of reliance is not primarily self-­centered or Nature-­inspired, but rather, Spirit-­led through scriptural truth and infused with Christ’s virtues. A flourishing contributor to a fellowship of scholars, her knowledge discovery and creativity are loving acts of worship and bear the fruit of the Spirit. As Jay Brewster of Pepperdine University observed during our discussions, our contemporary age of big critical data and technological advancements means larger platforms of collaboration among scholars. The rapidly evolving technologies, such as access to cloud-­based data, empower our access to scientific knowledge and our capacity to share it with other scientists around the world. Therefore, scholars of our era operate in global communities of shared inquiry where the disparate modes of knowing and divergent platforms of data may yet converge in our pursuit of truth and knowledge discovery. Emerson’s naturalist bent might possibly be tossed into the flotsam and jetsam of the information age if he sought to take the road alone as a philosopher anchored in the material world.

As Sacks shared in our conversation, Emerson rigorously strove to attain “the very best he could think” as well as “the very worst thoughts” he could manage in a “bipolar unity.”⁵ This interesting slice of Emerson’s thought experiments (his approach to developing the life of a mind) is not dissimilar from one of the critical-­thinking hallmarks of a liberal arts education. When I consider the impact of secular American scholars through the ages—MacArthur “Genius Grant” Fellows like our beloved poets Anne Carson, Don Mee Choi, and Ada Limón or the winners of the Nobel Prize in Literature such as the Polish American poet, Czeslaw Milosz, or the Missouri-­born Anglophile, T. S. Eliot—the majority of these intellectuals engaged with universal values and existential questions regarding humanity, suffering, exile, or the motherland through literature, science, and the performing arts. Their projects transcended national boundaries; neither did these intellectuals shy away from warning us about the flaws and fault lines inhibiting our aspirations as members of the human race. Marlies Carruth, director of the MacArthur Fellows, described the 2022 recipients as “architects” and “excavators” with references to “communities, systems, and social forces:”⁶

The 2022 MacArthur Fellows are architects of new modes of activism, artistic practice, and citizen science. They are excavators uncovering what has been overlooked, undervalued, or poorly understood. They are archivists reminding us of what should survive. Their work extends from the molecular level to the land beneath our feet to Earth’s orbital environment—offering new ways for us to understand the communities, systems, and social forces that shape our lives around the globe.⁷

In reading Carruth’s description of the MacArthur Fellows, I am reminded of the following lines from George Oppen’s Pulitzer-­prize winning book, Of Being Numerous, whose sequential stanzas of civic poetry teem with war, mess tents, corporations, and the lonely wilderness of urban anomie. Of Being Numerous seems a far cry from Emerson’s solitary way of self-­reliance in Nature with a capital N, where the Poet begins with a capital P.

There are things

We live among ‘and to see them

Is to know ourselves’.

Occurrence, a part

Of an infinite series,

The sad marvels;

Of this was told

A tale of our wickedness.

It is not our wickedness.

‘You remember that old town we went to, and we sat in the ruined window, and we tried to imagine that we belonged to those times—It is dead and it is not dead, and you cannot imagine either its life or its death; the earth speaks and the salamander speaks, the Spring comes and only obscures it—’⁸

As I read Oppen’s lines—struck by their stark Objectivism—I recall in contrast the Romantic impulse in Emerson’s Nature, “The Poet,” and “The American Scholar,” written in the lyric mode of Coleridge and Wordsworth, whom he met during his lifetime. How are today’s poets and scholars making sense of this current age of artificial intelligence and multifarious distractions? Through the lens of time and history, the phenomenology of Emerson’s transparent eyeball—a seeing organ at one with Nature, of lucid wisdom—is obscured in a modern era when human experiences, filtered through mass media, are disrupted by meaningless repetition and self-­referentiality. In Emerson’s own poetry, such as “Give All to Love,” we see a glimpse of a carpe diem impulse:

Give all to love;

Obey thy heart;

Friends, kindred, days,

Estate, good-­fame,

Plans, credit and the Muse,—

Nothing refuse.⁹

If we consider the “Muse” as a sort of ancient or classical shadow of the Holy Spirit, our contemporary Christian scholar is partly reminiscent of Emerson’s “Poet” in her ethos of love as the highest aim. However, her belief in the divine is not a generalized pantheism or neo-­Romantic pulse, but rather, a historical faith in the trinitarian Creator of the universe who is God, whom she calls Abba Father, alongside the Son and the Holy Spirit—the former, one whose gift of salvation redeemed the Creation, and the latter, a deposit guaranteeing our inheritance, as the apostle Paul says in Ephesians 1:13–14—and in all God’s creative and beautiful diversity—that which Emerson called Nature. The Christian scholar’s belief is therefore marked by the seal of the Holy Spirit. This is God whose love bound the atoms in the flesh of Adam and Eve in a garden paradise, and whose love binds us together even in this millennium.

