I have just finished my thirty-fifth year as an English professor at Houston Christian University (HCU), and I couldn’t be more excited and hopeful. As an increasing number of colleges and universities downplay (and downsize) their traditional liberal arts core requirements, HCU has chosen to double down on the centrality and indispensability of the core.
I will, in what follows, share what I have learned over the last three-and-a-half decades as a professor at a Christian university committed to integrating faith and learning and placing all areas of the institution under the Lordship of Christ. By doing so, I hope to demonstrate that a healthy liberal arts core is more, not less, important in a university that holds a biblical view of God, man, and the universe.
First, those who defend the liberal arts invariably fall back on that handy, catch-all phrase: critical thinking skills. While it is true that a strong liberal arts core enhances such skills, that is not its sole purpose. Too often, the critical-thinking defense is reduced to pure pragmatism, as if a class in literature, history, philosophy, or Latin is valuable only because it helps students understand the “big” words in their business or STEM textbooks. Just so, in his magisterial Leisure, the Basis of Culture, Josef Pieper criticizes the commonly-held notion that the only legitimate function of leisure is to enable employees to work all the harder when they get back to the office or factory.
The primary purpose of the liberal arts is not skill training but character formation. It is true that a robust core curriculum strengthens reading comprehension, introduces the actors and events of history, and provides access to Plato’ Republic and Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics. But it does something far more important: it inculcates in students a desire to read and wrestle with books that expand their understanding of themselves and their fellow man, a longing to participate in human flourishing through a concerted and creative use of their gifts, and a yearning to live lives of virtue that will allow them to fulfill what Aristotle called their telos: their purposeful end.
When properly taught, the liberal arts produce life-long learners with a passion to analyze and assess, but also enjoy and share, whatever they read or hear or see that contributes to the good, the true, or the beautiful. They are humble truth-seekers who, like Socrates, understand and accept their potential and their limits. They are confident but cautious, eager but not impulsive. They want to know everything, not as a computer does (as discrete packets of knowledge), but as a rational creature with a soul does (as parts of a greater whole). Not just reason, but imagination as well; not just analysis, but synthesis; not just facts, but meaning.
What I have written thus far can be implemented by a traditional secular university that respects the Greco-Roman, Judeo-Christian canon and that takes seriously its duty to shape virtuous, morally self-regulating citizens. A university that is undergirded and nourished by a Christian worldview, one that desire to “fully know and make known God,” can go much further. It can, to paraphrase HCU’s core curriculum mission statement, study, celebrate, and be humbled by the complexity of God’s design, our nature and status as creatures made in the image of God (imago Dei in Latin), and the promise that our world will someday be redeemed and renewed.
I am old enough to remember watching Carl Sagan’s Cosmos on television in the Fall of 1980. Again and again, Sagan would look up at the sky and, with an expression of awe and wonder on his face, wax lyrical about the millions and billions of stars that surround our tiny planet. He was quite a showman, but he should not have named his series Cosmos. Cosmos in Greek means ordered universe, but Sagan, the materialist/naturalist, did not believe it was ordered: like Richard Dawkins after him, he perceived in nature only the appearance of design. The Greek root for cosmos is the same root for cosmetics; for the medievals, along with the virtuous pagans of Greece and Rome, recognized, as Sagan did not, that the universe is the ornament of God.
Some defenders of the liberal arts forget that a traditional core curriculum does not confine itself to the humanities but includes classes in science and math as well. A core that rests upon a biblical understanding of reality is one that will discern design in every area of study. Math, physics, and cosmology classes should alert students to the fine-tuned numerical ratios that hold our universe together; biology and chemistry classes should uncover the specified complexity that runs all the way down from our brain and nervous system to the microscopic DNA that is the blueprint of life.
Disciplines that stand between the humanities and the sciences—anthropology, sociology, psychology, pedagogy—should teach students how to distinguish random groupings of rocks from Stonehenge, natural instincts from true altruism, cognitive science from the study of the soul (which is what “psychology” means in Greek), social engineering from the instilling of virtue. As for the humanities, the complexity of God’s design can be found in literature that mimics the metanarrative of creation, fall, redemption, restoration, and glorification, in the providential history of nations that know (and do not know) the God of the Bible, in the eternal questions asked by philosophers and theologians, in the transcendent beauty that illuminates the finest art and music, and in the grammar of dead and living languages that points to the Logos.
