Christian Life and Education: The Christian Belief in God

The sacramental vision of an authentically Christian education enjoys the sense of the holy in all things, and imparts a kind of sanctity to the study of all disciplines, seeing in each an avenue to the Creator Logos … (it) is an aspect of discipleship, a component of growth in Christ.

The Christian belief in God as the Logos, which Benedict XVI affirmed in his Regensburg address, grounds the Christian view of life and education. The Holy Father posed the fundamental question that lies behind all Christian discussion about war and terror. If God is Logos/Word, it means that a norm of reason follows from what God is. Things are, because they have natures, and are intended to be the way they are, because God is what he is. He has his own inner order. If God is not Logos/Word but “Will,” as some hold Allah to be, it means that, for them, Logos places a “limit” on Allah. He cannot do everything because he cannot do both evil and good, true and false. He cannot do contradictories. Thus, if we want to “worship” Allah, it means we must be able to make what is evil good, or what is good evil. That is, we can do whatever is said to be the “will” of Allah, even if it means doing violence as if it were “reasonable.” Otherwise, we would “limit” the “power” of Allah. This is what the Holy Father meant about making violence “reasonable.” This different conception of the Godhead constitutes the essential difference between Christianity and Islam, both in their concept of worship and of science.

Christians must consider education, in the light of our faith conviction, that God is the eternal Word (Logos). If we believe that truth is the conformity of the mind with reality, we believe that a reality exists that we do not ourselves make. It is a reality that cannot be “otherwise” by our own will. It also means that God, the eternal Logos, established what is, not we ourselves. Thus, if we are to know the “truth” that makes us “free,” it means that we know that what God created, is what it is. We rejoice to know the truth that we did not create. The wonder of what is, elates us.  This conviction underlies the Christian contribution to the intellectual tradition of the West.

If Allah is pure will, then anything that is, can be the opposite of what it is, so that nothing really is what it is. It can always be otherwise.

Matters of Consequence
John Paul II, in his encyclical Ex Corde Ecclesia, asserts that Christian professors and teachers must “set the content, objectives, methods and results of their (teaching and) research within the framework of a coherent (Christian) world vision.” 1 Richard John Neuhaus states that “A Christian university will settle for nothing less than a comprehensive account of reality. Not content with the what of things, it wrestles with the why of things; not content with knowing how, it asks what for. Unlike other kinds of universities, the Christian university cannot evade the hard questions about what it all  means. Therefore, theology and philosophy are at the heart of a Christian university.” 2

Christian faith is a guide to philosophy. Not all philosophies reach the reality that is. Faith directs itself to reason, and that reason is a reality that is not invented by the human mind. We did not fabricate the mind we have that thinks. We are to use it. We invent neither it nor reality.

Surely something has to be said about the wonderful intelligibility of the universe, as assumed and verified by science, in the full context of God as primary cause. Part of the mileage theology gets from the scriptural datum, that the human images the divine, is the insight that our understanding of the universe is the exercise of a created logos mirroring the divine Logos. It is a step from this realization to Augustine’s notion that it is the graced logos in us that is capable to recognize the Logos in Jesus Christ.

Although philosophy is possible and available to every person, some philosophies cannot defend either faith or reality. This is the problem of the “voluntarism” of classical Islamist philosophy. This same philosophy exists in the West, as Pope Benedict indicated.

But why is connecting a Christian mind to learning such a matter of consequence? What makes this issue of doing the church’s educational work from the vantage point of a coherent Christian vision of the world, and from the perspective of the historical biblical revelation account of reality, so important. There are at least three good reasons.

First of all, it is a matter of consequence because the integrity of the church, and the Christian character of education, depends upon it. If it is, indeed, true, as T.S. Eliot once asserted that “we must derive our theory of education from our philosophy of life,” how important it is, then, for Christian people to establish programs of education that are consistent with their most fundamental beliefs and confession of faith. 3 For integrity’s sake, Christian schools, worthy of the name, must be rooted and grounded in a radically comprehensive biblical picture of the world that supplies the first principles, and constructs the frameworks by which they operate.

