The Tenuous Life of the Christian Scholar - Reflections After Reading Still Christian: Following Jesus Out of American Evangelicalism by David Gushee

Christian ethicist David Gushee has served this last year as the president of the American Academy of Religion. Although I have read several of his essays and articles over the years on a variety of social and ethical issues, I had not heard him speak before this year’s presidential address at the national meeting of the AAR. His address was a powerful lament on the issues of race related to the American evangelical tradition. The address can be found on YouTube at this link - AAR Gushee Address - and is well worth watching.

I recently finished his memoir Still Christian: Following Jesus Out of American Evangelicalism which narrates his journey from coming to Christ as a non-churched teenager through his current place in Christian academia. As the title implies, his journey has not been an easy one and it eventually led him out of the segment of the Christian faith that birthed him. The highlights of his journey are as follows:

• At fourteen he left the marginal Catholicism of his upbringing.
• In late high school he became a “born again” Christian at a conservative Baptist church in Virginia.
• In college at William and Mary he found his new faith colliding with the challenges of higher education.
• He entered Southern Baptist Seminary in the midst of a conservative take-over of the seminary that was purging it of what some saw as creeping liberalism.
• He then experienced the complete opposite side of the Christian tradition working on his PhD in Ethics at Union Theological Seminary.
• After working for a few years with Ron Sider at Evangelicals for Social Action he was offered a teaching position back at Southern Baptist Seminary. The conservative take-over within the SBC was still taking place. When faculty who believed and taught that women could and should be ordained for ministry were being removed from the seminary, David felt like he had no choice but to find a position elsewhere.
• He landed at Union University and had a successful decade or so of teaching there as the university grew under the leadership of David Dockery. However, during the George W. Bush presidency, when David started writing ethics pieces against the use of torture from a Christian perspective, the push back from politically conservative denominational leaders and university constituents turned a blessed tenure of teaching into a time of not just being held in suspicion but being attacked personally and professionally.
• In 2007 Gushee was offered a position at Mercer University where he still teaches, and where he has a great deal of academic freedom but where he has also found himself dismissed and exiled from the evangelical faith tradition that birthed and raised him.

Reading Gushee’s book made me thankful for being part of a Wesleyan tradition that avoids some of the challenges he has faced in his ministry and scholarship. However, there was a great deal in what he shares about the pain and tension faced by Christian scholars that resonated with some of the scars I’ve received in my own journey. At times I found myself in tears realizing that although I am still largely embraced by and encouraged by the tradition that birthed and raised me, not all of my wounds are fully healed. It also served as a reminder of the ever-present fear that security for most evangelical Christian scholars is tenuous at best and only one or two offenses or misunderstandings away from being taken away.

Here are a handful of reflections:

Many of my favorite Christian scholars had a very warm-hearted Christian conversion experience as a young person that – although they may now be critical of some of the methodologies they experienced – has shaped them permanently.

My mentor Richard Mouw loves to write about the “smell of sawdust” that still exists in his memory from the camp-meetings of his youth. Gushee’s conversion as a teenager reminds me a lot of my friend James K.A. Smith’s coming to faith in a conservative Pentecostal church through the influence of his girlfriend’s (now wife’s) family. Both Mouw and Smith are often critics of some of the theology and practices of the faith communities that led them to Christ, and both worship in ways now that are quite distant from those traditions, nevertheless, both also reflect graciously about the transformational personal experience with Jesus Christ that they have not been able to shake and continues to shape their scholarly work at a deep level.

Gushee writes about his own faith conversion this way… “Probably everybody has foundational, identity-forming experiences, moments that set the course of their life. This was the most pivotal of mine…There was a before. Then there was an after... When everything is reviewed, tested, and sifted, I still choose to believe that what I thought happened that night in the old Buick Skylark is what in fact happened: I came into a personal relationship with God through Jesus Christ. I was born again. If that is not what happened, I literally do not know who I am. That experience so shaped the “I” writing these words that “I” am impossible apart from it”(pp. 11-12).

Christian higher education is very, very difficult.

Gushee rightly observes, “Every evangelical Christian university faces an extraordinary challenge. It must create a campus culture, an intellectual life, and a faculty that can accomplish its religious goals while meeting all requirements of the contemporary higher education and governmental establishments. This means conducting college life in a way that simultaneously satisfies students, alumni, donors, churches, pastors, trustees, parents, faculty, accreditors, regulators, employers, and the local community in which the school is situated. The demands of these constituencies are so different that tensions and difficulties are inevitable”85-86.

For these reasons, I do not envy Christian university and seminary administrators. And it is also why, up to this point, I have resisted joining their ranks. God bless you all. I don’t know how you do it.

Being held in suspicion by the church (and by the people) you love is really, really painful.

Several years ago, I was talking with a very accomplished Methodist scholar who had been raised in the Church of the Nazarene. I asked them why, in the early days of their academic career they had chosen to leave and spend their life teaching in Methodist rather than Nazarene institutions. They answered, “I finally decided that it was easier to be perceived as a conservative in a liberal environment, than to be viewed as a liberal in a conservative one. Because, when people think you are a conservative in a liberal environment you only have to defend your mind – which is not all that difficult. But when people perceive that you may be a liberal in a conservative environment, you have to defend your heart – and that is nearly impossible to accomplish.”

