Christianity and Intellectual Inquiry: Thinking as Pilgrimage
I am grateful for the generous response of the authors to my review. I appreciate their clarification of the book’s overarching aim: to provide “a framework that increases the capacity of all scholars—whether biologists or poets, accountants or artists, nurses or philosophers—to recognize that faith intertwines with every aspect of their intellectual work,” and to energize “Christian scholars to participate in the broader academy with vigor and confidence.” I also love their beautiful closing vision of faith: that “this is God’s world and that, by God’s grace, humans have the capacity to study and faithfully respond to both the grandeur and the present degradations of God’s creation.”
Without wishing to sound overly apocalyptic, I remain less optimistic about the ongoing durability of the current model of higher education to sustain this picture of meaningful post-secular dialogue. The signs point to continued fragmentation and erosion of the project of liberal education. Apart from the flickering lights of character education, the modern university leaves little room for such dialogue. We are moving further into a post-humanist era of value-free education. The authors are right to insist that the antidote is not false certitude or defensive retrenchment. Still, I am convinced that Christians in both church and academy will only weather the season ahead by deepening their acquaintance with our own resources for thinking about the human person and the value of education.
For this reason, I found the high-speed survey of the history of Christian views on faith and learning in part one less useful as a guide to these resources and traditions. The “four pathways of intellectual pilgrimage” would have been significantly strengthened by a more sustained account of the virtues and of the human person, for whom these virtues are constitutive of flourishing. What Christians now need to provide is not merely a defense of intellectual inquiry, but an account of the human person for whom such inquiry is a constitutive element of our overall good and core to what it means to be human.
This, in fact, emerges in the final lines of the authors’ response: we humans “have the capacity to study and faithfully respond to . . . creation.” Yes! It is precisely this widened account of the human person and the virtues associated with intellectual pilgrimage that secures the enduring value of education for the Christian imagination. That is an end which is also a beginning—a destination that does not foreclose inquiry but inspires ceaseless exploration. The more precise and concrete we are about this end, the more open the dialogue becomes. And for Christians, the most concrete way to speak about this end is Jesus Christ himself.
I increasingly find myself drawn to Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s approach to Christ and culture: what is needed are richer, more Jesus-centered accounts of every aspect of the Christian life. Such accounts do not alienate us from the culture but enable us to become a more specific blessing to it. My own teacher, Stanley Hauerwas, has long modeled this approach: the deeper Christians go into their concretely, Christ-centered vocabularies of the virtues, the more fully they are able to engage the wider secular university. This may not be the calling of every Christian scholar, but it is surely the task of those who seek to mine Christianity for a model of intellectual inquiry.
