The Liberal Arts E-Book

Gene C. Fant Jr.

• Herausgeber: Crossway
• Kategorie: Religion und Spiritualität
• Serie: Reclaiming the Christian Intellectual Tradition
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 157

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2012

Beschreibung

An excellent liberal arts education holds purpose-giving and society-shaping power. But how do we tap into that power and make the most of liberal learning for the glory of God? Professor Gene Fant teaches how to maximize a liberal arts education by outlining its history, criticisms, purposes, and benefits. Ultimately, he shows that liberal learning equips us to become spiritually and intellectually empathetic people who are passionate about serving God, the church, and the world.

Leseprobe

“Attention! The liberal arts are for everyone, especially Christians. They introduce us to all the personal dimensions that encompass our lives from beginning to end. But how is this so since so much of the liberal arts seems foreign to us as Christians? Begin with this book and find the answer. Then live out a rich life of knowledge and appreciation of what makes every life worth living.”

James W. Sire, author, The Universe Next Door and Habits of the Mind

~SERIES ENDORSEMENTS~

“Reclaiming the Christian Intellectual Tradition promises to be a very important series of guides—aimed at students—intended both to recover and instruct regarding the Christian intellectual tradition.

Robert B. Sloan, President, Houston Baptist University

“Reclaiming the Christian Intellectual Tradition is an exciting series that will freshly introduce readers to the riches of historic Christian thought and practice. As the modern secular academy struggles to reclaim a semblance of purpose, this series demonstrates why a deeply rooted Christian worldview offers an intellectual coherence so badly needed in our fragmented culture. Assembling a formidable cohort of respected evangelical scholars, the series promises to supply must-read orientations to the disciplines for the next generation of Christian students.”

Thomas Kidd, Department of History, Baylor University

“This new series is exactly what Christian higher education needs to shore up its intellectual foundations for the challenges of the coming decades. Whether students are studying in professedly Christian institutions or in more traditionally secular settings, these volumes will provide a firm basis from which to withstand the dismissive attitude toward biblical thinking that seems so pervasive in the academy today. These titles will make their way onto the required reading lists for Christian colleges and universities seeking to ensure a firm biblical perspective for students, regardless of discipline. Similarly, campus pastors on secular campuses will find this series to be an invaluable bibliography for guiding students who are struggling with coalescing their emerging intellectual curiosity with their developing faith.”

Carl E. Zylstra, President, Dordt College

THE LIBERAL ARTS

OTHER BOOKS IN THE RCIT SERIES:

The Great Tradition of Christian Thinking, David S. Dockery and Timothy George

Literature, Louis Markos

Philosophy, David K. Naugle

Political Thought, Hunter Baker

The Liberal Arts: A Student’s Guide

Copyright © 2012 by Gene C. Fant Jr.

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: Jon McGrath, Simplicated Studio

First printing 2012

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 KJV are from the King James Version of the Bible.

Trade paperback ISBN: 978-1-4335-3123-1

PDF ISBN: 978-1-4335-3124-8

Mobipocket ISBN: 978-1-4335-3125-5

ePub ISBN: 978-1-4335-3126-2

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Fant, Gene C. (Gene Clinton)

The liberal arts : a student’s guide / Gene C. Fant. Jr.

p. cm. (Recovering the Christian intellectual tradition)

Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index.

ISBN 978-1-4335-3123-1 (tp)

1. Education, Humanistic. 2. Christian education. 3. Education—Aims and objectives. I. Title.

LC1011.F17            2012

370.11'2—dc23                                                                   2011049817

Crossway is a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers.

