Christian Worldview and the Academic Disciplines

Crossing the Academy

Deane E. D. Downey, Stanley E. Porter, Downey, Porter

• Publisher: Pickwick Publications
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9781498275248
• Topic: Teología y religión
• Subtopic: Iglesia cristiana

This book--an edited compilation of twenty-nine essays--focuses on the difference(s) that a Christian worldview makes for the disciplines or subject areas normally taught in liberal arts colleges and universities. Three initial chapters of introductory material are followed by twenty-six essays, each dealing with the essential elements or issues in the academic discipline involved. These individual essays on each discipline are a unique element of this book. These essays also treat some of the specific differences in perspective or procedure that a biblically informed, Christian perspective brings to each discipline.Christian Worldview and the Academic Disciplines is intended principally as an introductory textbook in Christian worldview courses for Christian college or university students. This volume will also be of interest to Christian students in secular post-secondary institutions, who may be encountering challenges to their faith--both implicit and explicit--from peers or professors who assume that holding a strong Christian faith and pursuing a rigorous college or university education are essentially incompatible. This book should also be helpful for college and university professors who embrace the Christian faith but whose post-secondary academic background--because of its secular orientation--has left them inadequately prepared to intelligently apply the implications of their faith to their particular academic specialty. Such specialists, be they professors or upper-level graduate students, will find the extensive bibliographies of recent scholarship at the end of the individual chapters particularly helpful.

part one

Prolegomena

1

The Christian University in Contemporary Culture

The Distinctive and the Challenge

Douglas H. Shantz

The Christian college or university has a two-fold identity. On the one hand there is the historical distinctive: it is part of a great tradition of Christian scholarship that has explored truth wherever it may be found, confident that it is all God’s truth. On the other hand there is the contemporary challenge: it is called to confront the pressing questions and challenges of our day from the perspective of Christ and the Christian tradition.

My aim in this chapter is to offer an historical perspective on how the Christian university has been understood in the past, and then to consider what its place should be in the world of the twenty-first century. I will highlight two scholars who devoted their lives to the Christian university, Thomas Aquinas and John Henry Newman, and two more recent scholars, Jaroslav Pelikan and Charles Malik, who have much to teach us about the challenge facing Christian higher education today.

The Historical Distinctive of the Christian University

Thomas Aquinas, 1225–1274

Living in the thirteenth century, Thomas Aquinas was part of the first beginnings of the Christian university as it took shape in the high Middle Ages. The term universitas first appeared in a papal document in ad 1208–1209. It referred to the total body of teachers and students, a kind of academic union or guild. It also connoted the totality of the sciences (universitas litterarum) in four faculties: arts (philosophy), law, medicine, and theology. The university in Thomas’s day had three characteristics. First, it was independent of church control, yet felt obligated to act responsibly in serving the church. Second, the medieval university sought to serve the whole Christian world. It welcomed students from all over Europe, offering an education that prepared students for life in that world. Finally, the universities in Thomas’s day “stood in the current of urban life.” They were not sheltered from the real world but prepared students to make their mark in church and society.1

From Thomas Aquinas we learn something of the character of the Christian university as well as the calling of the Christian university professor and student. Thomas characterized the university as a place where students consider the great questions of life in a way that takes both God’s Word and God’s world seriously. Thomas advocated a “Christian worldliness” that avoids two pitfalls: an unworldly spirituality and a secularistic worldliness.2 Thomas opposed both a supra-naturalistic Biblicism that ignored the creation and an exclusive reliance on Aristotle that ignored the Bible. To Christian traditionalists, Thomas insisted that “the autonomy and effectiveness of created things prove the truly creative powers of God.” The world was a legitimate sphere for human study and learning.3 To extremist Aristotelians, he said, “You are right; the natural world is a reality in its own right, but there would be no such independent reality if the Creator did not exist.”4 In Thomas, we observe a speculative mindset that prompted him to investigate truth in all areas of life, to be open to truth wherever and whatever it might be. He sought an equal marriage of his faith with his reason. Aquinas’s Christian worldliness provides a wonderful model for Christian universities today. They too should demonstrate an intellectual curiosity that takes both God’s Word and God’s world seriously.

