Engaging with Mainstream Thinking:
A Conversation among Reformational Christians

I have just been involved in a useful conversation on the Refomational Scholarship discussion group about acting as a Christian in academic life, and thought I would share it in case it is helpful.

"Why isn't there a giant Cross instead of a dancing Shiva in front of the accelerator in CERN?" asked Jon Bennett in frustration. I had an intuitive answer but Jon's question forced me to think it out, and I wrote a fairly substantial response. This prompted another question from John McNamara,

"Is there a Christian way to do political science, economics, biology, chemistry, etc. ...? ... much of the research in political science would look very much the same whether a Christian, Muslim, Buddist, Jew, or atheist was conducting the research." Again, I was challenged to delve into my intuition to bring out a systematic answer.

The exercise has helped me enormously, to understand what has been intuitive to me for years in my own academic life: how to engage with mainstream thinking. It so happens that Jon's questions are from the context of the natural sciences while John's questions are from the context of the social sciences. So what emerged might be relevant to both.

These are the kinds of questions that many Christians are asking, either explicitly or implicitly. So I thought it would be useful to make our conversation available to others. I do so with the permission of Jon Bennett and John McNamara.

Andrew Basden 5 September 2023

Jon Bennett's Questions:

I want to thank you [Rudi Hayward] for your congenial, gracious and cogent response [to previous questions]. You really are a gentleman and a scholar.

Another reason I've been slow to respond is that it's kind of difficult for me to say what I want to say.

I think your response brought clarity but it was not exactly correct when speaking of my intentions, or understanding.

I want to understand how HD [Herman Dooyeweerd, a 'Christian' philosopher] gives the answer that neither modernism or postmodern gives.

Specifically, it would be helpful for me to see how this applies in the scientific revolutions. And by that I mean in the specific underlying ideas behind the revolution in the 20th century of relativity and quantum mechanics, and the attempt to harmonize them or accommodate them, or at least relate them to classical ideas.

Why has an Eastern model stepped into that gap? Why isn't there a giant Cross instead of a dancing Shiva in front of the accelerator in CERN?

Why didn't Neil's Bohr have Christian symbols on his lapel instead of a yin-yang symbol? Why didn't Schrodinger start and end his lectures with, "in Christ all things cohere"

Why wasn't there a book written on the Trinity and physics, instead of the Tao of physics, which incidentally Heisenberg said he endorsed and agreed with everything in the book!

Which is to say, why are the fundamentals of an Eastern philosophy and religion so easily adopted and adapted to explain this connection between modernism and postmodernism-and to explain the conflict between these fundamental conceptions in our understanding of physics?

And then we can move to the larger culture and ask why have eastern religion, Eastern philosophies become so dominant in the West? Where does this fascination with mysticism come from?

I believe postmodernism is Eastern in origin. I believe we see it coming from the matter-form distinction described by HD. It is Dionysian in response to the overly Apollonian mindset of the Enlightenment.

Incidentally this was the subject of Thomas Mann's book The Magic Mountain. He got the title of the book and the basic premise from Nietzsche, really a major conduit of postmodernism. He had two characters in the book reflecting each worldview of the Enlightenment and of the response of Romanticism in an effort to understand the mindset of German youth prior to world war I.

Why is there a move in the west towards totalitarianism and Marxism? I believe these also have Eastern origins.

So I'm trying to understand how HD resolves this tension. Specifically I'm trying to understand how Christianity answers these questions and this tension, in the intellectual life of the West as well as in morals.

The morality component is more obvious. but from Kuyper and HD we are told that the Christian worldview, a Biblical worldview, applies to every square inch of life and thought. That is what I'm trying to understand and specifically starting with the revolutionary reconception of the physical world that we see in the twin revolutions in modern physics in the early 20th century, relativity and quantum mechanics.

These revolutions gave us entirely new conceptions of space and time and a particle and law and causality. How are these answered effectively from the philosophy of HD?

Thanks again for your thoughts Rudi, and your precise and very thoughtful and kind way of expressing them.

Jon

Response to Jon Bennett, mainly about our attitude to engaging as Christians with mainstream thought.

[Several people offered various philosophical answers to Jon, for example about how HD would deal with postmodernism as a philosophy. I found myself thinking differently.]

Hi Jon,

Intro

I have not had internet access for several days, during which time you have received many responses that, to me, seem helpful. My response is perhaps a little different, not philosophical but in terms of Christian belief.

