Over the past two weeks, my colleagues Margaret Diddams and Perry Glanzer have articulated the mission of Christian Scholar’s Review by considering the “why” and “what” of the journal. In this blog post, I will explore the “how” question—how CSR approaches its mission. (As you might expect, the “how” overlaps considerably with the “what” and “why.”) How does CSR do its work? By taking on two distinct but related “integration” challenges that face Christian scholars and Christian academic institutions.
First, there is the familiar challenge of discerning how Christian faith bears upon everything we study, teach, and research. One of the usual warrants for the pursuit of this challenge is the Augustinian dictum that “all truth is God’s truth.”[1] If in our disciplinary research and teaching we believe we are encountering things that are more or less true, things that more or less count as knowledge, then we would expect there to be tendrils of connection to theological claims that Christians hold to be true about God and the world. This dictum, of course, depends upon a robust doctrine of creation. As the creator of all things, God is the source of the phenomena that our disciplines study. We might apply the famous phrase in Psalm 36, which has found its way into Christian liturgy: “in your light we see light” (vs. 9).
This creational warrant can be found also in Colossians chapter 1, which proclaims that it is in Jesus Christ, the “image of the invisible God” (vs. 15), that “all things in heaven and earth were created” and that “all things have been created through him and for him” (vs. 16). Even more, “in him all things hold together” (vs. 17). That chapter simultaneously weaves in a redemptive/reparative warrant—through the same divine Son in whom, through whom, and for whom all things were created, “God was pleased to reconcile to himself all things” (vs. 20).
We should find both caution and invitation here. Repair and redemption are only needed because something is wrong. The core Christian label for the wrong is sin. The caution is that sin applies not only to moral matters but also to epistemic matters, for all matters are spiritual matters. In our academic labors, we can err because we are finite, but our possibilities for error are magnified by sin. That means that we need significant humility when invoking a dictum such as “all truth is God’s truth.” Conclusions that we regard as truth may actually be misleading, partial, or erroneous—sometimes honest error, sometimes self-serving error. The “all truth is God’s truth” dictum is not a license to baptize as God’s all the things we (or our disciplines) treat as knowledge. Especially in the face of the Christian doctrine of sin, a healthy dose of skepticism is required—including of our own disciplinary knowledge claims.
But skepticism need not be thoroughgoing or result in a kind of cynical epistemic nihilism. We can’t know the truth perfectly. And we know that academic history is littered with discarded theories that, at their zenith, were understandably taken as reliable knowledge. But we—and our academic disciplines—do have reason to think that some things are correct or plausible or true, and other claims are unlikely or incorrect or implausible or false, even if such conclusions remain provisional on this side of the eschaton. When we claim knowledge, it is natural to seek connective coherence with the beliefs, practices, and virtues of Christian faith. In Colossians 1, we may find an invitation in the message that Christ, the one in whom all things were created, is at work in the world reconciling all things to himself. As we explore the height, depth, and breadth of all creation through our academic labors, we are invited to discern and give witness to the ways in which the Spirit is redemptively at work through what Christ has done and to seek ways in which our teaching and research may participate in the world’s healing.
This takes us to a second integration challenge. If all truth is God’s truth, we may be inclined to expect that truths (as provisional knowledge claims) in different disciplinary areas will have a bearing on one another. This is the challenge of seeing the integral relationship that different disciplines of inquiry have to one another, and thus the fruitful connections between courses across a curriculum. Just as it is all too easy to treat “faith” and “learning” as two parallel areas, so also it is tempting, especially for undergraduate students, to regard each course as a self-standing, self-contained, atomized entity, something to “get through” rather than something that relates fruitfully to all their other courses. It is easy for them to experience their education as fragmented. Such a mindset is also easy for scholars to fall into, as we are often trained in graduate school in deep but narrow ways. Most of the time, the academic journals in which we publish our work are specific and specialized. And in our universities, the whole issue of “silos” and “siloing” is well known. We are not as adept as we should be at helping our students to see how their courses fit together into a coherent education and a coherent invitation to formation.
