What is Christian higher education? It will hardly surprise you that there is more than one way to answer that; if universities have lost their intellectual and moral direction, there is more than one way to define that loss. Several answers are possible, and these answers seem to come in a certain order—each response going one better than the one before, keeping what the first answer says an educator ought to do and adding something to it. The result is a kind of progression or continuum of responses to that question of how to frame a Christian higher education.

Let me qualify that language slightly. By progression I do not imply that ‘a completely Christian school must go all the way along’ this continuum. The jury is out on how much of that ‘spectrum’ a Christian institution of higher learning ought to embrace. In fact, we are not even so far advanced as jury deliberation: cases pro and contra have yet to be heard in a sufficiently public way. At the moment, these answers represent silently held and conflicting views of what our faith commits us to in the sector of higher education. They reveal a substantial, de facto disagreement about what constitutes a Christian higher education—each answer marking a level beyond which we should not build, a limit in the mind of some Christian educator who has come to think, ‘We should do this and no more.’ There are so many Christian colleges and universities that reject the further answers along this ‘continuum’ that it would be ill-advised to stress the idea of progression at all, so let’s consider the progression logical and additive rather than normative.

Why ask the question at all? It can’t be avoided. It is positively senseless to offer a Christian alternative to the modern university without thinking about what a Christian alternative might require. The major thrust of our objection to the kind of education on offer at most universities today is precisely that it is not up to us to ‘decide’ what education comprises. In creating a Christian alternative, we are not doing what we want but doing what we ought. The question ‘What ought we to do?’ is pretty much inescapable.

And we certainly cannot act as if it has been answered already. The new life we have all seen in the return to Christian education, the growth of institutions like IAPCHE and the Society for Christian Philosophers, and the emergence of new Christian colleges (viz. my own), testify to the uniqueness of the present era. We stand at an early moment in the recovery of Christian education after a long lull, a long period of entrancement while Christians dreamed the dream (Christian enough in its own way) of perfect tolerance and the embrace of all. Well, we are awake now—wakened by the grinding of the coarsened world such diffident tolerance gets you. In our dazed and blinking state, we would be wrong to think that the way forward is instantly clear to us.

It isn’t. To find our way to a properly Christian higher education, we will have to “dare to be different, to pursue our own path, to take the risks involved in venturing into unmapped and unexplored territory,” Alvin Plantinga rightly notes. “That isn’t easy,” he adds. “There are enormous pressures towards conformity. But it is our university, after all, and we don’t have to follow the common herd.”[1] Currently the Mission Statements of Christian schools of higher learning are flooded with the terminology of the secular school. In 2004 expressly Catholic universities, for example, can frame their objectives with no mention of anything like the old aim of a Catholic education: as Thomist Jacques Maritain put it, “becoming who we are,” “the guiding of man toward his own human achievement” as ancient Catholic tradition had long understood that achievement, employing the cumulative intelligence of names like Aquinas and Augustine.[2] No mention of that: instead, “excellence in teaching and research,” “holistic education,” “leadership in debate,” “training in the professions,” the “maximiz[ing]” of “career prospects.”[3] The question is, where does the Christianity of the institution show up? Does “holistic education” really communicate a clear ideal? Does the Christian school have a different understanding of “excellence” from that of the thousands of colleges that so freely bandy that term about? I agree with Alasdair MacIntyre that they should.[4]

It is good to say, as some have done, that those framing a Christian education are concerned with “the relationships which inherently exist between the content of the faith and the subject-matter of this or that discipline; such connections,” writes William Hasker, “do not have to be invented or manufactured. But they need to be ascertained and developed.”[5] To fill in this detail we will have to think, and think carefully, and to do that we have to question the answers we have already come up with, the answers represented by our existing Christian schools. As MacIntyre has also said, writing of the dogmatic academy we are fleeing: “the structures of present society have exempted themselves from and protected themselves against being put in question by such systematic intellectual and moral enquiry.”[6] It would be pretty shocking were we to turn around and recreate that sclerosis in our own institutions.