(BTW I agree with Greg? that pomo is not necessarily Eastern, and with Roy that pomo has not conquered all. )

My response is perhaps 'prior' to theirs, insofar as it sets up the motivation for, and heart of, what Dooyeweerd did. Maybe in ways that Dooyeweerd did not explicitly discuss, but towardswhich he seems to have ben moving.. But it is - I now realise - part of what attuned me to Dooyeweerd when Richard Russell introduced D to me, such that his ideas resonated with me.

Your email

Thank you for explaining that you "want to understand how HD gives the answer that neither modernism or postmodern gives."

I will try to help in this, though not as the others have done, philosophically.

You ask a number of "Why (not)?" questions. I take these to be not just academic questions but to express frustration that Christian thinkers have not had much of an influence on major theories like Relativity and Quantum theory in the natural sciences. (And some, including I, find similar frustration in other sciences., so it is not confined to physics.) I would like to address this frustration.

Shepherd attitude

My response is more about how I like to respond to pomo, Eastern or any other of the world's thought and ideas, as a follower of Jesus.

As far as I can tell, Jesus saw the people, not as enemies, but as "sheep without a shepherd".. I would therefore expect that Jesus wanted his people to be shepherds to people. This includes thinkers, and implies engaging with them in ways in which it would be reasonable for them to value and even accept.

I find that the character of the shepherd is given in various passages. It is not to coerce nor condemn but to "gently lead those with young" [Isaiah 40], to "seek the lost, heal the sick, tend the lame" [Ezek 34], to "give one's life for the sheep" [John 10], etc.

What that implies to me is that I do not see pomo or even Eastern thought as an 'enemy' to be rejected or fought or even abhorred by us, but as a genuine but flawed attempt by human thinkers, in their context, at seeking the trruth - even though it is radically flawed, and maybe even influenced by Satan's activity.

Jesus also used the metaphors of salt and light, which have similar 'feel'.

However, Christ's people have failed to be such shepherds. As a result, non-Christians seem to have made more contributions to humanity's bodies of knowledge than Christians have done. I am sad that this is the case.

Why have we failed?

So one question is, why not? And another question is, how can we be more like shepherds?

I think there may be four contributors to why non-Christians have made more contributions than Christians seem to have done.

1. The errors and sins of the church and Christendom over the centuries have, undestandably, put people off, so they look esewhere, e.g. to Eastern thought. I find that completely understandable.

2. The nature-grace ground motive, whereby many Christians have deemed 'secular' activities like engaging with world's thought, as inferior to 'sacred' things like evangelism, prayer, worship, etc. So, mostly, we have not actively sought to engage with the world's thinking, especially not in terms meaningful to it. Sadly, the 'holiest' people have been almost completely absent from the arena of thinking. Exceptions might have been Augustine, John Calvinn and John Wesley.

3. The Roman idea of power. Interestingly, Dooyeweerd, in Roots, has a chapter 'The Roman idea of Imperium' after and separate from that on the Greek ground-motive. The idea of conquest, which was important to the Romans, is strong in Canaanite paganism. Christianity that came via Rome has arguably been too conquest-oriented. This includes much European Christianity and that of the USA.

4. Augustine. Even though Augustine sought to engage, he went about it one particular way that I do not find helpful, His metaphor of 2 cities, at war with each other, leads into adversariness, whereas shepherds are not meant to be adversaries to the sheep. (I acknowledge that, at that time or recently before, Christians were persecuted, so it is not surprising that he adopted that idea. But I question it, whereas many Christian thinkers assume it as a model approach.) Was he, for examole too influenced by the Roman idea of Imperium in his interpretation of the message of Scripture, as a kind of presupposition?

Augustine presupposed an aim of engaging is to build a distinctive, separate Christian thought. Thoughhhh it may be useful to do this within the Christian community (e.g.in order that we can be clear at which points Christian thinking differs from the world's thinking) that is for 'internal' consumption, not for engaging with the world's thought. As a result, Augustine's method includes "plundering the Egyptians" of the 'riches' of Greek philosophy, e.g. Aristotle.

Shepherds do not "plunder" the sheep for their own benefit. Does not Ezekiel 34 show God angry at that kind of attitude?

How may we be shepherds?

Or at least How have I done so? There might be other ways too.

