Saturday, October 13, 2012

What does it mean to lead a life of repentance?

In On Being Human, Calvin Seerveld invites Christians to sanctification and to see sanctification so broadly as to reach deep into the nature and manifestation of our occupations, in his case, philosophizing:
That means that those of us who are philosophers need to foster and build a philosophical anthropology that heals fractured theories of humanity and gives a younger generation of scholars not just a head full of split-hair concepts but horizons within which to think integratively.  We are faithful to God's Word in our philosophizing not merely when our analysis is logically correct and paired with right living but when our thinking is truly thanking, when our theory sparkles with life-giving wisdom (29-30).
For me, doing history as a Christian means not just getting the facts straight (doing my job well) and loving my neighbors in the past as well as my neighbors in the classroom and in my readership ("right living" as Seerveld calls it), but trying to think deeply and Biblically about my approach to historical study and in particular to questions of the nature of humankind, of what activity of humankind is significantly worthy of historical study, of what stories should I tell of the past, why I should tell them, and how.

And I pray that, in doing so, my theories will "sparkle with life-giving wisdom" (but that's a tall order!).

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