Donald G. Davis, Jr.
Professor Emeritus of Library History
University of Texas at Austin
Three temptations, particularly attractive to us as Christian faculty members, can minimize any public expressions of our Christian witness. They arise from conditions of entitlement that require no justifications, elicit few objections, and from which little deviation is expected.
(1) Privatized Spirituality
— a dichotomy between matters of faith and the intellectual demands of the academy. Spirituality and religion are very private matters, seldom to be raised in daily discourse within the work environment. Piety, if practiced at all, is best done in the privacy of one’s home or local congregation—or at the most, in one’s private office. We may be fervent Christians within the family or church, but we are essentially quiet about our faith within the academic community. The result is that others find about our faith experience and journey by accident, if at all.
(2) Secularized Vocation
— believing that the primary task of the Christian academic is to pursue tenure, and then further advancement within our department, college, university, profession, etc. There is no denying the significance of tenure and reasonable advancement in academia. And we are to work heartily as unto the glory of God. But this temptation frequently leads to preoccupation with an academic appointment as an all-consuming job. It grows to absorb virtually all our energies of a faculty member. This can start in graduate school or during our years as an assistant professor; habits formed early are hard to modify later.
(3) Rationalized Security
—convincing ourselves that our most important need is security. A predictably secure lifestyle is reflected in freedom from many surprises, from unforeseen risks, and from insecurities of any kind. Our behavior is guarded before tenure. Then the focus is upon an ascending lifestyle that involves ever larger homes farther from the campus, more costly vehicles, better vacations, etc.
Our homes and our stuff can be used in Christian ministry, but they are frequently seen as divine endorsement of the obligatory American experience of visible material success. We no longer engage in significant sabbatical or research leaves, in mission trips, exchange appointments—or other apparently risky behaviors. We move from a life based upon faith to a life based upon economics, with the bottom line determining virtually every decision. An academic appointment with tenure becomes a condition for avoiding flexibility and doing nothing that will alter or upset the secure life that has been so arduously pursued.
None of us are immune from these temptations, to be sure. Only the grace of God and heeding the Spirit’s voice will keep us true to the conviction that if God has brought us to an academic appointment, then God will care for us in every way and enable us to bear witness, in deed and word, on the campus where we have invested so much of our lives. If we obey the divine mandate to include the academic domain in the world that Jesus died to redeem, we may find ourselves, for Christ’s sake, investing the maximum, instead of the minimum, of our energies into ministry within our academic community.
(c) 2006 Donald G. Davis