The Wholehearted, Daring, Balancing Act of Christian Scholarship

The American Scholar

On August 31, 1837, Ralph Waldo Emerson stepped into the pulpit of First Parish Meetinghouse in Cambridge, Massachusetts, to deliver what would become one of the defining lectures of his life and legacy, “The American Scholar.” Harvard University, having celebrated its bicentennial anniversary not even a year before, was a bastion of tradition—an old school in a young nation—and its annual Phi Beta Kappa address was a fixture of its academic calendar. It not only attracted a Cambridge crowd, but it drew distinguished and influential guests from beyond Massachusetts to hear some of the most celebrated orators of their time.¹

While Emerson would go on to become an enduring luminary of American intellectual life, he was, in 1837, something closer to an emerging public intellectual. Having retired from a brief career as a schoolteacher and then minister, Emerson turned to the professional speaking circuit and organized the influential Transcendental Club.² Still, he was not yet as accomplished or well-known as many previous Phi Beta Kappa speakers. In fact, Emerson was invited on two-months’ notice when an originally scheduled speaker, an influential and well-known Episcopal minister, backed out of his commitment.³

Deeply familiar with his audience and establishing a reputation as a professional speaker, Emerson might have used his short notice to write a crowd-pleasing lecture sure to build his platform. He was practiced at that, having spent his years on the lyceum circuit studiously avoiding his ideals, so as not to stir up too much controversy and cost himself revenues.⁴ He could easily have told his listeners just what they wanted to hear, venerating the norms of his establishment audience.

He didn’t. Instead, an apprehensive Emerson delivered an electrifying lecture to a largely baffled audience, criticizing the prevailing understanding of the scholar’s vocation and challenging his contemporaries to adopt a fresh vision more attuned to the spirit of the young nation. Championing engagement over ivory tower distance, wholeheartedness over fragmentation, independence over tradition, and courage over comfort zones, Emerson turned his back on tradition and offered a new account of what it meant to be an American scholar.

The lecture, described by Oliver Wendell Holmes as “our intellectual Declaration of Independence,”⁵ became, by some accounts, the most influential oration in American academic history, but its impact was not limited to academia or to the moment. As Kenneth Sacks notes, it was “perhaps the first instance in America of academic debate intended also for public consideration.”⁶ It remains influential today.

The Christian Scholar

To some, it may seem odd to open an article on the vocation of the Christian scholar with a remembrance of “The American Scholar.” On the one hand, Emerson’s lecture was centered on the scholarly vocation, and little doubt exists concerning its ongoing relevance. On the other hand, Emerson deliberately walked away from Christian ministry because he no longer believed in the sacrament of the Lord’s supper⁷ and he eventually became the face of a transcendentalist movement incompatible with orthodox Christian belief.

Yet while many of Emerson’s answers may be irreconcilable with Christian orthodoxy, the Christian scholar who wrestles with Emerson’s questions and tensions will find herself invited to a life of wholehearted integrity, daring vulnerability, and a delicate balancing act between independence and community.

Wholehearted integrity

When we use the word integrity, we often point to harmony between words and deeds, agreement between values and actions, congruence between inner realities and outer appearances. The person of integrity matches who she says she is with what she does. She is not partial and does not have hidden standards, but approaches people and situations with principled consistency. Even amid challenge and change, she is the same person from one moment to the next.⁸

These commitments and behaviors point to an even deeper significance of “integrity.” Each combination—word and deed, inner realities and outer appearances, values and actions, stated commitments and actual aims—is integral, part of one whole. While the relationship between the parts may be complex, and sometimes marked by changing, tense, and delicate balances confounding to herself or illegible to others, the person of integrity lives a life in which these different aspects are compatible, each relating to the others in ultimately, if sometimes paradoxically, complementary, enhancing, and strengthening ways. There is no ignorance, abandonment, or betrayal of one aspect of life by another. The person of integrity is whole.

