The Plight of the Protestant Scholar

Why theological distinctives help the whole church and the whole academy

This is a guest post by John Ahern. It is cross-posted from the Coverdale House Substack. It looks like I’m not the only one who asked to repost this, as Mere Orthodoxy also did so this morning. So this piece is resonating with people. Be sure to sign up for their newsletter - Aaron.

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This February, our fledgling Christian study center in Princeton, the Coverdale House, will begin reading through Luther’s Large Catechism with around 15 students. It’s a sort of Beta launch for our study center—Beta because we are doing it primarily so we can listen carefully for that “click” that happens when you get the perfect product-market fit. Each Monday evening, we’ll get together for dinner, a short prayer service of Psalms, other Scripture, and appointed collects, and then we get to dive into the primary text. It’ll be facilitated by two graduate students from the Religion Department, Onsi Kamel and John Walker, and we’re delighted that the renowned Phil Cary from Eastern University will stop by and give us his expertise in April. So I fully expect to hear the “click” aforementioned.

We’re choosing Luther to start off for a number of reasons. For one thing, it is a beautiful summation of the gospel, written in simple and immediate language. It will be familiar and affirmative and accessible. But, for another thing, it will also likely shock us. Many of us Protestants in the room will be surprised to find Luther urging us to cross ourselves, Luther telling us to look to our baptisms for assurance of salvation, Luther, like a Desert Father, denouncing one of the “mortal” sins, acedia. We are, as it turns out, reading a historical document. It’s not modern, decidedly not modern evangelical. It will force everyone to engage with the text historically and carefully, and not merely as a mirror held up to one’s nodding self.

The Coverdale House has chosen to make part of its vision the furtherance of specifically Protestant scholarship. Of course, we want the furtherance of all Christian scholarship generally, but we see a special need to support historic, orthodox Protestant traditions in the academy. That may seem like an odd choice, so I’d like to explain why we have chosen to make it.

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There has been some disagreement recently about Protestant evangelicals in the academy. It’s over the degree to which Protestant evangelicals lag behind their Catholic counterparts, as Aaron Renn’s recent First Things article argued. On the one hand, it seems pretty clear that Catholic intellectuals dominate the scene of Christian scholarship—not just in the area of theology, but in every area. My friend Onsi Kamel gave a good example of this: back in 2021, Ross Douthat interviewed Sohrab Ahmari on New York Times’s Ezra Klein Show. Though both relatively conservative Catholics, they talked about the radical feminist Andrea Dworkin and her rejection of the idea that sex is purely private. Ahmari and Douthat noted that Dworkin’s ideas in an odd way supported St. Augustine’s notion of libido dominandi. Kamel’s point is not that Douthat or Ahmari are particularly great scholars. In fact, that’s just it—they aren’t scholars at all, but journalists, and yet they are beneficiaries of an incredible intellectual ecosystem that can cultivate this kind of rich and capacious approach to traditional Catholic theology. They are the fruit of a strong Catholic intellectual ecosystem. Why is it so difficult to imagine this sort of thing happening outside of Catholic intellectual circles?

Kamel takes a few stabs at this question:

First: not only have Protestants lost the institutions that were formerly home for us, but we also lack robust representation at elite levels in the secular academy. This, in turn, means there is less distinctly Protestant work to popularize. Because there is less Protestant work to popularize, public intellectuals are not reading Protestants on a regular basis; the void is filled by Catholics.

Now, this is a good answer, but there are other answers. One is that this is all a trick of the data: “Protestants” of the sort Kamel is talking about are an exceedingly rare phenomenon as it is, compared with Catholics. If you mean by “Protestant” the mainline denominations, that is a dwindling crowd (one which is, in fact, facing demographic collapse). If you mean more confessional Protestant denominations (Presbyterian Church in America, Lutheran Church–Missouri Synod, the Anglican Church in North America, etc.), this, although growing, is an even tinier crowd.

Still others would say that the evidence cited for the dominance of the “Catholic elites” over the “evangelical elites” in the academy is anecdotal, and that the broader trends are, in fact, in the other direction: Catholics in large numbers are converting to evangelicalism, not vice versa. The conversions that tend to get talked about in the circles of higher education are only a cloistered countercurrent with outsized influence. So maybe all this doomsday talk about the dearth of evangelical Protestant scholars is overblown.

Yet another position might be this: why should any of this matter? Evangelicals, Protestants, Catholics should all be working together. Vying for the most elite or ambitious intellectual ecosystem is surely a bad look. We all can benefit from each other’s scholarship, so let’s build institutions together. Let’s major in the majors and minor in the minors; academia is already a tough place for Christian scholars as it is.