VP         21     20    19     18     17     16     15     14   13    12

14    13   12    11    10     9     8    7    6     5    4     3     2     1

For my parents,

Gene Sr. and Ramona, who dropped me off at college with instructions to follow God into whichever major he might lead me

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

Series Preface

Introduction

1 The Beginning of Wisdom

2 Christian Responses to the Rise of Liberal Learning

3 What’s So Liberal about Liberal Learning?

4 Wisdom and Liberal Learning

5 General Revelation and Liberal Learning

6 Liberal Learning and the Core Curriculum

7 Current Opportunities for (and Challenges to) Liberal Learning

Conclusion

Questions for Reflection

Glossary

Resources for Further Study

Consulting Editors

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I am keenly aware that I stand in the midst of the gushing, powerful stream of the Christian intellectual tradition as an inheritor of other thinkers and as a professor of this tradition to my own students. I am ever grateful for teachers and professors I’ve had along the way, believers and nonbelievers, who have shaped me, challenged me, and provided me with the prodding necessary to overcome my personal limitations.

This project is the culmination of a number of activities commissioned by Union University and several lectures offered over the past few years. I am particularly grateful to Union’s president, David S. Dockery, for his leadership in cultivating a passion for the Christian intellectual tradition in higher education and for his invitation to participate in this important series. I am likewise grateful to our provost, Carla D. Sanderson, and to Barbara McMillin and Justin Barnard, who lead our faculty development and intellectual discipleship programs.

I have participated in many conversations with a number of colleagues on the topic of liberal learning, but I would be remiss if I did not identify Hunter Baker, John Basie, Bryan Dawson, Brad Green, George Guthrie, Scott Huelin, John Netland, Hal Poe, and Gregory Thornbury for their helpful comments and suggestions. I also should mention that our entire departments of mathematics and English have likewise provided me with much to ponder. I am thankful that I work in such a fecund setting. Likewise, I am grateful to my administrative assistant, Suzanne Nadaskay, for her help in so many tasks related to my work and this project.

For the folks at Crossway, especially Justin Taylor, thanks for the patience and the assistance.

Final thanks are due to my family: to Ethan and Emily, I’m glad that Saturdays are about to return to normal (for a while at least!). To Lisa, I cannot express fully the role that you have had in this project in particular. Your intellect and your encouragement are gracious gifts from God.

In all things, glory be to God, whose story I can only repeat.

SERIES PREFACE

Reclaiming the Christian Intellectual Tradition

The Reclaiming the Christian Intellectual Tradition series is designed to provide an overview of the distinctive way the church has read the Bible, formulated doctrine, provided education, and engaged the culture. The contributors to this series all agree that personal faith and genuine Christian piety are essential for the life of Christ followers and for the church. These contributors also believe that helping others recognize the importance of serious thinking about God, Scripture, and the world needs a renewed emphasis at this time in order that the truth claims of the Christian faith can be passed along from one generation to the next. The study guides in this series will enable us to see afresh how the Christian faith shapes how we live, how we think, how we write books, how we govern society, and how we relate to one another in our churches and social structures. The richness of the Christian intellectual tradition provides guidance for the complex challenges that believers face in this world.

This series is particularly designed for Christian students and others associated with college and university campuses, including faculty, staff, trustees, and other various constituents. The contributors to the series will explore how the Bible has been interpreted in the history of the church, as well as how theology has been formulated. They will ask: How does the Christian faith influence our understanding of culture, literature, philosophy, government, beauty, art, or work? How does the Christian intellectual tradition help us understand truth? How does the Christian intellectual tradition shape our approach to education? We believe that this series is not only timely but that it meets an important need, because the secular culture in which we now find ourselves is, at best, indifferent to the Christian faith, and the Christian world—at least in its more popular forms—tends to be confused about the beliefs, heritage, and tradition associated with the Christian faith.

At the heart of this work is the challenge to prepare a generation of Christians to think Christianly, to engage the academy and the culture, and to serve church and society. We believe that both the breadth and depth of the Christian intellectual tradition need to be reclaimed, revitalized, renewed, and revived for us to carry forward this work. These study guides will seek to provide a framework to help introduce students to the great tradition of Christian thinking, seeking to highlight its importance for understanding the world, its significance for serving both church and society, and its application for Christian thinking and learning. The series is a starting point for exploring important ideas and issues such as truth, meaning, beauty, and justice.

