Bibliotheca Sacra 143 (July 1986) 195-204.
Copyright © 1986 by
Thinking like a
Christian
Part 3:
A Call for Christian Humanism
D. Bruce Lockerbie
The novel The Great Gatsby ends with Nick
Carraway, the
narrator, musing on what he calls "the last
and greatest of all
human dreams."1 It is that,
certainly: the last and greatest, as
F
Scott Fitzgerald writes; but it is also the first and foremost,
the
primary dream. Anthropologists and students of
myth recognize it
as such; even casual readers of the Bible find
this same dream
tracing its way from
night conversation between a Pharisee named Nicodemus
and an
itinerant Teacher from
human dreams," this first and foremost
aspiration, is the dream of
starting all over again.
Other similar expressions are in use, such as
"turning over a
new leaf, " "making a fresh start, "
"creating a new identity, " "achiev-
ing a new
consciousness." The hope contained in these terms is
that, somehow—by an act of the will, by a physical
uprooting from
one location to another, by a deliberate change in
behavior—new
conditions can be formed that will lead to a
happier life.
In specifically Christian terms, this experience
is provided for
by the new birth—being born again. The gospel
offers this hope in
spiritual rebirth by faith, regeneration, and
renewal. Indeed Chris-
tians look back to their time
of rebirth; but they can also look
forward to a time when God the Creator will
fulfill His promise to
make everything new, the a]pokata<stasij
("restoration") of proph-
ecy and apostolic
preaching.
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July-September 1986
Defining Humanism
This is God's plan, to be performed in God's
time. But to the
God-denying
secularist, for whom there is no supernatural dimen-
sion, no ultimate power
outside this natural sphere, "God's plan"
and "God's time" are nonsense. If
anything new is to come about,
says secular man, it will happen only because human
beings them-
selves achieve it. This certainty, this
self-assurance, stems from the
belief, declared by Protagoras
in the fifth century B.C., that "man is
the measure of all things."2 This
is the philosophy of the egocentric
self, the vanity that exalts the individual over any
other authority.
Even
his Greek contemporaries—the playwright Sophocles, for
instance—recognized the heresy of Protagoras, who also wrote,
“About
the gods I have no means of knowing whether they exist or
do not exist or what their form may be.”3
If, then, the concept of God is at best
irrelevant, if human
ingenuity is all there is to rely on, there is no
course open but to
establish the supremacy of human values and the
legitimacy of
human claims to control human destiny. This is the
attitude popu-
larly known as humanism; but
because that word has been so
loosely used and abused in many quarters, the
term "secular
humanism" may be used. This is the dogma
that exalts the human
being as the god of this age. For secular humanism is
the religion of
the contemporary culture. It has its own shrines
and cathedrals,
its idols and icons, its scriptures and creed, its
hymns and bumper
stickers. All these proclaim belief in a
naturalistic universe defined
by time and space, denial of any supernatural or
eternal reality,
denial of human accountability to a personal and
transcendent
God. The magazine Free Inquiry condenses the
creed to a sen-
tence: "Secular humanism
places trust in human intelligence
rather than in divine guidance."4
A serious blunder is being made by well-meaning
Christians
in the pulpit and the classroom, before television
cameras, and in
widely read books. This is the common practice of
assuming that
all humanism is the same as secular humanism, that
the historic
tradition known as "Christian humanism"
is an oxymoron, a
contradiction as puzzling as
"liberal Republican." To give the
proper setting for this point some broad strokes of
historical survey
need to be made.
The Roots of Biblical
Humanism
Christians trace the revelation of truth about
God to the his-
A Call for Christian Humanism 197
torical Chaldean
whose willingness to trust the God of the cove-
nant resulted in the
righteousness of faith. All believers are the
"sons and daughters" of Abraham, his spiritual
descendants (
as well as heirs of faith. Yahweh's covenant with
Abraham did not
invalidate the patriarch's need to eat and sleep.
His tents prospered,
his flocks increased, his wealth and power
expanded. Abraham
became the associate of kings, as well as being priest
of Mamre and
more those covenant promises of God were to be
fulfilled through
an ever-enlarging penetration by Abraham's
children. "Your
descendants will take possession of the cities of
their enemies,"
said the Lord, "and through your offspring all
nations on earth will
be blessed, because you have obeyed me" (Gen.
22:17-18, niv).
Clearly the call of Abraham to leave
the culture of
the Fertile Crescent to
was a call to reestablish an order of living in
which God's authority
was supreme, a call to thinking and acting on godly
principles, a
call to living in full obedience and full delight.
The same must be
true for Abraham's spiritual descendants today.
