I received an email today from a friend studying philosophy at University. She was finding it difficult to marry being a Christian and studying in depth theories and worldviews that were opposed to her own. As a philosophy graduate myself, I can identify with this struggle. At times being a Christian and an academic is deeply difficult.

But it’s so important to pursue Christ with the same depth that we approach studying. Otherwise we end up with a superficial kind of faith; one that never asks questions, never probes deeper, one that is totally set apart from being a student. 

I think of a friend who has walked away from faith recently, who told me that they never connected the philosophical concept of God that they studied in their seminars with the Christian faith they tried to live in Church. The danger is that when living the life gets difficult, when the studying gets hard, when the world of work summons at the end of three years; things aren’t always as easy to follow. We have to be able to connect the God we worship in Church to the God we study in University.

The God I worship on a Sunday afternoon is the same God that we think about in philosophy, he’s the same God that created the world we study in science, who wrote the laws of nature we study in physics, who invented art and music, who created the human beings we study in psychology of sociology. God cannot be contained in the Church box. What does it mean to be a follower of Jesus in the philosophy lecture? In the biology lab? In the drama studio? Studying anything is studying a part of God’s creation, a part of who God is. When we learn to make our studying worship, when we learn to recognise that they compliment each other not contradict each other maybe we will learn to stop them fighting for our time and see a life lived following Jesus as one that is constantly studying more of who he is and the Universe he made.

Josh Cockayne is a Philosophy graduate from York, he now works for G2, part of St Michael le Belfrey in York. He writes a regular blog here.