to a lost world.
Being a missional professor is not just about “getting the missionary job done.” It is first and foremost about being a certain kind of person. As Christopher Wright states, “If our mission is to share good news [in all its dimensions], we need to be good news people. If we preach a gospel of transformation, we need to show some evidence of what transformation looks like . . . The biblical word . . . ‘holiness’ . . . is as much a part of our missional identity as of our personal sanctification.”30 In short, we need to become whole people. We need to integrate all that we are and do as Christians with all that we are and do as university professors. The gospel is not just something to believe, it is also something to obey. In the next chapter, we will consider what kind of person we ought to be. As we shall see, the Bible is passionately concerned about the character of God’s people and their commitment to the God whose mission they are called to share.
Questions for Personal Reflection or Group Discussion
1. Think of your favorite story. Why are you drawn to the story? How does the story invite participation? What does the story reveal about the storyteller?
2. Gould suggests that there is a three-way battle between Christian monotheism, naturalism, and postmodernism for your allegiance. Do you agree or disagree? Why or why not? What is the dominant story of your academic discipline?
3. Discuss the implications for Christian scholarship in light of the doctrine of creation. Do you agree that all truths discovered somehow point back and illuminate the divine? What might this look like in your academic discipline?
4. What is the “received role” of the university professor? In what ways is this received role good and useful? In what ways is it fallen and in need of correction?
5. Gould states that the university is a mission field. Do you agree or disagree? Why or why not?
6. Do you agree that you need the gospel as much as the non-believer? How is the gospel not just the “ABC” but the “A–to–Z” of the Christian life?
7. How can you more fully enter the story of God as a university professor?
8. The very short story I tell my children when they beg for “just one more story” before bedtime.
9. 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