From Thomas, we also learn something of the calling of Christian university professors and students. Thomas considered teaching his first vocation: “I feel that I owe it to God to make this the foremost duty of my life: that all my thought and speech proclaim Him.” It could be said of Thomas that “he was one of those who teach as they grow and grow as they teach.”5 For him, teaching involved two relationships and activities: his relationship to the truth in silently listening to reality; and his relationship with his pupils in clarifying, presenting, and communicating that truth.6

The Summa Theologica illustrates Thomas’s understanding of the teaching task. He devoted his best energies not to a work of scholarship for fellow professors but to a textbook for beginners. His Summa was essentially that: ad eruditionem incipientium (“for instruction of beginners”). For Thomas, the teacher should possess the art of approaching his subject as if he were encountering the material for the first time. Successful teaching requires “loving identification with the beginner.” “He sees reality just as the beginner can see it, with all the innocence of the first encounter, and yet at the same time with the matured powers of comprehension and penetration that the cultivated mind possesses.” Thomas knew that the greatest challenge in teaching is to keep the material fresh and alive, to avoid the disinterest that often comes to teachers because of over-familiarity and constant repetition. As with Plato, for Thomas learning and teaching begin with “amazement” and questioning. He sought to lead the learner to recognize the mirandum, the wonderment, the novelty of the subject under discussion. In this way the teacher “puts the learner on the road to genuine questioning . . . [that] inspires all true learning.”7 Christian professors today must likewise make it a priority to keep their teaching current and fresh: to read, write, and stay abreast of the latest research in their fields and to keep alive the wonder of discovery.

Thomas Aquinas also presents a challenge to today’s busy students. Thomas was no cloistered medieval monk; he was a member of the Dominican order of mendicants, a “youth movement” in the cities that challenged a church that was too comfortable with worldly wealth and power. The order was dedicated to imitating Christ’s poverty, to preaching, and to study of the Bible, science, and philosophy.8 In the midst of his busy urban life Thomas learned how to find inner seclusion, how to “construct a cell for contemplation within the self to be carried about through the hurly-burly of the vita activa [active life] of teaching and of intellectual disputation.”9 Thomas’s academic achievements and writing were completed in the midst of constant distractions. When he arrived in Paris in ad 1252 to teach theology, he faced considerable opposition simply because he was a Dominican. Many Paris scholars thought that the mendicant orders were becoming too influential at the university. The Pope himself finally intervened to lift the boycott against him. Yet in his works during this period, “the smooth flow of not a single sentence appears to have been ruffled by all these troubles.”10

Throughout his life, Thomas experienced constant interruptions to his chosen intellectual task of presenting “the whole of the Christian view of the universe.” These interruptions included the following: (1) He was sent from Paris to Italy by the Dominican Order on commissions related to the organization of studies; (2) Pope Urban IV called him to his court in Orvieto for three years to work on defining the theological basis for union between the Eastern and Western branches of Christianity; (3) for two years Thomas served as head of the Dominican academy at Santa Sabina in Rome; (4) he was then recalled to the University of Paris, spending the next three years in theological debates between conservative and radical thinkers; (5) in 1272 the superiors of his order recalled him from Paris to found an academy in Naples; (6) after just a year in Naples, Thomas received another papal assignment asking him to participate in the General Council in Lyons, which began its sessions in the spring of 1274. On the way to Lyons, he fell ill and died on March 7, 1274, not yet fifty years of age.11

What Thomas wrote in the midst of all of this, especially in the last...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Contributors
• Preface
• How to Use This Book
• Part One: Prolegomena
• Part Two: The Academic Disciplines