The Christian Scholar as a Poet

As Paul writes in Ephesians 2:10, we are the handiwork of God, his living poiemas: “For we are God’s handiwork, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do” (NIV). Our souls bear the image of God, the imago Dei. This special aspect of our created essence manifests in the knowledge discovery and creative production of a Christian scholar’s act of worship. In other words, we are all “living poems” who bear God’s divine signature of life. For Emerson, poets were comparable to what today’s readers might recognize as an Aristotelian, didactic vehicles for conveying truth, ethics, and moral character through the literary tropes and genres of tragedy, catharsis, and epic. Emerson’s ideal American scholars were wholly educated, thoughtful persons, more than mere “parrots.” Rather, his American scholars aspire to the function of poets in a neo-­Platonic sense—not the mere imitators unceremoniously ejected from Plato’s ideal republic, but rather, the “seers” of nineteenth century America.

According to Emerson, even Plato makes concessions towards poetry as preferable over the mimetic chatter of “parrots,”¹⁰ albeit insofar as poetry is philosophical rather than, in his opinion, historical and the recanting of past systems. In Chapter VII of Nature, Emerson observes, “In view of this half-­sight of science, we accept the sentence of Plato, that, ‘poetry comes nearer to vital truth than history.’ Every surmise and vaticination [sic] of the mind is entitled to a certain respect, and we learn to prefer imperfect theories, and sentences, which contain glimpses of truth, to digested systems which have no one valuable suggestion.”¹¹

The Emersonian ideal of a poet was a naturalist of the soul, the ultimate “transparent eyeball.”

For Emerson, poets are essentially “namers” in creation and our soothsayers, the “seers” through whom God and the law of Nature flows.¹² Set apart in solitude to seek truth and beauty, the poet aspires to a spiritual labor that is neither purely hedonistic nor utilitarian as a practical craft—but rather, humanly rich in its divine explorations and epic implications: “The poet is the sayer, the namer, and represents beauty.”¹³ As Sacks noted, Emerson grappled with staying true to these poetic ideals, as he personally and publicly defined them, concurrently pressured by fame and intellectual celebrity while ineluctably drawn to collective activism and social change on behalf of the soul of his nation, propelled forward by his ideals about creating good in society. Notably, in the Emersonian concept of “bipolar unity,” oppositional instances, including material and immaterial or metaphysical phenomena, are joined together by rigorous thought.¹⁴ In Christian higher education, we grapple with the tensions between the expectations of rigorous academic scholarship versus “just in time” professionalization fueled by market demand; what is authentic and true to our mission of Christian liberal arts, and what forces push us away from our foundational principles?

Is there a third pathway—can the two, in fact, co-­exist as positive outcomes of the Christian liberal arts? Is the notion of a whole-­person education mutually exclusive with strong first destination outcomes? Of course not. In Emerson’s poetry, we see an inkling of his synecdochal desire for Nature in “Each and All:”

Over me soared the eternal sky,

Full of light and of deity;

Again I saw, again I heard,

The rolling river, the morning bird; —

Beauty through my senses stole;

I yielded myself to the perfect whole.¹⁵

While Emerson’s scholar is a poet and philosopher hallowed by wholeness in Nature, today’s Christian public intellectuals speak from a collective grounded in Scriptural knowledge, interpreting the signs of the times and speaking the truth with voices of love, pointing to Christ’s redemptive purpose in view of eternity. The poetics of these Christian public intellectuals are ultimately anchored in love. Emerson’s call for self-­reliance is a product of his era—for our generation, America is a world power no longer under the shadow of the British Commonwealth. With established literary, philosophical, and scientific advancements, as well as historical traditions, our nation holds a legacy of thought leadership with a powerful role in global politics. At the same time, however, we have yet to resolve longstanding social and civic issues, including rural poverty and racial violence. Additionally, while I know many poets would love a forest retreat, not all people can afford the resources and solitude to be alone with our books and ideas for extended periods of time—notwithstanding the reality of an attenuated consciousness. Riddled by memes, hashtags, and reels, the opportunities for quiet contemplation are rarities in this age of distraction.