I find it fruitful to take the reverse approach, derived from Abraham, whe God promised that "hrough you all peoples will be blessed." Not "defeated" not "proved wrong" but "blessed".

Rather than goddies moving from the world to build up Christian thought, goodies should move from Christ via his people to the world to build up (bless) the world's thought.

Importantly, Blessing (building up) is not unquestioned support but involves strong critique, especially of presupposiiitions etc. It does not involve taking sides [modernism v pomo], but rather critiquing both sides, and their presuppositions. And my/our own presuppositions too.

That, I believe, is what Dooyeweerd did. Henk Geertsema (I think it was) once told me that Dooyeweerd felt a calling in whaaat he did; it was more than an academic project, though it was indeed that. Was he part of this Abrahamic blessing through which God would bless all peoples and their thinking, and through them all Creation?

I believe so. And we who follow him may develop his ideas in similar spirit. I personally find his idea of aspects etc. more useful for shepherding thought than his idea of ground-motives. This involves LACE: Listen, Affirm, Critique, Enrich. I have explained this in an email about Chris Watkin's Biblical Critical Theory, which I could send to anyone who wished.

Towards the philosophical

At this point I hand over to the philosophical responses that Roy, Rudi, Jeremy, and others have given, as being the philosophical content of where Dooyeweerd was pointing us, us who follow where he ventured.

I hope that is useful.

Andrew 230831

Questions from John McNamara

[This email came directly after I had sent that one.]

Jon, Andrew, and others:

I have been reading this thread with interest and as we came to the later posts in thread came to realize there may be something underlying some of Jon's questions. For example he asks why there is a dancing Shiva instead of a cross in front of CERN. But in doing the scientific work that is done at CERN, does that really matter? Andrew talks about being a shepherd in each of our disciplines when we interact with the world an to a certain extent, I agree.

But, I think underlying a lot of this is another question. The question I am thinking about come up when talking to Political Scientists (my background), economists I know, several biologists I know and others. This question is: Is there a Christian way to do political science, economics, biology, chemistry, etc. ...?

Taking an example from my own background (political science) it would appear that to a large extent there might not be. Setting aside, for the moment, political philosophy; much of the research in political science would look very much the same whether a Christian, Muslim, Buddist, Jew, or atheist was conducting the research.

Take a study of voter behaviour in elections. If one were doing research on voter activity, you would look at poll results prior to the election, the election results, there would be voter polls as they were leaving the polling site, voter polls and interviews via surveys afterward, etc. .. During none of this are you (or should you) be attempting to influence the voters. You are trying to determine what the voters actions are/were and why they took those actions. After all this and crunching the data,; you publish your results. The publication can be in an acadamic journal or even a popular newspaper or magazine. Such a study would look very much the same no matter who was doing it or what nation they were doing it in.

I am not a natural scientist, but I suspect it is much the same in the natural sciences. Studying migration behaviour of wolves in the United States mid-west, as a friend of mine did, would look very much the same not matter if it was done by a Christian or an atheist.

This was a discussion that came up 45 years ago or so when I was a freshman at Gordon College in Massachusetts. Jim Skillen was there at the time, but I do not recall if he was there for the discussion. A Professor William Harper was there for the discussion as were others that I do not recall.

There is not much shepherding to be done in a lot the the cases I included and can imagine.

Jon, I don't know if you are looking for a specific Christian way to work in a specific discipline or not. But in many cases, in many disciplines; there may not be such a way. Now in Philosophy and Political Philosophy you are of course looking for a specific way to view the world that will influence the way you live. The views a person comes up with here may very well influence what they study in their specific field. For example in Political Science there is a number of subfields. Political Philosophy, Comparative politics (study of the politics of a nation other than your own); International Relations/Foreign affairs, and sub-national politics (state, provinces, cities, towns)..

It seems to me this is an underlying question for a lot of this.

John McNamara

Response to John McNamara, mainly about the content of Christian engagement with mainstream thinking

Hi John,

Thank you for your question, "Is there a Christian way to do political science, economics, biology, chemistry, etc....?" As you say, "It seems to me this is an underlying question for a lot of this." An important question.

It is a question that we in the UK Christian Academic Network have been addressing for some years. See

"http://www.christianacademicnetwork.net/"

and

"http://christianthinking.space/academic/

Nuances of Your Question

Your question is more nuanced than perhaps you realise, because it could be interpreted loosely in three ways, to two of which I would answer "Yes".