Christians are
called not only to the test of faith but also to the
blessings con-
comitant with faith. Believers
have inherited the rich legacy that
begins with recognition of God and continues through
mankind's
unique relationship with God as Creator and Lord. From
this same
legacy springs the revelation in the written Word and
the incarnate
Word,
the doctrine that "God was in Christ reconciling the world to
Himself' (2 Cor.
dignity to all of life, dissolving the old fear
of death; a new regard for
all persons—men and women, husbands and wives,
parents and
children, masters and servants—eliminating the
old bondage to
pride and caste. From this legacy a new social order
evolves, in
which Jesus Christ is Lord. Wherever this recognition
obtains,
that domain becomes known as Christendom; the
cultures that
come under the saving knowledge of the gospel
combine to form a
way of life that may be called a Christian
civilization, marked by a
consciousness of the Cross and the
empty tomb.
From the beginning of Christianity's influence
on the Mediter-
ranean world, some 250 years
before the Emperor Constantine
proclaimed the church as his own, its role as
conservator of social
and domestic values has been clear. In a culture
where the home
and hearth were, first, honored in the worship of
patron goddesses,
then debauched in fornication at temples, Christian
apostles and
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Bibliotheca Sacra -
July-September 1986
teachers called for faithfulness in marriage. At
the same time,
when Gnostic heresy began to infect Christian
doctrine with denial
of material worth, the writers of the New
Testament letters affirmed
the goodness of God in nature and the sanctity of
all that God had
created, including the human body, confirmed by
the incarnation,
resurrection, and exaltation of
God-in-flesh in the person of Jesus
of
recognition of the sacramental possibilities in
every human act
and artifact. For if "culture" may be
defined as "the work of men's
minds and hands,"5 then within every
culture lies the potential for
believers to praise God.
The Breadth of Truth
So for all its emphasis on conserving the truths
of Jewish and
early Christian teachings, Christian doctrine never
excluded truth
from other sources as well. Paul occasionally made
reference to
pagan literature (e.g., Acts
message to Greeks familiar with the old ways. Of
course Paul was
not thereby acknowledging the validity of all pagan
writings. He
was simply recognizing an element of truth in some
of that liter-
ature. While God's ultimate
revelation of truth is embodied in Jesus
Christ,
truth is not limited to Christ's few years of earthly life.
Justin Martyr, the second-century apologist,
spoke of this
truth. Prior to his conversion he had been a teacher,
entitled to
wear the blue robe marking his profession. After he
became a
Christian,
he continued to wear the robe, having determined that
the Logos for which he had been seeking in
philosophy was now
made known to him in Jesus Christ.
More than 250 years after Justin, at the
beginning of the
fifth century, Augustine of Hippo, in his treatise On
Christian
Doctrine, argued against those
who would restrict Christians from
studying and learning to appreciate the work of
nonbelievers. In a
passage of sublime insight Augustine wrote,
"Every good and true
Christian
should understand that wherever he may find truth, it is
his Lord's."6
By so recognizing the universality of truth and
its divine
origin, and by following the examples of both Justin
Martyr and
the apostles, Augustine established a model for
thinking Chris-
tians to emulate. But today
many Christians seem to have lost
much of this breadth of truth. They have become
victims of their
own narrow and defensive views. Now as never before
they need to
A Call
for Christian Humanism 199
liberate their minds and hearts—their intellects
and emotions-
from all that would enshackle
them; they need to become open and
free to all that is reasonable and lovely, orderly
and inspiring,
stimulating to further knowledge and at the same
time overwhelm-
ing in its awesome beauty.
They need to reclaim for God what He
has given and they have squandered, offering back
to Him what
their mind and hands find to do. If thinking
Christians were to live
each day in full realization that every area of life
belongs to God,
they would see again the kind of art, literature,
education, govern-
ment, and social order that
marked much of Christendom in
earlier centuries. The church would experience
again culture cap-
tured for Christ, culture
embraced by Christians throughout every
aspect of living, as was the case during the 15th and
16th centuries
in
In the Middle Ages, when infant mortality was
high and life
expectancy short, when the serf system bore down
heavily on most
people, when education was limited to a few, the
church had little to
offer by way of comfort for this life. Its eye was
fixed on the pros-
pects of life-to-come,
"the life everlasting" of the creed. Human life
and human endeavor seemed to count little when
weighed against
eternal values. Against this bleakness arose the
reaction known as
the Renaissance, stirred by a revival of interest
in ancient Greek
and Latin writers whose work had offered a brighter
view of human
worth.
It is hard for people today to imagine that
there was ever a time
when books had the same power as the television
screen to rule
lives and set forth values. But so it was, just as
there had also been a
time in Athenian society when public discourse
determined the
highest ethic. The revival in
human and humane values idealized in love sonnets and
sculp-
ture, in painting and fine
speech. This preoccupation with the
present life became known as humanism, but it
was not neces-
sarily Protagoras's
kind of rebellion against God's standard of mea-
surement; rather, it was a
reaffirmation of the biblical appreciation
for human experience lived in a mutually caring and
responsible
relationship with God the majestic
yet loving Father. Certainly it is
true that, under the guise of reasserting human
worth and individ-
ual importance to God,
humanism in some of its forms exalted the
creature over the Creator; some men renewed Protagoras's
agnosticism, raising a battle cry against divine
authority. But if
some aspects of humanism led to a perverse sense of
human
autonomy, humanism also led to a breaking of the
medieval
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Bibliotheca Sacra -
July-September 1986
church's stranglehold on the free expression of
faith, for human-
ism led to the Reformation.