In today’s world, not all poets and scholars are devoted to retreat—nor can all poets afford one. Our thought leaders do not always emerge out of forest baths. If we consider again the roster of MacArthur Fellows, we recognize the importance of scholarly research and creative production together with artistic, sociocultural, or scientific relevance. For Emerson, the value of genius lies in its capacity to supersede talent and elucidate truth: “Of course, the value of genius to us is in the veracity of its report. Talent may frolic and juggle; genius realizes and adds.”¹⁶ Later in the essay, Emerson writes, “I remember that a certain poet described it to me thus: Genius is the activity which repairs the decay of things, whether wholly or partly of a material and finite kind.”¹⁷

Christian scholarship is further inspired by the genius of the Holy Spirit—what some might also describe as the personified spirit of God’s wisdom in Proverbs 8, or Lady Wisdom calling out at the city gates—as more than a scholarly vessel of human knowledge discovery alone, and which ultimately transcends our human understanding. If we consider Old and New Testament examples of scholarly genius, there is Daniel, thoroughly learned in Babylonian literature and known for his faithful adherence to a kosher, vegetarian diet; Solomon, renowned for his wisdom and learning, writer of proverbs and wisdom poetry; David, a poet-­shepherd turned warrior-­king who authored many psalms; and Paul, the ultimate scholar-­evangelist whose astute mind, great learning, and religious scholarship—later counted as garbage along with his days as a legalistic persecutor—who yielded to the will of Christ and the Great Commission from his Damascus Road moment onward for the eternal purpose of sharing the gospel.

These faithful leaders glorified God’s design in fulfillment of the divine plan for salvation—before the coming of Christ, after Christ was crucified, then resurrected, and whose Spirit is alive now, in this very age. Therefore, as Christian scholars, we should hold fast to Christ in our scholarly research and creative activities as we dedicate them to God’s glory, as in Hebrews 1:3: “The Son is the radiance of God’s glory and the exact representation of his being, sustaining all things by his powerful word” (NIV). For the vocation of a Christian scholar as essentially a poet, we can also draw from the richness of church history shaped by poets whose theological writings and visions have nourished generations of Christian thinkers: Hildegard of Bingen and her visionary theology as a musician and poet; Julian of Norwich and her vivid “showings” in the Revelations of Divine Love; Thomas à Kempis; and the Jesuit poet, Gerard Manley Hopkins—influenced by John Henry Newman while an Oxford undergraduate. Our work as Christian scholars as poets ultimately points to Jesus as the Christ, to whom all knowledge and wisdom belongs, and who is gracious to impart it to us through our human modes of understanding. A loving, crucicentric awareness yields humility, rather than arrogance or the “knowledge that puffs up,” residing at the core of these endeavors, as we remember that “love builds up” (1 Corinthians 8:1 NIV).

Integration of Faith and Learning: A Hermeneutic of Love

A survey of the “Faith and Learning” papers recently authored by Wheaton faculty illustrates the quality of Christian scholarship expected of our professors. Thanks to the fruit of their labors, we see the traits of a prototypical Christian scholar. These faith-­integrated papers, required components of their applications for promotion and tenure, are often published in journals. According to the faith and learning site hosted by the Wheaton College Library,¹⁸ the founder of Wheaton’s philosophy department, Dr. Arthur Holmes, served as the director of the faith and learning program in 1974. Subsequently, The Idea of a Christian College¹⁹ appeared the year after he stepped into the role, followed by another classic volume for the integration of faith and learning, All Truth is God’s Truth.²⁰ The first-­year seminar, currently facilitated by David Lauber, dean of humanities and theological studies, focuses on Christian faith integration and teaching. I invited Lauber to describe the essential components to developing a robust faith integration in learning and teaching, and he offered the following insights, emphasizing the importance of sound biblical knowledge and theological understanding, which in turn provides our students with guidance on the integration of faith and learning with their personal lives:

Biblical knowledge and theological understanding are requisite. And this needs to be coupled with personal piety and a commitment to a life of discipleship. Piety without biblical knowledge and theological understanding is too thin. It cannot sustain rigorous scholarly integration and cannot nourish the intellectual and spiritual lives of students who need substantive answers to weighty questions. Knowledge and understanding without evident piety and the life of discipleship fall short of thorough integration and holistic education. Students might grasp the intellectual argument, but they are hungry for guidance for how to live, not just think.²¹

Additionally, I asked David Lauber why the church and society need Christian scholars, and moreover, how they might be distinctive from American scholars with a secular worldview. Lauber offered this reply, highlighting the relevance of Colossians 1:17 where Paul reminds us that in Christ “all things hold together,” and that Christ is the eternal sustainer:

