The Gospel and the Mind E-Book

Bradley G. Green

• Herausgeber: Crossway
• Kategorie: Religion und Spiritualität
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 269

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2010

Beschreibung

History demonstrates that wherever the cross is planted, the academy follows. But history alone cannot demonstrate why this is—and must be—the case. Green engages theology and philosophy to prove that the Christian vision of God, mankind, and the world provides the necessary precondition for and enduring foundation of meaningful intellectual life. The Gospel and the Mind, deeply rooted in Augustinian and Reformed thought, shows that core principles of the West's Christian inheritance—such as creation and the importance of history, the centrality of a telos to all things, and the logos and the value of words—form the matrix of any promising and sustainable intellectual life. More than a lament of the state of the evangelical mind or even an argument for the primacy of a Christian worldview, The Gospel and the Mind is a paradigm-shifting declaration that the life of the mind starts at the cross.

Leseprobe

“In this perceptive, thoughtful, and very readable book, Brad Green shows that historic Christian witness is always accompanied by an intellectual awakening. Where the Christ life is authentically present, it proves to be intrinsically fruitful for education because to be a Christian, essentially, is to think as well as act in a new way. Anti-intellectualism, by contrast, is a sign that full obedience to the gospel is lacking. Green provides a very helpful perspective on what has become a central issue for the church in our time.”

David Lyle Jeffrey, Distinguished Professor of Literature and the Humanities, Baylor University

“Bradley Green poses the question as to why there is so little written on the relationship between the cross and the life of the mind. His book is a riveting response to this lack. In an age when postmodernism seems to have reinforced the oft-held notions that the human mind and knowledge are unimportant, we need some guidance on the authentic Christian attitude toward both. With a focus on creation and the cross, Green’s study looks at the relationship between biblical Christianity and the human intellectual endeavor. He argues with great clarity that the postmodern age is no longer interested in knowledge, and that only by a return to the Christian view of both past and future can the present have real meaning.This is a much-needed and timely response to the contemporary Zeitgeist.”

Graeme Goldsworthy, Visiting Lecturer in Hermeneutics, Moore Theological College, Sydney, Australia

“The Gospel and the Mind gets to the heart of the fact that Christianity is in truth addressed to the human mind, both in its right ordering and in its critique of a disorder of mind.While keeping clear the distinction of faith and reason, Christianity has long sought their proper relationship.There is no belief against mind and no mind against belief. Bradley Green spells out this tradition in a welcome reflection on the coherence of Christianity.”

James V. Schall, Professor of Political Philosophy, Georgetown University

“The Enlightenment teaching that reason is a neutral universal act of thought free of tradition has been as decisively refuted as any philosophical theory can be. But the question remains of how to understand the embeddedness of reason in tradition. Professor Green makes a convincing argument that Christianity contains just those foundational beliefs about reality that make the life of the mind possible. Christians who for two centuries have anxiously tried to conform their teachings to Enlightenment reason will discover—perhaps to their astonishment—that it is the gospel that makes reason in its fullest sense possible.”

Donald Livingston, Professor of Philosophy, Emory University

“Readers who take up and read The Gospel and the Mind will discover a patient, methodical, and exceedingly well-informed treatise on the intellectual life. Brad Green’s book succeeds where many books on the Christian mind or Christian world-view fail. Like Augustine, to whom he regularly returns, Green keeps his sights focused on the beginning and the end and the cross between—on the gospel of Christ and the Christ of the gospel, in whom alone is our hope for renewing the mind.”

Peter Leithart, Pastor, Trinity Reformed Church, Moscow, Idaho; Contributing Editor, Touchstone

“Brad Green has written a very accessible book on the intellectual life and its related responsibilities for Christians and the church. He has pursued his central aim by careful appeals to great thinkers in the history of the church: for example, Athanasius,Augustine,and Aquinas.Dr.Green not only grounds his theological work in both creation and the gospel, but also takes on the nihilistic assumptions regarding words and their meaning as espoused in deconstructionism. I gladly commend this work to anyone looking for a clear and thoughtful approach to the church’s responsibilities for shaping and preserving the great intellectual traditions so crucial to human flourishing.”