The pursuit of this integrity, oneness, or wholeheartedness⁹ runs throughout “The American Scholar” but is most pronounced in Emerson’s contrast between the “mere thinker” and “Man Thinking.”¹⁰ He clarifies the distinction by recourse to what he calls an ancient fable:

It is one of those fables, which out of an unknown antiquity, convey an unlooked for wisdom, that the gods, in the beginning, divided Man, into men, that he might be more helpful to himself; just as the hand was divided into fingers, the better to answer its end. The old fable covers a doctrine, ever new and sublime; that there is One Man, – to all particular men only partially, or through one faculty and that you must take the whole society to find the whole man. Man is not a farmer, or a professor, or an engineer, but he is all. Man is priest, and scholar, and statesman, and producer, and soldier. In the divided or social state, these functions are parceled out to individuals, each of whom aims to do his stint of the joint work, whilst each other performs his. The fable implies that the individual to possess himself, must sometime return from his own labor to embrace all the other laborers. But unfortunately, this original unit, this fountain of power, has been so distributed to multitudes, has been so minutely subdivided and peddled out, that it is spilled in drops, and cannot be gathered. The state of society is one in which the members have suffered amputation from the trunk and strut about so many walking monsters, —a good finger, a neck, a stomach, an elbow, but never a man. Man is thus metamorphed into a thing, into many things. The planter, who is Man sent out into the field to gather food, is seldom cheered by any idea of the true dignity of his ministry. He sees his bushel and his cart, and nothing beyond, and sinks into the farmer, instead of Man on the farm. The tradesman scarcely ever gives an ideal worth to his work, but is ridden by the routine of his craft, and the soul is subject to dollars. The priest becomes a form; the attorney, a statue-book; the mechanic, a machine; the sailor, a rope of a ship.¹¹

Here is the payoff for Emerson:

In this distribution of functions, the scholar is the delegated intellect. In the right state, he is, Man Thinking. In the degenerate state, when the victim of society, he tends to become a mere thinker, or, still worse, the parrot of other men’s thinking.¹²

Note that the scholar who is “in the degenerate state” and “the victim” of society’s fragmenting tendencies is the “mere thinker.” The mere thinker is content with a social division of labor that separates thinking from other aspects of public and community life and a scholarly fragmentation that values narrow specialization over connection. The mere thinker separates his scholarly work from everything else that he is and does, isolating thinking from other aspects of his own life and work.

In contrast, “Man Thinking” stands in for the scholar committed to overcoming any artificial distribution of functions, whether disciplinary fragmentation, ivory tower isolation, or personal disintegration. He does not isolate the insights of one discipline from the insights of another. His thought, informed by nature and experience (rather than being cut off from them), in turn, inspires action, which inspires further reflection. “Man Thinking” resists the temptation to separate his scholarship from other aspects of his life and work. He is wholehearted, bringing all that he is to all that he does.

Emerson’s quest for wholeheartedness resonates with any Christian scholar. Scripture is shot through with this theme, but perhaps no text speaks to it more clearly than Jesus’ answer when he is asked which commandment is greatest: “The most important one . . . is this: ‘Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one. Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.’ ”¹³ The greatest commandment calls us to devote to God all that we are and all that we possess or control.

This expectation of entire devotion is only more obvious when we consider the passage Jesus quotes. As Daniel Block notes, the pattern of Deuteronomy 6:5 is one of concentric circles: God’s people are to love him with their hearts, or all their inner being, their persons, or all their living body, and their substance, or everything they possess or control.¹⁴ “Moses,” Block writes, “begins with the inner being, then moves to the whole person, and ends with all that one claims as one’s own.”¹⁵ The commandment calls God’s people to “unreserved commitment,” “exclusive allegiance,” “wholehearted . . . love.”¹⁶

This theme is a less frequently emphasized implication of one of Abraham Kuyper’s best known statements: “Not one segment of our intellectual world can be hermetically sealed off from the others, and there is not a square inch in the whole domain of our human existence over which Christ, who is sovereign over all, does not call out: ‘Mine!’ ”¹⁷

On the one hand, Kuyper’s insight is regularly used to validate as worthy a wide range of vocations. In academic circles, it is offered as one support for adventuresome learning and intellectually intrepid Christian scholarship. Resonating both with the Belgic Confession’s emphasis that we can reliably, though not fully, understand God “by the creation, preservation, and government of the universe”¹⁸ and with an understanding of common grace that recognizes God is already at work in all corners of his world, it gives us confidence that God’s “truth shines in all learning.”¹⁹ It undergirds an approach to Christian scholarship that begins not with anxiety about tensions between research and religious convictions, but with awe and wonder at how God is already at work in the world, in both the objects and methods of our study. This approach invites an integration of joyful and expectant, rather than fearful and apprehensive, integration of faith and learning.