Christian scholars provide coherent thinking in a fragmented age. This thinking is rich, deep, discerning, expansive, and life-­giving. The church needs Christian scholars in order to fulfill its mission to bear witness to Christ in the world, and for the sake of the world. Christian scholars help the church understand the world better so the church can live within the world with greater faithfulness and integrity. As disciples of Jesus, Christian scholars seek God and a deeper understanding of God’s world through their own scholarly practice in their unique academic disciplines. Knowing that their work is provisional, only to be complete in the eschaton, and knowing that their work rests on all things holding together in Christ, Christian scholars can take up their work in freedom, without fear, focused on the subject matter of their work and not on their own expertise, and with love and joy.²²

Tim Larsen, Carolyn and Fred McManis Professor of Christian Thought and professor of history, leads the second year of the seminar on the topic of faith and learning. Larsen shared the following insights on the integration of Christian faith and learning as a form of witness, also noting that an important prerequisite for Wheaton faculty is “a working biblical and theological literacy. Without that, you do not have half of the equation.”²³

After that, the key is faithfulness without fearfulness. We must follow the evidence wherever it leads and never try to rig an argument to save a theological claim from embarrassment. Yet we bring our whole selves as believers. We model for our students—and for each other—how to be a faithful disciple of Christ in our disciplines and calling. It is a form of witness—witness to truth, to faithfulness, to a life of integrity and obedience.²⁴

Concerning the salient distinctives between American scholars who are secular humanists and Christian scholars, Larsen offered the following:

Secular scholarship can be a very thin place. Rather than giving different answers to the same questions it often just avoids the questions. We can all agree on the upholding of human rights, but secular scholars usually are unwilling to explain why human beings have rights, who gave them to them, and why they differ from those accorded to the lower animals. Likewise, secular scholars can denounce something as immoral, but are often unable or unwilling to explain what the basis of morality is. How was that judgement derived? From what authority? Christian scholars are braver. They ask the deeper, more fundamental questions. They are not afraid of questions of ultimate meaning.²⁵

As Christian educators, Wheaton’s faculty serve as agents of Christ’s redemption through their faith-­integrated engagement with scholarship on a wide range of topics. For instance, our faculty relate the traditional theological topics on faith, morality, and ethics to a range of topics including the global church, technology, the sacredness of life, the marketplace and business organizations, culturally responsive pedagogy, and the role of literary textual interpretation in the Christian liberal arts, as illustrated by the titles of a sample of recent papers: “Envisioning Filipino American Biblical Interpretation” by Jordan Ryan, “Entrepreneurship and Faithful Presence” by Denise Daniels, “Lament as Transformative Learning: Fostering Diversity in Christian Camping” by Muhia Karianjahi, “The Geography of Down Syndrome” by Tim Taylor; “Beyond Beliefs and Ballots: The Interplay of Faith and Politics in the Lives of Evangelical College Students” by Olga Dietlin, “A Christian Perspective on an Open Software Community” by Hyunju Kim, “Navigating the Double-­Edged Sword of Moral Conviction in Politics” by Kristin Garrett, “Whence and Whither the Christian Liberal Arts?” by Benjamin Weber, and “Organizational Spirituality” by Danielle Corple.

These papers edify us in building the church and benefiting society in domestic as well as international contexts. Many of these “Faith and Learning” papers were published in journals, including the Christian Scholar’s Review:²⁶ “The Medium Is the Message: Reflections on Disciple-­Making In the Age of Social Media” by Michael Hakmin Lee; “The Vocation of the Christian Historian: Re-­Envisioning our Calling, Reconnecting with the Church” by Tracy McKenzie; “Practicing Lament to Teach for Justice: Reflections from a Survey Course” by Jamie Huff; and “Enabling Evangelicalism: How a Renewed Vision of Church as an Alternative Community of Reconciliation Necessitates the Inclusion of People with Disabilities” by Rochelle Scheuermann. Annually, a Faith and Learning paper is selected and presented, free to the public, as the Margaret Diddams ’83 Faith and Learning Lecture, named for the first woman provost at Wheaton College, who loved evaluating the “Faith and Learning” papers from every  tenure-­track faculty member.²⁷

In all these “Faith and Learning” papers, there is a shared motif of a Christ-­centered hermeneutic of love. The English professor and literary critic, Alan Jacobs, wrote A Theology of Reading: The Hermeneutics of Love as a Wheaton faculty member and a former director of faith and learning. This shared telos is highlighted in the conclusion of Olga Dietlin’s paper:²⁸

Specifically, I have emphasized the importance of the hermeneutic of love in understanding human flourishing, highlighting its divine origin and transformative impact on our affections towards God and others; the significance of community in a continuous forming of our commitment to love and cultivating faithfulness; the need to locate our lives and our political endeavors within the Christian story of redemption and restoration; the illuminating and centering role of eschatological hope; and the transforming presence of the Holy Spirit who brings life, sustenance, and renewal. In a polarized and disintegrating world, people innately long for a guiding center that can bring meaning and coherence to their lives (Eaton, 2011). For Christians, this center is Jesus (Colossians 1:17).²⁹