Robert B. Sloan Jr., President, Houston Baptist University

“This remarkable and groundbreaking book is an adventure to read. Bradley Green argues convincingly that there is a strong link between Christian faith and the intellectual life of human beings. Given the Christian theological vision of God, human beings, and the world, learning has both a foundation and an animating purpose. Apart from Christian views of creation, history, and redemption, learning is adrift and without ultimate purpose. I strongly recommend this book for all those who long for the recovery of a vibrant intellectual life in our time.”

Stephen Davis, Russell K. Pitzer Professor of Philosophy, Claremont McKenna College

“Brad Green has given us a superb contribution to one of the most important discussions of the new millennium, that of the relation of the head to the heart. His affirmation of the significance of the past and his discussion of a much-neglected feature of the debate—purpose—are particularly worthy aspects of this wide-ranging book. His thorough, though brief, analysis of language and the crucial role it plays in discovering meaning for our lives is one we all need to read. His conclusion is that, ultimately, only an intellect that understands and affirms God’s redemption of humanity in Christ will provide a way out of the despair of late modernity.”

Drew Trotter, Executive Director, Consortium of Christian Study Centers

“Brad Green turns relentless scholarship and a forensic eye on a set of controversial questions: Does one’s mind matter when it comes to faith? And is it possible not to be a Christian and still have a genuine intellectual life? Contrasting the premodern assumption of the beatific vision with nihilistic modernism, Green makes a compelling case for the necessity of Christianity, both for personal fulfillment and for cultural progress. In the end, Green makes a compelling call for an evangelical reexamination of the need to shape minds in the context of Christ’s cross.”

Charles T. Evans, Executive Consultant, Paideia, Inc.; coauthor, Wisdom and Eloquence:A Christian Paradigm for Classical Learning

“I found Brad Green’s The Gospel and the Mind engaging and helpful. Not another abstract, mind-numbing discussion of ‘the Christian mind,’ his book is a patient guide for those wanting to deepen their faith. It is a well-reasoned reminder that the true salvation of not only our souls and bodies but also our minds begins at Calvary.”

James M. Kushiner, Executive Editor, Touchstone: A Journal of Mere Christianity

To Caleb Conaway Green Daniel Braun Green Victoria Glynn GreenNullus intellectus sine cruce.

The Gospel and the Mind: Recovering and Shaping the Intellectual Life Copyright © 2010 by Bradley G. Green

Published by Crossway 1300 Crescent Street Wheaton, Illinois 60187

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher, except as provided for by USA copyright law.

Cover design: Tobias’ Outerwear for Books Cover photo: Wikipedia Interior design and typesetting: Lakeside Design Plus First printing 2010 Printed in the United States of America

Unless otherwise indicated, Scripture quotations are from the ESV® Bible (The Holy Bible, English Standard Version®), copyright © 2001 by Crossway. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Scripture quotations marked NASB are from The New American Standard Bible.® Copyright © The Lockman Foundation 1960, 1962, 1963, 1968, 1971, 1972, 1973, 1975, 1977, 1995. Used by permission.

All emphases in Scripture quotations have been added by the author.

Trade paperback ISBN:

978-1-4335-1442-5

PDF ISBN:

978-1-4335-1443-2

Mobipocket ISBN:

978-1-4335-1444-9

ePub ISBN: 

978-1-4335-2420-2

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Green, Bradley G., 1965–          The gospel and the mind : recovering and shaping the intellectual life / Bradley G. Green.

                p. cm.          Includes bibliographical references and index.          ISBN 978-1-4335-1442-5 (tp)

         1. Thought and thinking—Religious aspects—Christianity. 2. Intellect—Religious aspects—Christianity. I. Title. BV4598.4.G74 2010 234.01—dc22

2010019843

Crossway is a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers.

