We need to recover the call of God to intellectual service. We need to find a way to do it that resists the diminished framework of academic culture, the short-termism of our churches, and the low bar of our times. We need to stop wrecking the call on the rocks of selfish ambition and individualism. We need the courage and vision to become more than we currently are and to take responsibility for growing into who God is calling us to be. We do not need to become giants, but we must refuse to remain dwarves.
The Intellectual Vocation
We are all given a mind and God expects us to use it, but in every generation there are men and women called to a deeper intellectual vocation. The expression of this calling may differ widely, but the vocation itself involves serious learning, wide reading, hard thinking, intellectual honesty, creativity, and imagination. It is unavoidably theological and philosophical, for the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom. It is unavoidably apologetic, in that it works to understand and articulate what truly is, for the truth sets us free.
“The intellectual calling, like all vocations, is a call to serve the kingdom of God.”
The intellectual calling, like all vocations, is a call to serve the kingdom of God. This defines its ideal character, interdependence, and purpose. Those called to the life of the mind are called to turn their gifts and energies to strengthen the church, contribute to the flourishing of culture and society, enlarge the soul, make disciples—in short, to love God with their minds in the fullest sense.
And yet heart, soul, and strength remain essential. It is an awful and inauthentic caricature of the intellectual life when we envisage an isolated scholar who reads books because they cannot cope with people or chooses to live in the realm of ideas because they will not dare to do. Unfortunately, some of us end up living the caricature. The authentic life of the mind must have a life: Jesus, the bishops of the early church, the monastics of the Middle Ages, the Reformers, the Puritans, and so we go on—the intellectual call is never a call to intellect alone.
University and Church
If such is the call, then few of us who have received it are living up to it—we are, on the whole, in bad shape. The posture of our churches and universities are contributing factors, as are various features of our wider culture, but honesty should prevent us from ducking responsibility for our own ills—we too are part of the problem. Let’s survey these factors in turn.
Many of those with an intellectual calling will naturally attempt to explore it through higher education and entry into the academy, but this environment presents substantial obstacles to its true realisation. Foremost amongst these is the utterly dominant output culture that rules the roost: for your study to be considered of any worth, it must be published; if you want any prospect of an academic job, you must publish numerous times; if you secure such employment, there is intense pressure to publish frequently and widely. This is due, in no small part, to the metrics-driven competitive model of attracting students and securing funding—in truth, very few at your university really care about the genuine quality or worth of what you publish as long as it represents quantity and ticks the right boxes for the next round of assessment and ranking. The result is that there is an ever-increasing amount of dross published as each scholar desperately tries to fulfil the demanded quantity of publications, regardless of whether or not they have anything worthwhile to say. It also leads to such a proliferation of publications in each discipline that there is a desperate scramble for “new” material to study or “fresh” angles from which to approach it (all in order to justify another publication). Of course, this means that ever more is being written about matters of ever-decreasing importance.
The necessary corollary to this is that the academy funnels its students and scholars into increasingly restricted specialties. The pursuit of a PhD appropriately requires specialist knowledge in a particular area, but the desperate search to find something original in a mass output culture forces a narrowness of focus that betrays the intellectual call. It also contributes to the rampant isolation and individualism of our academic system. When the overarching pressure is to keep publishing in whatever impoverished niche we have ended up in, there is little time or energy for a meaningful intellectual community beyond whoever may be functionally useful for our current project. If we add to this picture the huge growth in the administrative burden on scholars and the increasing time required to satisfy the demands of consumer-students in a competitive marketplace, then we might appropriately ask whether our universities provide an environment that does as much to prevent the realisation of our intellectual call as it offers to enable it.
The other traditional home for this call is the church. If in recent times we have tended to become pastors or scholars, this belies much of the history of the church in which the pastor-scholar was far more normal. How many churches would be willing to stipend this role today? I suspect not many. I have my own anecdotal observations, but beside these it has been widely observed that pastors are often now expected to work mostly as church managers, marching to the beat of another manifestation of output culture—but in this case what is measured is the number of programs, services, activities, and congregants. The idea that someone financially supported by the church may be released to spend time reading, thinking, writing, praying, and fostering intellectual community in a way that is not connected to concrete outcomes for their local congregation is beyond the pale for most churches. This could be attributed both to a lack of vision for the wider kingdom of God (“why should we support what doesn’t directly benefit our local church?”) and an anxiety ridden short-termism (“but there is so much that needs doing here and now”).
The Ocean We Swim In
In many ways, these sketches of both the academy and the church show how our zeitgeist has infiltrated both institutions, but there is more to be said about the influence of our culture; I want to briefly highlight four points.
First, it is evident that our education system has long departed from an aspiration to nurture and form mature human beings of virtue and is now brazenly orientated around producing economically productive workers and consumers. This adversely impacts all of us who go through such a system where we suffer both from the privation of a more robust, wholistic, classical education and from the subconscious adoption of the presupposition that only what can be measured or is materially productive has value.
“The idea that technology is a neutral factor for core issues of human flourishing and formation is clearly fallacious.”
Second, the technological developments of the last thirty years (the internet, personal computers, smartphones) have done much to increase our access to information and have doubtless been functionally useful, but they have also diminished our concentration span and have destroyed much of the necessary mental space for reflection, imagination, and creativity. The idea that technology is a neutral factor for core issues of human flourishing and formation is clearly fallacious.