We trust that the series will help introduce readers to the apostles, church fathers, Reformers, philosophers, theologians, historians, and a wide variety of other significant thinkers. In addition to well-known leaders such as Clement, Origen, Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, Martin Luther, and Jonathan Edwards, readers will be pointed to William Wilberforce, G. K. Chesterton, T. S. Eliot, Dorothy Sayers, C. S. Lewis, Johann Sebastian Bach, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, George Washington Carver, Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Michael Polanyi, Henry Luke Orombi, and many others. In doing so, we hope to introduce those who throughout history have demonstrated that it is indeed possible to be serious about the life of the mind while simultaneously being deeply committed Christians. These efforts to strengthen serious Christian thinking and scholarship will not be limited to the study of theology, scriptural interpretation, or philosophy, even though these areas provide the framework for understanding the Christian faith for all other areas of exploration. In order for us to reclaim and advance the Christian intellectual tradition, we must have some understanding of the tradition itself. The volumes in this series will seek to explore this tradition and its application for our twenty-first-century world. Each volume contains a glossary, study questions, and a list of resources for further study, which we trust will provide helpful guidance for our readers.

I am deeply grateful to the series editorial committee: Timothy George, John Woodbridge, Michael Wilkins, Niel Nielson, Philip Ryken, and Hunter Baker. Each of these colleagues joins me in thanking our various contributors for their fine work. We all express our appreciation to Justin Taylor, Jill Carter, Allan Fisher, Lane Dennis, and the Crossway team for their enthusiastic support for the project. We offer the project with the hope that students will be helped, faculty and Christian leaders will be encouraged, institutions will be strengthened, churches will be built up, and, ultimately, that God will be glorified.

Soli Deo Gloria David S. Dockery Series Editor

INTRODUCTION

All Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, that the man of God may be complete, equipped for every good work.

—2 Timothy 3:16–17

A few years ago, the father of a college freshman approached me with a question. His student was attending a fairly expensive private school that had retained only nominal relations with its original sponsoring denomination. He expressed disappointment with the lack of a strong religious presence on the campus but was particularly concerned with what his student had related to him about her classes and the general ethos of the campus, which could only be described as hedonistic or fleshly, to use an old-fashioned term.

“You’re an administrator at a Christian college,” he said. “Maybe you can answer this question that I keep asking myself. It follows a kind of syllogism. ‘Knowledge is power,’ right? That’s what we hear all the time; I think it was Francis Bacon who first said it, but I hear it all the time. But what does power do? It corrupts, right? Isn’t that what Lord Acton once said? So if ‘knowledge is power’ and ‘power corrupts,’ and ‘absolute power corrupts absolutely,’ of course, then can you explain to me why I’m paying tens of thousands of dollars to have my student corrupted? That’s what it feels like. I look at my child, and I don’t even recognize who I see after only a semester in that place. What is college for if all it does is foster corruption?”

At the time, all I could do was shake my head and say, “It doesn’t have to be that way,” but I pondered his words carefully over the next few weeks. I realized that a worldly goal, power, would always result in a fleshly education that is quite secular and selfish. Power corrupts because it is the great magneto that drives our selfishness. Whether the power yields wealth or connections or fame or leverage in relationships, unfettered it always leads down the same path: destruction.

I decided to create my own competing syllogism, starting with an entirely different premise. “Education is the search for truth” (a sentiment reflected in the common use of veritas, Latin for “truth,” in college mottoes, such as that of Harvard). “The truth shall set you free” (a specific claim that John 8:32 makes in the New Testament). “Therefore, education can set you free” (freedom in Christ being one of the central themes of Christianity).