VP         21   20   19   18   17   16   15   14   13   12   11   10 14   13   12   11   10     9     8     7     6     5     4     3     2     1

  Acknowledgments

9

  Introduction

11

1 Creation and the Importance of the Past

31

The Centrality of Creation

32

The Centrality of History

39

Conclusion

50

2 The Centrality of a Telos to All Things

55

The Notion of Teleology in Contemporary Secular Thought

61

Roger Scruton

Allan Bloom

Back to the Beginning

67

The Liberal Arts

68

Athanasius and the Way Things Ought to Be

70

Augustine and the Eschatological Vision

72

Conclusion

76

3 Understanding and the Cross

81

Augustine and Faith Seeking Understanding

82

The Will, Sin, and the Possibility of Knowledge

84

The Cross and the Mind in the New Testament

87

Christ and the Life of the Mind in Christian History

93

Augustine

Hugh of St. Victor and Richard of St. Victor

Bonaventure

Thomas Aquinas

Conclusion

99

4 Words, Language, and Modern Culture

103

Wordish Creatures

104

Words, Cultures, and Community

106

Language and the Modern Age

107

Derrida, Deconstructionism, and the Nature of Language

115

Conclusion

122

5 Toward a Christian Understanding of Words

125

The God Who Speaks, Creates, and Rules

125

Creation

127

Why the Incarnation Matters

132

Christ the Teacher

137

Words, Redemption, and Telos

140

A Better “Logocentrism”

142

The Possibility of Repentance

143

Conclusion

144

6 The Moral Nature of Knowledge and the Human Heart

149

To Know God Is to Honor Him

150

Back to the Beginning

152

Creaturely Knowing by Grace

161

The Inescapability of the Moral Nature of Knowledge

162

Knowing and the Nature of the Human Heart

164

Augustine, Knowledge, and Love

165

Calvin on Knowing and Honoring God

171

Conclusion

172

  Epilogue

175

  General Index

183

  Scripture Index

191

There are too many people to thank when one completes a book. My friend Michele Bennett first suggested I contact Crossway. It has been a blessing to work with folks there. Justin Taylor and editor Thom Notaro were professional and helpful through and through. My sincere thanks to all my Crossway friends.

Several friends read all or part of the manuscript and shared their thoughts: Dave Gobbett, Michael Garrett, and Phil Long—I thank you.This manuscript was completed during a research leave granted by my employer, Union University.At Union two colleagues were particularly encouraging as I tried to move this book to completion: my sincere thanks go to Hal Poe and Ray Van Neste. Also, Daryl Charles has been a great encourager of my scholarship. Thanks Daryl.

I cannot imagine a better place to write than Tyndale House (Cambridge, England), where I finished this book while sitting at desk 13, overlooking Selwyn Gardens. I thank Pete Williams and Tyndale friends for a wonderful research leave. I also owe many thanks to friends and acquaintances who took the time to read the manuscript and offer endorsements.

Portions of this book have appeared in print before, if in quite a different form, and are used with permission. Some material came from “Augustine, Modernity, and the Recovery of True Education,” Churchman (December 2009); “Theological and Philosophical Foundations,” in Shaping a Christian Worldview: The Foundations of Christian Higher Education, ed. David S. Dockery and Gregory Alan Thorn-bury (Nashville: Broadman and Holman, 2002). I was writing two chapters for other volumes as I worked on this book, and some ideas from those two chapters, if not text, show up in chapter 6 of this book.Those two chapters are “Colin Gunton and the Theological Origin of Modernity,” in The Theology of Colin Gunton,ed.Lincoln Harvey (London:T&T Clark,2010);“Richard Weaver,the Gospel,and the Restoration of Culture,” in Thriving in Babylon: Essays in Honor of A. J. Conyers, ed. David Capes and J. Daryl Charles (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2010).

