Thinking Faith blogs

In the week after Easter I had the privilege of travelling to the Republic of Macedonia to take part in a conference on 'The Bible and Literature'. It was co-hosted by the Macedonian Academy of the Sciences and Arts - a research university in the capital city of Skopje - and the Balkan Institute for Faith and Culture, a Christian organisation seeking to engage with academic circles and promote interfaith discussions in Macedonia and surrounding areas. This was the first time the two organisations had worked officially together and the result was a fascinating and wide-ranging bilingual conference touching on scholarship from manuscript studies to feminist theory.

The two keynote speakers represented two different ways of taking the title of the event. The first, my fellow guest Professor Simon Horobin of Magdalen College, Oxford, looked at Biblical aspects of literature - specifically, the genre of the saint's life in a fourteenth-century collection he identified for the first time only ten years ago.  The second, our host Academician Katica Kulavkova of MASA, examined literary aspects of the Bible, pondering the discourses of the sacred in the parables of Christ and their modern adaptation by the twentieth-century Serbian writer Borislav Pekić.

I also had the opportunity to present on my research, analysing the use of the Psalms in a thirteenth-century text. Other topics included the 'feminine principle' in the Bible and apocryphal texts; the Book of Malachi in James Joyce's Ulysses; creation in Marilynne Robinson's novels; the image of the suffering Virgin Mary in medieval frescoes and contemporary Macedonian poetry, and various others. I found it particularly stimulating to hear from Eastern Orthodox perspectives, and also from a number of academics who are also poets. This pairing of vocations seemed much more common in Macedonia than has been my experience in the UK!

The Balkan Institute for Faith and Culture stems from the small minority of evangelical believers in Macedonia, and is committed to fostering real and productive dialogue between different expressions of Christian faith, other religions, and more secular elements of society. This was certainly a feature of the conference, and for me also provoked the question of how this could be done more effectively in academic and literary spheres in the UK. The humanities have certainly seen a 'religious turn' over the last several decades, which (in my discipline especially) has borne fruit in history, theory, and interpretation which takes seriously the living power of religion. In a world where, in the West as well as the East, the centrality of religion in human decision-making and lifestyle is ever more obvious, Christian academics have an opportunity to speak into what can be a self-deceptively 'secular' academy with the authority of personal experience as well as disciplinary expertise.

The conference took place on 20-21 April 2017.

Many people ask how Christianity relates to science - often assuming some kind of conflict.  Faith-in-Scholarship has always involved scientists, and is more about progress than apologetics - so we'd typically start by pointing out that everyone has a worldview, that the Christian and naturalistic worldviews held by many celebrated scientists are closely related, and that all kinds of worldview inevitably shape the paradigms, theories, models and hypotheses that we develop and investigate (see the Church Scientific 'ideas' Prezi - especially Arthur Jones' diagram on slide 26).  Today I want to tell you about a research project where divergent paradigms are the main focus.

Back in 2015, the International Society for Science and Religion (ISSR) invited me, through FiSch, to contribute to a project called Philosophical, Theological and Educational Implications of the New Biology. This rather unwieldy title represents a number of intriguing ideas:

• There has been a move towards more-holistic and less-reductionistic perspectives in biological sciences in recent decades;
• This philosophical shift seems to fit better with theistic worldviews, and so may have interesting theological corollaries;
• Biology teaching (especially in schools) is likely to take a while to adopt such a new trend and could be helped to pick it up faster.

So the 'new' biology refers to holistic thinking, organism-oriented models and non-linear causation, in contradistinction from reductionistic thinking, mechanistic models and determinism.  And the project focuses on three biological sciences where such a shift is thought to be particularly evident or interesting: genetics, neuroscience and ecology.  I was asked to join the project as an ecologist, and in a future post I'll report on my collaboration with Francis Gilbert of Nottingham University, which has produced a paper and is due to yield a book chapter.

But is there really a holistic trend in biology, or is this just a matter of idiosyncratic perspectives?  Then if there is such a trend, is it disingenuous for Christians (for example) to take a principled interest in it - perhaps we're engaging in some kind of God-of-the-gaps thinking (if reductionism is inappropriate in Christian worldviews)?  And finally, shouldn't school biology just be about facts, leaving philosophical interpretations aside?  Let me address those ideas in turn.

The first question is actually a central focus of the ISSR project itself.  Our papers about epigenetics and cognitive neuroscience certainly evidence a rise in less-hierarchical, less-reductionistic models than historically prevailed.  Michael Ruse, for his part, takes a historical look at holistic thinking in and around biological sciences, from Aristotle's four causes, through Darwin to E.O. Wilson.  He shows how holism has appeared in different guises as biological paradigms change - and that Christians have taken contrasting views on its value.

That last point is pertinent to the second question - along with the fact that not all of the project participants are inclined towards any traditional religion.  For my part, however, the project's appeal surely was related to my faith and my anti-reductionist leanings - so what have I to say for myself?  Quite simply: I have no doubt that every interest I have is somehow related to my faith: from why I enjoyed maths at school, gardening at home, and learning music and languages in my spare time, to why I became a biologist and did a PhD in ecology.  And I'm equally sure that everyone's interests are connected to their broader framework of convictions, values and visions, be they traditionally 'religious' or not.  It's a common ploy of secular humanism to try and separate out 'religion' as an interfering prejudice muddying intellectual waters - but there is no view from nowhere.