This goal of edification through Christ’s love—to be salt and light by drawing souls to the redeeming power of the cross—similarly arose in our conversations for this project facilitated by Todd Ream. What does a hermeneutic of love look like when it is taught, researched, and fully embodied by scholar-­mentors, artists, scientists, historians, and poets? How do we mentor our students as whole persons who value the habits of mind and character infused by virtue? In an age of artificial intelligence, how will we bear witness to heavenly wisdom that exceeds the lightning-­speed precision of real-­time predictive analytics? In a fractured society, how do charity, tone, humility, and temperance shape our personalities as we develop tomorrow’s church and government leaders? We cannot seek this road alone—scholarly communities of shared inquiry do not operate in isolation; neither should this collective road of cogitation be an end unto itself, lest we degenerate into the isolated, totalitarian brain in A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L’Engle.³⁰

Our Christ-­centered, educational mission is accomplished through the vision for Wheaton graduates, cultivating knowledge and reason as well as Christian character, love, and practical wisdom together in a beloved community.³¹Realizing this vision in our undergraduates through our Christ at the Core general education curriculum also requires the discipline of developing our habits of mind.³² As Paul writes in 2 Corinthians 10:5: “We demolish arguments and every pretension that sets itself up against the knowledge of God, and we take captive every thought to make it obedient to Christ” (NIV). Nonetheless, not even the noble purposes of Christ-­centered education are sufficient as an end unto itself; if for only this life we educate, then we are still missing the ultimate plan for eternity: “If only for this life we have hope in Christ, we are of all people most to be pitied” (1 Corinthians 15:19 NIV).

In an age where religious extremism and mass extermination persist to this very day, our Christian scholars faithfully reaffirm and realign the vision, value, and identity of a Christian liberal arts education to the upward calling which is our collective and eternal aspiration. When market forces and thin margins pressure colleges to look at the bottom line of net tuition revenue, the value of general education and holistic education become peripheral to careerism. More than trainers of skilled workforce employees, a Christian liberal arts degree prepares well-­rounded, holistic shapers of ecclesial and social thought, what should be an integral component of a democratic society of free, educated thinkers who are more than skilled tinkerers.

On the Christian Liberal Arts:
A Whole-Person, Fully Incarnational Education

Our church and society need tinkerers who think—and thinkers who tinker, in a manner of speaking, who are principled thinkers versed in multiple ways of knowing, including the skill of critical thinking. To describe this, I’ve coined the playful neologism, “thinkerer,” one also skilled in the critique of ideologies. Our colleges offer more than supplying skilled employees for a workforce, whether as Christian managers for non-­profit organizations or for-­profit corporations. Likewise, our thinkers do not cloister their scholarship in their towers of learning, but rather relay their messages outside Wheaton’s walls without conforming to the world. We should not be so otherworldly that we are no good to the world. We need Christian thought leaders and thoughtful Christians who lead, and this chiastic way is mutually edified by God’s truth and love. As a girl, when I was lying in bed at night, reciting the syllables of classical Chinese poems in my head, I had no inkling that the paradigm of the classical Chinese “scholar-­official”—a poet-­philosopher first and foremost educated in literature, culture, and the arts for a life of governance—would shape my own understanding of the liberal arts in terms of its integrative approach, grounded in principles and ethics. More specifically and distinctively in a Christian worldview, we are further holistically and habitually edified by Christ’s love.

As John Stott puts it, “Our love grows soft if it is not strengthened by truth, and our truth grows hard if it is not softened by love. We need to live according to Scripture which commands us both to love each other in the truth and to hold the truth in love.”³³ The best of our secular American scholars today function powerfully as shapers and interpreters of culture, wellsprings of social wisdom, both architects and archivists charting the course of our nation and its values, and teaching us how to learn from its historical past; this is a genius birthed out of the tradition of humanism which reaches this moment of the post-­human—a social construction or instrument of culture and technological advancement. Yet the Christian thinker is called to offer more than our contemporary humanists—to be shapers of thought, church, and society; and to live incarnationally through the Holy Spirit.

