Christ Across the Disciplines: Past, Present, Future by Roger Lundin

Christ Across the Disciplines: Past, Present, Future Reviews

• 
  Andres Vera

  Roger Lundin’s Christ Across the Disciplines was inspired by Arthur Holmes’ The Idea of a Christian College. Lundin gathers a group of scholars from various disciplines to contribute to the same issue tackled by Holmes—faith and learning. Not only are the contributors’ fields of study diverse (history, science, philosophy) but so are their theological positions (Roman Catholic, Anglo-Catholic, Protestant). Nevertheless, they all strive to cultivate the life of the mind for the sake of the Body of Christ, who seeks to honor and serve God with all her heart, soul mind, and strength.
  The first series of essays include a discussion on faith and history. David Bebbington locates the present discussion on faith and learning within the 20th century, particularly after the Second World War. He notes that British intellectual life after the war was dominated by politics and economics rather than what was considered the “triviality” of religion. He then introduces a series of historians who argued for the study of history “in a Christian manner” and who sought to relate the disciplines of religion and history. John Schmalzbauer focuses instead on the “creative tensions in evangelical intellectual life” over the past hundred years highlighting the intellectual journey of fundamentalist thinkers, which eventually gave rise to “a renaissance in evangelical intellectual life.” David N. Livingstone’s historical contribution centers on the culture wars of science and religion and argues that place, politics, and poetics “should be accorded more attention in efforts to get a handle on the encounters between science and faith.”
  The next series of essays discuss the intersect between the intellectual life and theology. John Webster argues that the object of Christian theological inquiry is God and all things in relation to God (his outer works as creator). One of Webster’s theological foundations is that of the created intellect. Because our intellect, which he defines as our human power of apprehension, is created, it should be understood in terms of the history of fellowship between God and creatures. Eleonore Stump’s theological contribution presents the external and the internal challenge to the integration of faith and learning. On one hand, Christian intellectuals are faced with the modernist claim that Christianity and reputable academic work are incompatible, that Christian conviction and scholarship operate with mutually exclusive rules and standards. The internal challenge is two-fold: on one hand, Christians are uncomfortable with judging any view as heretical, on the other hand, the intellect of scholars is sometimes rejected entirely based on one heretical idea they hold. Christians, Stump suggests, should distinguish between rejecting beliefs and rejecting the persons who hold them.
  Stephen Barr enters the conversation from the perspective of a Christian theoretical physicist. As such, he is the perfect individual to argue that there is no conflict between (biblical) religion and science. In his essay, Barr discusses the three elements of the supposed conflict: the historical claim, the philosophical claim, and the scientific claim. Although Barr demonstrates that this conflict is unfounded, he does recognize the clash between biblical religion and scientific materialism. Jeremy Begbie shifts the discussion from the natural sciences to the arts. His essay explores the theological approaches to art with a focus on beauty, sacrament and language.
  The last series of essays are by Katherine Clay Bassard and Sujit Sivasundaram. Bassard maps out the progress of the emerging discourse on faith in the academy onto the growing and important discussion on race. She focuses on the Christian notion of redemption and applies it to the current conversations as depicted by three neo-slave narrative novels. Sivasundaram, closes the book by offering three intellectual concepts that should characterize Christian scholarship: race, culture, and nation. She argues that Christian interpretation of these three ideas stretched over unity and diversity.
• 
  Zach Hedges

  This book is worth owning for Webster's essay "on the intellectual life" alone, but there are many other solid contributions as well, including Bebbington on history and Barr on science. A few seem a bit too abstract to be of much practical use. But in general this is a solid collection of writings from a highly diverse cast of Christian scholars demonstrating just how many implications may actually result from the "integration of faith and learning."
• 
  Daniel Scheiderer

  Decent book, but it should've been more confined regarding the contributor's theological traditions