Secondly, it is a matter of consequence because a genuine Christian perspective of the academic enterprise supplies a cogent philosophical alternative in contrast to the fragmentation and incoherence of the educational systems in our secular culture. “Tis all in pieces, all coherence gone” bemoaned the English poet/preacher, John Donne (1572-1631), in a poem describing the modern period, when a new secular science and philosophy had called the old verities into doubt. This dissolution of the spiritual and intellectual unity of the West, no doubt, lies behind George Marsden’s recent claim that, “Contemporary university culture is hallow at its core.” In his opinion, not only does it lack a spiritual center, but that it is without any real philosophical alternative of its own. 4 And, certainly, what is true for many colleges and universities, is true for many primary and secondary schools as well.

But this is exactly where a Christian worldview comes to education’s rescue. It offers a fresh set of neglected theological assumptions, based on the infinite/personal, creator/redeemer Word /Logos, that provide an epicenter to the educational enterprise, tie things back together again, and infuse the academic venture with renewed vigor, meaning, and purpose. Christian educators, instead of feeling like they must emulate secular models, must capitalize courageously and wholeheartedly on their theological heritage, creating, by these resources, schools of such quality and distinction that their non-Christian counterparts must play catch-up. 5 This kind of Christian vision supplies a sound, visionary alternative for the educational task in our disintegrating cultural context.

Our Christian commitment to the grace and call of our Creator, the Eternal Word, grounds the enterprise of Christian education in affirming the following:

1. Objectivity: there is truth to be known.
2. Subjectivity: there are the capacities of the human subject for knowing the truth.
3. Wholeness: a recognition of the integrity of creation.
4. Cultural mandate: learning about, and participation in, the divine commission to establish an authentically human culture and civilization.

Recovering the Christian Intellectual Tradition
Recognizing the contribution that the Church has made to western civilization, it is important for Christians to recover the resources available in the historical Christian intellectual tradition. We lose touch with the dynamic classical Christian tradition in education to the detriment of our schools, colleges, and universities. For centuries, the church was at the heart of the educational enterprise in the West. Her leading theologians and philosophers reflected profoundly on the foundations and meaning of the educational enterprise in the light of faith. They committed the best of their reflections to writing, forming an unofficial canon of texts that served as an amazingly rich literary resource for subsequent generations. They put their theoretical considerations into practice, establishing various kinds of schools, and creating a pattern of education and scholarship, grounding a distinctive Christian intellectual tradition of remarkable breadth, depth, and influence, that for centuries constituted the heart of Western intellectual life.

Without a working knowledge of the church’s intellectual heritage, Christian educational endeavors suffer a serious loss. As a result, we may be using methods, and pursuing goals, that are more in keeping with the current Zeitgeist than with the wisdom of our Christian heritage. It would be foolish to think that the church’s academic task today can be undertaken successfully apart from the accumulated wisdom of her past. For it is only by standing upon the shoulders of giants that we see. As Robert Wilken has affirmed: “…there can be no genuine Christian intellectual life that is not rooted in history … The Christian intellectual is inescapably bound to those persons and ideas and events that have created the Christian memory.” 6 Or as this author has asserted: “… a tradition is an orientation for a particular future.” 7

Six Major Benefits of Catholic Education
A university not only can, but ought to, be Catholic if it is to achieve its highest potentiality. I wish to call attention to six major benefits that higher education can receive from being Catholic:

1. Personalism. (Ex Corde Ecclesiae, E.C.E., Pope John Paul II’s 1990 apostolic constitution on Catholic universities, No. 18). Our modern utilitarian and technological society tends to reduce the individual to the status of a mere instrument, a docile servant of the state or of the firm, an efficient tool in the workforce. Education, however, is more than an acquisition of technical skills. It is cultivation of the students’ active powers. A genuinely humanist formation will help them to rise to the full level of their humanity, enabling them to find truth and meaning in their lives. As Newman contended, liberal education is its own end.

2. A Sense of Tradition. Although all religions have traditions, the Catholic Church has a special affinity with tradition. It has lived by tradition for 2,000 years, and has consistently defended the rights of tradition against those who denigrate it. It knows how to preserve the past, not as a dead museum piece, but as a living memory, enriching the present.  By its very nature, the school ought to be a locus of tradition. It passes on to new generations a fund of knowledge and skills that has been built up over time, presenting it in a form appropriate to the current situation. The goal is to enable the young to take advantage of what their elders have learned, rather than having to begin again and, so to speak, “reinvent the wheel.” Thanks to their humanistic formation, students should be able to adapt the heritage of the past to the needs of their own day and, in some respects, to make progress beyond what was previously known. Catholic institutions, instilling a lively sense of tradition, are especially qualified to form students for this task.

