The Plight of the Christian Scholar

Why Princeton needs a study center.

I recently had the pleasure of grabbing coffee with T. C. Schmidt, the author of Josephus and Jesus: New Evidence for the One Called Christ. Princeton is lucky to have Schmidt for the year while he is a visiting fellow at Princeton University’s James Madison Program. Sitting down and talking with him for several hours clarified a great deal in my mind about the plight of the Christian scholar.

First, a bit of background: Schmidt, whose book is available through open access from Oxford University Press, argues that a famous passage of Josephus which talks about Jesus of Nazareth, for centuries considered to be the insertion of Christian propagandists and not authentically by Josephus, is in fact by Josephus after all. There has been long-standing consensus on the inauthenticity of the Testimonium Flavianum (as the passage has come to be called), and so it’s all the more remarkable that the early reaction to the book is overwhelmingly positive. Schmidt’s rigor and methodological soundness are widely acknowledged, and it seems that scholars of the New Testament are swayed where they are not entirely won over by Schmidt’s reading.

In itself, it’s a fascinating study (here is a good layman’s summary), and I highly recommend it for the sheer joy of experiencing first-class philological sleuthing. The stakes couldn’t be higher. I had goosebumps listening to a talk Schmidt gave, where he pointed out that Josephus indicates in Testimonium Flavianum something about the sources from whom he learned about Jesus’s trial—and, based on Josephus’s biography, we can reasonably suppose that he heard the account first-hand from Ananus, son of Annas the high priest mentioned in the Gospels. Remarkable stuff. (I overheard somebody say after Schmidt’s talk, “A masterclass!”)

The Church is built up by scholarship like this. This is precisely what Christians in the scholarly world ought to be doing: granite-like argumentation, unwavering commitment to truth—even more than that, an assumption that the truth of scholarship will vindicate and harmonize with God’s truth. Schmidt said to me over our coffee that the profile of a Christian scholar must be, like Daniel in Babylon, ten times better. In other words, the task of a Christian scholar is to be as excellent and as fine and as winning a scholar as he or she can possibly be.

But here is the brutal truth: T. C. Schmidt is not as common a phenomenon as one would hope. That is not because Christians are not trying to be good scholars, or are incapable of it (or are not writing enough books about it). I suggest there are two rather practical reasons: first, Christian scholars are not receiving the training necessary. Second, when they do receive the training, they can expect none of the funding necessary. There is, perhaps, a third point as well: even if they receive the training and the funding, they suffer from an overloaded ecclesial information economy, such that the good they offer the Church cannot be absorbed into the bloodstream of her pastors and laity.

Christian ministries have focused on higher education with the primary goal of getting Christian undergrads to stay Christian through their programs. This is not nearly enough. We must also form future scholars. In other words, we must form graduate students. After all, they will be the ones who, in 10 years’ time, will be forming the undergraduates. In 20 years’ time, they will be publishing the monographs that define whole scholarly conversations.

This matters not just for the good of the Church but for the workforce as well: the students you hire at your company in 10 or 15 years will have their assumptions and virtues and appetites formed by today’s graduate students. If no one is speaking into their lives, if no one is forming a generation of Christian scholars at that juncture, the consequences are profound in the academy, in the Church, and in the workforce.

So this is the first bottleneck: we need to address the gap in the formation of graduate student, postdoc, and young-career Christian scholars.

Scholars at this stage often face a forking path: do they go where the Christian formation is, or do they go where the scholarly resources are? In other words, do they go to the evangelical seminary, where there are orthodox, confessional professors, or do they go to Ivy Leagues, where there is access to top-tier research tools, primary sources, libraries, or, if not, the funds to send you almost anywhere? That’s a pretty raw deal. It’s certainly a tragic choice for anyone around Princeton University to have to make, since it was an institution founded, in part, to enable precisely the combination of those things (epitomized in people like James McCosh, or E. Harris Harbison).

But even after this fork, there’s another. Say you’ve found a research niche that may build up the Church and further all scholarship. That may not be enough. Research funding is a game of the Zeitgeist, and there are winners and losers. Many of the scholarly concerns that would be of great interest to the Church are not going to be awarded funding or grants or postdocs. Certainly a graduate student whose career is in the balance can’t be certain of it. They can either gamble on the scholarly idea that benefits the Church but isn’t likely to get funded, or they can move their research in another direction. And this is, in part, why there are a fair amount of “Christians who are scholars” but seemingly few “Christian scholars.”

This is the second bottleneck: we need to address the lack of funding for young career scholars who are researching things which redound directly to the benefit of the Church, her ministers and teachers, and her members.

What can a study center do? Our job is, in essence, to address these two bottlenecks.

First, the formation bottleneck: undergraduates, graduates, and younger-career scholars need formation as scholars. This means not merely ensuring they remain Christian, nor that they have apologetics training and smart comebacks, nor even that they have basic Christian catechesis. Rather, we want actively to foster a new generation of Christian scholars: another James Davison Hunter, another N. T. Wright, another Esther Meek, more Oliver and Joan Lockwood O’Donovans, etc. We propose doing that through tiered mentorship programs, scholarly residency programs, seminars with top notch scholars, and reading groups across different communities within the university.

Second, the funding bottleneck: we simply want to connect supply and demand. We know there are generous people in the Church, and gifted scholars in the Church. There are those with resources who want to see “knowledge be increased among us, and all good learning flourish and abound,” as the Book of Common Prayer says. And there are the people committed to that life of learning. One had has the supply and the other the demand. The two need mediating institutions committed to connecting that supply and that demand.

Just as John Henry Newman said there is no university without students, there is also more to a university than its students. Who is teaching those students? We can use our resources to transform that aspect of the university as well. A study center in Princeton would be a strategic way to ensure that high-quality Christian scholarship across a wide variety of areas would be funded, and that scholars whose work redounds to the benefit of the whole Church would be able to pursue their research interests with the confidence that they will have an academic home to do the task God has given them to do.

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One thing I didn’t yet talk about, which is the overloaded information economy. That’s a third bottleneck. Here’s what I mean: there is, in fact, some excellent Christian scholarship out there. But now the problem is that the scholarly world is so diffuse, and the voices of information are so loud, that the pastor or the person in the pew might never hear it. Or would never have the time to read it. (Or wouldn’t be able to decipher it if they did read it.)

We need more organizations that stand between the academy and the Church, helping to bridge that gap, making “trade routes,” as it were, between different economies of information. Christian scholars need pastors and laypeople as much as vice versa—church communities provide scholars a grounding and an accountability and a humility. The Church in turn needs her scholars, her “doctors.” Study centers can be pivotal ways for churches to receive what they need from Christian scholarship, and for Christian scholars to be forced constantly to refresh themselves in the well-spring of intellectual life, which is Christ and his worship. “Then thought I to understand this; but it was too hard for me, Until I went into the sanctuary of God.”

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Welcome to the newsletter of the Coverdale House (it’s still a tentative name, for what it’s worth), a Christian study center coming to Princeton, NJ. Of course, you are free at any time to unsubscribe from this Substack (see below). If your email box is like mine, you would probably be smart to. Then again, if you’ve read this far, maybe you shouldn’t.

Please be in touch, and in prayer, about the Coverdale House, as we seek to begin operations in the near future.