1. Is there a Christian way to do political science, economics, biology, chemistry, etc. (i.e. taking it literally as you word it)

2. Is there a Christian political science, economics, biology, chemistry, etc.?

3. Does a Christian (or rather Biblical) perspective give the most fruitful (or at least a very good) perspective on the full (Creational) reality that political science, economics, biology, chemistry, etc. study and teach?

1. The first version refers to ways of operating as thinkers. It is to do with behaviour of scientists and scholars, rather than about the content they are dealing with. For example, we can operate honestly or dishonestly, open to reality or with prejudice and bias, lovingly and generously or cruelly and with unconcern, being humble about our own ideas or protecting them at all costs, and so on. Obviously, the first in each pair is a Christian way to operate, so I would answer "Yes". It is important that we operate thus. The UCCF in the UK, some of whose erstwhile leaders were dead set against Dooyeweerd, focused on this behavioural aspect of Christians in science.

However, I do not think you mean this. From the rest of your email, I think you are referring to content more than behaviour - which is what the other two versions interpret your question as.

2. The second version ("Is there a Christian political science, economics, biology, chemistry, etc.?") was around in the 1960s and 1970s when Dooyeweerd burst on the English-speaking Christian scene. Some Christians, keen to engage in the academic enterprise, thought [to put in unfairly] "With this philosophy we can conquer the world!" And some claimed there is a Christian mathematics, a Christian chemistry, a Christian ..., a Christian philosophy. This claim put many people off Dooyeweerd (in my experience, especially in the then leaders of the UCCF etc.) and set up resistance among Christians to his ideas, which I am still having to overcome, though increasingly less so.

My answer to this first way is "No, there is not a Christian maths, Christian chemistry, Christian biology, Christian politics, Christian economics. And - I risk getting excommunicated from RefoSchol for this! - I do not believe there is a Christian philosophy - even though Dooyeweerd kept speaking of one. What I believe is that there is a Created reality within which all humans operate, and some human schemes of thought can be closer to this than others. I believe that Dooyeweerd's scheme of thought is the closest we, as humanity, have to date. (Maybe including Vollenhoven; have not studied his enough to say.) I would describe Dooyeweerd's, not as a Christian, but as a Most-real, philosophy, and it is so because of his Biblical Christian belief and mindset. This brings me to version 3 of your question.

3. As indicated above, I believe that a 'Christian' or rather Biblical perspective is the most fruitful when doing science. So I would answer "Yes" to the third version ("Does a Christian (or rather Biblical) perspective give the most fruitful (or at least a very good) perspective on the full (Creational) reality that political science, economics, biology, chemistry, etc. study and teach?"). Shepherding, in my words.

I like that version because it is non-Christian-friendly. That is, it brings the Biblical perspective in, not as a rival nor as a conqueror, but as contributing to humanity's mandate of coming to understand the way Creation operates in all its diverse aspects (ways of being meaningful).

However, doing this is not as simple as it might seem. Because some of the benefits come from a general religious perspective, some from Judaic, some from Christian.

Towards a Fruitful Perspective

A group of Reformational Christians have been discussing economics and forming a radical rethink of economics, "with the help of philosophical and Christian perspectives". You can see the draft of this at

"http://christianthinking.space/economics/rethink.html"

Chapter 3 sets out five perspectives from which we operate, two being from Dooyeweerd and one from a Christian/religious perspective (the other two are: everyday perspective and recognising Overall Good).

Now, we had to think hard about in what ways a Christian perspective would actually benefit the field of economics. You can read about this in Section 3-4, at

"http://christianthinking.space/economics/r3-dyx.html#s-xnxi"

There we discuss:

Most of these actually affect study.

I also attach the draft of a poster I am preparing for a conference next week, on "A Systems Approach to Economics", which summarises our Rethink.

How This Works Out

To show why these make study and research more fruitful, I will take two of the examples you give.

(a) "Take a study of voter behaviour in elections. If one were doing research on voter activity, you would look a poll results prior to the election, the election results, there would be voter polls as they were leaving the polling site, voter polls and interviews via surveys afterward, etc...During none of this are you (or should you) be attempting to influence the voters. You are trying to determine what the voters actions are/were and why they took those actions."