Third, one of the most striking ironies of our day is that our technological developments have only increased the felt sense of time poverty. Public rhetoric sells technological advances (together with “efficiency” and economic growth) as benefits that should increase our freedom to rest and enjoy ourselves; the reality I observe is that people seem to be busier than ever. Perhaps being connected to everything and everyone all the time only reinforces the unending to-do list that terrorises us. As much as elements of our time poverty come to us from without (work, dependents, maintaining relational networks, etc.), a good case could be made that much also comes from our own choices and the anxiety of “missing out” in some way. Many of the detrimental consequences of our time poverty are obvious, including the inculcation of a pace of life that is hostile to our humanity in general and the intellectual call in particular.
The final influence I wish to highlight is the ubiquitous culture of entitlement. If the truth is that no good thing comes easily, then this is a truth which has been largely forgotten, for the dominant attitude is that all good things should cost us very little. This doubtless applies to the socio-economic dimensions of our lives (we are owed the kind of income that allows us to maintain our desired standard of living) but it is also pernicious in areas that bear upon the intellectual call: the disciplines of the mind should not be too taxing; any effort we apply should be justified by quickly recognisable results. For the call of the mind, traditionally characterised by a posture of service—like the call of politics or the great professions—has now little vision beyond personal progression and the satisfaction of individual goals.
This is the ocean in which we swim and the embedded values which erode our response to the intellectual call. But, as my father used to say, we are those who must swim against the tide.
Neglecting the Call
It is important to face our failure to do so. We contribute to our stunted growth and in the end this cannot be seen as anything other than a lack of virtue. The particulars will differ for each of us but are more often than not a combination of fear, laziness, and selfish ambition. Our lack of fortitude is, perhaps, the most obvious: we are anxious that in owning our call we will be branded (or at least thought of) as arrogant or detached (and perhaps some of us become so). We are nervous about stepping beyond our narrow expertise and we fear the risks of speaking in the public square. We are haunted by our insecurity that others have more to offer or that it will turn out that we have nothing of value to say. (It should be noted that all these fears make us the central issue rather than the call of God).
More difficult to see is a laziness that is grounded in the cultural dynamics highlighted above. We have failed to resist the short-termism and entitlement of our culture: on some level, we think we can respond to the call without hard work or, even more importantly, the crafting of a way of life that enables it to be lived into.
Unfortunately, some of us who overcome these first two struggles do so by indulging the selfish ambition that wrecks the whole enterprise. When it becomes about our position, career, reputation or ego, we lack the humility that would allow us to truly serve. Perhaps we feel that we either have to become giants or remain dwarves.
Pursuing the Call
Such is, what will be? None of us are detached from the pressures or innocent of the failures I have described, so what are we going to do about it?
If we are to grow into the fullness of what God has called us to be, we need to recapture a vision and hunger for the intellectual call and pray for the courage and humility to walk into it. This must involve consciously owning the call and reorientating ourselves to be able to pursue it. There is no single model, but the overall shape and rhythm of our lives must facilitate our vocation. This is impossible to do unless we are willing to confess that this is our sense of vocation and that our response is as much a matter of obedience and faith as it is preference and personality. Substantial change in anything usually requires the reordering of the whole of life, and we should expect no less in this instance.
We must also accept the movement beyond specialism. We will always have our own areas of particular expertise and knowledge, but we are called to engage in a broader sphere. We must find a better balance between breadth and depth, read more widely (even if this is costly) and have a confident humility that allows us to offer our service without needing to be invulnerable. Each of us will face the full challenges of our humanity, and none of the truly important questions can be contained or addressed within any one speciality. Our churches and communities need men and women who will fulfil the intellectual vocation in this wider sense: we can be specialist-generalists without needing to be polymaths. Once again, to refuse to be dwarves does not require us to be giants.
“We must trust that it is much better to be a small part of the right thing than a big part of the wrong thing.”
Our ambition thus needs a robust and determined formation. Rather than orientating around our ego or career (and thus rendering us permanently insecure), it must instead draw its energy from the needs of the church and the beauty of the kingdom. The call is fundamentally rooted in the one who calls us; our part is therefore one of faithful obedience, leaving all outcomes in his hands. If we do not need recognition or success, then we can be free to offer our gifts and live for something bigger than us (which, in all honesty, usually comes as a huge relief). We must trust that it is much better to be a small part of the right thing than a big part of the wrong thing.
This path leads away from individualism towards communion. I doubt whether any of us can embrace this call without the companionship of others similarly called. If we find this in our local church, we are the vast exception and extremely fortunate. It is rare in the academy, since it cuts against the culture that is primarily orientated around personal research rather than shared endeavours. So where are the environments in which the call is nurtured and challenged, where it relaxes in the company of others who share it, and where personal egos and careers are left at the door? Quite transparently, the pursuit of such community is costly: it will be hard to justify on the metrics of material outcomes or career progression; it will require a personal engagement that takes us beyond the protective boundaries of “my work” into the vulnerability of “my person”; it speaks to a purpose somewhat intangible which offers no guarantee of anything that might be designated success.
And yet, for those who are called, is there not a stirring of the spirit when we talk of such things? It is easier to remain dwarves, but to finish with another quote from my father: there is another way to live.
Tim Murray (PhD, Nottingham) is a pastor at Amblecote Community Church in the West Midlands, UK.