 

We need to evaluate our understanding of what a Christian education requires of us for the sake of our students, too. As educated people standing before the young and advocating the unity of faith and reason, it is truly necessary to be able to give good reasons for offering what we do. We ought to know that we have chosen one sort of offering over another, and we ought to be articulate about why we have done so—why doing more, or doing less, is a mistake.

In extolling the virtue of justifying ourselves, I am not, of course, saying ‘how nice and honest if all these arguments were on display’: that it would be more fitting of our business in reason if we could decorate our schools with the reasons that match our practice. Arguments are not ornaments (perfect in their own relativistic ensembles). Arguments have the progressive character that Graeme Hunter gave them in formulating a distinctly Christian understanding of the university. “Universities,” he says, “are places where, given enough time, disputes can be resolved or at least their false presuppositions unmasked”—a view of argument that the modern university has recently jettisoned.[7] Put these arguments up so that we can all see them and discussion will ensue...and it won’t be long before some of these arguments begin to fall down repeatedly. To become the Christian alternative we claim to be, we need to make that progress.

Time, now, to look at six different answers to the question, What is Christian higher education? But let’s first recast that question in a slightly more productive way: What, in its curriculum and teaching, does a Christian higher education offer a student that a non-Christian education does not? The starting position, to make reference to Hasker’s typology, will rest upon a “compatibilist” view of the relation between faith and academic knowledge: “The compatibilist does not recognize any deep, fundamental tension between the assumptions and procedures of her discipline and the Christian faith.” But there are really three different approaches that fit under that umbrella.

 

Level 1

Christian education, some say, is simply education by and for Christians. It is, first and foremost, education by godly people. What does the Christian college do that the non-Christian one does not? It educates within a community and all its disciplines gain in dignity by belonging to an institution that acknowledges the Lord.

You cannot say that such an education is not Christian, or that there is no difference between it and what the secular institution offers. Such a school is a haven for an ideal too often trampled today: it is led by its faith to protect the pure love of knowledge against the love of practical benefit that has driven learning out of so many contemporary places of higher education. It is not right that the people “hated knowledge, and did not choose to fear the Lord” (Proverbs 1:29). To this the Christian church and the Christian school attuned to it are the answer: as the church takes care of faith, Christian schools take care of knowledge.

Many Christians teaching in non-Christian universities see the work they do as Christian work in the second of these ways, for serving knowledge. The liberal arts education that introduces students to Augustine, Hobbes, and Marx; Christianity, Buddhism, and Pragmatism; the Upanishads, the Consolation of Philosophy, and On Liberty is an education that disseminates knowledge—something noble and based upon no partisan doctrine, favoring no one position over any another. “All truth is God’s truth,” as people often put it. And even if it isn’t all truth, Plato and Shakespeare, Nietzsche and Freud will help you understand the world—thus help you live a Christian life within this world. A Christian defender of such an education might be Jaroslav Pelikan, who endorses the university (which “has been for almost half a century the chief repository of truth and the community of wisdom to me personally”) and writes of the necessity to accommodate the increasing pluralism of higher education.[8]

The task of the Christian educator is, then, to be a Christian and assist an education: to profess the faith and to love knowledge. As this version of Christian higher education, in its curriculum, is no different from the standard liberal arts education, it might fittingly be called the broad liberal arts conception of Christian higher education.

 

Level 2

The above liberal arts education, serving the love of knowledge (according to Proverbs 1), does not give us an education different in content from the education offered at secular colleges and universities; both schools, secular and Christian, understand the nature of knowledge in the same way. But many Christians have trouble with the inclusiveness of the modern humanistic or even liberal arts education, which very often includes views, sections, sometimes entire courses that to the Christian institution are vapid and false: “Technology and the American Music Industry” (a course at Vassar), “The Invention of Homosexuality” (Sarah Lawrence), “Deconstructing Barbie” (University of Alberta), “Images of Latinas” (Skidmore), “The Rhetoric of Alien Abduction” (Bates College). These ideas and everything else the modern university has taken on board to flesh out its pluralistic commitment represent, many of us believe, a corruption of the healthy conception of knowledge that flourished in the past. “All truth is God’s truth,” but a lot of this is not truth and not even instructive falsity. The broad liberal arts conception of Christian higher education will therefore fail us.

