During my “tween” years, I devoured novels about Christian boys of my age. For example, I read most, if not all, of the Moody Press thirty-six-volume series about the Sugar Creek Gang, a group of boys who encouraged each other in maintaining their shared Christian identity. Even though I am grateful for the “wholesome” image of boyhood those stories conveyed, I was aware that the boys from Sugar Creek showed no signs of struggling with many of my own quite human anxieties and temptations. But I am grateful that at a time when I was surrounded by peers whom my evangelical youth leaders would consider “the wrong crowd, ” the “wholesome” image of boyhood portrayed in those Sugar Creek stories did help to reinforce my sense of Christian identity.
While in high school, though, I discovered a fictional peer with whom I could more closely identify in acknowledging my inner struggle: Holden Caulfield, in J.D. Salinger’s 1951 novel Catcher in the Rye. I was fully aware that Holden would not have been accepted as a member of the Sugar Creek Gang. He was explicit about his attraction to girls and about enjoying various rebellious fantasies. But while I did secretly admire him, I also wished that he could get to know my Christian friends from Sugar Creek. I was convinced that each would benefit from honest conversations with each other—conversations that I was actually having in my own soul!
In my freshman year of college, one of my professors cited a saying that struck me as quite profound: “Nothing human is alien to me.” He attributed the quotation to Ralph Waldo Emerson, but I later learned that it originated with Terence, a Roman playwright in the second century B.C. In any event, I was so taken with the saying that I typed it on a note card and taped it above my desk in my dorm room. I saw the saying as something I could cite to my Sugar Creek friends. My openness to Holden Caulfield’s struggles and joys was confirmed by my undergraduate exposure to diverse human experiences in my studies of literature and history.
While I had a strong sense that my conviction that “Nothing human is alien” was compatible with my Christian commitments, I wasn’t clear how to make the case theologically. Nor was I reassured by my early exposure to the writings of Calvinists like Gordon Clark and Cornelius Van Til, who placed a strong emphasis on ”the antithesis” between belief and unbelief. That doctrine–which I still accept in a nuanced version—led me at the time to wonder whether my fondness for the Terence quotation was naive. Still, I had a hard time convincing myself that what I was learning from and about non-Christians amounted to nothing more than a catalog of erroneous thoughts.
Years later, though, I was pleased to find my Calvinist hero Abraham Kuyper expressing approval of Terence’s dictum. Kuyper argued that while the loving bond that holds the Christian community together “is much stronger, firmer, and more intimate” than the bond based on our human ties, that does not mean that we should view the human bond as less important. The unity that we experience with fellow Christians, Kuyper noted, “is not independent of the fellowship of our shared humanness but added to it.” We must be careful, then, said Kuyper, to recognize the “double root of fellowship.” What we experience so strongly within the Christian community is the second part of the “double work of the Holy Spirit,” which is also “causing our hearts to be drawn to all that belong to us by virtue of our human kinship.” It is the Spirit who is encouraging us to see to it that –and here is Kuyper’s endorsement of Terence–“nothing be alien to us that is human.”[1] That way of seeing things continues to inspire and motivate me in my explorations of human realities.
Christians do have to set some boundaries here, though. We know that included in the “human” are sinful behaviors that we must avoid. What it is like to be a child abuser must forever be alien to me. But I should make an effort, if the occasion presents itself, to understand a ten-year-old girl’s experience of being abused. Forming relationships, reading novels, watching films—these are among the things that can help us to gain empathy for the complex realities of what it means to be human. Our example in this is the Savior himself, who became a human baby in Bethlehem to apply his redemptive power to “the hopes and fears of all the years.”
One of the important documents issued by the Roman Catholic bishops when Vatican II came to an end in 1965 had the title “The Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World.” I find the opening words of that document to be very moving ones regarding what I have been discussing here: “The joy and hope, the grief and anguish of the people of our time, especially of those who are poor and afflicted in any way, are the joy and hope, the grief and anguish of the followers of Christ as well. Nothing that is genuinely human fails to find an echo in [Christian] hearts.”
I have thought much during my sixty-plus years of teaching and scholarship about finding echoes of the genuinely human in what we are exposed to on our campuses. The evangelical approach to higher education during my undergraduate days often struck me as designed to appeal to the Christian folks at Sugar Creek. These days we are certainly more open—in the films and books we assign to our students—to the world of Holden Caulfield. But I also struggle with how this applies to the non-Christian content in the worldviews I have covered in my philosophy courses. Can I encourage students to hear echoes of the genuinely human in the writings of Simone de Beauvoir, Karl Marx, and Friedrich Nietzsche?
And here is an intriguing thought: It might be good preparation for exploring this to have our present-day students and faculty look for echoes of the human in some Sugar Creek Gang and Nancy Drew novels!
[1] Abraham Kuyper, Holy Spirit, trans. Henry De Vries (Eerdmans, 1946), 645.
