High Calling Magazine

The official publication of The Francis Asbury Society

The Christian Scholar
BY DR. DENNIS KINLAW

There is a unity in human history. It is there diachronically as well as synchronically. Our modern period with its technological advance, with its near simultaneity of knowledge, and with its potential for simultaneity of experience, is more impressed with the synchronic. Yet the diachronic is there and is, in the long run, more important. Yesterday is part of today just as today is inevitably a part of tomorrow. The cleavages in history are never absolute, otherwise neither progress nor retrogression in human history would be possible. This diachronic unity in history is the special domain of the scholar.

This unity is what makes the Christian scholar essential to the church as well as to the larger society. Modern culture has learned the importance of one’s individual past for one’s own self-understanding. Thus individual memory is essential to personal wisdom. Corporate memory is equally crucial to the human race. In the larger society, the scholar should play the role that memory does in the individual. He or she needs to be there to save us from ignorance and naiveté, ignorance that deprives us of understanding and naiveté that leave us in illusion, particularly about ourselves.

Humankind has not reached its present level of achievement and understanding by accident. Both the good and the bad in the human situation have lineages. Those lineages help us account for the present and give clues to the future. The myth of the inevitability of progress has been exploded. Blind despair, though, is not the appropriate alternative. Human progress is possible. There is evidence to support this. History need not be cyclical. But it is only a wise and responsible use of human freedom that enables us to effect such progress. Here the scholar with his or her knowledge and understanding is essential.

It is the scholar alone who has the time and opportunity to plumb the depths of our corporate memory or to explore the interrelationships and casual connections in the time fabric of people, events, and ideas. The scholar alone can protect us from meaningless repetition or retrogression.

This fact accounts for the popularization of scholarship as being as crucial as the work of scholarship itself. Only seldom does the scholar find himself or herself in the role of the decision-maker. There is undoubtedly a justice in this. Few good administrators have been scholars. The qualities that give excellence in one area are not necessarily those to be most valued in another. Few executives, though, have performed creatively without the fruits of good research at their call. If an institution, a movement, or a culture is to see creative movement, it needs leadership that has a heart both to access and to use the wisdom that only the scholar can provide. The scholar’s role is thus to provide essential information and understanding.

The scholar is the primary one who should enable a culture to be free to change without loss. Two forces perpetually collide in any society. One is the demand for change; the other, the effort to protect traditional good. The former demand reflects our fear that opportunities will be lost, while the latter, our view of the danger of the erosion of present privileges. For this reason, the scholar must not be left unnoticed in his ivory tower nor forgotten in the recesses of academia. True scholarship has practical implications. Without the recognition of this fact, society suffers and scholarship loses its integrity.

One of the concepts that have excited theologians and philosophers is the unity of all truth. This is illustrated in the diachronic unity of history. The fabric of human history is without seam. Thus the scholar and the decision-maker need each other. Where the decision-makers have been kept as beneficiaries of the work of the scholars and where they have had the requisite humility and discernment, progress and blessing have resulted.

It is obvious that the scholarship of which we speak is more than mere acquisition of facts. True scholarship is more than numeric addition. It involves seeing relationships between those facts as knowledge becomes wisdom. Information should lead to understanding that enables us to make sound judgments which, in turn, create the context for progress. Scholarship must not be divorced from the well being of the body politic. There is a rightness in the fact that scholarship is seldom self-supporting. That fact is fair in that its goal is inclusive of the well being of the society that makes it possible. At least the benefit of his or her fellow beings should be the lateral vision of the one most dedicated to what we call pure scholarship. Otherwise, truth can be irrelevant. And that thought should be the supreme heresy for the one who makes truth the goal.

What has been said of the scholar generally is equally applicable to Christian scholarship in particular. The church can forget its history and how its present privileges were secured as readily as can the secular state. It often has done so with tragic results. Few things are sadder than the church embracing old heresy as “the wave of the future” because its pride has blinded its eyes to its past and deadened its sensitivity to truth. The scholar is needed to keep the church both humble and wise. And those two, humility and wisdom, are like Siamese twins whose separation inevitably brings about death.

But the scholar is needed not just to save us from the old errors. God’s will is that our knowledge of his truth should be on the perpetual increase with all the attendant benefits of such augmentation. If this generation is technologically like a dwarf upon the shoulders of the giant of all that went before it, it should be so theologically, too. Our generation should certainly understand more of truth than any preceding one has done. It is not heresy to believe that Luther understood justification by faith more clearly than did his predecessors. Nor is it heresy to believe that John Wesley understood sanctification by faith more fully than did his predecessors. Our knowledge of the riches of God’s grace and truth should be—though not inevitably—on the increase.

The tendency of the church in every generation is to define its message in terms of the issues of the moment. Thus the world often sets its agenda. The result is that every theological system tends to be idiosyncratic and particularistic. This tendency is as obvious in Barth as in Aquinas. The circumstances of any given era almost necessitate selective response with the loss of a certain universalism and wholeness.

Here Christian scholars are essential. Their perpetual reference to the scriptures in all their fullness and constant consideration of the history of the church are our prime protections. How else can the church transcend its own time and avoid becoming captive to the zeitgeist?

That the church has with some success been able to do this seems obvious. We may yearn for “the good old days,” but few would be ready to be transplanted if it meant the loss of insights that have found currency only in more recent times. It is exciting to see the way the best minds in the church work in confidence of a fuller understanding of God’s full truth. Karl Barth and Emil Brunner affirmed their deep indebtedness to the Reformers, but that indebtedness did not stop them from diligent study of the doctrine of election. The conviction which motivated them seemed to originate in a confidence that something more compatible with the biblical data and more reflective of the purposes and ways of God was attainable. Thinkers with such conviction and dedication are a priceless asset to the church. They have kept and will continue to keep the church in their debt. The absence of such will guarantee our repetition of the past or worse. The vocation of Christian scholarship is still a high and necessary calling.


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