So, finally, what about restricting education to scientific facts?  That, I fear, is one of the most persistent delusions of the Enlightenment. 'Facts' are proclaimed by authorities (and yes - I'm trying to be one now!), and historically they come and go.  Facts appear to exist when there is consensus, but that doesn't guarantee their correctness, and truth cannot so easily be known.  But I do believe in progress - and in the very nature of both research and teaching, new ideas need to be aired and considered on their merits - indeed discussed and debated in order to test their merits. 

So I'm excited to be part of this project, diverse and unpredictable though the outputs may be. The workshops have been stimulating and jovial - a great example of spirited, communal and humorous dialogue. And that experience goes far beyond what biological sciences could themselves account for.

Although there are a few places in the UK where Christian postgraduate groups are thriving (have a look at the list on cpgrad.org.uk to find one near you), there are many cities and universities where there is no such group. This blog is one attempt to provide an online community. In the US, InterVarsity’s Graduate & Faculty Ministries faced a similar situation, and they found a similar solution! It’s called the Emerging Scholars Network. Their main aim is to ‘support those on the academic pathway as they work out how their academic vocation serves God and others’. And the primary means by which they do this is, as you may have guessed… a blog!

As the USA is a larger country than the UK, and InterVarsity a larger organisation, their blog has a larger number of writers than ours (including some from the UK – and even some who also write for the FiSch blog!) and offers 4 to 7 posts a week. The blog focuses on three themes:

- academic vocation and calling: what does it mean to be an academic and why would a Christian follow an academic vocation?

- the role of faith and theology in specific academic disciplines

- spiritual formation in the academy: how can we be faithful Christian scholars?

Besides posts that cover similar topics as this blog, they also have a regular ‘Science Corner’ series. Furthermore, over the past few years, they have developed a devotional specifically aimed at scholars and their vocation. This devotional is called the ‘Scholar’s Compass’. I followed it when it was being put together, and found it hugely stimulating to find a new post in my inbox a few times a week to start my working day with. I have also used some of these to start off meetings of our local postgraduate group.

Although some posts of course are more relevant to particular aspects of academia in the USA, it is striking to see how similar many of my experiences in UK Higher Education are to those of our US colleagues. Although the internet has many problems, it has made it possible for people all over the world to be blessed by this work. I would encourage you to subscribe to their blog feed, and hope you will be blessed as I have been blessed!

Image copyright (c) 2013 by Kate Ter Haar, made available under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license. https://www.flickr.com/photos/katerha/8347212476

In the past few months, I’ve noticed increasingly regular mentions, in various places, of the concept of ‘imposter syndrome’ as a common problem within academia – especially for postgraduates or early-career researchers. I’m sure many reading this will already have come across the term, or have experienced something of it themselves, but if you haven’t, it’s fairly self-explanatory: it’s the feeling that behind the polished exterior you’re secretly a fraud; that you’ve got to where you are by blind luck, which is bound to run out soon; that one of these days you’ll be exposed as a phoney, and lose your place in the community that you so value.

These confidence-sapping thought processes are fuelled by the increasing opportunities that contemporary, digitally-connected life provides both to compare ourselves to those around us, and to stage-manage our own images so that such comparisons are never fair. Moreover, once this mind-set has been established, it can easily become a vicious circle: working hard and achieving highly only serves to provide you with a new set of unrealistic standards against which to measure yourself. The often achievement-driven culture of the academy (where people are too often encouraged to measure their own value by their most recent publication or grant award) only makes it all worse.  So I thought it might be worth considering how this common problem might relate to life as a Christian in this environment. What difference does knowing Jesus make? What difference can our words and actions make for others suffering in this way? Three truths seem vital here, corresponding to three dimensions of the syndrome itself.

• There is no condemnation for those in Jesus. Comparing our own achievements (or any other aspect of our lives) with those of our peers can easily leave us feeling like frauds; yet the truth of the matter is that when we take on Jesus’ life, we are clothed in his identity and victories – our lives are no longer our own, and all comparisons are rendered void.
• We need not worry about being ‘found out’; we are already fully known. We have no secrets from God; he knows the best and the worst of us, and he chose to redeem us when we were at our worst. We don’t need to fear the rejection (or crave the approval) of those around us; we have a Father who accepts us by grace, and is constantly making us more like Him.
• Our value comes from our Caller, not our achievements. It is God who has invested us with value, by making and then dying for us. It’s great to work hard doing what is good, but we don’t need to become trapped by the lie that our achievements are what give us the right to exist. In his brilliant little book Ordering Your Private World, George MacDonald highlights the importance of being ‘not driven but called’; both identities spur us on to action and accomplishment, but the second sees it not as a precondition but a consequence of our acceptance in Jesus.

Hopefully these truths will help give perspective when we feel like frauds. They also free us from the need to present ourselves as more accomplished, more perfect, than we really are – something which will greatly help those around us who also feel the same way. Moreover, this freedom and openness also provides a firm foundation when it comes to actually doing our work, day by day – it allows us to seek and give advice without embarrassment, be honest about and learn from our mistakes, and not use self-deprecation or false modesty as an excuse for retreating from our responsibilities.

In a sense, all Christians are imposters – we are clothed in the unearned status of Jesus, called to live as exiles and strangers, waiting for a new life that is yet to come. But in Christ we also have great authority to embody His truth and love in our communities – and that includes academia. And when God calls us, He also equips us: whatever situation we find ourselves in, as we rely on Him we can grow in our confidence and ability to do the job that is set before us.