Christians lament the modern university’s sudden loss of faith in reason, knowledge, and truth, rapidly displaced by the non-values of diversity, identity, and sexiness. And so the Christian school excludes these tendencies, courses, and books; dedicates itself, as one college puts it, to finding “alternatives to the lines of thought which dominate most of higher learning today.”

But that material excepted, what the Christian school of this description teaches remains identical to what is taught by numerous departments and colleges in the secular system. Their Great Books are largely the same, their outlines identical, their textbooks shared, their commentary equivalent. There is no superadded Christian component and no specific Christian ‘spin’ given to the material. The distinctly Christian component of this education is, once again, the shared faith of the participants, which enjoins them not to ‘hate knowledge’ but to love it—and now enters into education in the form of a filter on the material and a measure of its worth.

Given its implicit relation to the education that prevails on this continent, this answer to our question could fairly be called the discriminating liberal arts conception of Christian higher education. The task of the Christian educator is, once again, to be a Christian and assist an education: to profess the faith, love knowledge, and filter out what is not Christian, not fit for education, not knowledge in any proper or meaningful sense. That task is to acquaint the student with “the best that has been said and thought in the world,” with the major facts of the world (science and history), with the reality of beauty—all of these being godly things that it does not require a Christian mind to establish and perceive.

 

We have just seen two versions of the liberal arts model. Both represent the ‘Christian difference’ of some university or college, which stops there. But others say that, though this is good as far as it goes, it does not go far enough: the liberal arts education really represents a faith in reason, knowledge, and truth, which shows you its shortcomings instantly. As California’s Thomas Aquinas College, in Santa Paula, puts it, the liberal arts studies that prevail today have no other purpose than to “lead the student to a greater appreciation of the ‘learning’ and ‘culture’ of his civilization,” an objective that abandons “genuine liberal education.” The tendency that “always favors the ‘world’ against God” is at home in human history just as it is in the modern college.[9] Reason, knowledge, truth, culture, and civilization as the secular world understands them are in some way deficient; what matters in a Christian education is reason, knowledge, culture, etc. as they appear in light of the reality of God. And there are several different ways to parse that qualification.

 

Level 3

The simplest and most obvious way (still a ‘compatibilist’ way, for those following Hasker’s distinctions) to extend the reach of reason, knowledge, and truth is to broaden the component of knowledge. You can Christianize education a little further by taking knowledge and not just purging but also supplementing, by adding a specific Christian component to each course or to the syllabus as a whole, or to both course and syllabus. This added material might come in the form of entire discrete discussions (mandatory courses in Church History or Bible Studies; or lectures 13-15 of the History of Philosophy course, lectures devoted to ‘Christian Philosophy’). On the other hand, the Christian material might be woven through the program, as in course outlines that constantly and purposefully return to scientific or historical or aesthetic matters of special Christian importance (the Burgess Shale, the birth of monasteries, the Council of Trent, the faith of Kepler and Newton)—all of these topics being presented not so much in a Christian light as simply presented, so that the student will know about these important things.

The task of the Christian educator is, again, to be a Christian and assist an education: to profess the faith, love knowledge, filter out what is not Christian and not knowledge, but also to add in the material that the secular version of education too often leaves out. Relative to the dominant kind of education, it is both purgative and additive, but we can name it for the feature that distinguishes it from type (2) and call it the topical conception of Christian higher education.

 

To a great many faculty and administrators in Christian schools of learning, these responses exhaust the subject of Christian education so far as content is concerned. There is nothing more the Christian educator can seek to do. But voices from pre-modern times, sometimes cited in academic Mission Statements, have suggested otherwise. Toronto’s Institute for Christian Studies, for example, puts forth the proposition that “true knowledge is made possible by true religion.” This can of course be understood in different ways. The three versions of Christian education we have just looked at can all be taken to demonstrate how “true knowledge is made possible by true religion,” in that all three, via their Christianity, give the student a quality of knowledge the secular student does not receive—because the secular student is getting job training, or pseudo-knowledge, or gaps in knowledge, deficiencies that versions (1), (2), and (3) progressively correct.

