Gideon Strauss interview

Gideon Strauss was the keynote speaker at the third annual thInking Faith conference held at Geneva College on October 23. thInking Faith—originally the brainchild of Geneva graduates Keith Martel and Scott Calgaro, and Hearts and Minds Bookstore Owner Byron Borger—was founded as a way to encourage and instruct students to write academically solid papers through a lens thoroughly rooted in a biblical worldview.

Gideon Strauss is currently Senior Fellow at the Work Research Foundation and editor of Comment, a “monthly journal that works through the issues of human dignity, poverty, and justice—all from the perspective of a Christian worldview,” according to a description from www.wrf.ca. Strauss was a conscientious objector to the injustice of apartheid in South Africa, a decision for which he served three years of a six-year community service sentence. Access his blog site here. This interview was originally printed in Geneva College’s The Cabinet.

Matt Stewart: I thought it was pretty interesting how you were talking about the idea of a Christian college revival. Would you want to summarize Keith Martel’s argument and expound on it, and talk about what it would look like at Geneva?

Gideon Strauss: First of all, I think that you need to quote Keith, and see what Keith says, and link people to his blog. That is important.

[This is an excerpt from Geneva graduate Keith Martel’s blog entry from Wednesday October 20.] “The problem for me in the accounts that I have read is that the revival consisted of a wildly irregular occurrence of the "spiritual." The abnormal occurrence of nightlong prayer, healing, confession, and a diligent pursuit of the spiritual disciplines. I must say that all of these things are exciting, and should be sought after. The problem it seems that the accounts of revival had very little to have to do with the academy. If revival, as Finney writes, consists in obeying God, then college revival, it seems to me at this moment, would consist of some of the aforementioned aspects, but the major direction of the college revival should be distinctly marked by a wild pursuit of living fully as a student. I desire a revival on our college campuses, but this revival would perhaps look a bit different. To wake up and live on the college campus (seems to) necessitate the marks of Christian students, faculty and staff wildly pursuing life in the university together. It would consist of students taking their studies serious in a transformational way; it would consist of faculty members seeing their teaching as a holy calling from the Lord of education himself. Perhaps, instead of skipping classes to take part in prayer meetings, students might even skip their fellowship groups to create and craft seriously scholarly work that exemplifies the kingdom.”

I think what Keith is basically saying and I completely agree with him, is that we need a campus revival in this generation. And that has to do with a more thoroughgoing commitment by college students to Jesus. And then he asks, okay, what does that look like, compares it to campus revivals that took place in the mid-90’s at Wheaton College and other places where students would pray through the night, read the Bible—very serious about their commitment to Jesus and what that might mean, and he says that’s a good thing. But then he asks, what does that mean if you have a college revival?

So it’s not just a generic revival that leads to more praying, more Bible reading—which is desperately needed—but that also asks, if we are completely dedicated, we are making a living sacrifice of our bodies, our whole selves, if you will, to God—what does that mean on a college campus? And he says it has to have a close connection to the renewal of the mind, it has to have implications for how we do what we’re called to do at college. So it has to have implications for our scholarship, for our academic life as students. And then he tries to work out what that might look like, what does a campus renewal, a college revival look like when it is appropriate to the specific context of academic life?

MS: Your blog references neocalvinism frequently [the blog is billed as “worldview revivalism, neocalvinist unapologetics, zeitgeist surfing,” and there are links to writers who are “the next neocalvinism”]—where do you see Christian scholarship in the next ten years, particularly with regard to neocalvinism?

GS: I have to emphasize that what I’m advocating, what I want to see is academic revival, if you will. As far as I’m concerned, that means scholarship that is more thoroughly rooted in the Gospel, more deeply informed on what the Bible teaches, more brightly brought alive by the work and the presence of the Holy Spirit. As far as I’m concerned, you can’t squeeze such a revival, you can’t squeeze the work of the Holy Spirit into a box. And if the Holy Spirit works and brings academic revival in our time, it’s not going to be limited to something like neocalvinism. So I’m just saying that as a first precautionary thing.