For secular humanists and social constructionists, nothing exists outside of the human system, which is part of the universe’s mad randomness—and for postmodern society, there is no true belief in God and ultimately nothing is new, except the remix of language games and their meaningless repetition. For Christian scholars, there is hope beyond our total depravity and the debasement of our minds. The gift of salvation empowers our regeneration through the Holy Spirit, and we bear fruit.³⁴

Through discipleship, we nurture the development of character, virtue, and new habits of mind. Simply put, the Christian scholar aspires, as Paul writes to the Corinthians, “to have the mind of Christ.”³⁵ In our role as Christian educators, as well, we guide our students through a whole-­person, integrative discipleship, a fully incarnational education anchored in virtue and ethics with a moral compass guided by Christ’s sacrificial love. As such, we operate as agents of the gospel, everlastingly under grace.

The following portion of Paul’s letter to the Corinthians is still relevant to today’s Christian academics, inviting us to consider the limits of human wisdom:

We have not received the spirit of the world, but the Spirit who is from God, that we may understand what God has freely given us. And this is what we speak, not in words taught us by human wisdom, but in words taught by the Spirit, expressing spiritual truths in spiritual words. The person without the Spirit does not accept the things that come from the Spirit of God but considers them foolishness, and cannot understand them because they are discerned only through the Spirit. Who has known the mind of the Lord to instruct him? But we have the mind of Christ.³⁶

The contemporary American scholar is expected to be a qualified intellectual in a subject-­matter specialty, to serve as an active teacher-­scholar or practitioner who mentors students, and to exercise her purview over academic curriculum; she is a steward of the future common good of society, and therefore prepares students for lives of civic engagement. In our vocation as Christian scholars, our belief in the remedy of Scripture—of God’s unmerited grace and forgiveness towards us—goes hand in hand with Scriptural necessity. Scholarship and service are therefore expressions of our faith. Knowing the gospel message and God’s plan for salvation provides a conciliatory and biblical space for repentance, reconciliation, and redemption. This posture of mind, soul, heart, and hands sets us on the path of integration. In the terms set forth in The Idea of a Christian College by Arthur Holmes, the four approaches of this integration are attitudinal, ethical, foundational, and informed—namely, by our Christian worldview.³⁷

On the last evening of the first-­year transition program at Wheaton College, I walked with our students and faculty through a pine forest to the foot of a hill. This journey known as “the path of integration” wound its way to a cross at the top of the hill, where we shared communion. In the quiet of fireflies under the Milky Way, while I waited shoulder to shoulder with Sarah Holman, our professor of voice and director of opera in Wheaton’s music conservatory, a new poem hummed inside my mind and heart, and later I wrote it down. This poem was originally published in The Reformed Journal, edited by Rose Postma, and later included in the collection, Duress.

The Path of Integration

The Holy Spirit comes in while you are quiet. There is nothing

voiced yet many questions while our tongues are still. In the years

ahead of us, will we hear laughter on this path? Not whether but where

will we shed tears? How shall we know our vocation in this place?

We must walk together in silence; one must not speak in the forest.

The sycamores and birches shed green syllables only God deciphers—

And soft flames light our darkening path. And the slope of the hill

is most arduous at the end but those walking around us will help.

And a late, wild wind caresses the pines edging the hill at nightfall—

and there is a dragonfly hovering like a thin angel, a warrior of air—

custodian of daybreak when the moon will set again over the water.

What blessing covers our lives? What shall we take back to this world?

And Christ is at the top of the hill, the one who offers body and blood.

The plague of the world is not yet dead, raging against our assurance

of heaven. Come to the door of this hill and look up— at the foot,

we won’t see all the way to the summit, but the Son is there, hanging

on a tree. The lowest star in the sky will soon be the brightest.

And there will be those offering fire to light the way,

their eyes burning with witness.³⁸

As agents of the gospel in their scholarly vocation, our professors bear witness to Christ and serve as faithful educators benefiting society and building the church. This vocation is first and foremost the action of loving surrender to Christ; to do so is to love God with all your heart, mind, and soul, and to love our neighbors as ourselves.³⁹ As Stott wrote nearly half a century ago, “Every Christian should be both conservative and radical; conservative in preserving the faith and radical in applying it.”⁴⁰ With a spirit of balanced theology—or Emersonian bipolar unity—this observation is relevant for our generation today.

Neither one of these commandments is complete without the other, and far from adequate to save ourselves. Part of the polarization in our church is due to a bifurcated approach instead of a stereoscopic, three-­dimensional view of these two commandments. One side of the tent insists that the other does not love God enough—and the other side of the tent says that the first does not demonstrate enough love for neighbors—while both risk the self-­righteous pride and “cash value” of social status entangling some early American public intellectuals like Ralph Waldo Emerson. In fact, in a fully stereoscopic view of these two commandments—loving God and one’s neighbor—one is insufficient without the other.