My family was patient as this book moved closer and closer to completion. I thank Dianne, my wife, and children Caleb, Daniel, and Victoria for their patience as Daddy finished this book. Dianne is patient with me in many things— this book is just one example.Thank you,Dianne.This book is dedicated to Caleb, Daniel, and Victoria.The material may be a little over your heads right now, children, but one day it may be helpful to you. I hope it is.

What does the gospel have to do with the life of the mind? Before starting doctoral studies in theology,I had discovered the Reformation, and I suspect every sermon I preached for a year during this time kept circling back to one of Paul’s key summaries of the gospel—1 Corinthians 15, where Paul speaks of four that’s of the gospel: that Christ was killed, that Christ was buried, that Christ arose, that Christ made many appearances. I had discovered precious truths about the gospel of Jesus Christ, and my life would never be the same. I had discovered that the gospel is first and foremost a set of historical events that occurred outside of me and for me.This gospel,first outside of me,was then applied to me through faith, and I discovered the glory of Christ crucified. I knew that the cross is central to any proper understanding of what it means to be an evangelical. I was not sure, however, how it all might fit together.

Another experience had lodged itself in my head. I had heard D. Bruce Lockerbie speak on a number of occasions. He is fond of saying, “Wherever the gospel is planted, the academy follows.”That is,wherever the gospel takes hold of a culture, you inevitably see academies, schools, and institutions of learning develop. They develop not only to teach people how to read and understand the Bible, as important and central as that is. But wherever the gospel goes, it seems to generate intellectual deliberation and inquiry. In one sense this book is an extended effort simply to ask why that is. What is the link between the Christian gospel and intellectual deliberation, between the Christian faith and learning? Why has the Christian faith always seemed to spur on the intellectual life? What is the connection, indeed, between the gospel and the mind?

As a father of (then) an infant, I had dreamed of what kind of education I wanted to offer my child. I began to get to know new friends and colleagues at Union University while completing my PhD (that dissertation still had to be finished), and some of us began to dream about starting a school for our children and other children in the community. As I wrestled with how to articulate the Christian theological moorings of education, I read Colossians 1:15ff., particularly verses 21–22: “And you, who once were alienated and hostile in mind, doing evil deeds, he has now reconciled in his body of flesh by his death, in order to present you holy and blameless and above reproach before him.”

Two interrelated truths impressed themselves upon my mind: (1) our alienation and hostility toward God as sinners includes the alienation and hostility of our minds;(2) it is through the cross that this alienation and hostility are overcome.As I thought through this,I realized that the seeds of a radically evangelical approach to the intellectual life were present. If in his death Christ redeemed all of who we are, that must include our intellectual life. Christ did not die to redeem part of us, but he died to redeem all of who we are—including our minds.

In one sense this monograph is an attempt to explicate this fundamental insight and to wrestle with the question, what does the gospel have to do with the intellectual life? Hence the main title of this book, The Gospel and the Mind, comes from my interest in exploring the relationship between the atonement and the life of the mind, an interest triggered at least in part by meditating on Colossians 1:21–22.The outline of this book was essentially generated in an afternoon at my office at Union University. However, the argument of the book extends beyond the question of the cross (narrowly considered) to include five main interrelated Christian theological themes and their relevance to the intellectual life:

The realities of creation and history

The notion of a telos or goal to all of history

The cross of Christ

The nature of language

Knowledge, morality, and action

Augustine (354–430) once wrote that he had come to understand what he believed through the process of writing: “I must also acknowledge, incidentally, that by writing I have myself learned much that I did not know.”1 As I have read and written and rewritten, two main interlocking theses have emerged, and these two theses function as the heart and soul of this book: (1) the Christian vision of God, man, and the world provides the necessary precondition of the recovery of any meaningful intellectual life; (2) the Christian vision of God, man, and the world offers a particular, unique understanding of what the intellectual life might look like. As I wrote and rewrote, I found myself at first thinking I was just arguing the first thesis—the Christian vision of things provides the necessary precondition for the life of the mind. But the more I wrote, I realized that a complementary (and interlocking) thesis was emerging—the Christian vision of things offers a particular understanding and construal of the life of the mind.

