Research
A fresh theological contribution to "faith and scholarship"
Understanding the Times
The Cambridge Christian Study Centre traces its story directly to Francis Schaeffer’s work at L’Abri in Switzerland in the mid-twentieth century, where he celebrated the gospel’s implications for all of life – art, philosophy, science, and more. He commended the gospel through serious, honest engagement with the questions people were actually asking. In doing so, he defended a classical evangelical Protestant doctrinal vision.
Looking back, Schaeffer’s son-in-law, Ranald Macaulay, who founded both English L’Abri in the 1970s and our ministry here in Cambridge in 2001, has observed that Schaeffer’s successors have often diverged. Those committed to Christian cultural contribution and those committed to evangelistic apologetics have often developed on quite separate trajectories. Within the former, the faith-and-scholarship movement has emphasised the inherent goodness of academic endeavour and our shared creedal inheritance with Roman Catholic and Orthodox traditions.
In response, traditional university ministries are now partnering together to develop a clearly evangelical Protestant contribution: The Gospel and Academia Project. The project asks: what does it look like to make the gospel our starting point in academic ministry? How should academic endeavour and cultural apologetics be related appropriately?
Faith Seeking Understanding
The Cambridge Christian Study Centre is glad to partner within The Gospel and Academia Project through which resources are shared between project members who hold the same faith commitments in common.
But “faith seeks understanding” and the so-called “scandal of the evangelical mind” illustrates the way in which the Protestant gospel has not, in recent church history, generally been treated as a starting point for Christian intellectual endeavour.
To contribute to this wider task the Study Centre is undertaking a long-term research project which consists of the following two streams. From their different perspectives, both are concerned with the alignment of Scripture and reality. The story of the Bible is the true story of the world, and Christ’s work of salvation redeems his creation not privately but by demonstrating God’s righteousness in public at the cross. In short, our academic work and our confession of faith both demand that we pursue a true understanding of the reality which we find around us and in Scripture. So what is the biblical account of reality?
Historical & Systematic Theology
The West now finds itself in a late modern post-secular phase in which it is accepted that our public and intellectual lives cannot operate purely on the basis of the Enlightenment’s neutral rationality. Cultural assumptions and religious beliefs play an inescapable part in shaping our academic lives.
As late moderns we have a lot to learn from our early modern forbears, when, in mid-seventeenth century England, immediately prior to the Enlightenment, the gospel was seen as the inspiration for what would become modern religious liberty. How was the newly clarified Protestant gospel being related to the older Christian intellectual tradition concerning the Creator-creature relationship? Where was the conversation left-off, and what can we learn today?
The approach we are taking is to examine the cross of Christ as a demonstration of God’s justice, considering divine justice from a realistic perspective instead of the prevailing ‘nominalism’ which dominated modern philosophy from the late seventeenth century onward.
Our focal point is the former Vice-Chancellor of Oxford University, John Owen, whose change of mind concerning divine justice in 1653 has been cited by Herman Bavinck as an important stand against nominalism in the Reformed tradition. Against the potentially arbitrary voluntarism of the earlier approach, Owen’s clarification not only demonstrated the necessity of our sin’s punishment in Christ but it also demands that the Bible’s account of salvation history is at the same time an account of real history, thus providing the context of all human academic endeavour.
Biblical &
Systematic Theology
Partner members of The Gospel and Academia Project (above) collaborate on the basis of three foundational commitments – shared doctrine, shared mission and shared ethos. Each of these represents a faith commitment to pursue academic ministry by placing the gospel at its intellectual centre.
As this faith seeks understanding our aim is to offer the project an accessible and unifying theological framework demonstrating how these three foundational commitments can be shown to arise from a coherent account of biblical reality and salvation history.
The approach we are taking is itself a response to the prevailing holism of the wider faith and scholarship conversation, in which the rejection of modernity’s false dichotomies (faith/reason, sacred/secular, etc.) has sometimes resulted in a lack of conceptual or categorical precision concerning the mission of the church and the vocation of the Christian scholar.
So far we have developed a core framework based on a cumulative account of seven familiar theological distinctions: the Son within the Trinity; the Creator-creation relationship; creation-fall-redemption; Adam and Christ; this present age and the arriving age; the local church and the local workplace; and the promise-fulfilment dynamic within Scriptural interpretation.
Our aim is to demonstrate how these familiar distinctions, when placed alongside one another, together serve to clarify the orientations of the Christian mind, the relationship between academic work and evangelism, and the way we can relate general and special revelation.
Engaging the Disciplines
Our theological research will be complemented and filled out through interdisciplinary engagement, for which the Study Centre will be the hub. Our aim is the production of a range of resources for students, academics and ministry practitioners will be made widely available via The Gospel & Academia Project, and taught through its joint programmes for the benefit of Christian scholars and university ministries.