That raises two important points. The first thing I notice about this is there are two issues. One is the difference between understanding and action, between trying to understand voter behaviour, and trying to influence them. The latter is not science, and should never be allowed to influence our understanding. However, without action, our understanding is useless, and worse than useless. For example, we believe that it is vital for economics to radically change, given that most European countries have an ecological footprint of three whole earths, and that of the USA is five whole earths - largely because much human activity is motivated by economics. We need to both understand why this is and also act; mere understanding without action is cruel because is will leave a destroyed planet for future generations, as well as going against God's mandate for humanity to rule (tend and care for) Creation for its good. (This in fact a wider idea of shepherding, of which shepherding academia is a subset; you can read about it in "http://abxn.org/nv/shepherds.html".)

It is a religious (or ideological) perspective that urges action, and a Christian one most of all. Yet the urge for action should not influence our understanding of the world. That is discussed in Section 3-4.3 of chapter 3 of our Rethink.

The second point is: what data does one collect in a study of voter actions, especially if one wishes to include something of intentions too? You can collect merely which party voters voted for. But you might wish to see if that correlates with something else, such as voter income, voter attitudes, voter education, voter faith, etc. If you have a perspective that the Creation is diverse in its meaningfulness, as a Biblical one does, then you are likely to think of factors that a narrow secular person might not. So the results of your research would likely be richer. This is discussed in Section 3-4.2.

If you take the (Humanist?) perspective that there is no such thing as sin (except in certain groups of people), then you are depriving yourself of certain possibilities about voter behaviour. Those who acknowledge the reality of sin in humans, and the possibility of repentance, as Judeo-Christian perspectives do, are more easily able to conceive factors like selfishness etc. as dysfunctions about which people might feel guilty, whereas much secular thought assumes it is 'natural', i.e. part of 'the way things are'. So again a Judeo-Christian perspective gives a richer study. See Section 3-4.5.

Likewise, those who believe the Christian gospel, that there is salvation and hope, are likely to be more motivated to study and act with wisdom, than are those who believe there is none. As well as being more motivated to take action. This is discussed in Section 3-4.6.

(b) "Studying migration behaviour of wolves in the United States mid-west, as a friend of mine did, would look very much the same not matter if it was done by a Christian or an atheist." Agree and disagree. I agree insofar as both Christian and Atheist and wolves all operate in response to the same set of Creational laws, such as biotic- psychical laws that govern migration, and psychical and analytical that govern observing and analysing. But I disagree insofar as there is more to the study than this.

I happen to be involved in a similar project, to understand biodiversity, with a Muslim and a more-or-less secular person in Australia. The original concept of BD was just to count species. But to understand the dynamics and causes of BD we need to take human activity into account too. In all its aspects. Now, which aspects would your Atheist take into account in addition to the biotic and quantitative of species-count? Maybe economic, and technical. Maybe juridical laws. But - and we have found this - probably not the pistic/faith aspect. For example, my colleague is appalled that his ecologist colleagues ignore indigenous religious perspectives that influence BD.

A Christian, or at least religious, perspective makes is much easier to recognise the importance of faith as part of an explanation for behaviour. We are using Dooyeweerd to provide us with aspects with which to understand BD - and he loves it that Dooyeweerd gives explicit space to the faith aspect. I suspect it is similarly multi-aspectual with wolf migration.

OK, that refers to Dooyeweerd's aspects rather than a Christian perspective. However Dooyeweerd, I believe, was more open to the diversity of meaning in reality than most thinkers were, specifically because of his Biblical faith. Just as it was Michael Faraday's Biblical faith that freed him to conceive of magnetism as a force acting at a distance rather than trying to theorize it in terms of particles, which the materialists of the time were doing.

For a more academic and more general discussion of all this, including that last point, see my book, "Foundations and Practice of Research : Adventures with Dooyeweerd's Philosophy", which you can see at:

"http://dooy.info/bk/adventures/"

Its Chapter 11 collects as many examples as I could find of Dooyeweerd being used in actual research.

Concluding Remarks

I hope that you can see from that, that I believe there are ways in which a Christian or other religious perspective can indeed influence the content of the bodies of knowledge of our fields by challenging and enriching them. And thus 'shepherd' our fields. For a bit more see also

"http://christianthinking.space/academic/"

Thank you for your important question. I trust that what I have written above is helpful.

Andrew 3 September 2023

[John M then replied saying that most of that was exactly what he was meaning.]

End


This is part of the Academic section of Christian Thinking Space.

Created: 8 September 2023. Last updated: