I have known economics faculties and history faculties and others too, where half the professors are Marxists and half are not, or where half are committed postmodernists and half are not. Where should the Christian be in such a case? You may well believe that the gospel commits us to one side of the debate, though these things are rarely that easy. But my suggestion is that you see it as a call to be in prayer where your discipline is in pain. Read the Scriptures on your knees with you discipline and its problems on your heart. Come to the Eucharist and see in the breaking of bread the broken body of Christ given for the healing of the world. Learn new ways of praying with and from the pain, the brokenness, of that crucial part of the world where God has placed you. And out of that prayer discover the ways of being peacemakers, of taking the risk of hearing both sides, of running the risk of being shot at from both sides. Are you or are you not a follower of the crucified Messiah? And of course this applies in many other areas as well: in families and marriages, in public policy and private dilemmas.
May I speak personally for a moment? I have had a very clear vocation that has resulted in some very unclear choices. I live in a world that has done its best, since the Enlightenment, to separate the church from the academy. I believe passionately that this is deeply dehumanizing in both directions, and I have lived my adult life with a foot on both sides of the divide, often misunderstood by both. I live in a world where Christian devotion and evangelical piety have been highly suspicious of and sometimes implacably opposed to serious historical work on the New Testament, and vice versa. I believe passionately that this is deeply destructive of the gospel, and I have done my best to preach and to pray as a serious historian and to do my historical work as a serious preacher and pray-er. This has resulted in some fellow-historians calling me a fundamentalist and some fellow-believers calling me a compromised pseudo-liberal. The irony does not make it any less painful.
I am not looking for sympathy in saying all this. In my experience it has been precisely when I have found myself in prayer on one of those fault-lines in another private Gethsemane (and sometimes they have been moments of real agony) that I have known the presence and comfort of the living Messiah, that I have discovered that the one with whom I was wrestling and who has left me limping was none other than the angel of the Lord, and I have been reassured again and again that my calling is not necessarily to solve the great dualities of our post-Enlightenment and now postmodern world but to live in prayer at the places where the world is in pain, in the assurance that through this means, at a level far deeper than the articulate solving of the problem, my discipline may find new fruitfulness and my church, perhaps, new directions. And out of that may perhaps grow, I pray, work that is peacemaking and fruitful. The darkest times have again and again been the most productive at every level. We British don’t like to talk about ourselves in public, and I hesitate to hold myself up as a model, but it may be that my experience will resonate with some others who read these words and perhaps bring encouragement to some for whom Gethsemane has been hitherto an unnamed and hence misunderstood reality. “As the Father sent me,” said Jesus, “so I send you; receive the Holy Spirit; forgive and retain sins.” We need to reflect long upon, and to be prepared to live with, the meaning of that “as… so.”
And of course, if we are faithful and loyal to this calling, the most frightening and unexpected thing of all, as least within many Protestant and evangelical traditions, is that we will in turn be for the world not only what Jesus was for Israel but what YHWH was and is for Israel and the world. If you believe in the presence and power of the Holy Spirit in your life, this is what it means. You are called to be truly human, but it is nothing short of the life of God within you that enables you to be so, to be remade in God’s image” (The Challenge of Jesus, p. 191-193).
Tom Wright, on Being a Peacemaker
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