Faith & Scholarship: A Personal Statement
PAPER • The Christian faith enhances scholarship by nurturing virtue, intensifying truth-seeking rigor, and imbuing scholarly work with transcendent beauty, aligning it with the classical ideals of the Good, the True, and the Beautiful.
Read time: 3 min
Abstract
What role, if any, should one’s Christian faith play in scholarship? Do religious pre-commitments necessarily cloud objectivity and coerce conclusions? These questions are pertinent precisely because “it is entirely possible for a Christian who is an academic to compartmentalize her faith from her scholarly activities . . ., whether in the humanities, the sciences, or even theology.” But is such compartmentalization appropriate? To be sure, when faith commitments bias research or force research findings, legitimate “scholarship” has been comprised. Even so, I will argue that faith should play a role in Christian scholarship. I will make this case by showing how religious pre-commitments can improve scholarship relative to three classical categories of the Good, the True, and the Beautiful. That is, Christian faith can make scholarship (1) more virtuous by making scholars better humans, (2) more rigorous by intensifying the urgency to discover truth, and (3) more transcendent by consecrating even tedious aspects of scholarship to God as worship, something significantly beautiful. ❖