But forgive me if I think that the ancient idea is really saying something else altogether. It has a radical character such interpretations are deaf to. In the idea of knowledge “made possible by”—not just made available through—one’s faith, I hear an echo of Calvin’s claim (itself an echo of Augustine, and Augustine an echo of the Gospels) that “It is Christ, the interior teacher, who will teach us.”

Christianity is not just a haven for knowledge that others devalue (knowledge that others deny is knowledge, via the fate of ‘truth’ in the modern university, or knowledge that others have wholly lost interest in, such as the history of the Church or any knowledge that won’t bring home a paycheque). Christianity is a source of knowledge in its own right—an insight into the world as rich in implication, for knowledge of how things are, as the insight of a Mendeleev or a Toynbee. What follows are two ways of understanding the phrase that do not chase the radical implication away. It is at this point, too, that Hasker’s second strategy for shaping Christian education comes into play: “The scholar who follows the transformationist strategy...finds [his] discipline to be lacking in insights and perspectives which are vital to him as a Christian.” But again, there is more than one way to define that lack.

 

Level 4

You could understand the conception of true-knowledge-made-possible-by-true-religion to say that, by our straightforward cognitive operations, we do indeed have knowledge, but in a still unfinished form. It is only when we consider that knowledge in the light of faith that the real significance of that knowledge—the truth of that knowledge—becomes knowable. “True knowledge is made possible by true religion.”

By that way of thinking, a Christian education will not be possible if all a school or a professor does is introduce the student to the results of the established academic disciplines (suitably sifted)—introducing students to the science, history, art, literature, etc. that it is good, from a Christian standpoint, to know. Such knowledge will be good, and it will be knowledge, but it will not be an adequate or true knowledge of science, history, art, literature. It will have stopped short of such knowledge—quit at the barrier that the secular liberal arts education soon meets on the road to wisdom: the door shown us by Christ, which for its own many reasons the prevailing education balks at.

As Harry Blamires put it in The Christian Mind, “We are not saying that these studies are not important,” but that “they exemplify the secular mind recording, categorizing, evaluating, explaining within the bounds of [a] this-worldly frame of reference,” the “this-worldly frame of reference that the non-Christian scholar employs” to understand his world.[10] Plantinga, too, writes that in academia “we Christians are heavily influenced by the practice and procedures of our non-Christian peers.” Whether we are talking about

history, literary and artistic criticism, musicology, and the sciences, both social and natural...in all of these areas there are ways of proceeding, pervasive assumptions about the nature of the discipline …, about how the discipline should be carried on and what a valuable or worthwhile contribution is like and so on…. But in many cases these assumptions and presumptions do not easily mesh with a Christian or theistic way of looking at the world.[11]

It is not enough to make the major issues of Greek philosophy intelligible in the historical or intellectual ways the secular world is satisfied with. They must be made intelligible to the mind of the Christian student, who must be shown how Greek philosophy fulfills or fails to fulfill God’s plan, must be taught to differentiate the good tools from the bad, and must be shown how to use these tools in the work of Christian life.

It is not enough to know historical events. “True knowledge” includes understanding; it is insufficient to gape at events like the Industrial Revolution or the development of the atom bomb without exploring the thoughts that will spring to the Christian mind, thoughts that the Word of God has placed into our heads (recall the Tower of Babel and God’s displeasure that “now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do”—Gen. 11:5). Not to look at these facts of history in the light of the wishes that God has communicated to us is surely to fail to understand them—or to burden the student with understanding on their own, which communal, loving education does not do. “Happy is the man who meditates on wisdom …; he places his children under her protection” (Sirach 14:20–26). Can we educate if we defer understanding to some chancy, fleeting, private moment outside the occasion to ask and discuss?

To teach students about art, it is not enough to teach them about periods, style, beauty, iconography. We need to bring out the relevance of art to a Christian. We need to help students do more than hold their own in conversation with secular students of art, learn more than the liberal arts student. We need to give young people the understanding of the meaning that works of art have had, for us, in Christian lives—convey what works of art are in the wider world encountered by passing through the Christian door, which is not a new world but the world as it truly is.

