Academic Writers: Amazon Drivers or Artisans?
It was one of the weirdest, almost out-of-body experiences I have ever had. I was lecturing my freshman comp course in the same classroom on the seminary campus I had taught in for years when the thought crashed into my conscience: “I’m teaching this course just as I would if I were teaching it across town at the state university.” Sure, I prayed at the end of class, talked like a Christian professor, and corrected student papers with more grace than sarcasm, but here I was, employing the same teaching philosophy and methodology I had acquired in my secular training. I had been serving students the same vanilla ice cream writing course they could get anywhere but distinguishing mine as Christian because it had sprinkles of prayer and was served in a Christian campus cup. Were “spiritual sprinkles” the only way to differentiate a Christian versus secular writing class? I longed to honor Jesus in the classroom, but while I devoured books on integrating faith and learning that covered a range of disciplines including literature, none of them addressed how to saturate (not just sprinkle) faith into teaching writing.
Several months after experiencing that inner earthquake in my freshman composition class, I was still reeling around a nine on a mental Richter scale and signed up for a conference on integration hoping to re-ground and spiritually stimulate my “Christian” pedagogy. At the conference, I was delighted to see a breakout scheduled to be led by a professor at a large evangelical university whose job it was to help all of the faculty on his campus integrate faith and learning in their courses. Here was the person who could answer my question. After the breakout, I waited my turn to ask him, “How do you help your faculty integrate faith and learning in writing courses? How do you coach those professors to teach writing Christianly?”
“I don’t,” he answered. “Writing is a skill; you can’t integrate faith and learning when you’re teaching a skill.” Bumfuzzled by my question, he turned to the next person. I felt like Larry the Cucumber seeing the peach in a towel. Embarrassed!
Most educators agree that writing is merely a skill helping students convey ideas in a clear and organized way. Composition courses remain in the core curriculum at undergrad institutions because writing is a necessary competency both in academia and the workforce. Or at least that used to be the assumption before AI became college students’ writing companion, interpreter, research assistant, tutor, and maid cleaning up messes.
It is not just composition professors who teach writing; most professors find themselves coaching students how to write no matter the discipline. And the default assumption we all share about writing is that of the integration consultant: writing, like riding a bicycle, is a neutral skill outside the scope of integration of faith and learning. The theological undergirding of disciplines expected at Christian institutions does not apply to writing or writing pedagogy. It is not necessary to our mission. We pray in class. We assign the occasional faith-as-it-applies-to-your-discipline paper. We use examples of great Christian writers. But the philosophy and methods of teaching writing we use are ones we inherited from the secular academy, and we pass them on to our students largely unchanged.
The Amazon Box We Inherited
The writing model the consultant expressed is the one most of us share—writing is information transportation. A scholar has an idea. He packages the idea in sentences. The package travels to a reader. If it arrives intact—clear, organized, free of grammatical or syntactical dents—the writing has done its job. Once the contents are unloaded, the box can be flattened and recycled. Let us call this the Amazon Box Theory of Writing. And it seems like a pretty good one: information does need to travel from the writer to the reader. Sentences should be clear, and boxes should arrive intact. But the cardboard assumption from which the Amazon Box Theory is built is that words are containers for ideas; readers are consumers of ideas; any piece of writing is functional and disposable, merely a means to deliver ideas, not something inherent to the conceptual content. The box does not matter. (Unless it does follow Turabian formatting, and then it is probably a salvific matter.)
If the Amazon Box Theory is correct, the faculty consultant was right. There is no Christian way to ship a box. Even if we slap a cross sticker on the side, the box is still a box, and faith and learning have nothing to integrate. If Christian professors want to help their students be competent writers and those student writers are being discipled as Christians, are they not Christian writers? Is that not sufficient? If students experience effective integration of faith and learning elsewhere in their academic journey, does it matter how they learn the skill of writing?
But what if we really believe that from Him and to Him and through Him are all things (Rom 11:36), including writing? Should not the aim of every discipline be to show the deep connection of every area of life to God? Our Savior is the Word, and He speaks to us through His written Word. The universe was created by God’s words—“and God said . . .” So, our assumptions that writing is merely a skill are theologically thin, tragically underemphasizing the sacredness of words and word crafting. The question is what other model of writing can we use?
A Different Box
To move ourselves and our students from being writers who are Christians to being Christian writers, we need to deconstruct the Amazon Box Theory of Writing and build a new model. Let us consider a different box. In 1241, King Louis IX of France paid an exorbitant sum for what he believed to be the Crown of Thorns. He paraded the crown to Paris and then built a box—the Sainte-Chapelle—to showcase it. Since its completion 800 years ago, the Sainte-Chapelle has been called a jewel box. In fact, Louis’s contemporaries walking into it said it was like entering “one of Heaven’s most beautiful rooms.”[1]
The footprint of the Sainte-Chapelle is barely bigger than a college basketball court, but fifteen five-story-high panels of stained glass soar upwards from the floor. Each panel tells the Bible’s stories—over 1100 narratives in all—stacked one atop the next in the towering pillars of glass. A five-minute walk away, the much more famous Notre Dame hunkers down under its immense weight of stone. While it too has beautiful stained-glass windows, it is the enormous amount of stone—stone walls, stone pillars, stone flying buttresses—that give Notre Dame such a weighty presence. The medieval mind equated light with God’s presence, and while Notre Dame was under construction long before and long after the seven years it took to build the Sainte-Chapelle, Louis wanted the Sainte-Chapelle to be a celebration of light. As a result, though the Sainte-Chapelle’s footprint is one tenth that of Notre Dame’s, it has six times more stained glass. Notre Dame feels like a sepulcher compared to the dancing light raining down colors in the Sainte-Chapelle. To bring in more stories, colors, and light, stone walls were audaciously replaced with slender iron girdles, all for the crowning effect of placing Christ’s redemption of his people as the centerpiece.