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What is left out of this discussion is an important asymmetry: Catholic intellectual institutions are allowed to be Catholic, to act Catholic, to assume Catholic theology is true, and to admit to assuming it is true. Take Lumen Christi Institute at the University of Chicago, for instance. No one is unclear as to what it believes and where its theological convictions will lie. And that is its strength. The fact that it is an institution that owns its beliefs is what gives it energy and confidence.

On the other hand, evangelical and historic Protestant intellectual institutions generally aren’t encouraged to call themselves evangelical or Protestant. They don’t so much emphasize their theological distinctives as blunt them. They don’t attempt to argue that such distinctives are particularly important for the scholarly life. Institutions responsible for the formation of Christian scholars tend to emphasize only three quasi-theological topics: apologetics, vocation, and moral formation. But they tend, on the whole, to demur to go too much further. “Mere Christianity” is an oft-repeated slogan.

And why not, one might well ask? What do arcane and granular theological issues afford us? What does the view of the Eucharist, for instance, or what sort of liturgy one ought to have, or different views of atonement, really have to do with mainstream scholarly inquiry?

Yet here, again, is an asymmetry. I suspect that if you asked major Catholic scholars in a variety of disciplines, they would be shocked by the question. Ask the late Josef Ratzinger, or Eugene McCarraher, or Margarita Mooney Clayton, “Does the doctrine of the Eucharist affect how you do theology? history? sociology?” I am sure of what their response would be. Of course their view of the Eucharist affects their work. Of course the shape of the liturgy matters (after all, isn’t the law of faith the law of prayer?). This might be incomprehensible to many evangelicals Protestants, but that in itself tells you something.

The bottom line is that Catholic intellectuals tend to assume that all theology is relevant to all areas of intellectual endeavor. If it’s not obvious how, it’s still worth assuming it nevertheless until it becomes apparent. On the other hand, theology for the evangelical scholar tends to be a sort of God-of-the-gaps, an occasional mortar to stick in crumbling joinery.

The situation is not helped by the reduction of “theology” to the three issues mentioned above, at least in institutions responsible for forming Christian scholars—apologetics, vocation, and moral formation. After all, what is the point of apologetics when the actual content of the faith in question is underdetermined on all its most crucial points? What is “moral formation” if we don’t have a clear sense of how to arrive at agreement on moral issues, because we have avoided discussing the nature of the Church and her polity?

It won’t work, either, to say in answer, “But mere Christianity!” There is, in fact, a very good author who discusses why this is not an adequate response, by the name of C. S. Lewis, and he wrote a book on the subject which I can recommend, whose title I will leave you to guess. In it, he says that mere Christianity in relation to different theological traditions

is more like a hall out of which doors open into several rooms. …But it is in the rooms, not in the hall, that there are fires and chairs and meals. The hall is a place to wait in, not a place to live in.

Lewis is right, not only about people, but also about institutions in higher education. The hall is a place to wait in, not a place to live in. To be genuinely useful to scholars, institutions that equip Christian scholarship and form Christian scholars ought to do so with convictions.

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But won’t this lead to more division in the body of Christ, rather than less? I suspect not. If I look at my bookshelf, it has the names of many great Catholic thinkers, like Rémi Brague, Josef Pieper, Josef Ratziner, Henri du Lubac, and so forth. I am convinced that these people, by being serious about their Catholicism, have made me a better Protestant, not least because they have helped me to conform my mind to the pattern of Christ. Many Reformed, Lutheran, Anglican, and Baptist Christians I know have deeply benefited from Catholics being good at being Catholics. The whole academy has benefited, secular and Christian.

Yet there are riches within the magisterial Protestant tradition that desperately need recovering too. They are criminally underrated, although there are exciting projects attempting their recovery. Catholics need these riches. The secular academy needs them. It is for the good of the whole church that Protestants be good at being Protestant. Or, to borrow the words of John Henry Newman about his own Catholic faith, Protestants in the academy ought to become the cordial and deliberate maintainers and witnesses of the doctrines they are to support.

For that reason, the Coverdale House has a two-fold mission. First, the furtherance of all Christian scholarship, through formation of every Christian scholar. Second, the more specific furtherance of historic, orthodox Protestant scholarship (Reformed, Anglican, Lutheran, Baptist), especially that scholarship which seeks to recover and further a Protestant vision of the Bible, theology, worship, human experience, humane letters, and society as a whole.

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