On the other hand, the fact that Christ calls out “Mine!” over every square inch is not only a blessing to venture fearlessly into all sorts of scholarly questions but is a claim about and upon our scholarship. Every square inch must include our research and creative work. In other words, we could not agree with Kuyper and, at the same time, compartmentalize our scholarship.

The Christian scholar is therefore called to a wholeheartedness beyond Emerson’s wildest dreams. Her work is not to be a mere thinker in one space and a mere worshipper in another, a mere scholar in one space and a mere disciple in another.²⁰ Rather, the Christian scholar is called to bring her whole self into the work and bring all her work before the living God of the universe, scholarship included.²¹ We are, as the first answer of the Heidelberg Catechism notes, not our own. We belong body and soul—and scholarship—to our faithful savior, Jesus Christ.

Daring vulnerability

“The American Scholar” draws our attention not only to wholeheartedness, but also to scholarship as a life of daring vulnerability. Emerson’s ministerial and scholarly careers saw him revise his positions and share against-the-grain convictions within his community, risking his own status and sense of belonging. At stake in “The American Scholar,” were his reputation and his community ties. He put both on the table to deliver the talk that his conscience required, and he paid for it.

While some in the audience were captivated and motivated by Emerson’s talk, others were confused and offended. Many left simultaneously shaped by the message and rejecting the messenger. Indeed, between “The American Scholar” and his 1838 “Divinity School Address,” Emerson so deeply offended his Harvard audiences that he was not invited back to his alma mater for three decades, despite his increasingly important role in American public life.²²

It is possible to see Emerson as standing in a long line of teachers punished for corrupting the city’s youth and failing to acknowledge its gods, and this certainly reflects a sort of daring vulnerability required of the scholar.²³ At the same time, I am not referring only to the sacrifices one must make if one reaches unpopular conclusions. I am not referring to the hidden orthodoxies of campus politics, the complexities of the culture wars, or the hot takes and cancellation of our polarized climate. I do not mean bots, trolls, and the Professor Watchlist. Those risks are real, but they are not the biggest or the most enduring. The stakes for the scholar are so much higher and more fundamental.

Indeed, the life of scholarship is a life of daring vulnerability, in the basic sense of susceptibility to change. ²⁴ Every scholarly project—and, even more so, the scholarly vocation—demands a willingness to grow in understanding and revise one’s positions.²⁵ A life of scholarship requires rejection of foregone conclusions in favor of fresh insights. Research and creative work demand curiosity and humility. They require patience, and an openness to saying, “I don’t know where this will lead,” “I don’t know yet,” “I still don’t know,” and, eventually, “I learned something,” “I changed my mind,” and even later, “I take it back.”²⁶ The risks of revising one’s position can be very high; scholars dare to change their minds because the risks of the unexamined life are higher.

Yet the stakes for the Christian scholar can be even deeper and more complex precisely because of her wholeheartedness. She has no firewall between her adventuresome learning, intellectually intrepid integration, and susceptibility to change, on the one hand, and her deepest convictions about God, self, and world, on the other. Because of this, her research informed by biblical truth may also stretch familiar interpretations of Scripture. Her creative efforts may expand our understanding of how God is at work in the world, sometimes in uncomfortable ways. Her scholarship may prompt her—and others—to grapple mightily with her interpretations of the creeds and confessions of the church, a struggle that can mirror Jacob’s transformative struggle with God, leaving the scholar both blessed and wounded, even limping.²⁷ All this raises the bar for the Christian scholar: greater stakes; greater vulnerability; greater daring.