In addition to opening students’ eyes to the design that runs rampant through the cosmos, the natural world, and every facet of the human experience, a vigorous liberal arts core turns the focus on us as creatures made in God’s image but fallen. The only secure foundation for affirming all nations and establishing real dialogue between people of different ethnicities, religious beliefs, and cultural norms is a firm belief in the imago Dei.
A Darwinian worldview that attributes growth and change to natural selection will not be able to affirm the inherent value and worth of all human beings, regardless of sex, race, class, culture, faith, technological advancements, government structures, or philanthropic institutions. But it will also, minus the fall, be unable to judge between cultures to determine which comes closest to divine moral-ethical standards. Man is neither a soulless object to be manipulated nor a perfectible animal to be reeducated and reprogrammed. We have infinite value, but we are broken. And that brokenness, to paraphrase Solzhenitsyn, does not run through political parties or institutions or ideologies, but through the heart of each individual human being.
A liberal arts core that invites students to take a chronological journey through the literature, history, philosophy, art, music, and science of the classical, early church, medieval, Renaissance, Enlightenment, Romantic, Victorian, modern, and postmodern ages is best equipped to balance the unchangeable nature of the human heart with the unique challenges and discoveries, victories and defeats of each age. When I teach the epics of Homer, Virgil, and Dante, my students learn that no matter how foreign Achilles, Odysseus, Aeneas, and Dante may seem, they are members of the same human race with an essential dignity that cannot be eradicated by disease, conquest, or subjugation. And the same goes for the great statesmen, philosophers, scientists, and artists.
Too often, Christians think that humanism is the great foe to faith. It is not. There is a world of difference between humanism, which believes that the things humans create are valuable and should be preserved, and secular humanism, which believes that we are alone in a world without meaning, purpose, or design. Students who wrestle their way through a carefully constructed liberal arts core will quickly realize that secular humanism is an oxymoron, for if all that exists is our material world, then neither we nor the things we build possess transcendent meaning.
And that leads to the Christian virtue of hope, which promises students that the things they learn are part of a greater plan of redemption and renewal. As a literature professor, I experience great joy when I see in the eyes of my students that they have made a connection between what I just taught them and something they learned that week in their history, philosophy, theology, or science class. The Christian worldview is uniquely poised to foster an interdisciplinary approach to learning, for it recognizes Christ as the ultimate source of all goodness, truth, and beauty.
Christian universities are built, or should be built, on a foundational belief that matter and flesh are good things created by God. It is true that both are fallen, but equally true that both can and will be redeemed and renewed. What we study has eternal value, not because it was made in the image of God (humans alone bear the imago Dei), but because alongside us, and through us, it will persevere and be transformed. As Paul shares in Romans 8:18-23:
For I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory that is to be revealed to us. For the creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the sons of God. For the creation was subjected to futility, not willingly, but because of him who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to corruption and obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God. For we know that the whole creation has been groaning together in the pains of childbirth until now. And not only the creation, but we ourselves, who have the first fruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly as we wait eagerly for adoption as sons, the redemption of our bodies. (ESV)
Not just us, but all of creation, both the earth below and the cosmos above, has been subjected to futility; but that same creation, both the earth below and the cosmos above, shall be redeemed at the same moment that we ourselves will be redeemed from bondage and corruption into freedom and glory. How exciting, how significant and profound, to teach the liberal arts in the light of such a promise! I can think of no nobler, more effective impetus than this to conduct students on a comprehensive, chronological, coordinated pilgrimage through the greatest books, persons, ideas, and discoveries. Students thus taught will not only make the best parents, parishioners, employees, and citizens; they will be the salt and light our culture needs if it is to endure and flourish.
A university without a strong liberal arts core is not a weak or bad or compromised university; it is not a university at all. And that is more, not less, true for a university that claims to serve and worship a God who designed the cosmos, created us in his image, and promises to restore and renew us and our world at the end of all things.