3. Rootedness in the Culture of the West. The Catholic Church, I would contend, is the principal bearer of the great heritage of wisdom that emerged from the confluence of biblical revelation and Greco-Roman culture. While other cultures have much to offer, none of them, I believe, has equaled Western culture in the fields of literature, philosophy, and science. However that may be, it may be safely said that most students in western society today can best find their identity in relation to this biblical and classical heritage, which has been foundational for that society, and the whole family of nations, which belong to it.

Some are asking now whether education should be multicultural. To the extent that cultures are consonant with authentic Christian values, their diversity is something to be celebrated, not suppressed. An educational institution should respect the various cultures from which the students come, and to which they are likely to return. Any given university will take account of all the major streams of culture that are vitally represented in its own student population.

Catholic universities, located in other parts of the world, such as Central Asia and the Far East, will have special responsibility to engage in dialogue with non-Western cultures. Without prejudice to other civilizations, Pope John Paul II expressed his deep respect, in particular, for the spiritual traditions of India, from which humanly sound and beneficial elements may be gleaned (Fides et Ratio, Pope John Paul II’s 1998 encyclical, “On Faith and Reason,” No. 72). But in carrying out this discernment, the Christian will have to make use of the full range of wisdom that has been acquired from Christianity’s prior inculturation in the world of Greco-Latin thought.

4. Unity of Knowledge. It is of the very nature of a university to impart knowledge of many fields. It is good to have courses in the various arts and sciences, even though no individual student will be able to take more than a limited selection. While specializing in certain areas, students should see their fields of specialization in relation to the realms of knowledge that they have not been able to study in detail.

This fourth criterion for Catholic education, therefore, is that it be such as to impart a sense of the unity of knowledge. In the absence of this sense, one could not have a true university but, at best, a “multiversity.” In some schools, the struggle for coherence has been abandoned, with the result that the students are disoriented and perplexed. How can the claims of different specialties, they ask, be reconciled and integrated? Reason itself teaches us that there can be no ultimate contradiction between truth and truth. In the Catholic university, the search for a higher synthesis will be kept alive.

5. The Light of Faith. Christians are convinced that no synthesis of knowledge will be successful without reference to God, the supreme Truth; and to Christ, who is the divine Logos, the center of creation and human history (E.C.E., No. 16). In this season of national and international peril, it needs to be said quite simply that the future of the world will be in danger unless it turns to him who is “the Way, the Truth, and the Life” (E.C.E., No. 4). A university that neglects the word of God deprives itself of an important source of truth.

Theology, which studies all reality in the light of divine revelation, has its proper principles and methods, defining it as a distinct branch of knowledge (E.C.E., No. 29). It should, moreover, interact with the other disciplines by bringing a perspective and orientation not contained in their own methodologies (E.C.E., No. 19). In the words of Pope John Paul II: “In promoting the integration of knowledge, a specific part of a Catholic university’s task is to promote dialogue between faith and reason, so that it can be seen more profoundly how faith and reason bear harmonious witness to the unity of all truth” (E.C.E., No. 17). The university should be a place in which faith enters into conversation with reason on every level, including historical reason, scientific reason and philosophical reason.

6. A Sense of Mission.  As they are intellectually formed in the light of faith, students will become aware of moral imperatives, and the power of the Gospel, for the transformation of human society. Conscious of the gap between what is, and what ought to be, according to God’s design for the world, they will be motivated to bring ethical values and a sense of service into their lives as husbands or wives, parents or children, employers or employees, citizens or statesmen. They will work for peace and justice in the family, the neighborhood, the nation and the world. By their integrity, they will evoke trust and respect, not only for themselves, but for the tradition within which they stand. They will bring credit upon the religiously oriented education they have received.

For all the reasons I have given, I believe that every university, no matter how excellent it may be, would stand to gain if it stood fully within the Christian and Catholic tradition. Most American Catholic universities, to be sure, fall far short of realizing their promise. For the most part they are relatively small, young and poorly endowed. But with all their limitations, they are on the right path. Even now, they are capable of giving their students an excellent formation as persons, imbuing them with a keen sense of tradition, an appreciation of the biblical and classical heritage, and a capacity to see the bearing of faith upon the whole universe of knowledge, and upon every area of human conduct. If students take advantage of the specific strengths of Catholic higher education, they can be proud of their alma mater.