While our wholehearted pursuit of the integration of faith and learning puts us in a position of risking our whole selves before our whole communities, the Christian scholar inherits resources that aid in this daring calling. She has confidence in a God who created all things and calls us to understand him through that creation. She has the redemptive work of Jesus Christ and the promise of the resurrection, so that any loss is ultimately transformed to his glory. And she has the indwelling Holy Spirit, who can empower us with humility and vulnerability and comfort us amidst the pain and suffering that sometimes come with the territory.

The balancing act

One of the most important aspects of “The American Scholar” is Emerson’s emphasis on radical “intellectual and moral independence.”²⁸ Anticipating a theme that he would continue to develop in his later essay, “Self-Reliance,” he redirects his audience away from money and power because of their potential to corrupt the scholar’s essential independent judgment. Despite his anxieties about the talk’s reception, he steels himself against sensitivity to audience response, lest it compromise his self-reliance.

About this aim, Emerson wrote “[I]t becomes [the Scholar] to feel all confidence in himself and to defer never to the popular cry. He and he only knows the world. . . . In silence, in steadiness, in severe abstraction, let him hold by himself; add observation to observation, patient of neglect, patient of reproach; and bide his own time. . . . In self-trust all the virtues are comprehended.”²⁹ This self-trust extended beyond freedom from base influences to independence from tradition, from both community and institutional norms. Of Emerson’s scholar, Sacks writes, “Ignoring the constraints not only of European institutions but American ones as well, the scholar must live from within.”³⁰

Emerson’s emphasis on independence found expression in the American academy, which largely shares in the assumption that “Colleges, if they are to serve humanity faithfully, must nurture the individual voice.”[³¹ For more than two centuries, this emphasis has nurtured an academy that esteems, rewards, and protects the independent, inquisitive, and enterprising individual. Without stretching toward this Emersonian ideal, it would be difficult to imagine the diversity and innovation that has shaped various scholarly fields and pedagogical approaches

Yet we may ask whether Emerson’s ideal is achievable. In fact, denying or attacking tradition almost always risks performative contradiction. Emerson’s lecture, and his own experience of its reception, was no exception, as he was dependent upon tradition. “The American Scholar” “conforms to classical oratorical structure—“[Emerson’s] only extant speech to do so precisely”—and bears the marks of the jeremiad and the American revival.³² After giving the talk, Emerson struggled to free himself from obsession about its reception, falling at least some way into the very trap he warned against.

But the question Emerson prompts is not necessarily whether standing alone is possible. Answering “No” proves too easy. Answering “No” also might not credit Emerson enough for calling his audience not necessarily to achieve an ideal but to strive toward one, not to grasp self-reliance but to reach toward it. A more important question might be the extent to which a scholar—and especially a Christian scholar—should want the kind of self-reliance that Emerson idealized.

On the one hand, the Christian scholar should develop independent insights and stretch her students to consider new perspectives. She should generate and disseminate knowledge that advances our understanding of the world even if it requires shedding new light on old assumptions or rethinking foundational conventions of her field. To do so requires some measure of independence from community and tradition, some skepticism of common knowledge and received wisdom.

On the other hand, the wholehearted Christian scholar must realize that in bringing her whole self to the project that she is necessarily and primarily shaped by tradition and community—not in ways she should regret, but in ways she should celebrate. Christian scholars are called to transformation by God’s word and spirit, and that transformation does not happen in a vacuum. It happens in a covenant community that instructs us not with insights from or visions of pure independence, but through constant engagement and reframing of God’s truth discerned by the church over the centuries. Christians are, after all, followers, and at the risk of oversimplification, the scholar who follows Jesus should feel significant tension between Emerson’s urging to forge one’s own path and Jesus’ self-revelation, “I am the way.”

The Christian scholar should attentively embrace both emphases—scholarly independence and traditions of the church—and for at least two reasons, scholars at Christian colleges and universities should do so with even greater intentionality. First, at institutions committed to the integration of faith and learning, much of our teaching and scholarship is explicitly perspectival, bringing a Christian perspective—or, more narrowly, a Baptist perspective or a Nazarene perspective or a Presbyterian perspective or a Reformed perspective—into conversation with the assumptions, questions, and insights of an academic discipline.