A Living Poetics: Aspiring to a Scholarship of Love

This is why a scholarship of love is important—to be a Christian scholar is to love God with all our hearts, minds, and souls; and to love our neighbors as ourselves, the first and the second greatest commandments. This way is also essentially one of humility. As Christian scholars, our stereoscopic vision of these two commandments provides meaningful depth and context to what God expects of us on this incarnational journey of a wholly embodied, truly holistic Christian education. A scholarship of love also calls us to consider “every moment holy” in both our joys and sorrows.

A colleague in the marriage and family therapy program, David Van Dyke, recently sent a message with a blessing: “May today surprise you with glimpses of wonder.”⁴¹

He also wrote: “In hard times, we need to look for the rays of light. This morning, I was reading Every Moment Holy and came across this and thought I would share it with you.”⁴² Here is the excerpt from Every Moment Holy: Volume II:

Let me neither ignore my pain, pretending all is okay when it isn’t, nor coddle and magnify my pain, so that I dull my capacity to experience all that remains good in this life. For joy that denies sorrow is neither hard-­won, nor true, nor eternal. It is not real joy at all. And sorrow that refuses to make space for the return of joy and hope, in the end becomes nothing more than a temple for the worship of my own woundedness.

So give me strength, O God, to feel this grief deeply, never to hide my heart from it. And give me also hope enough to remain open to surprising encounters with joy, as one on a woodland path might stumble suddenly into dapplings of golden light.⁴³

In response, I shared a few lines of “Lectio Divina, Counter-­clockwise,” which originally appeared in Image: Art, Faith, Mystery and is included in my collection, The Beautiful Immunity:

Nothing I do can deliver me from my own folly.

When this basin of hunger pours its shame,

even my blunt senses touch a healing salve –

without fragrance or blight,

your pseudo-­absence

is holy presence –

blotted rosettas on a chilled ledge

under linen, seventy-­five pounds of aloe, myrrh,

your lungs ninety-­percent sea, nine percent

Nazareth well-­water. Who are we

to say what is pure,

this marvelous opening

onto light.⁴⁴

We share in a part of God’s plan as little makers of meaning in the image of God, imago Dei, with the eternal purpose of glorifying Christ. To draw some neo-­Platonic inspiration from Emerson, we are “children of the fire,” souls of passion and imagination called to more than skilled craftmanship:

“For we are not pans and barrows, nor even porters of the fire and torch-­bearers, but children of the fire, made of it, and only the same divinity transmuted, and at two or three removes, when we know least about it. And this hidden truth, that the fountains whence all this river of Time, and its creatures, floweth, are intrinsically ideal and beautiful, draws us to the consideration of the nature and functions of the Poet. . . .”⁴⁵ As Paul writes in Ephesians 2:4–10, we are God’s poiemas, translated from the Greek as handiwork, masterpiece, workmanship, and made as living poems thanks to God’s great love and mercy:

Like the rest, we were by nature deserving of wrath. But because of his great love for us, God, who is rich in mercy, made us alive with Christ even when we were dead in transgressions—it is by grace you have been saved. And God raised us up with Christ and seated us with him in the heavenly realms in Christ Jesus, in order that in the coming ages he might show the incomparable riches of his grace, expressed in his kindness to us in Christ Jesus. For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith—and this is not from yourselves, it is the gift of God—not by works, so that no one can boast. For we are God’s handiwork, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do.⁴⁶

In an Emersonian sense of vocation, a Christian scholar is essentially a poet—and American society hungers for the substance of faith and the living bread of its poets. One possible vitality measure for a democracy is paying attention to the message of its poets. Who are our poets of faith and witness? Who are the poets of lamentation, repentance, and deliverance? Of hopeful resiliency and healing? Let us beware of totalitarian societies whose seers and sages, including our dissident poets, are silenced. Unquestioning indoctrination—without adequate space to engage thoughtfully and critically with a set of beliefs, including faith and doubt on the journey of a person’s spiritual formation—masquerades in a multiplicity of forms, including among the religious, the secular, and the purists alike. Finally, I conclude with Paul’s reminder to the church in Corinth, that whatever we produce in our scholarship as we aspire to the mind of Christ, it does not matter if we speak in the tongues of angels—we are only resounding gongs or clanging cymbals if we have not love: “And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love.”⁴⁷

