1. How do the worlds of applied science and theology intersect, and how can this inform the task of a holistic Christian educational framework?
It could sound over-simplified or even trite to say from the outset that loving God with our heart, soul, mind, and strength and our neighbor as ourselves requires the realignment of the two worlds of applied science and theology into a single sphere rotating on its axis around the heat and light of, yes, the Son.
For from him and through him and to him are all things. To him be glory forever. Amen. (Rom 11:36, ESV)
So, whether you eat or drink, or whatever you do, do all to the glory of God.” (1 Cor 10:31)
For several generations, Western higher education has tended toward specialization. Whereas a historian in the 19th century, for example, might have studied the broad sweep of European history (and drawn parallels with other times and places), the 21st-century historian is trained as a specialist in a much narrower field, say, interwar political aesthetics. Likewise, a scientist or social scientist today is much less likely to propose a grand theory than those in the past. There is certainly a good side to this—specialization has allowed research to push further than ever, and we have all benefited from the resulting discoveries.
But this specialization has also exacerbated the atomization of knowledge—specialists toiling away in their own disciplinary enclaves, largely unfamiliar with the work, methods, and norms of their colleagues in other fields. For a student, this produces a sense that their courses are unrelated domains or, worse, disconnected challenges on their way to a degree—that they are, in a word, disintegrated.
At LeTourneau, we believe that coherence underlies all these disciplines and knits their study together. That coherence is grounded in the trust that they are features of the creation of a good and loving God who is apprehended by faith and studied through the discipline we call theology. In this way, theology is fundamental to academic disciplines and to the knowledge and skills they shape across industries and scientific endeavors.
Far from devaluing science or technological work, this relationship ennobles them. To study science is to study, with its particular methodologies and objects, the work of the Creator. To invent technology is likewise to unfold the potential latent in God’s good creation and to participate in our vocation as his image-bearers, whom he chose to steward the earth.
Science and technology also occupy a particular place in the culture and society into which we are sending students, and, because of our institutional saga, we feel a special responsibility to train students who are equipped both with technological sophistication and theological grounding and, moreover, who are able to relate those to one another—to practice their integration. We are increasingly intentional about shaping our curriculum so that students and faculty engage in ongoing pedagogical conversation about how theology integrates scientific study and technological skill within a distinctively Christian learning community.
2. What questions should we ask to form a robust Christian account of human flourishing?
A robust Christian account of flourishing begins from a question of what humanity is and what it is for. What is a human being, not just superficially or accidentally, but essentially? Why are human beings what they are—what are the purposes they share with other creatures and those that are particular to them?
But these questions naturally open up other questions. At LeTourneau, we focus on three in particular. The first is, “Who is God?” And part of the answer to that question is that God is Triune and that God is therefore, in God’s essence, a God of love, and, in turn, that our existence and our purpose is rooted in divine love.
The second is, “Of what story am I a part?” This question turns out to be not only extremely important for helping us understand ourselves but also practically significant for discerning what the good life might look like for us. Anthropologists and psychologists have increasingly emphasized in recent decades that narrative is somehow basic to the way we function. There are many stories that purport to answer our most fundamental questions about what we are, what we are here for, what is wrong in our world, and what can be done to set it right. Even approaches that seek to question or destabilize so-called metanarratives turn out to imply their own stories about these questions.
Christian Scripture offers an overarching narrative that situates us within a cosmic story and furnishes a set of answers to our fundamental questions. This story suggests that we truly flourish when we act in ways that conform to that story and our particular place in it. The implications of this story are not always intuitive for us, in part because we have all internalized and been shaped by other stories that conflict with the biblical story in some respects.
A third question arises from this question about our story: It is a question of calling. At LeTourneau, we talk frequently about vocation, not primarily because we’ve always had an orientation to career preparation and applied learning (although that’s true) but rather because we see that within our story, we have a calling (a vocation) from God as humans, as a community, and as individuals. To ask how we flourish is, therefore, to ask how we discern and faithfully respond to that calling both individually and corporately.
Finally, the language of flourishing is for good reason deeply connected to the tradition of virtue ethics, the ethical approach that is interested primarily in the implications of our character or moral dispositions for our doing right, and vice versa. To understand human flourishing, we have to understand virtue, since virtue—if it is not precisely equivalent to flourishing—is nevertheless indissolubly bound up with it. To truly flourish, we will need not only to understand but to actually conform to the good, the right, the just, and so on. Fortunately, Christian Scripture and its interpretive tradition give us an incomparably deep well from which to begin answering questions about virtue and the good life.
3. How does Christian virtue promote responsible technological innovation?
In the spring of 2021, Bill Gates proclaimed this the “Age of AI.” Later that year, Marc Andreessen published his Techno-Optimist Manifesto, placing a tremendous amount of faith in digital technology’s capacity, especially when unrestrained, to transform human life, produce wealth, and achieve happiness. On the other hand, around the same time, the late Presbyterian pastor Tim Keller published a book entitled Hope in Times of Fear: The Resurrection and the Meaning of Easter, in which he proclaimed this the “Age of Anxiety,” reflecting a widespread recognition of an apparent dramatic increase in anxiety and related challenges, particularly among young people. A number of commentators have pointed out that, although the relationship is probably not simple, there seems to be some link between those phenomena—the dramatic acceleration in digital technology, its perfusion into almost every aspect of our society and lives, the increase of ambient anxiety and the intensification of anxiety disorders.