I give these examples to show how little this has to do with the caricature always prompted by any mention of specific Christian content. We are not talking, here, about “using academic disciplines as a source of illustrations for spiritual truths.” We are talking about what philosophy and history and art themselves tell us.

In short, Christian interpretation must accompany the outlay of facts, the obvious model in the Christian educational tradition being the commentary. Take Aquinas’ commentary on Aristotle, which was not simply the effort to make Aristotle intelligible to his students at the University of Paris. Only the right kind of intelligibility mattered. To understand Aristotle was to grasp the relevance of Aristotle to the Christian of Aquinas’ day. It was to understand what Aristotle could show the Christian that he or she could use in navigating a course to God (the powerful armament of an understanding of the virtues). But because Aristotle knew nothing of Christ, a certain amount of clarification was needed, with Biblical footnotes. We might suitably call this fourth version of Christian higher education the commentary version, in which the ‘book of knowledge’ includes a running effort to help the student see the relevance of the facts of science, history, etc., to a person of faith. Here we have both the scientific, historical, and artistic record (which is what it is) and our specific way of understanding it.

This version of Christian education is still grounded in faith, still exclusive in the manner of (2), and still makes room for the special subject matter included by (3). The task of the Christian educator is, once again, to be a Christian and assist an education: to profess the faith, love, knowledge, filter out what is not Christian and not knowledge, and add in the material the secular education omits—except that now the understanding of what the secular education omits is deeper. The secular education leaves out more than just topics of Christian interest; it cannot teach the very meaning of history, art, and philosophy for a Christian, and the Christian school that accepts that limit is seriously derelict in its duty.

 

Level 5

But that is not the end of the possibilities. Indeed, there is something notably limited in the commentary version of Christian higher education, for here the Christian educator starts with academic protocols, establishes the historical record, and then interprets it. And it might reasonably be said that the Christian educator cannot start solely with the academic protocols that he shares with the secular academy (and the results thus furnished).

When Plantinga says that assumptions about the proper conduct of academic disciplines and “what a valuable or worthwhile contribution is like” do not mesh with “a Christian way of looking at the world,” one of the things at issue is the capacity of such disciplines to chart the basic topography of their field, given the limitations that such assumptions may impose. Facts are facts, to be sure, but we all understand that the facts of history, science, literature, etc. are all established by the asking of questions formulated by scholars. And are there not questions that need asking, in establishing the material that the secular academy cannot ask? Having passed through the door of Christ, do we have only new comments to make—no new questions? Are none of our new questions in any way relevant to the establishment of facts about history, science, literature?

Clearly, we now have another way to understand “the transformationist” who finds his discipline “to be lacking.” Plantinga gets quickly to the heart of one powerful deficiency: “As they are ordinarily taught and practiced” our established academic disciplines are often “artificially separated from questions concerning the nature of the objects they study”—that is, they are defective in their grasp of what those objects are (satisfied, instead, with rigid and narrow definitions, or distrustful of the very enterprise of defining the nature of things, a distrust that simply gives narrowness a license). A Christian art historian who takes it as a tacit starting point that art is a tool for the revelation of beauty and truth in the building of God’s kingdom (or a tool of service to the Prince of this World) does not have the same instincts and cautions as a scholar sticking to facts-not-embroiled-in-presumption about the correct theory of art, which is the proper business of the philosopher. We are not talking, here, about a Christian ‘view’ of these things; we are talking about what, for a Christian, the objects of his or her study really are, and about disciplines that are in certain ways constitutionally unfit to pay any attention to the objects of which they are the ‘science.’

If from a Christian standpoint the secular scholar’s questions are in some way deficient and the ‘record’ established on their basis defective, any Christian professor who conceived their work as providing a commentary on the meaning of that record (version 4) or who conceived their work as serving the record up plain (versions 1 to 3) would be naive about the task before them.

