Academic Integration is the task of bringing Christian thought to bear on our work as scholars, so that our research, indeed our very lives, are influenced and permeated with God's truth.

The bedrock belief behind our effort is that the Christian worldview is actually, objectively true. This veracity should therefore do a better job of explaining reality as we find it than any of its competitors. Much of the research being done today, even by nonbelievers, is compatible with, and therefore could be a part of, the Christian worldview. It is what we would expect to find, if the picture of the world painted by the Bible was actually real. Further, such findings can be used to confirm the truthfulness of the Biblical portrait of the world. This, in turn, is part of the overall project of re-describing the world (including, of course, humanity) in particularly Christian terms, which leads as a matter of course, to the need for a Redeemer.

Thus, our desire is to help foster the sort of purposeful academic integration that contributes to this sort of “re-description” of the world. It is our belief that as Christians who are academics actually become “Christian scholars,”—as they begin to think about their fields in theological terms—their research and publishing will, in many cases, naturally begin to challenge the “conventional wisdom” and reigning paradigms within their disciplines. Not only will what they write be intellectually viable and true, it will also begin the process of changing what is plausible to the modern/postmodern mind.

Thus, as one of our colleagues has written, serious integration on this level  does not merely mean adding a Bible passage at the beginning of a paper, nor does it mean "The Bible says it, I believe it, that settles it." Nor does it simply mean bringing our subjective experience of faith into our work, although of course, there is a subjective component to the Christian life. "Faith," as we are using it here, does not refer to a subjective experience of trust in God, but the Faith, the set of propositions generally agreed upon by Christians of differing traditions as objectively true and publicly defensible.

It is also important to note that a serious commitment to integration does not simply mean rejecting the latest research in our field when it appears to contradict the Christian worldview. Rather, it means taking the time and effort to ascertain whether our assumptions about how to interpret Scripture in particular cases have been wrong all along (e.g. interpreting passages in the Psalms to require that the earth is the center of the solar system), or whether certain presuppositions in our field, or flaws in the research itself, have led to certain conclusions. Each particular case must be taken on its own merits.

Academic Initiative is committed to helping and coming alongside Christian academics to assist them in this difficult task.