I don’t like the labels “conservative” and “liberal” because they are so inaccurate, and because they are completely dependent upon where a person is standing at any given time. Nevertheless, that scholar’s point has resonated with me across the years. It is incredibly difficult to defend your heart with those who might hold you in suspicion.

It took me a while to understand this reality. There are many reasons why I have spent my ministry years in both the academy and the local church, but one positive by-product of being in local church ministry is that it regularly gives me the opportunity to reveal my heart. People know I am passionate about the church, about evangelism, and about spiritual formation. These days I get the benefit of very public ministry and a congregation that has my back. That is not the case for many of my colleagues in universities and seminaries. That was not always the case for me.

There was a moment early in my teaching career when I could see two things clearly. The first was that people who feel like they are defending, protecting, or conserving orthodoxy often become manipulative and destructive. When a person is afraid, principles often take priority over people. It is a deeply painful experience when people you love become the people you fear.

The second thing I discerned was it is very rare to find leaders who – when caught between those they love and agree with and those they fear and disagree with – will choose to stand with those they love. This made me angry when I was young. I am much more empathetic now to the challenges of those who are trying to lead any church related institution through the barrage of criticism and anger that often comes from multiple directions. I have much more empathy now for a Caiaphas who is willing to scapegoat one person for the sake of an institution. And I have much more compassion for a Peter who shrinks back in denial out of fear that they too might get crucified. I get it. And I have regretfully now been on both sides of it. This Gushee quote says it well, “There is hardly anything as disillusioning as being disillusioned by religious people, especially religious leaders, and being disillusioned by yourself as a faux religious leader, and wondering what any of this has to do with the God who created the universe and the Jesus to whom we all had supposedly pledged our lives”(p. 76).

Let me say, I have been with and worked alongside a handful of Christian scholars who, in my opinion, said or did foolish things, took too much delight in deconstructing the faith of students, deeply disliked the church they were supposedly preparing people to lead, or who (for all practical purposes) had lost the vital faith they could still write and lecture about. But I can count those people on one hand. The vast majority of the colleagues I have worked alongside do their work out of a passion for knowing God more deeply and making him known more fully. And I know very few of those faithful women and men who haven’t struggled deeply with the shock they feel when they discover that, the longer they stayed in school, the less they were trusted by their brothers and sisters in Christ.

Complete academic freedom isn’t all it’s cracked-up to be. Shared values and vision will always bring limitations and boundaries – and the challenges that come with them.

But wait! Here’s the “Catch-22.” Although it is clearly still painful for David Gushee that he felt that he had to leave the evangelical institutions where his academic freedom was limited and where his exploration of important social and political issues caused turmoil, he isn’t all that happy and fulfilled to now be in a place of complete academic freedom. As he writes, “There is a real trade-off here. Shared religious vision often seems possible only at the price of constrained academic freedom. Unfettered academic freedom, on the other hand, often seems possible only at the price of a loss of shared religious vision”(p. 110).

In other words, Gushee loves being able to say and write whatever he wants now, but he can only do that in a place with little or no faith at stake. The only intolerance in his new setting is toward intolerance. However, where everything is permissible, little or nothing is at stake. Here is one of my favorite statements from Gushee toward the end of his memoir – as he reflects on the kind of students he encounters now:

But twenty-five years later, much of the younger constituency really is liberal on most metrics one could dream up. I am not talking here about political liberalism, or taking progressive stands on social issues based on a serious reading of the Bible. I mean something more like this: They do not talk much about the positive meaning of biblical inspiration and authority, they tend to be underdeveloped theologically, they don’t embrace evangelism, their missions efforts tend to be service-oriented more than proclamation-oriented, and so on. Strikingly, many also are attracted to older mainline styles of worship, so that many a moderate Baptist worship service resembles what would go on at the Methodist or Presbyterian church down the road. In relation to them, I am relatively conservative. I might even be viewed as an evangelical. Go figure (p. 114).

In other words, he misses doing theology in a place where faith matters deeply because it forms convictions someone might actually give their life for. He admits that he feels a little bit homeless now, and that he’s looking for a “creative alternative” to rigid fundamentalism on the one hand and the freedom that comes with lack of conviction on the other.

I hope that “creative alternative” is what we Wesleyan/Nazarene types are trying to find and embody. If it is, it will mean that we will have to foster environments of “generous orthodoxy” where thoughtful theological and biblical conversations can take place free of political, economic, and cultural co-opting. But it will also mean that we acknowledge that there are significant convictions that hold our communal life together. And although we may try to keep focusing on how to make those convictions as centered-set (as opposed to bounded-set) as possible, there are edges and limits to even the biggest of tents. The challenge is (and has always been) how to navigate those edges faithfully, thoughtfully, and lovingly.

Comments

[Levi Jones]

Thanks for your reflections, Pastor. I can certainly relate with the tensions Gushee is espousing. Always work to be done but glad to do it with some wonderful people along the way!

[Scott]

Thanks, Levi. Thankful for you. Scott