While the specific integrative insights offered may be fresh, they are not “self-reliant” in the sense that Emerson emphasized; rather, they are reliant upon received tradition. Second, forming the Christian scholar is arguably a community-first endeavor. You can’t do it alone. From communal practices at church—including baptism, communion, and discipline—to formative experiences with faculty colleagues, the Christian life runs counter to Emerson’s radical independence. ³³

Indeed, as Calvin University’s Derek Schuurman emphasizes in a recent Christian Scholar’s Review post, becoming a Christian scholar happens in community. In our Christian colleges and universities, it happens in mentoring relationships and faculty development programs, in formal and informal conversations with colleagues, in faculty reading groups, and in cross-disciplinary friendships and collaborations.[33] ³⁴ As Schuurman notes, when he began his career, he “was a Christian who was a scholar, but not yet a Christian scholar.”³⁵He reminds us that our institutional communities play a significant role in shaping that second step.³⁶

Conclusion

In July 2023, almost 200 years after Emerson’s talk, I found myself in Cambridge for a week. Having already been invited to contribute to this project, I decided to find and learn firsthand as much as I could about First Parish, where Emerson had spoken. The church was undergoing renovations that had taken the front door—across from Harvard Yard—offline and made the building less accessible. On my first visit, I was greeted at the side door by a surprised older gentleman who gently turned me away but suggested that I return the next day.

When I returned, I was greeted by a staff member who invited me inside. I explained that I was curious to see the place where Emerson spoke, and the staff member guided me to the sanctuary. According to my guide, the room has not changed much since 1837. Over nearly two centuries of Boston weather, windows have needed work, and the wall behind the pulpit had major repairs at some point due to a leak. Other than that, she assured me that the room has largely been maintained as it was. She claimed the pulpit was the same one at which Emerson stood.

I asked my guide for permission to step up to the pulpit and take in something like the view that Emerson did in 1837, and she allowed it. I stepped into the pulpit and looked out at the pews where the audience would have been sitting. I softened my gaze and imagined them taking in his talk with critical appreciation.

After a moment, I looked back down at the pulpit itself, the entire top shelf of which was covered with a very large Bible open to Proverbs 24–27 in the King James Version. It looked old and pageturned, frayed and torn. The first full verse on the open page was Proverbs 24:13–14, “My son, eat thou honey, because it is good; and the honeycomb, which is sweet to thy taste. So shall the knowledge of wisdom be unto thy soul: when thou hast found it, then there shall be a reward, and thy expectation shall not be cut off.” I spent a moment pondering the text.

“What can you tell me about this Bible?” I asked my guide.

“I don’t know much about it,” she said. “We don’t read it much. I just know that when we removed it from the pulpit, some people got upset and we had to move it back. Sorry I can’t tell you more.”

It occurred to me, of course, that First Parish was not Emerson’s church; its sanctuary was merely the largest lecture room available to Harvard audiences in 1837, and so it happened to be where Emerson spoke. And the congregation stands in the Unitarian tradition from which Emerson’s transcendentalists broke. In fact, it seems to me that Emerson, if his actions matched his convictions, might have removed the unread Bible from the pulpit over the protests of the congregation.

Reflecting on my experience at First Parish left me deeply wary of Emerson’s legacy in American scholarship—a legacy of radical independence bought at a great price. But even justified wariness about Emerson’s answers should not keep us from a closer look at his questions and tensions. Wrestle long enough with those, and we might discern through them a calling worthy of our commitment—a calling to the wholehearted, daring, balancing act of Christian scholarship.

