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Guelzo2Allen Guelzo is the Henry R. Luce III Professor of the Civil War Era at Gettysburg College, where he serves as Director of the Civil War Era Studies Program. He is widely recognized as one of the leading scholars of the Civil War in general and Abraham Lincoln in particular.

He is also a committed Christian and churchman. Though far better known for his work on Lincoln and the Civil War, he has also written noteworthy studies on Jonathan Edwards and free will and on the Reformed Episcopalians, as well as co-editing a book on the New England Theology.

Dr. Guelzo has just published a new article for Christianity Today online that should be read by anyone concerned about the evangelical mind and the temptation for respectability.

Here is the beginning:

van til rollieIt is very nearly four decades since, as a terribly callow graduate student with an interest in philosophy, I made a pilgrimage with a friend to the home of a professor of Christian apologetics. I was looking for direction, and even though Cornelius Van Til had been retired for many years, he was known to welcome inquirers—whom he often greeted on his front porch with a rake in hand, suggesting that perhaps they could pile-up his leaves for him before they talked.

I was hoping to hear an intimidating, intellectually-convoluted, scholastic, metaphysical strategy for blowing the philosopher’s version of Gideon’s trumpet. So I asked Van Til, then pushing eighty but with still the hard white comb of hair brushed back from his cliff-like Dutch brow, and the smile of an old Dutch dairy farmer (which his father had been), “Dr. Van Til, why did you decide to devote your life to the study of philosophy and the teaching of apologetics?”

And I then sat back to allow the metaphysics free room to roll. Kees Van Til never blinked.

“Why,” he said, “to protect Christ’s little ones.”

The surprise that could have dropped me to the floor that afternoon has never quite evaporated. Why, to protect Christ’s little ones. Not only because those words express a great nobility in a few syllables, but because, remembering them, they cast down every castle of intellectual folly I erect, or am tempted to erect. And because, at the end, I am not worthy of them, and because anyone who understands that the kingdom of God is our true home, that God’s people are truly our people, and that this is a world by turns indifferent and hostile to both, must see those words as a true reminder of what we owe to each other as Christians, and in what relation we stand to each other.

I recall those words—Why, to protect Christ’s little ones—with tears, first because I have not always lived according to them, but second because it is precisely the world of the scholar and historian that encourages me to ignore them. Certainly, I do not recall in graduate school ever being so advised. I was so busy protecting myself as a graduate student in history that I barely had time to worry about those little ones. I had only just earned the PhD and was on the job market when my department’s graduate chairman took me aside, and in the kindliest terms, said, “I wish I didn’t have to say this, but you should know that the slightest hint of religion on your resume is the kiss of death.”

In the years since I was given that advice, the shadows have only grown longer in the academic world.

If this is a subject that interests you, I highly recommend you read the whole thing. It is a beautiful and bracing piece.

Here is Professor Guelzo’s conclusion:

When we no longer make ourselves the center of our desires, when we take as our aim as Christian scholars, college presidents, pastors, thinkers, to make perfect our wills, then and only then do I imagine that we will have any real effect on the world—only when we have surrendered the notion of having an effect will we have one. And only then will we begin to see that our real priority is not to change the world, to change our professions, to publish this or footnote that, but to protect Christ’s little ones.

Again, the whole thing is here. I hope this piece spreads far and wide as those called to academic work will take it to heart.

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