One response to technology is a utopian hope that it will overcome our deepest problems. Another is a reactionary rejection of technology. Both are misguided. Humans bear God’s image and likeness, and our impulses to create and invent reflect God’s own creativity. But Scripture shows us that these are bound up in our tendency to seek our own good—to do so on our own terms, to fail to recognize our obligations to others. Because of this, technological innovation needs to ask questions not only about progress and marketability but also about wisdom and virtue. Just because you can build it, should you? What can this technology do, but also, what is it doing to me? Innovation thus belongs within a wider sapiential and formational process, which is a primary reason we take the approach to education we do at LeTourneau. We are seeking to build the wisdom and character that help students make difficult decisions as they leave here. We want them to approach these questions in a thoroughly integrated way. We want their experience with technology to be characterized by wonder, delight, and diligence but also situated within an understanding of how that technology relates to the wider story of God’s work in the world.
Developing technology raises both opportunities for doing immense good for the world but also always raises discreet ethical questions, the kinds of questions The Center for Bioethics and Human Dignity wrestles with in its reflection and research. What a wonderful privilege it is to be part of cutting-edge conversations about the possibilities, potentialities, and also pitfalls of human ingenuity within God’s world.
4. As a visionary leader, how do you create a culture that promotes these values?
Anytime creating culture is at stake, it begins at the top with the leadership. In part, that certainly means that the virtues and fruits of the Spirit that we hope to display through our organization must be first observed and embodied in our own lives and work. The same questions of technology confront us as an organization, not just within our academic disciplines. We should be setting the tone by encouraging our campus to be at the cutting edge of our work while exemplifying genuine Christian virtue. It also means we set the conditions for our faculty, staff, and students to be able to pursue the right aims in our education. A few years ago, I read a book by Stephen Graves called The Five Tasks: What Every Senior Leader Needs to Do, in which it argued that the responsibility of the executive is to spend 80% of their time on setting the institution’s direction, speed, risk, resources, and culture. So, our job as leaders is to mobilize the campus both with the freeway and the guardrails for pursuing our mission in a distinctly Christian way in our world.
One standard way of doing that is through our core curriculum. We want to build a general education portfolio that embeds Scripture and Christian virtue, especially with technological advancement in view, within every single one of our degree programs—from Engineering to English Literature, through to our co-curricular programming in Student Life and Athletics. Not only do we have a “Christian Polytechnic” core of classes that are devoted to learning about technology and Christian virtue, but we also are committed to our School of Theology and Vocation core of classes. These are four distinct courses on the Bible, Trinitarian theology, and Christian vocation.
We also have distinct faculty and staff development initiatives sponsored by our Center for Academic Ministry and our Faith, Science, and Technology Initiative. These offer the time, space, and resources for employees to grow in their understanding of their own discipline and/or role at the university within God’s world and according to his ways outlined in Scripture.
We still have room to grow. We want to continue to help technologists reflect on faith and theology in ways that enrich their work and to help those in the humanities and arts to relate their work to our technological age. We need to continue to find a balance between, on one hand, embracing technology and science as reflections of the goodness of creation, and, on the other, reflecting thoughtfully and at times critically on the past, present, or likely future effects of technology.
5. What can this approach to holistic education teach the pastor or ministry leader?
It is important for pastors and ministry leaders to understand that their congregants are trying to navigate a very complex world of advancing technology and need help answering the important questions of virtue, like “Just because I can, should I?” And our church leaders should recognize that all of us, almost without exception, are working in jobs oriented around technology. Therefore, it would benefit our brothers and sisters with whom we worship every week to provide ways to reflect on our work from a holistic, Christian point of view; to consider how our jobs, industries, and companies work with the grain of God’s plan for human flourishing as well as in what ways they might work against it.
Our church ministry should not just address how to think Christianly but also how to act and work in ways that bear out the Gospel. As a university, we are inescapably in the business of knowledge. But we also recognize that the problems Christians face in our digital age are not primarily deficiencies of knowledge. Modern digital technology, including tools like generative AI, gives us unprecedented access to knowledge, but has it made us wiser? Has it helped us flourish more completely?
At a Christian university, we have the extraordinary privilege not only of informing but of forming students. We ask them to take part in practices and contexts—curricularly, co-curricularly, and extra-curricularly—that are designed to help them to assimilate knowledge and build skills but also to become the kind of people who can respond faithfully to God’s calling for them. This is extremely important in our context.
In churches and parachurch ministries, this formational responsibility is, if anything, even more important. Disintegration is always threatening our congregations. Some wrestle to harmonize faith with learning and knowledge. Many struggle to relate their job or family life robustly with their life at church. Most of us now struggle with the implications of technology for our lives and families. Perhaps LeTourneau University, as fundamentally a parachurch organization, can come alongside the local and global church with a certain set of gifts to help us all think deeply and act faithfully for God’s kingdom’s sake in a world pulling on us without pause.