As I’ve taught cultural apologetics in the key of “subversive fulfillment,” I’ve developed a framework based on Paul’s Athenian encounter in Acts 17:
- Entering: stepping into the world and listening to the story.
- Exploring: searching for elements of grace and the idols attached to them.
- Exposing: showing up the idols as destructive frauds.
- Evangelizing: showing off the gospel of Jesus Christ as subversive fulfillment.
Recently, I had the opportunity to utilize this framework and promote it to a group of Christians who inhabit the “world” of the academy (to borrow a term from Christopher Watkin). Most but not all were postgraduates and postdocs at the start of their careers, representing a range of academic disciplines.
My aim was to cover how we introduce matters of ultimate concern in a world whose horizons appear stubbornly limited and inflexible, far removed and perhaps vehemently opposed to any consideration of the gospel.
Through my framework, I attempted to articulate how academics in all disciplines can introduce the gospel in a winsome way, drawing naturally on their own academic expertise to demonstrate how Christ both subverts and fulfills the deeper longings expressed through the cultures of our faculties.
Christ both subverts and fulfills the deeper longings expressed through the cultures of our academic faculties.
At the “entering” and “exploring” stages, we must consider the specific shape of the late modern university world. Understanding this context is important as it affects how we hear and how we’re heard; what “defeater beliefs” we have to deal with; and the plausibility, or in our case maybe implausibility, structures.
But intellectual and academic matters aren’t the whole shape of the university’s world.
What Rocket Scientists Discuss at Lunch
We can talk in rarefied terms about the philosophical and ideological influences that shape our disciplines, but what about the rampant and seemingly more worldly careerism and materialism around us? What about the phenomena of employment absenteeism or presenteeism? There are many equally powerful commitments and idolatries to which we subscribe both consciously and unconsciously—they need to be exposed and the gospel brought to bear on them.
This might be a disappointment, but within your average university department made up of messy human beings, the chats over lunch or coffee are rarely about some deep, intense, and abstruse aspect of one’s discipline. Instead, they’re about pay, plans for the weekend, annoying colleagues, frustration, resignation to the tech not working, promotions, and the latest equality and diversity missive doing the rounds. That familiar trinity of money, sex, and power is alive and well within the modern university.
But when it comes to sharing our faith, these things are no less effective than esoteric intellectual debates as points of apologetic contact and opportunities for Christian witness.
What Rocket Scientists Need from You
At my lecture, after I presented my paper, three senior academics responded to the proposed framework and considered how it could be applied. One of the respondents was a recently retired biology professor, Chris Willmott.
Having helpfully identified three dimensions of science (its context, conduct, and content) that might be fruitful in using the subversive fulfillment model of apologetics, Willmott ended by reflecting on the challenge of being disciples at work in a rich way:
There is no doubt that in many ways the late modern university . . . has taken significant wrong turns. What is an appropriate response? On the surface there are legitimate grounds to be bitter and jaundiced, but our right to win a hearing for the gospel may be strongest if we resist these, if we resist the allure of moaning or of gossip. I am reminded of an honorary degree speech in which author Bill Bryson shared his seven tips for a successful life. Number two, after “Be happy,” was “Don’t whinge.” Bryson said, “Don’t whinge; it’s awful and it doesn’t become you. Indeed it doesn’t get you anywhere. No one will ever thank you or admire you more deeply or say ‘Oh, let’s invite Simon and Emma to the party, they’re fantastic whingers.’ So stop moaning, it’s a waste of oxygen.” I do look back on recent years and regret the extent to which verbalizing my dismay at the state of higher education may have had a detrimental effect on my witness, so I’d encourage you to make a conscious decision to avoid falling into the same trap.
Our evangelism flows from our discipleship. If our whole lives are connected to the gospel, it’ll be natural to connect the gospel to the lives of our non-Christian friends and colleagues, because we face the same struggles and pressures in our worlds.
You Can Answer Rocket Scientists’ Questions
If you’ve been given the responsibility of pastoral oversight, you may not be in the academic world, but you do have the task of discipling those in your church who are. Such discipleship cannot be blandly generic and superficial but contextual to the worlds of our people. This requires careful listening and collaborative, thoughtful theological application of the lordship of Christ to all of life in equipping the saints for works of service.
That familiar trinity of money, sex, and power is alive and well within the modern university.
But let’s not prioritize the particular and specific over the universal and mundane in a way that might intimidate church leaders away from ever stepping (both metaphorically and literally) into those hallowed halls.
Over the last year, I’ve convened informal round-table discussions with people who are interested in and working within the film and music industries. While it was illuminating and encouraging to discuss the distinctive pressures for Christians within these vocations, it was the similarity between the groups that surprised me most. I wasn’t surprised that in the arts they’d often felt misunderstood and lonely in their fields. The surprise was the similarity of mundane issues they were facing—issues not unique to them as artists but shared by every Christian, and certainly issues present within the world of the university.
As we return to this world, let’s seek to disciple and holistically evangelize in all this world’s profundity and mundanity. It’s not rocket science—even if it is.