Christian Scholar’s Review pursues the “how” of its mission by offering resources for the adventurous pursuit of both challenges. Let’s take the second integration challenge first. CSR is an interdisciplinary journal. That sometimes takes explicit form as many articles, book reviews, blog posts, and podcast conversations are directly interdisciplinary in their arguments and energy (e.g., most of the articles in the winter 2026 issue). But other times, the interdisciplinary character of CSR shows itself more implicitly through explorations of disciplinary themes and questions. Perhaps a blog post is by an art historian or a review is on a book focused on politics, or, in the case of the winter issue, a journal article is on agriculture. The approaches to disciplinary questions that are featured in CSR tend to be approaches that are open to other disciplines and deal disciplinarily with questions that ultimately transcend discrete academic silos. In other words, in reading across what is published by CSR, we are helped to understand a little bit better what our colleagues across our universities are thinking about and what they are teaching about, which in turn helps us to appreciate what the students in our classes are learning about in their other classes. This gives us more to go on in helping them to see the relationships and connections—the structural integrity—of their overall education.
To be clear, there’s no grand plan of presenting a unified, integrated, fully consistent theory of “all knowledge” in CSR’s journal, blog, and podcast offerings. The hubris of such an approach is obvious. Moreover, each year we have hundreds of scholars contributing in ways that reflect their own personalities, institutional contexts, theological traditions, etc. They approach things in distinctive ways and do not always entirely agree. The goal is more modest, namely, that from the bottom up, which is to say from scholars doing their work in the sundry domains of academic life, with their intellectual noses to the grindstone—exploring ideas, running studies, reflecting on their experiences, reviewing work by others—a broad picture will emerge, something that falls short of full coherence or systematicity but gestures in that direction, offering a sense of the whole via the diversity of parts, the connectedness of things in our fascinating, fragile, and fractured world, but a world that belongs to God and in which Christ is at work.
These modest contributions may sometimes originate in disciplinary silos but usually create passageways to other silos, and sometimes even break open the silos themselves. And this scholarly work, with a scope as broad as the “all things” of Colossians 1, has a more important common denominator than just its transdisciplinary openness. It is a fact that this scholarly activity is Christian. The journal/blog/podcast/website resources of Christian Scholar’s Review strive to shed the light of Christ on the topics they are contemplating, in ways that fit the interests, approaches, traditions, and even quirks of their authors. There is a creational and redemptive bent to the analysis that the journal seeks to provide. There is a refusal to privatize the light of Christ as only an interior matter or simply a matter of choices about how to spend Sundays. The grounding conviction of CSR is that the light of Christ illuminates all areas of inquiry. Because the Christian gospel is true, it bears upon all subordinate truths. We will not be able to understand those truths in their full depth or richness or context or complexity or simplicity without striving to grasp their threads of connection to the primary Truth. It is a rather audacious claim, but one that CSR has been striving to pursue with scholarly rigor and appropriate humility for 55 years.
These two integration challenges go hand in hand. When persuasive, faith integration insights in one disciplinary area may clue us into connections to the light of Christ that we had not previously noticed in another area. Flashes of insights across academic contexts are simultaneously reminders that our academic areas—though each having their own methods and dynamics—should never be thought of as wholly independent. The light of Christ in which we see all other light shines on it all.
These two integration challenges are one way of expressing the “how” of Christian Scholar’s Review. How does the journal carry out its mission? How might we envision the Christian academic calling? As the vocation of discerning the creational and redemptive shape of academic inquiry in partnership with one another. We invite you to join in the mission by submitting short pieces to the blog and research articles to the journal, by being open to reviewing important new books in your area (contact me with ideas!), and by contributing financially through a tax-deductible donation. This spring, we received a generous $10,000 matching gift. Your support will help the journal to continue its pursuit of these two integration challenges.
[1] This is also the title of an influential and nuanced 1977 book by Arthur Holmes, All Truth Is God’s Truth (Eerdmans, 1977).
