Stranger in a Strange Land

• INTELLECTUM VERO VALDE AMA • Greatly love the intellect

—Augustine

As Books & Culture finishes its fifth year, it is time to take stock. The existence of one more magazine is not of earth-shaking consequence, although for a word-heavy, content-intensive journal to make it this far in an era dominated by the image, the slogan, and the byte must mean something. Considered in this light, the survival of a journal where a diverse range of self-defined evangelicals have been joined for specifically intellectual purposes by a wide array of other Christians and a few sympathetic non-Christians is a noteworthy occurrence.

Books & Culture exists, in the first instance, because two generations of religion officers at the Pew Charitable Trusts joined the officers and board members of Christianity Today, International, in providing money, physical space, and corporate commitment to make it happen. (Strategic support from the Lilly Foundation has helped as well.) But it also exists because of a growing willingness among at least some evangelical Christians to consider seriously—as part of their Christian vocation—the domains of science, art, psychology, history, world affairs, social forces, literature, politics, and more.

I am sometimes asked whether I still hold to the dire indictment of evangelical Christian thinking set out in my 1994 book, The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind The answer is a resolute “sort of.” My charge in the book was that evangelicals, though excelling at many tasks, were failing in the use of the mind as God had made it possible for the mind to be used. The existence of Books & Culture may be considered partial refutation of that charge, especially since one of the magazine’s greatest practical problems has been finding enough column inches fast enough to get the thought-provoking prose of authors on to the page before they either forget they have written or they grow irritated at the long delay between submission of manuscripts and appearance in print. The silver lining in this cloud is realizing that a remarkable wealth of pretty wise folk are willing to write for a magazine like this.

Books & Culture, however, is only one of many signs that now testify to stimulating intellectual engagement from evangelical or quasi-evangelical groups. Conscientious efforts to promote distinctly Christian learning are coming from many self-defined Christian colleges and universities. A series of projects headquartered at the University of Notre Dame continues to provide the most promising ventures sponsored by Protestant evangelicals in the last hundred years to assist explicitly Christian thinking. (These ventures are the various Pew initiatives in Christian scholarship that have provided research fellowships for college and university professors, scholarships for graduate students, and seminars of various sorts for Christian academics at different stages of their careers.)

Then there is the Intelligent Design movement. Because the work of William Dembski, Michael Behe, Philip Johnson, and their colleagues represents a much more directly intellectual challenge to evolutionary naturalism than so-called creation science, it has generated much more solid scientific reflection from Christians who disagree with their proposals, as well as from those who agree. Substantial intellectual endeavors of a similar sort now exist for political thinking, the arts, psychology, and other spheres as well.

Yet problems remain. Once past a shared commitment to a supernatural gospel, evangelicals are all over the place theologically. We are still a movement defined by our activism, our skill in popular communications, and our ability to draw a crowd. For the most part, common, generic evangelicalism does not possess a theology full enough, a tradition of intellectual practices strong enough, or a view of the world deep enough to sustain first-order Christian learning. In addition, general pressures from the world at large—including the frantic pace of modern life, the need to raise money for keeping institutions afloat, and the intrusion of celebrity-think into intellectual spheres—undermine evangelical thinking as they do the thinking of other North Americans.

Evangelicals do not need to abandon the activism, the emphasis on conversion, or the trust in Scripture that define them as evangelicals, in order to pursue the life of the mind. But if we would ever make a genuinely Christian contribution to modern intellectual life, we must add patient grounding in the great traditions of classical Christian theology, for these are the traditions that reveal the heights and depths of Jesus Christ. In turn, only by understanding those heights and depths—in relation to the Godhead, in relation to human psyches and societies, in relation to the natural world—can genuine Christian learning emerge.

In sum, and drawing in no small part from the delights of five years of stimulating reading in Books & Culture, my conclusion is that we have not moved very far in developing explicitly evangelical Christian learning. But we are witnessing more and better Christian learning from evangelicals, which, on balance, is a very good thing indeed.