The Kirby Laing Centre (February 2021)

The Kirby Laing Institute for Christian Ethics (KLICE) has become an independent charity now called The Kirby Laing Centre for Public Theology in Cambridge (KLC).

According to their website, ‘KLC is committed to foster and nurture public theology and Christian scholarship, rooted in spirituality, practiced in community, oriented toward the question how then shall we live?’

In the latest article in their Nuances in Public Theology series, KLC’s Director, Craig Bartholomew, reflects on the tools we need to integrate our scholarship and our Christian faith. The article (‘The Bible and Other Texts: The Character of Scripture and its Role in our Scholarship’) is available as a pdf here.

In addition, Ethics in Conversation (formerly Ethics in Brief) ‘offers succinct, insightful Christian perspectives on a range of contemporary ethical issues’. In the February 2021 edition, Matthew Wiley engages with Vernon White’s book, Purpose and Providence: Taking Soundings in Western Thought, Literature, and Theology. The review is available as a pdf here.

Mark A. Noll on Jesus Christ and the Life of the Mind

Mark A. Noll, Jesus Christ and the Life of the Mind (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2011), 196pp., ISBN ISBN 9780802866370.

Having benefited from reading Mark Noll’s seminal The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind (1994) when it first came out, I was interested to see this follow-up of sorts. Eerdmans make available the table of contents and introduction here.

Noll writes: ‘My contention in this book is that coming to know Christ provides the most basic possible motive for pursuing the tasks of human learning’ (ix-x).

More fully:

‘The message in this book for my fellow evangelicals can be put simply: if what we claim about Jesus Christ is true, then evangelicals should be among the most active, most serious, and most open-minded advocates of general human learning. Evangelical hesitation about scholarship in general or about pursuing learning wholeheartedly is, in other words, antithetical to the Christ-centered basis of evangelical faith’ (x).

I’ll be interested to see how Noll plays out these contentions...

Some 2009 lectures on the book’s material are available for download from ‘Thinking Matters’ here.

David K. Naugle on Solomon the Scholar

David K. Naugle, ‘Solomon the Scholar’ (DBU Scholars’ Luncheon, 7 April 2009).

In an address to Christian scholars, Naugle begins with the question, What would you ask the Lord to do for you if you could ask Him for anything at all?

He takes his cue from 1 Kings 4:29-34…

29. Now God gave Solomon wisdom and very great discernment and breadth of mind, like the sand that is on the seashore. 30. Solomon’s wisdom surpassed the wisdom of all the sons of the east and all the wisdom of Egypt. 31. For he was wiser than all men, than Ethan the Ezrahite, Heman, Calcol and Darda, the sons of Mahol; and his fame was known in all the surrounding nations. 32. He also spoke 3,000 proverbs, and his songs were 1,005. 33. He spoke of trees, from the cedar that is in Lebanon even to the hyssop that grows on the wall; he spoke also of animals and birds and creeping things and fish. 34. Men came from all peoples to hear the wisdom of Solomon, from all the kings of the earth who had heard of his wisdom.

He highlights what he sees as several pertinent features…

1. Solomon the scholar’s wisdom, discernment and breadth of mind/heart were God-given gifts (1 Kings 4:29)
Not just the accumulation of data, but the ‘capacity to understand all aspects of life in its mysterious, depth dimension from God’s point of view’ (4). Our intellectual capacities are gifts of God’s grace, and we must be faithful stewards of them, work hard to develop them, as well as recognise that God gifts others, believers or not.

2. Solomon the scholar’s superior intellect and wisdom (1 Kings 4:30-31)
The leading scholar of the day ‘was a religious man, a Jew, an Israelite, a man of God’ (5), whose wisdom was greater than the leading lights and centres of learning of his era.

3. Solomon the scholar’s encyclopedic knowledge and his work as a writer and composer (1 Kings 4:32-33)
Solomon committed his research, knowledge and wisdom to writing – in wise sayings and songs. In addition to dendrology and botany, the second part of verse 33 indicates he was a student of the four principal families of the animal kingdom. According to Naugle all this presupposes ‘the original and ongoing importance of the cultural mandate that God gave to the human race…, the continuation of the original Adamic vocation of naming and explaining the animal kingdom…, the communal nature and institutional character of Solomon’s scholarship, for it is highly unlikely he undertook this kind of vast research alone…’, and that the wisdom had shalom as its goal (as 4:25 indicates, with everyone living in safety, ‘every man under his vine and fig tree’) (8-9).

4. Solomon the scholar’s fame and appeal (1 Kings 4:31b, 34)
Internationally famous for his knowledge and wisdom.

5. Someone greater than Solomon the scholar has come (Matthew 12:42)
Even in his great wisdom, discernment and breadth of mind and heart, Solomon is ‘a type, a foreshadowing, an anticipation of Jesus Christ’ (10-11), and ‘He is the One we serve as Christian scholars through our contributions to the broader arena of knowledge’ (12).