A picture of reality in which there is a being great enough to produce and to oversee the universe is, after all, quite different from one in which things operate sheerly through impersonal forces. If we affirm a reality that includes a being of immense intelligence, power, and concern for us, every other fact or belief will have some relationship to that being. At the least, the presence of that being should alter our view of the relative significance of the other aspects of reality that we deal with in our scholarship.

The doctrine of divine creation has the widest implications for scholarship in Christian and other monotheistic traditions, but Christians should ask as well whether more specifically Christian theological beliefs might also have implications for their scholarship. The Christian fa

We run into a central irony in attempting to isolate the implication of Christian commitments for our scholarship. The sensibilities of Christians toward the poor and the weak have been dulled by the very success of the assimilation of these same sensibilities by the wider Western culture and, lately, world culture.

The Christian experience of faith involves in some way knowing God through an encounter with the historical person Jesus Christ. The starting point for Christian thought, then, entails an implicit rejection of the rule (perhaps derived from more abstract conceptions of the deity in classical Greek thought) that we cannot bridge the gap between empirical truths and wider metaphysical realities. Religious truths are not first of all "necessary truths," like the truths of mathematics, but rather, according to Christianity, revealed to us in encounters with the divine person within our history.

At least by the time of the French Revolution, the flowerings of such sensibilities were often separated from their Christian roots. In fact, whatever spirit of Christianity they embodied was often being opposed by institutional Christianity. So, while in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries many Christian expressions of such sensibilities have persisted, they have been overshadowed by their non-Christian or anti-Christian counterparts. Marxism's concern for the poor is the most obvious example.

This revelation of the character of God in Christ should thus change our sensibilities toward other humans. In the Incarnation, Christ emptied himself and became poor for our sake. He identified with the poor and the ordinary. Christ went so far as to instruct us that when we see the poor and the destitute we see him. How we act toward them is an indicator of how we love him. Christ's incarnation honors what the world has not usually honored.

Eventually the rootlessness of such humanitarianism caught up with Marxism. One of the great tasks of Christian scholarship is to recover some dimensions of Christian teaching that have been alienated from their theological roots. This task is particularly urgent in an era when secular morality is adrift and traditional Christianity itself is too often beholden to the politics of self-interest and simplistic solutions.

B.The interpretation and understanding of the truth is radically distorted by sin. For that reason, true knowledge is possible only because of God's grace which has triumphed in Jesus Christ. At the same time it should be recognized that God's grace is the source of truthful insights that arise outside of Christian scholarly endeavor.

At the same time, in academic

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