This paradigm possesses two distinct differences from the one with which I was originally confronted: the goal of the education and the result of such a pursuit. Truth is not worldly but rather is tied, particularly in the Christian tradition, to the person of Christ. Likewise, freedom is not found in this world but is effected by the divine rescue of persons from their selfish fallen natures, a rescue that is part of the priestly ministry of Christ. Freedom, genuine freedom that transcends the created order, may be found solely within the context of Christ-centered education rather than self-centered training.

The contrasting views of education that I have identified here are crucial to understanding the foundations of the Christian liberal arts tradition and the stark contrast it enjoys when compared against the reality of most educational approaches that are lived out in contemporary culture. Indeed, our culture is the poorer (and the more frail) because of a shift away from liberal learning in general and the Christian liberal arts in particular.

When I was growing up, I always liked Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer movies because of their iconic lion’s roar at the opening. If you look closely, the lion’s head is surrounded by an ornate, circular ribbon panel inscribed with these words: Ars Gratia Artis, “Art for the sake of Art.” Next to E Pluribus Unum, these are the first words in Latin that I remember seeing. “Art for the sake of Art,” which has been a rallying cry for millennia for artists as they have sought to balance their personal vision for their work against its practical value. If, as critics often ask, art is neither decorative nor practical in some way, then what value does it have? For artistic purists, art possesses an innate value that need not bear scrutiny from any source apart from the value that the artist him- or herself has assayed to the work.

Champions of liberal learning often repeat a version of this saying, proclaiming that learning should be undertaken for its own sake, that it has intrinsic value that stands apart from any purely practical values. Generally this is stated as a contrast of sorts between liberal learning and the vocational or practical arts that lead directly to employment. More times than not, the sense is that the latter is inferior to the former, that idealistic purity is superior to more mundane cares. This is the reverse, of course, of an opposite view of education: practicality trumps idealism and abstraction such as one might find in the liberal arts.1

Christians will quickly see the flaws in both viewpoints. We are more than mere human resources, finding purpose in work and business. As the Westminster Catechism answers its opening query: “What is the chief end of man? Man’s chief end is that he glorify God and enjoy Him for ever.”2 The same may be asked of any human endeavor, including education. The primary purpose of education is the glorification of God. The glorification of God typically finds an overflow in the edification of his people, whether the people of faith or humanity as a created race.

Ephesians 4:11–25 describes the way that God uses the various gifts and callings to build up his people to his ultimate glory:

He gave the apostles, the prophets, the evangelists, the shepherds and teachers, to equip the saints for the work of ministry, for building up the body of Christ, until we all attain to the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God, to mature manhood, to the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ, so that we may no longer be children, tossed to and fro by the waves and carried about by every wind of doctrine, by human cunning, by craftiness in deceitful schemes. Rather, speaking the truth in love, we are to grow up in every way into him who is the head, into Christ, from whom the whole body, joined and held together by every joint with which it is equipped, when each part is working properly, makes the body grow so that it builds itself up in love. Now this I say and testify in the Lord, that you must no longer walk as the Gentiles do, in the futility of their minds. They are darkened in their understanding, alienated from the life of God because of the ignorance that is in them, due to their hardness of heart. They have become callous and have given themselves up to sensuality, greedy to practice every kind of impurity. But that is not the way you learned Christ!—assuming that you have heard about him and were taught in him, as the truth is in Jesus, to put off your old self, which belongs to your former manner of life and is corrupt through deceitful desires, and to be renewed in the spirit of your minds, and to put on the new self, created after the likeness of God in true righteousness and holiness. Therefore, having put away falsehood, let each one of you speak the truth with his neighbor, for we are members one of another.

This passage speaks to the unity of knowledge in Christ (v. 13), to the importance of sound doctrine (v. 14), to the pursuit of truth (v. 15), to the abandoning of intellectual futility (v. 17) and ignorance (v. 18), all in the context of an education (v. 20) that seeks after the renewal of the mind (v. 23) and that comports with the goal of godliness (v. 24). The overall purpose of this enterprise, where the gifts and callings work together in total harmony, is the equipping of the saints (v. 12) for service that