In writing a book on the Christian mind, I am all too conscious of my own shortcomings. For my defense, I take my cue from Dorothy Sayers. Toward the beginning of her seminal essay on education and potential education reform, “The Lost Tools of Learning,” Sayers concedes that her critics might ask why she has any authority to hold forth on education. Her answer is simple. Though not a formal educator, she was a student her whole life, much of it spent in formal education.2 As someone who invested much of her life in schooling, she was confident she had at least some authority to speak on the matter.

I likewise have spent many years in school. And I have been teaching at various levels for some twelve years. Like many students, I came to value education much later in the game than is wise.While gaining this appreciation certainly was a process, looking back I seem to have realized abruptly that something was wrong. Why were so many historical events, so many older authors, so many seminal texts and works foreign to me? I suspect that I wasn’t the only young person who would find himself at a dinner party or conference, nodding in agreement with others’ observations, posing with a knowing look while asking myself, “Now who was Anselm, and which century did he live in?” As I have wrestled with the realization that I indeed missed something along the way, I have tried both to rectify my own situation and so to act and live that things will be different for my children and other children in my community.

Having gone through school and now made the transition to teaching at a small liberal arts college, I have discovered that others have had similar experiences. They have come to the realization that they really have missed something crucial in their education.And it is important to emphasize that this is not simply the mature act of realizing that our knowledge is minuscule compared to all there is to know. What I am speaking of is not simply a humility that comes with age. I am describing a more troubling reality among my contemporaries marked by a genuine ignorance of the past, a lack of grounding in the cultural and intellectual inheritance of the West, and perhaps most sadly, no sort of remorse or recognition that this situation might be a bad thing.

In the end, Aldous Huxley’s vision in Brave New World might be truer to reality than George Orwell’s 1984 or Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451. In 1984 and Fahrenheit 451 some people develop a passion or concern for what is right and for not succumbing to the forces that would rob them of their dignity and purpose as human beings. But Huxley may indeed be more accurate: in Brave New World there is very little genuine concern about how culture and society have developed. The fact that the state is all-encompassing and all-controlling, and that a scientistic worldview permeates the culture, is of little concern to most characters in the novel. The great majority of them are no longer living, in one sense, in that they have given up (if even unwittingly) on any sort of truly meaningful life.3

This book perhaps has its origin in my own theological studies at seminary and later at a university. I was simultaneously wrestling with modern skepticism about the possibility of knowledge—whether of God or otherwise—and with so-called postmodern skepticism of or challenges to knowledge. While I have since come to the conviction that the modern and so-called postmodern challenges are cut from the same cloth, these challenges set me on a course from which I have ultimately never departed.4 During and since my formal time of study, those challenges have always been in the back of my mind. Part of what this book attempts to do is to answer those legitimate questions and challenges, and I have attempted to do so by arguing that it is the Christian vision (and, ultimately, only the Christian vision of God, man, and the world) that provides the necessary substructure, or precondition, for meaningful and enduring intellectus (understanding).

One of the Christian faith’s great insights is that nothing lies outside the good and providential workings of God.This includes the life of the mind. Indeed, some of the church’s earliest and most profound thinkers were making the connection between the reality of God and the possibility of human understanding. For example, Origen (born ca. AD 185) wrote:

Truly He is that light which illuminates the whole understanding of those who are capable of receiving truth, as is said in Psalms 36, “In Thy light we shall see light.” For what other light of God can be named, “in which any one sees light,” save an influence of God, by which a man, being enlightened, either thoroughly sees the truth of all things, or comes to know God Himself, who is called the truth: Such is the meaning of the expression, “In Thy light we shall see light”; i.e., in Thy word and wisdom which is Thy Son, in Himself we shall see Thee the Father. Because He is called light, shall He be supposed to have any resemblances to the light of the sun? Or how should there be the slightest ground for imagining, that from the corporeal light any one could derive the cause of knowledge, and come to the understanding of the truth?5