Cite this article

Noah J. Toly, “The Wholehearted, Daring, Balancing Act of Christian Scholarship”, Christian Scholar’s Review, 54:1 , 9-20

Footnotes

For scholarly accounts of Emerson’s lecture, including its sources, trajectories, influence, and meaning in American culture, see Merton M. Sealts, Emerson on the Scholar (University of Missouri Press, 1992); and Kenneth S. Sacks, Understanding Emerson: “The American Scholar” and His Struggle for Self-Reliance (Princeton University Press, 2003). I am grateful to Jeffrey Stout for his generous initiative in sharing with me an unpublished book chapter on calling that engages “The American Scholar.” I am also grateful for a year of conversations with Jay Brewster, Nancy Brickhouse, Mike Hardin, Karen Lee, and Todd Ream. Their insights and encouragements were indispensable to this rewarding project.
Sacks, Understanding Emerson, 19.
Jonathan Mayhew Wainwright was originally slated to speak. It is not known why he ultimately had to withdraw. See Sacks, Understanding Emerson, 5.
Sacks, Understanding Emerson, 48.
Sacks, Understanding Emerson, 18.
Sacks, Understanding Emerson, 3.
See Lawrence Buell, Emerson (Harvard Belknap, 2004), chap. 1: “The Making of a Public Intellectual,” Kindle. “The point of no return,” Buell writes, “was Emerson’s refusal to administer the Lord’s Supper—the ritual of communion. He asked his congregation to choose between him and this ceremony in which he no longer believed. More to his relief than disappointment, they chose the ceremony.” Buell describes the sermon Emerson preached to force the issue with his congregation as the moment when “Emerson becomes Emerson,” as it was the first time that he had publicly declared his judgments to be on the basis of his intuition: “On trial,” Emerson noted, the sacrament “was disagreeable to my own feelings.” As Buell writes, “It’s one thing to say I reject something because of X, Y, and Z. It’s quite another to say I reject it because it doesn’t suit me, doesn’t speak to me.”
The brief description offered in these paragraphs is obviously not a complete account of integrity, and much less a theory of integrity, which I would not be equipped to propose. An integrated, whole, and consistent life may be a necessary aspect of integrity, but it is not sufficient either for a theory or life of integrity. For example, the person of integrity is not merely integrated and consistent but has also oriented their life and work toward worthy ends. See Damian Cox, Marguerite La Caze, and Michael Levine, “Integrity,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. Edward N. Zalta, fall 2021 edition, https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2021/entries/integrity/. That aspect of integrity is one among several not considered here, though it might be worthwhile to explore a connection between that aspect of integrity and Emerson’s calling his audience to attend to higher goods than money and power.
Wholeheartedness is a concept at home in broader scholarly discussions of integrity. See, for example, Harry Frankfurt, “Identification and Wholeheartedness,” in Responsibility, Character, and the Emotions: New Essays in Moral Psychology, ed. Ferdinand Schoeman (Cambridge University Press, 1988).
Emerson’s use of masculine language to refer to entire groups of people (e.g., scholars), including both pronouns and phrases like “Man Thinking,” was consistent with practices of the early- to mid-19th century. (We might also say that it reflected with a fair degree of accuracy the nearly all-male academy of the time. But merely to emphasize that the language used more accurately reflected the composition of academy would perhaps underplay the role of language in constituting the social norms and practices that resulted in an all-male academy.) While, two centuries later, many are less comfortable with this usage, I will retain Emerson’s original in any quotation or references to his lecture. However, I will refer to the Christian scholar by way of feminine pronouns.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, “The American Scholar,” in Kenneth S. Sacks, Understanding Emerson: “The American Scholar” and His Struggle for Self-Reliance (Princeton University Press, 2003), 132.
Emerson, “The American Scholar,” 132.
Mark 12:29–30 (NIV).
Daniel I. Block, Deuteronomy (Zondervan, 2012), 182–186. Note that Block insists that this pattern of concentric circles or centrifugal movement extends further into the passage, comprehending children, future generations, and public life
Block, Deuteronomy,184.
Block, Deuteronomy, 182–184.
Abraham Kuyper, “Sphere Sovereignty,” in On Charity & Justice, ed. Matthew J. Tuininga (Lexham, 2022), 141.