The Spirit blows where the Spirit pleases, and I am convinced if we have revival, if God wills it, we’ll bring about wonderful, biblically-informed, Jesus-committed, Spirit-moved scholarship in all kinds of traditions, and—I don’t know where you’re coming from—but I would say we would see astounding Catholic scholarship, astounding Anabaptist scholarship, astounding Methodist scholarship, astounding Calvinist scholarship.

Now I will argue that when the Spirit moves, whenever the Spirit moves it is in ways that are consistent with what God has been doing historically. And so God brings surprising revivals, he does new things under the sun that nonetheless connect with what we see in the Bible, and connect with what we see the Spirit as having done historically—so we have these connections. Which is why, when we see renewals—academic renewals, for instance—they draw on resources that came before.

So, for example, in the 15th, 16th, 17th, century we had a revival in the Christian church at large that we refer to as the Reformation. So what happened is that the Spirit moved, woke people up to what the Scriptures taught, which drew people to renewed commitment to God in Jesus by grace through faith. That had close connections to what happened academically. People like Luther and Calvin, Zwingli, Knox—various leaders in the Reformation—were revivalists in the sense that they were instruments of the Holy Spirit to bring people to new life, to awaken people to Christ, but they were academics.

They were legal scholars, they were theological scholars, they were philosophical scholars, and they had pulled themselves into the study of the Bible, but also in the study of those scholarly texts which were being rediscovered in the context of the Renaissance. So they were reading Plato anew, they were reading all kinds of classical scholars anew.

And in the case of John Calvin, which is the example I know best, the work of the spirit in the life of John Calvin took him back to the work of Augustine and John Chrysostom. So that yes, this was a revival, a scholarly revival, a study of the Scriptures, but it recuperated work that had been lost—the work of Augustine and John Chrysostom, preceding biblical scholars. When in my tradition we see a revival again like that is in the late 19th century in the Netherlands, where Abraham Kuyper, mentored by Groen van Prinsterer, and other people reimmersed themselves in the study of the Scriptures, but again recovered what had been done by Calvin, recovered what had been done by Augustine.

So you have a new Calvinism that is nonetheless a vehicle that God uses for a contemporary revival through the work of the Holy Spirit. So, yes, the Spirit works in surprising ways, but always the Spirit allows us to recover the good work that has been done by previous generations. So my guess is we’re sitting in a moment of potential Holy Spirit-sparked revival in scholarship among students and faculty. My guess is that it will draw on preceding traditions, and among evangelicals the “best” tradition, if you will, that we have is the neocalvinist tradition. It’s the tradition that shapes the Coalition for Christian Outreach, it’s the tradition that shaped the scholarship in various different ways of people like Mark Noll the historian, Alvin Plantinga and Nicholas Wolterstorff the philosophers—that is behind a kind of a calvinism “lite,” if you will, in generic evangelical scholarship.

So in Books and Culture, for instance, you have all kinds of voices, but the underlying notion that Jesus is the Lord of all of life, which is articulated I think most distinctively in the neocalvinist tradition in our time. So, over the next ten years I think a new generation of young people guided by the Holy Spirit will pick up the legacy of neocalvinism. My guess is that they will interact with other young people who under the guidance of the Holy Spirit pick up Anabaptist strengths, pick up Roman Catholic strengths—and I think those are going to be the interesting conversations.

The traditional Stanley Hauerwas in an Anabaptist sense, the tradition of neocalvinism mediated in various ways, and the tradition of Catholic social thought in particular I think will, in a fruitful and rich interaction, an argument if you will, serve to bring the gifts of God into the service of the public good in our communities.

That is what I think. This is theory; I am not an anointed prophet of God. [Laughs]

MS: [Laughs] That’s a good disclaimer.