Similarly,Origen says that God“is the mind and source from which all intellectual nature or mind takes its beginning.”6 Indeed, Origen argues that as image bearers we are shaped in such a way that knowledge of divine things is possible.7

In stark contrast to the Christian tradition, the modern age—which has often constricted itself to seeing knowledge as chiefly available through the senses—has often balked at affirming the possibility of knowledge of the supernatural, or suprasensible reality. But as Origen wrote, “It is one thing to see, and another to know: to see and to be seen is a property of bodies; to know and to be known, an attribute of intellectual being.”8

Origen, like Augustine who will follow him, construes the intellectual life in theological, indeed christological, terms. Thus, Origen quotes John 1:9 regarding Jesus, “He is the true light, which enlightens every man that cometh into this world.” And referring to Matthew 11:27, Origen speaks of Christ as “the image by which we come to the knowledge of the Father, whom no one knows save the Son, and he to whom the Son is pleased to reveal Him.” Origen continues, “The method of revealing Him is through the understanding.”9

What I am trying to do in this work might best be portrayed in contradistinction to two brief statements in Roger Scruton’s book An Intelligent Person’s Guide to Modern Culture. In the preface Scruton summarizes his project succinctly: “Culture, I suggest, has a religious root and a religious meaning. This does not mean that you have to be religious in order to be cultivated. But it does mean that the point of being cultivated cannot, in the end, be explained without reference to the nature and value of religion.”10And in his “Conclusions” he says, “Culture is rooted in religion, and . . . the true effort of a high culture is to perpetuate the common culture from which it grew—to perpetuate it not as religion, but as art, with the ethical life transfixed within the aesthetic gaze.”11

Scruton recognizes that cultural development and sustenance have a religious root. There is something about religious conviction (or at least about some religious convictions) that is inextricably tied to cultural development. Indeed, wherever the cross is planted the academy follows. Scruton is happy to cut the Gordian knot and say that one can actually have the cultural development without the religious root itself.12 One of the key burdens of this book is to suggest that without certain key theological realities and commitments, the cultivation of an enduring intellectual and cultural life becomes increasingly difficult, if not impossible.

In short, there is an inseparable relationship between the reality of the gospel and the cultivation of the intellectual life. When the gospel ceases to permeate and influence a given culture, we often see a confused understanding of the possibility of knowledge and the meaning of our thoughts. Ultimately, where the gospel is not holding sway, it should not surprise us to see the subtle or not-so-subtle disintegration of, or rejection of, meaningful intellectual engagement and activity.

A number of recent works have explored similar territory, some from more and some from less explicitly Christian theological moorings. For example, in his recent book Education’s End,Anthony T. Kronman laments that colleges and universities have “given up on the meaning of life.”13 C. John Sommerville, in his recent book The Decline of the Secular University, takes aim at the secularism of the contemporary university and offers an argument for the necessity of religion. Sommerville observes, “Universities are not giving us much practice at formulating worldviews, in [their] haste to fit us for our jobs.”14 The thesis of the present monograph has some kinship to Sommerville’s work. Sommerville repeats the lament of Clark Kerr, former president of the California university system, who says that universities have “no great vision to lure them on, only the need for survival.”15

This lack of vision will occupy us in the second chapter. True education requires an animating and inspiring vision, which is the very thing the gospel provides, and which is the very thing missing in most construals of education today. I particularly resonate with Sommerville when he writes of “the intellectual void that results when religious categories are systematically rejected.”16 I will be arguing that the Christian vision of God, man, and the world provides the most meaningful and coherent presuppositional framework for the intellectual life. Again, Sommerville is correct when he writes that “the academy needs to learn to speak theologically.”17 All intellectual discourse is—at a very fundamental level—theological, and the failure to appreciate this has most certainly led Christian thinkers and intellectuals to construe their own intellectual and academic endeavors in ways that are not as theologically robust as they should be.