See Belgic Confession, art. 2, “The Means by Which We Know God”, which begins, “We know God by two means: First, by the creation, preservation, and government of the universe, since that universe is before our eyes like a beautiful book in which all creatures, great and small, are as letters to make us ponder the invisible things of God. . . .” Of course, we must also reckon with the limits to what we can know through the creation, preservation, and government of the universe and the sinful corruption of our capacities to understand the world.
See Our World Belongs to God: A Contemporary Testimony, https://www.crcna.org/welcome/beliefs/contemporary-testimony/our-world-belongs-god.
On this point, insights into the calling of the Christian scholar need not be so different from insights gleaned from the theology of work. Among the many emphases of that literature is the Christian responsibility to integrate, and not to separate, work and faith, work and discipleship, work and worship. This responsibility exists not because work is unique, set apart from other aspects of life and most deserving of integration with faith or worship. Rather, it is precisely the opposite: Work is not unique; so, like everything else, it is under the lordship of Jesus Christ and should be fully integrated into a life of discipleship. The work of the scholar is no exception but deserves and requires as much intentionality and reflection as any other work. In fact, to the extent that one aspect of the scholar’s calling is to awaken others to their callings, they should be keenly aware of their own callings. To the extent that our colleges, universities, and churches are involved in vocational discernment and exploration with their students, they should be aware of the ways that they are constantly engaged in their own vocational exploration and discernment. (Any number of resources representing various Christian traditions could be recommended to those who want to explore further the theme of work and worship. Among others, I recommend Matthew Kaemingk and Corey B. Wilson, Work and Worship: Reconnecting Our Labor and Liturgy [Baker Academic, 2020].)
All Christian scholars are called to this pursuit of wholeheartedness regardless of their institutional setting. Independent scholars, scholars in secular institutions, and scholars in explicitly Christian institutions all have opportunities to shape their vocations in such a way as to emphasize this integrity and reduce fragmentation. But while many Christian scholars must keep their wholeheartedness in the background, those who hold appointments at Christian institutions have the opportunity to shape their vocations in ways that more explicitly reflect this wholeheartedness.
See Wilson Sullivan, New England Men of Letters (Macmillan, 1973), 14.
Of course, Socrates is among the paradigmatic examples of the one who suffered for teachings against the grain of his community. His trial and execution are recounted in multiple sources, including Plato’s Apology. See Plato, “Apology of Socrates,” in The Last Days of Socrates, ed. Christopher Rowe (Penguin, 2011).
For a theological exploration of vulnerability as susceptibility to change, see Kristine A. Culp, Vulnerability and Glory: A Theological Account (Westminster John Knox, 2010).
I should confess to revising my own assessment of Emerson at least a dozen times during this project. Given his towering status in American literature and culture—not to mention that I am working here outside my academic field of study—I am sure that more time with him would only yield more adjustments to my opinions.
For a portrayal of these virtues—and the beauty of liberal arts education—see Luminous, directed by Sam Smartt (2022), streaming.
This metaphor of learning as a paradoxically empowering wound only highlights important tensions with models of higher education focused on simple empowerment, mastery, and upward mobility.
Sacks, Understanding Emerson, 48.
Sacks, Understanding Emerson, 48.
Sacks, Understanding Emerson, 47.
Sacks, Understanding Emerson, 4.
acks, Understanding Emerson, 47.
While this essay is focused more on the scholar and less on the university, a more expansive and institutionally oriented version of this argument might engage Alisdair MacIntyre, Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry (University of Notre Dame Press, 1990); especially the last chapter of that volume, in which he argues that a university is an institution in which tradition constrains and gives purpose to disagreement.
Derek C. Schuurman, “It Takes a Village to Form a Christian Scholar,” Christian Scholar’s Review, June 4, 2024, https://christianscholars.com/it-takes-a-village-to-form-a-christian-scholar/.
Schuurman, “It Takes a Village to Form a Christian Scholar.”
This year, I will complete two decades in higher education, having spent fifteen years at Wheaton College and four at Calvin University. I could not be more grateful for the opportunity to be shaped and stretched by both Calvin and Wheaton. Excellent colleagues, vibrant Christian witness, and genuine commitment to scholarship have been among the most important sources of growth and development over the course of my career.