This is a book that may be more accessible if read backwards. Richard Hughes, Distiguished Professor of Religion and the director of the Center for Faith and Learning at Pepperdine University in California, has written a reflection on how the life of a scholar can flourish in the christian faith and not in spite of the Christian faith. His basic tenets and highly focused approach are better understood as reflections of his own life experience. This is not a great book to enhance scholarly pedagogy. It is a book about why one scholar engages personal piety as an integral part of who he is as a teacher and a Christian.

Reading the book from back to front Hughes exposes the bedrock experiences that have shaped his passions in being a teacher. Throughout the book, a frequent assertion is the importance of helping students recognise human finitude. This finitude leads students and the teacher to pay attention to life’s big questions. In the last chapter we read of Hughes’ own tri-fold encounters with significant health problems that could have been life-ending are the existential reality for this persistent focus. Knowing this from the beginning would help keep any reader to be a bit more patient with the multitude of ways Hughes comes at this central tenet of his pedagogical hopes.

In the main, this is a very simple book. Hughes summarises ‘four main dimensions of human thought’ as: a rigorous search for truth; a diversity of perspectives and worldviews; an involvement with critical thinking; and a capacity for intellectual thinking. He then looks at these four foundational components which are necessary for any scholar, through his own worldview that is informed by his experience and understanding of the Christian faith. For the first forty-five pages of the book, this understanding seems more informed by a non-Trinitarian Protestant liberalism than by the gospel, centred in the person and work of Jesus Christ. It’s an unfortunate aspect of the book that will keep many readers from the more helpful and better rooted chapters that follow.

Hughes’ most helpful point and challenge in the book is his recognition that paradoxical reality is at the heart of the Christian faith. Our readiness to embrace paradox at a most foundational level should create in the Christian scholar a greater capacity for his four central themes. Our tolerance for paradox should make us patient in research, honest in evaluation, and open to new ideas. Hughes’ ultimate points are helpful and valid throughout the book. The disappointing aspect of the book is how he goes about building a case for his commitments. He undermines his own argument in several ways throughout the book.

In his persual of four of the basic religious traditions that contribute to the Christian faith’s sustenance of the life of the mind (‘Roman Catholic, Reformed, Mennonite and Lutheran’), not only does he give a poor summary of some central understandings of each tradition, but he also seems to manipulate the traditions in order to find his own four foundational values within them. This attempt is regrettable because embedded in the convolution are some points that are worth savouring.

In the end, it must be said that the life of the mind can be sustained by the Christian faith, but that this faith must be defined by the gospel, centred explicitly on the Incarnation of God in Jesus Christ, not on a Gospel summarised without this particularity by Hughes as God extending ‘his grace to us, so we must reflect that grace to the neighbour’. In addition, the person and work of the Holy Spirit are not examined at all in the book, even in his summary of the Reformed tradition.

It was difficult to discern who the book was written for. At first I thought it was written for secularists who might be encouraged to think better of the Christian faith if the language of the academy, quotes from Tillich and the absolutes of incarnational particularity were marginalized. I am not sure, however, that that would be the outcome. At one point a pre-publication Jewish reader of an early draft of the book asked Hughes this question: ‘Why must you go through such theological gymnastics to get where you’re going when you and I arrive at the very same place in the end?’ I don’t think this final revision ever answers that question in a way that honours the faith or helps make a good case to address the title of the book.

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