Oliver O’Donovan notes that many Western cultural institutions persist even though we have no idea why we should show allegiance to them: “So Western civilization finds itself the heir of political institutions and traditions which it values without any clear idea why, or to what extent, it values them.”18 In an analogous way, we are accustomed to believing that knowledge, meaning, and communication should all be affirmed as real and important, but we may not always draw the connection that all of these realities—in some way, shape, or form—are ultimately defensible only in the light of the vision of God, man, and the world that the Christian faith provides.

Thus Robert W. Jenson can speak of “the—barely— existing intellectual world.”19 In commenting on Allan Bloom’s book The Closing of the American Mind, Jenson says, “The nation built on Enlightenment has not merely become ignorant and unthinking, or even anti-intellectual in Richard Hofstadter’s sense, but is becoming incapable of thought.”20Incapable of thought. It is the purpose of this book to tease out Jenson’s insight. Is there a connection between the loss of the gospel’s hold on the modern world and the modern world’s increasing skepticism about the viability, purpose, meaning, and possibility of an intellectual life? Again, out of this question emerge the two theses of the book summarized above:

TheChristianvisionofGod,man,andtheworldprovidesthe necessary precondition for the recovery of any meaningful intellectual life.

The Christian vision of God, man, and the world offers a particular, unique understanding of what the intellectual life might look like.

Jenson also writes, “It is the insight of the whole line from Rousseau to Nietzsche that reason undoes itself because it undoes God, without whom reason—as every other interesting virtue—is groundless. . . . The university is to be democracy’s temple, but it is to house no God.”21 Jenson’s thesis forms the backdrop of this book—“reason undoes itself because it undoes God.” As the gospel loses hold on a culture—or as people lose hold of the gospel— the rationale for the use of reason (and the intellectual life more broadly) becomes inexplicable. Noting the decline of the liberal arts in American institutions of higher learning, Jenson comments,“It seems likely that the liberal character of America’s colleges stands and falls with their ideologically and liturgically Christian character.”22 Hence, we should not be surprised to see in our own day (and we have seen it for some time) an increasing confusion about the possibility of the intellectual life and a jaded cynicism or flippancy about the importance and possibility of knowledge.

Jenson has argued in a way similar to how I am arguing here. In a culture denuded of anything meaningful in the public square, people will turn to an endless variety of things to find meaning in the private realm.Thus Jenson writes,“It is no accident at all that mystery-cults and esoteric wisdoms flourish in California or Minneapolis as once in old Corinth or Alexandria.” But it is his next statement that most resonates with the line of argument I am advancing:“Neither is it an accident that the liberal arts languish.”23

As we will later see, Jenson argues that the liberal arts are most fully realized in ecclesial settings, or at least in settings where the church is vibrant and fulfilling her calling. Thus the Greeks could hear “the gospel as a promise that specific humanity, just as Athens had evoked it, was not a delusion, and they could see the church as a community in which specific humanity could occur.”24 Likewise,“where freedom is abstract and arbitrary, and needs no community, neither does it need arts. It is again no accident that where historical relativism rules, the liberal arts die.”25Jenson concludes, “The gospel gives hope for the freedom that the liberal arts serve.The liberal arts give hope that the free person whom the gospel evokes can actually exist.”26

In a related essay Jenson argues:“If scholars of the liberal arts wish to pursue and maintain their calling, they must emulate the church’s use of Scripture. If they will not, it is likely that the process now so far along will grind to its completion and the liberal arts will disappear altogether.” In fact, “the church has throughout the history of our culture been in its communal entity the very possibility of the liberal arts.”27 Jenson argues further:

If an academic institution is to teach the liberal arts, it must embrace within its cognitive grasp Aristotle and Isaiah and Machiavelli and Luther and the future genius who will yet unify field theory, as partners of a single continuing conversation that is identical with its own single communal reality.That it can do only by faith in the unity of truth, which is to say, in God.28