This gives us a further way of integrating faith and learning; it gives us a kind of constitutive version of Christian higher education: a version in which Christianity is not just a user of the academic knowledge framed by secular activity but the rightful completion and indeed correction of that secular activity, not just as an interpreter of the established record but as an establisher of that record. The Christian, taught by Christ—taught, that is, to see...and see what others do not see—is a discoverer of the kind of knowledge proper to a Christian education, which picks up where secular powers of perception and understanding leave off. This, by the way, is the only conception among all those we have looked at that is not passively reliant upon the understanding of what knowledge is that the wider world accepts.

It is important not to overstate the case. We are talking here about a practice of knowledge that picks up where academic questioning leaves off (and retrospectively replaces bits of construction that are now found deficient), not one that rebuilds anew. Rebuilding anew is Hasker’s third and final strategy in the formation of a Christian education: the “reconstructionist strategy” whose advocate finds “existing disciplines [to be] so deeply permeated with anti-Christian assumptions of secularism, rationalism, and naturalism he has no choice but to reject them and to begin at the beginning,” creating “new disciplines” from the ground up. Logically, one could call this the sixth version in our continuum, but because I am mapping answers that are represented in actual practice I have not done so, as I don’t know of any school or professor who has actually taken this approach, which has the air of fancy.

Christians do not have their own way of determining the laws of nature or the facts of history (at a certain level): the ways of understanding God’s world, in history and nature, are largely universal. But it is a common error to overstate the implication of that: thinking that the wealth of knowledge that entirely shared methods of determination make possible is proof that all knowledge—knowledge proper, knowledge itself—is the product of some kit of universal cognitive procedures. Of course they are universal tools, in one sense—in the sense that the door is there, open to all: pass through and perception will be given you. But, as the historian Herbert Butterfield said, you will not see “God in history if you have not found God in your daily life.” To talk about universal knowledge as the output of an innate faculty we could all operate at will—the quasi-Kantian picture of knowledge that the modern university has sold to the modern mind—is to be seriously misled on the topic of knowledge.

When the idea that God has a plan for mankind, wants something of us, is added to our understanding of the world, the implications are profound—not only for the meaning of the established facts but for what we are to call a fact. It is not just that the panorama of human history, or revolutions in art, or the birth of new themes in literature take on new meaning in the light of that fact (version 4); new questions must be asked of history and art and literature on account of this, giving us a new record, a new take on the actual events themselves.

As an example, take the history of art. In the light of God’s plan, the widespread failure of the art of the present day (the art that governments fund, art schools teach, and critics tout) to help us in any way in making that advance surely needs to be understood and explained. There is an historical question here: the art of the age of cathedrals did help us, even the art of ancient Athens pointed forward—how did everything change in the way it has? You will not find the answer to that question in the textbooks of Janson and Gombrich. The “story of art” you get there—early, middle, and late, first and second phases, the birth of pictorial space, the repudiation of illusion, the advent of modernism—has an entirely different contour. The question cannot be framed in secular terms at all (it is asking about something more specific than ‘the decline of art’). A Christian history of art outlines an entirely new history—not one that repudiates all the others (it can likely be meshed with many) but one that promises to eclipse them in significance. Academic accounts are suddenly less compelling and (bereft as they are of any understanding of what art is) in many ways hardly the story of art at all. And not merely in the eyes of the Christian.

That is one distinctly interesting aspect of this version of Christian learning. The Christian story of the decline of art, as something that has ceased to serve the building of the Kingdom of God, will not be a story that is meaningful only to the Christian, because it will not fail to address in a forthright way issues that matter to those who are not Christians (take, for instance, the twentieth century’s attack on beauty and meaning). These are issues that the protocols of the secular scholar do not allow him to wrestle with. The disaffected art lover who is not a Christian will therefore get more from the Christian history of art than he or she will from most academic histories, given that scholarship in the modern period has made the same retreat from human need that we have seen in the case of art. To a certain extent, modern scholarship is ‘modern’ in a distinctly problematic way.