During the French Revolution, the crown was moved to Notre Dame (and later the Louvre), but even without the relic, the Sainte-Chapelle still tells the Word’s truth in stories, still shows Christ’s passion and his second coming, still experientially, artistically, and visually displays truth through beauty for people’s good and God’s glory. But only because it borrows external light. This is the jewel of the chapel jewel box for Christian writers: the glory of stained glass is the borrowed light that brings it to life. Stained glass has no light of its own. The window’s function is to receive the sunlight and pass it on in a way that moves the person looking up at it.
What if we could coach students (and ourselves) to see and experience the craft of writing less like an Amazon box and more like the Sainte-Chapelle—not a container that delivers information and is discarded, but a beautiful jewel box that magnifies the treasure, impacting those who see it? Louis helped people interpret what the crown of thorns meant. His box, the jewel box, was a commentary for the treasure. Should not believers’ writing do the same?
Writing Christianly by Borrowing Light from the Trinity
That moment in my classroom continued to gnaw at me as did my conversation with the integrationist. I was tired of sprinkling Christianity on writing pedagogy and longed to be able to help students build Sainte-Chapelles in their writing. Actually, I longed for that in my own writing, and still do. What was the way forward? I started at the only place I could think to start, the very beginning, the nature of God. Does who he is have any impact on how we write and teach writing? Could theology hold a portal into an entirely new realm of unexplored combinations of writing pedagogy and worship practice?
The more I studied the triune God as the conceiver of language, facilitator of communication, author of life and words, I began to see that the entirety of creation—including writing—reflects and glorifies its Designer: “For from him and through him and to him are all things. To him be the glory forever. Amen” (Rom 11:36). Writing is not a neutral skill. It is an act of worship. Can it be hijacked and used for evil ends? Absolutely. But writing itself is an inherently good and lordly craft, one in which God himself engages and gifts to his image-bearers.
That is the conviction Jonathan Pennington and my forthcoming book Borrowed Light: A Trinitarian Approach to Writing Christianly[2] sets out to develop: writing Christianly is a trinitarian act, drawn from the inner life of the God who is himself the Word, eternally spoken and eternally communicating in love. If that is true, then the way we write is not a neutral skill stickered onto our faith, but an artistic act of worship grown in and inseparable from our faith, thereby rendering our pages into stages upon which the drama of our doctrine is on full display.
I began to examine writing in light of each person of the Godhead. God the Father’s character calls us to the pursuit of truth on the path of beauty for the purpose of goodness. God the Son calls us to incarnational writing, writing for both the body and the soul. Abstract truths scholars love to dwell on matter deeply, but unless they are written in a way that readers can grasp with minds and bodies, they have no sticking power. And finally, the Holy Spirit enables us to join in trinitarian community, engaging with other Christian writers past and present to express age-old truths in fresh ways. The framework sketched here is developed at length with specifics and practical applications in the forthcoming book.
Writing to Recycle or Writing to Reveal
If I could, I would go back and fervently thank that integration consultant. His answer to my question has been a driving force in finding a deeper, more theologically satisfying model of writing Christianly. He was truth-telling: if writing is only a skill, there really is nothing to integrate from our Christian faith. But—I think he might be open to a different question—not how to sprinkle faith on a neutral skill, but how we can see the craft of writing differently if we believe our own theology about words and the Worded One.
Our writing (and our teaching of writing) are like the stained-glass windows in the Sainte-Chapelle—a skill that requires precision and artistry, a skill that requires beauty to translate truth for people to receive it and be changed by it. The glory of stained-glass windows is when light passes through them. The most a Christian scholar’s writing can do is what those Sainte-Chapelle windows do: let light they did not create shine through them, broken into storied colors, to wash over readers and change them. The light is borrowed, as it should be: “And there will be no . . . need for lamps or sun—for the Lord God will shine on them” (Rev 22:5).
The craftsmen of the Sainte-Chapelle used Scripture in the design, colors, and content of the chapel. When we as Christian writers use writing principles drawn from the Trinity, we too can create a mosaic in which we, as well as our readers, are pulled into a closer relationship with God. May we as both Christian writers and those who coach others to write use our medium—words—to transmit the light of God to others, in all our disciplines.
Notes:
[1] Laurence de Finance, The Sainte-Chapelle Palais de la Cité, éditions du patrimoine (Paris: Centre des Monuments Nationaux, 1999), 2.
[2] Amy L. Crider and Jonathan T. Pennington, Borrowed Light: A Trinitarian Approach to Writing Christianly (Nashville, TN: B&H Academic, forthcoming 2027).
Amy L. Crider
Associate Professor of Foundations of Education | Director of the Center for Writing and Rhetoric | Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary