Christianity and non-Christian authorities

I went to a debate tonight between Hugh Ross/Fazale Rana and Michael Shermer/some UT professor Sahotra Sarkar. It was basically evolution vs intelligent design - Ross/Rana presented what they called a testable model of creation by design, and Shermer/Sarkar attacked it in favor of naturalistic evolution. To those who were curious, the debate was OK/not that great, and some decent points were made by both sides, but I still feel like there were unanswered questions and holes in each presentation that were covered up by the use of numbers and big words.

While my interest in these topics have subsided, the debate did get me to reflect on the idea of authority and the interaction of Christians with secular authorities and experts. Obviously, intelligent design is one of them - Christians (some in science, some not) disagree with secular experts on macro-evolution and the development of the human species. However, this is a fairly extreme and polarizing example.

More commonly, I feel like I can see Christians disengaging themselves from human authority in less outrageous ways. Broadly, I've wondered how commonly Christians consult experts in the different fields relating to their ministries? For example, urban ministry is closely intertwined with sociology, missions with cultural studies (many Christians strive to do this well; some not so much). When we consider restructuring the church, does the thought of studying human interaction ever cross our minds? In preparing for ministry or thinking about Christianity in general, does it ever cross our minds to pick up anything but a Christian book on the subject?

One example of this taken to the extreme would be, say, end times speculation (spurred on by the Left Behind series and such) - instead of carefully analyzing and thinking in a Christian manner about a series of events, the events are simply seen as (only) the fulfillment of eschatological prophecy and treated as such - as supernatural events that are far beyond us. In doing so, we distance ourselves more and more from culture. Instead of offering a Christ-like analysis of the situation, wrestling with secular analysis/opinions and presenting a Christian response, end-times speculation simply causes the church to withdraw further into itself, muttering amongst ourselves of things that only we understand. This is negative on two fronts - we refuse to interact with culture and confront it with our convictions, and two, we appear more and more like lunatics than revolutionaries to the culture we're called to influence. (This is not ruling out that the end times are being heralded - only that the response we commonly give is probably not optimal)

To some extent, I can understand the separation - Christian counseling and Christian psychology, for example, have flourished as fields on their own, and there is a genuine need for them, since non-Christian counselors and psychologists typically evaluate progress/success/health via different metrics than the ones a Christian would use. However, in some cases, the tendency for Christians to ignore secular authorities on subjects just seems baffling, or worse, ignorant.

I tend to believe any church trying to influence culture should still listen to its critics and to people outside itself. There's genuine danger of any good Christian body becoming an isolated society of zealots, and examples of such are fairly numerous. While we as Christians may often claim to follow the truth, it'd be going a little to far to say we have a monopoly on all truth in every area.

I see my current applied mathematics department as an analogy: we are an interdisciplinary department focusing on real world problems through 1) accurate physical modeling of the problem, 2) sound pure mathematical formulations, and 3) accurate numerical solutions to the problem. We manage large databases of code that run our numerical methods and simulations, but while there is much emphasis on good mathematics and solid engineering/modeling, we seem to have ignored all of what computer science has to say about good coding practices (global variables everywhere, illogical function names, few comments, FORTRAN, no object oriented programming, etc). The result of engineers coding without any consultation of the field of computer science is a code that is mostly functional, but is inflexible, extremely hard for anyone to get used to, difficult to modify and change without breaking lots of things, and very tedious to understand. Likewise, if a church is functional but yet similarly unrelatable and inflexible, I feel like culture might acknowledge what we can do but would never really want to get involved with us.

In the end, I'm reminded of Jesus' admonishing us to be wise as serpents and yet innocent as doves.