This is an unexpected virtue of the constitutive version of Christian higher education, which endeavors to convey the results of Christian scholarship: though it is logically more extreme than the commentary version, it has a greater potential for universal benefit. Clarifying the Christian meaning of established history (per version 4) presents the non-Christian with a familiar history in an unfamiliar guise—i.e., with nothing new or useful. But the new accounts of history, art, etc. that actual Christian scholarship can create are potentially different: the unfamiliar history may contain much that speaks to the wider public, in that the scholar’s very starting point is the plan, God’s plan, for human fulfillment, happiness, meaning, love.

In short, no conception of knowledge that unduly limits the character of the world—to material, to numbers, to empirical data, to the protocols of the academy, to the conclusions secured by universally demonstrable evidence—will ever give us an adequate view of the nature of the world and ever lead us to true knowledge. A proper understanding of the nature of knowledge will only follow from conceiving the world aright: from receiving it as all that it is, which can only be seen by the Light of the World. “True knowledge is made possible by true religion.”

 

Level 6

It is easy to overlook the final take on the nature of Christian higher education, which supplies something perhaps missing from all the five we have looked at and all taken together. Marion Montgomery has noted that, “liberal arts colleges have occupied the vacuum created by the abdication of sound theology addressing the intellect on the subject of first and last causes of human being.” Christianity has no doubt about these causes—about why and for what we are here, what we really are and what we must become to be ourselves—yet one can talk a great deal about Christian higher education (as I have just proved), adding and subtracting and radically rethinking, without establishing any purpose or objective such pedagogical shuffling is to serve.

To be a Christian educator, one might say, the one thing needed is an understanding of what the task of education is: which is to say, an appreciation of how a Christian education helps us do the one essential thing. To know what you are to teach, you must understand what makes these various subjects and texts important to the project of following Christ, for if they are not important to that project then it is hard to see what importance they have at all. This may be what John Paul II is getting at when, in his own conception of higher education, he envisions “scholars...engaged in a constant effort to determine the relative place and meaning of each of the various disciplines within the context of a vision of the human person and the world that is enlightened by the Gospel.”[12]

If one is a minimalist on the topic of the task of education (education is the transmission of knowledge) then no added burden may fall on your shoulders—and sadly there is plenty of reason to think educators become minimalists so that no added burden slows them. But if one believes, with Montgomery, that “there must be no deliberately created or innocently maintained blindness to the proper end of the human being,”[13] and also understands the uniqueness of higher education relative to that progress (in that it gives a kind of help nothing else can), then the five positions we have canvassed thus far turn out to be inadequate. They won’t build a properly Christian education. For that you have to order all you do as a school or a professor—all your emulating, subtracting, adding, commenting, and creating—to the end of helping the student make the specific progress that education alone assists. It won’t be enough if you accept (1) to (5), inclusive, but do not build your curriculum and teaching around the needful knowledge—if you never discuss or name ends, if you never stop yourself from teaching some perfectly good thing because it is taking the place of something more vital to the student’s progress.

 

It certainly won’t do for us to think what we would never dare to state: that ‘We are Christian enough,’ which simply hardens us against the task of discerning God’s will for the Christian teacher. That is our task. “Be transformed by the renewing of your mind,” that “you will be able to test and approve what God’s will is” (Romans 12:1-2). One thing that is by now perfectly clear is how useless it is to rely on over-capacious declarations like ‘our commitment to faith-learning integration’ or ‘the task of the Christian educator is to be a Christian and assist an education,’ which take no position and make no distinctions. The more savvy that students and parents who are seeking to choose a school become about the differences outlined here, the less you will be able to attract them with such non-committal commitments.

The limitation of some of these alternatives was an impetus in the founding of Augustine College, in Canada’s capital. As John Patrick, our college president, wrote in 1998:

Even Christians seem often to be confused about what is at stake…. For most students education is not about [the] deeper questions, but simply about the acquisition of information,… T.S. Eliot understood this mindset and its growing dominance when he wrote, “Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information? It is for lack of wisdom, not lack of information, that the people perish.”[14]

Perishing, foundering, the opposite of flourishing is indeed the issue. But to respond to it, we need the “communal debate” that—I agree with MacIntyre—is an essential task of the Christian college and university.