1. Ralph Waldo Emerson, “The American Scholar,” in Kenneth S. Sacks, Understanding Emerson: The American Scholar and His Struggle for Self-­Reliance (Princeton University Press, 2021).
2. Kenneth Sacks (professor of history, Brown University), in discussion with provosts hosted by Todd Ream (publisher, Christian Scholar’s Review), December 14, 2023.
3. Sacks, Discussion.
4. Sacks, Discussion.
5. Sacks, Discussion.
6. “MacArthur Fellows,” MacArthur Foundation, https://www.macfound.org/, (an introductory announcement that has been removed from the website by September 12,
7. “MacArthur Fellows.”
8. George Oppen, Of Being Numerous (New Directions, 1968), 9.
9. Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Give All to Love,” The Poetry Foundation, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/50464/give-­all-­to-­love.
10. Emerson, “The American Scholar,” 132.
11. Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nature (James Munroe, 1849; Project Gutenberg, 2009), https://www.gutenberg.org/files/29433/29433-­h/29433-­h.htm.
12. Ralph Waldo Emerson, “The Poet,” in Essays, Second Series (1844; Project Gutenberg, 2008), https://www.gutenberg.org/files/2945/2945-­h/2945-­h.htm.
13. Emerson, “The Poet,” par. 6.
14. Sacks, discussion.
15. Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Each and All,” The Poetry Foundation, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45877/each-­and-­all.
16. Emerson, “The Poet,” par. 9.
17. Emerson quoting an unnamed poet, “The Poet,” par. 16.
18. Tim Larsen, “A History of Faith and Learning at Wheaton College,” Integrating Faith and Learning at Wheaton College, last updated May 13, 2024, https://guides.library.wheaton.edu/c.php?g=853929&p=7051551. This online libguide is curated and maintained by Greg Morrison, associate professor of library science.
19. Arthur Holmes, The Idea of a Christian College (Eerdmans, 1975
20. Arthur Holmes, All Truth is God’s Truth (Eerdmans, 1975).
21. David Lauber (professor of theology, dean of biblical and theological studies, Wheaton College), email message to author, March 1, 2024.

22. David Lauber notes, “My responses reflect some things Keith Johnson writes in his essay, ‘Bonhoeffer and the end of the Christian academy,’ from the Wheaton theology conference volume Bonhoeffer, Christ and Culture – ed. by Keith and Tim Larsen.” Lauber, email message.

23. Tim Larsen (Carolyn and Fred McManis Professor of Christian Thought and Professor of History, Wheaton College), email message to author, February 27, 2024.
24. Larsen, email message.
25. Larsen, email message.
26. “Published Faculty Faith & Learning Papers and Projects,” Integrating Faith and Learning at Wheaton College. July 22, 2023, https://guides.library.wheaton.edu/faithandlearning/published.
27. Larsen’s “A History of Faith and Learning at Wheaton College” further notes that “one of the most important figures in this story is unquestionably Dr. Stan Jones who, as soon as he was appointed Wheaton’s first provost, made it a key priority of his to deepen and strengthen the Faith and Learning Program. In 1997, he initiated the much-­expanded current model of a weekly seminar that meets throughout an entire academic year.”

28. Alan Jacobs, A Theology of Reading: The Hermeneutics of Love (Routledge, 2001).

29. Olga Dietlin, “Beyond Beliefs and Ballots: The Interplay of Faith and Politics in the Lives of Evangelical College Students,” (unpublished manuscript), 38.
30. Madeleine L’Engle, A Wrinkle in Time (Dell Publishing, 1962), 132.
31. “A Vision for Wheaton Graduates,” Wheaton College, https://www.wheaton.edu/about-­wheaton/why-­wheaton/vision-­for-­wheaton-­college-­graduates.
32. “Christ at the Core: Liberal Arts at Wheaton College,” Wheaton College, https://www.wheaton.edu/academics/the-­liberal-­arts-­at-­wheaton-­college/christ-­at-­the-­core-­liberal-­arts-­at-­wheaton/.
33. John Stott, The Epistles of John: An Introduction and Commentary, The Tyndale New Testament Commentaries (Eerdmans, 1965), 204–5.
34. Galatians 5:22–26.
35. 1 Corinthians 2:16 (NIV).
36. 1 Corinthians 2:12–16 (NIV).
37. Holmes, The Idea of a Christian College.
38. Karen An-­hwei Lee, Duress (Cascade Books, 2022), 29.
39. Cf. Luke 10:27; Mark 12:28–31; Matthew 22:37.
40. John Stott, “HIS,” Christianity Today 36, no. 14 (1975).
41. David Van Dyke, email message to author, January 24, 2024.
42. Van Dyke, email message.
43. Douglas Kaine McKelvey, Every Moment Holy, Volume II: Death, Grief, & Hope (Rabbit Room, 2021).
44. Karen An-­hwei Lee, The Beautiful Immunity (Tupelo Press, 2024), 89.
45. Emerson, “The Poet,” par. 2.
46. Ephesians 2:4–10 (NIV).
47. 1 Corinthians 13:13 (NIV).