The Outrageous Idea of the Missional Professor. Paul M. Gould
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Quote from Costello, Streets of Hope: finding God in St. Kilda, 145.
10. Thanks to my friend Mike Erre for these two points about the importance of story. See his Why the Bible Matters.
11. Plantinga, “When Faith and Reason Clash,” 16.
12. Lest you doubt that perennial naturalism is a story that invites participation, consider the February 21, 2011, issue of Time magazine. On the front cover there is a picture of a human head connected to a computer cable. The cover reads, “2045: The Year Man Becomes Immortal*” and the “*” (also on the front cover) says, “If you believe humans and machines will become one. Welcome to the Singularity movement.”
13. Opitz and Melleby summarize the main story-line of perennial naturalism and creative anti-realism respectively in terms of three main acts: matter–ignorance–progress, and culture–oppression–expression in The Outrageous Idea of Academic Faithfulness, 61–2.
14. More fully, man was created on the sixth day, after the earth (i.e., the “place”) was populated with plants and animals in order to make it suitable for human life.
15. Augustine, Confessions, 10.
16. Lewis, The Weight of Glory, 46.
17. John Piper, Let the Nations Be Glad! (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Books, 1993), 11.
18. Plantinga, Not the Way It’s Supposed to Be, 10.
19. Newman, The Idea of a University, 51.
20. This state of affairs is well documented in Donoghue, The Last Professor.
21. Wolterstorff, Reason within the Bounds of Religion, 126–27, asks, “Could it be that [theoretical knowledge] is itself a good thing? Could it be that it is itself a dimension of shalom, a component in human fulfillment? . . . I find it impossible to answer no to this question. To me it seems evident that understanding, comprehension, knowledge, constitutes a fulfillment of our created nature . . . I want to say that a theoretical comprehension of ourselves and of the reality in the midst of which we live—of its unifying structure and its explanatory principles—is a component in the shalom God meant for us. Where knowledge is absent, life is withered.”
22. Donoghue talks about the “scholarly personality” of an academic in which the capacity to thrive on solitude is essential to professional survival in academia. See The Last Professor, 19.
23. Wolterstorff, Educating for Shalom, 272.
24. Ibid.
25. For a good discussion of the over-arching story of Scripture, see Roberts, God’s Big Picture. According to Roberts, believers today live within the “Proclaimed Kingdom.”
26. Quoted in Gould, “The Fully Integrated Life of the Christian Scholar,” 39.
27. Keller, Paul’s Letter to the Galatians, 2.
28. Keller, The Reason for God, 227.
29. Lewis, Mere Christianity, 176.
30. Wright, The Mission of God’s People, 29–30.
A Vision for Wholeness
“Nowhere can the mind’s eye find anything more dazzling or more obscure than in man; it can focus on nothing more awe-inspiring, more complex, more mysterious, or more infinite. There is one spectacle greater than the sea: That is the sky; there is one spectacle greater than the sky: That is the interior of the soul.”—Victor Hugo31
“The most important [commandment] . . . 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. The second is this: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’”—Jesus (Mark 12:29–31)
Since ancient times, man has tried to makes sense of the fact that we live in a uni-verse. Philosophers seek to provide a metaphysical account of why there is unity among so much diversity—the age-old problem of the one and the many. Scientists have long been searching for a unification theory, hoping to find one fundamental law of physics that can unify and explain all the diverse phenomenon of this world. Artists seek aesthetic unity when painting or sculpting. In relationships, humanity seeks a kind of unity or harmony with each other, even while it often remains elusive. In our own lives, we hope to unite our thinkings, feelings, and willings under some over-arching purpose. In short, we long for unity. And this is as it should be given the reality of God.
I suggest that we long for unity because we’ve been created for such wholeness by the perfectly united triune God. And it is this divine unity that is the pattern for all lesser unities:
The Christian doctrine of God thus contains an assertion about the nature of unity. It asserts that all the actual unities of our earthly experience, from the unity of the hydrogen atom to the unity of a work of art, of the human self, or of a human society, are imperfect instances of what unity truly is. We may find in them analogies to that true unity, and learn from them something of what perfect unity must be. But perfect unity itself is to be found only in God, and it is through the revelation of God in Christ that we find the unity of God to be of such a kind as to cast light upon all lesser unities.32
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