Fundamentalists and Scholarship, Part 8
The Scholarly Life
Read Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, and Part 7.
If we fundamentalists want to produce scholars—and particularly theological scholars—then we must invest in their preparation. We must create training institutions with adequate faculties and libraries as well as classroom facilities and other infrastructure. We must expose would-be scholars to the scholarly community, working to bring them into the “big conversation” that constitutes scholarly exchange. The Ph.D. dissertation should constitute a significant contribution that actually begins to advance the conversation in some significant way.
This regimen of training is more than any fundamentalist institution is doing at the moment. Implementing it will require a significant investment. Even if we were to make this investment, however, we still would not be producing scholars. We would merely be producing people with scholarly training. If we want actual scholars, we must also make it possible for these individuals to go on and do the work of scholars.
What does a scholar do? Expressed in its most basic terms, the scholarly life is very simple. Scholars read and write. More specifically, scholars give themselves to research and to publication for the community of scholars. Of course, most scholars are also professors, but being a professor and being a scholar are not the same task. The scholar as a scholar gives himself or herself to advancing specific aspects of the scholarly conversation. In order to achieve this goal, the scholar must know that part of the conversation in detail, must ponder the factors that affect the conversation, and must publish cogent research and argument in a form that other scholars will consider.
In order to perform this service, scholars must pursue several tasks. First, they must know the background of those parts of the conversation in which they are engaged. They must have read all of the books, theses, dissertations, articles, and papers that pertain to any area they choose to address. Furthermore, they must maintain ongoing currency in the new materials that are constantly being published. They will read everything in their subject areas, often before it actually reaches publication.
Scholars must also be engaged continuously in the conversation itself. Particularly, they must attend the meetings of the learned societies. Those meetings are the forum in which they will encounter the most recent thinking in their disciplines. They will hear, in the form of academic papers, the presentation of ideas that will often take years to appear in books. These encounters enable scholars to stay ahead of the academic curve so that they are alerted to new ideas that have not yet reached the general public. Such presentations also enable scholars to continue expanding their areas of academic competence.
Once they are doing all of the reading and attending all of the necessary meetings, scholars must find time to write. Scholarly writing is not simply a matter of putting one’s prejudices into print. It is a matter of locating a manageable question within the overall scholarly conversation, inquiring into the possible ways that the question might be answered, amassing the evidence for and against each of those answers, and forming a judgment as to the likely conclusion, given a sober evaluation of the evidence. Scholarly writing is careful, meticulous, dispassionate, and usually quite tedious for the general public. Like it or not, however, such writing is what shapes the thinking of the academy, and whatever shapes academic thinking will sooner or later find its way into the popular mind. If we cannot make our case in scholarly publication, then we will be left to do repair work when our people have been influenced by the ideas to which we did not reply—and for fundamentalists, this repair work has often taken the form of demagoguery.
Scholars rarely begin by publishing books. Instead, they present their ideas in the form of papers at academic meetings. Also in attendance at those meetings are editors from the journals and publishing houses. Once a budding scholar has attracted attention through well-reasoned and well-defended scholarly papers, she or he may be offered the opportunity to publish articles or even to present a more lengthy argument in the form of a monograph. The ability to sustain this sort of academic contribution is the mark of a genuine scholar—two or three papers and a couple of peer-reviewed articles each year are a kind of minimal canon for scholarship. As a scholar advances within a field, the publication of a book every few years becomes more of a possibility. Of course, some scholars publish more, but a person who is able to maintain the output that I have described will be recognizable within the scholarly community.
If we wish scholars to perform these tasks, then we must equip them with specific tools. First, they must have access to research materials. That is why most scholars do their work in or near educational institutions: they absolutely must have access to a good library. No single library is going to provide scholars with all the materials that they need, so they must also have the ability to travel. Their research will often take them around the country and sometimes around the world.
Scholars must also be able to travel in order to attend academic meetings. No scholar worthy of the name can be involved in fewer than three or four learned societies. Those societies meet annually, and some of them also hold regional meetings throughout the year. A scholar must be provided with the means to attend the meetings.
Mostly, true scholarship requires leisure. Scholars must spend hours reading every day. If they are going to write, they will have to spend hours more. In order to get from what they read to what they write, they must have leisure simply to think. People who have never tried to perform these tasks often believe that they are simple, but the fact is that scholarship is hard work and self-denial.
Most of all, if fundamentalists wish to produce scholars, then they are going to need a shift in thinking. They must come to believe that a person who sits at a desk for hours every day, reading, thinking, and writing, is performing an important—even a vital—work for the cause of Christ. They must be willing to recognize that scholarship is neither laziness nor a form of elitism, but a worthy calling that God gives to some individuals, just as He calls others to become physicians, attorneys, machinists, and janitors.
Fundamentalism has not produced many scholars. The reason is not that we lack bright individuals. We have as many intelligent people as the rest of the world. The reason is simply that we have not been willing to pay the price of scholarship. We have not been willing to pay the price because we have not valued the product. Indeed, we have not even understood what the product is, so we have often contented ourselves with thinking that we had scholars when, in reality, we had something else.
Some younger fundamentalists who read these essays may believe that God is calling them into a life of scholarship. What encouragement will they receive? And where will they go? That is a decision that the present generation of fundamentalist leaders is going to make.
The Waterfall
Henry Vaughan (1622-1695)
With what deep murmurs through time’s silent stealth
Doth thy transparent, cool, and watery wealth
Here flowing fall,
And chide, and call,
As if his liquid loose retinue stayed
Lingering, and were of this steep place afraid,
The common pass
Where, clear as glass,
All must descend
Not to an end;
But quickened by this deep and rocky grave,
Rise to a longer course more bright and brave.
Dear stream, dear bank, where often I
Have sat, and pleased my pensive eye,
Why, since each drop of thy quick store
Runs thither, whence it flowed before,
Should poor souls fear a shade or night,
Who came, sure, from a sea of light?
Or since those drops are all sent back
So sure to thee, that none doth lack,
Why should frail flesh doubt any more
That what God takes, he’ll not restore?
O useful Element and clear!
My sacred wash and cleanser here,
My first consigner unto those
Fountains of life, where the Lamb goes,
What sublime truths, and wholesome themes
Lodge in thy mystical, deep streams!
Such as dull man can never find,
Unless that Spirit lead his mind
Which first upon thy face did move,
And hatched all with his quickening love.
As this loud brook’s incessant fall
In streaming rings restagnates all,
Which reach by course the bank, and then
Are no more seen, just so pass men.
O my invisible estate,
My glorious liberty, still late!
Thou art the channel my soul seeks,
Not this with cataracts and creeks.
This essay is by Dr. Kevin T. Bauder, president of Central Baptist Theological Seminary (Plymouth, MN). Not every professor, student, or alumnus of Central Seminary necessarily agrees with every opinion that it expresses. |
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