The Dangers of Objectivity, and Helping My Students Hit the Sweet Spot

I'm using the word "objective" here to refer to an analysis or description which is done entirely without reference to the person doing the analysis. Thus, in an ideally objective analysis, two entirely different people would reach identical conclusions, regardless of their own history and biases and blindspots.

Objectivity is important; if I'm having a tense conversation, I need to be able to filter out my own knee-jerk reactions and view the situation from the outside. When I'm interpreting a passage of Scripture, I have to try to filter out my own subjective impressions and biases. But our peculiar context in living after (and, in a very real sense, still in) the Enlightenment makes the question of objectivity more sticky, for, although theologians and scholars have been trying to be objective for centuries before the 18th century, it is only in the Enlightenment that you get this idea that a radical separation from your own personal context and, indeed, your own self will deliver you into a bird-eye view of the world in which you can see all things clearly and truly and "objectively"--and you get that through ignoring your own self. I've come to learn this is very unwise.

All this might sound theoretical, but this issue shows up all the time in my own context. I've found (through making this mistake repeatedly) that when I try to be "objective" about teaching--when I try to teach a class so that we cover the "important" "scholarly" issues, cover all the bases, and deal with things objectively, the class is boring and I lose students. But when I get up there and talk about the things I'm interested and why--when I relax and enjoy myself and talk about what matters to me--the class always goes better, and students make stronger contributions through their own questions and comments.

Another example: I had a student once who very obviously had the talents for ministry, but who really struggled in class; while very interesting to talk to in person, but his papers would be flat and lifeless and not always very coherent. So for the last class he took with me, I told him: Don't write an academic paper; don't write what you think an academic paper is supposed to be. Just tell me what you think. Use the first person; don't worry about being scholarly or whatever. And, lo and behold, mirabile dictu, the paper he turned in was superb. I had to tell him to stop trying to be objective, and he hit the sweet spot.

Bruce Cockburn (pronounced "Coe-burn") once prayed in a song, "O Love that fires the sun, keep me burning." There's a victorious energy in each one of us, a symphony deep down beneath the drone and white noise of our weeks and days and habits and sins, a fire burning that was kindled by God and, indeed, comes from his own. Trying to be a Christian or a thinker or a writer or a businessman or whatever by separating yourself from that won't work: the music will come out atonal and flat. But learning how to breathe on that fire so that it grows, how to hit the sweet spot, how to walk and talk in time with your own music, will not only refresh yourself--it will refresh others and help them, sparking new insights and breaking open their lives in new ways. I've had it done for me, and, by God's grace, watched it happen in my own context.