In the nominally Christian states of
its laws compelling baptism and uniform church
attendance, but
nothing could compel the spirit to believe or
the mind to accept as
necessary a God propped up by a human prince.
Medieval scholars
plodded through their constructs of questions
and answers, but
could their cold, formalistic reasoning warm men's
hearts with the
love of God? Could men and women learn to see the
goodness and
grandeur of God in His works of common grace?
What of man's
attempts to glorify God in return? Can art and
architecture, poetry
and song reflect anything heavenly by means of
earthly expres-
sion? Or, to put the
question plainly, can a person be both a
Christian
and a scholar, a Christian and an artist?7
Christian Humanists
An affirmative reply may seem straightforward
and obvious
today, but it was a radical response when, after A.D.
1300, Dante
began writing his epic The Divine Comedy in
vernacular Italian
rather than ecclesiastical Latin; or after A.D. 1400,
when Flemish
and Italian painters began depicting religious
themes by means of
realistic figures of common people in familiar
settings. Little by
little, artists and then scholars began to make the
worship and love
of God less ethereal, less other-worldly, less
spiritual, less remote,
less divine—more human! Was this not in keeping with
the gospel
itself and its doctrine of the Incarnation? Had not
God chosen to
become human, thereby sanctifying by His very bodily
form and
substance the life known by human beings?
Little of this humanizing reality, this mystery
of God-in-flesh,
came through the categorical theology of that time.
The gospel was
being suffocated by too great a reliance on systematics and dialec-
tics. There were no translations of the Bible in the
common Euro-
pean languages. Furthermore,
until the advent of Johann Guten-
berg's printing press around 1456, access to
manuscripts was
limited and learning necessarily depended a
great deal on rote
acceptance rather than inquiry and discovery for
oneself.
But by the middle of the 15th century, aided by
Gutenberg's
invention, ancient texts and scholars who could
read them began
finding their way into
who knew not only the classical poets but also the
language of the
New Testament and the Eastern Church Fathers. Subsequently a
A Call for Christian
Humanism 201
new interest in learning Greek and Hebrew sprang
up, and with
this interest in the Bible's original languages came
the translation
of the Scriptures into common tongues.
Three names from this era are important to
remember.
Lorenzo
Valla (1405-1457), a linguist, goaded theologians
into
understanding that their hermeneutics
must be based not on their
knowledge of theology but their knowledge of the
Bible itself. Next
John
Colet (1466-1519), an English priest, founder of
School
and dean of
1496, on Romans and 1 Corinthians. These were unlike
anything
before their time. Instead of turning every line of
text into allegory,
Colet actually treated the text as if a man named
Paul had written
an important letter to other men and women in a
real city called
and their problems to life; he made the Bible
breathe with vitality.
Colet's friend Desiderius Erasmus (1466-1536) is the third
name. Erasmus may have been the greatest scholar in
history. His
accomplishments were numerous, but
among his most important
were these: his translation of the New Testament
from the Greek
text; his call for Bible study by everyone,
including women; and his
paraphrases of the Gospels and the Epistles,
eventually translated
into German, French, and English. Erasmus is
responsible for
some of the most profoundly striking statements, as
these
instances show:
People say to me, How can scholarly knowledge
facilitate the under-
standing of Holy Scripture? My
answer is, How does ignorance con-
tribute to it?
Only a few can be scholars, but there is no one
who cannot be a
Christian.
To be a schoolmaster is next to being a king. Do
you count it a mean
employment to imbue the minds of
your fellow-citizens in their
earliest years with the best
literature and with the love of Christ, and
to return them to their
country honest and virtuous men? In the
opinion of fools it is a humble
task, but in fact it is the noblest of
occupations.
All studies, philosophy, rhetoric are followed
for this one object, that
we may know Christ and
honor Him. This is the end of all learning
and eloquence.8
Thinking
in Christian Categories
The commitment of Erasmus and others like him to
a pro-
gram of studies so singlemindedly
Christ-centered sets him
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Bibliotheca Sacra -
July-September 1986
and other Christian humanists of his time among the
forerunners
in the search for an authentic integration of
faith and learning.
Their
sense of wholeness in studies and teaching, in art and
science, in politics and government, puts to
shame many of today's
so-called "Christian schools" and
"Christian colleges, " whose index
of forbidden pleasures maybe their highest measure
of orthodoxy;
whose curriculum and instruction resemble not at all
T S. Elliot's
understanding that "the purpose
of a Christian education would
not be merely to make men and women pious
Christians….A
Christian
education would primarily train people to be able to
think in Christian categories."9
The Christian humanists of long ago knew how to
think in
Christian categories. They devoted their
lives to serving Jesus
Christ
by making His Word more accessible. By their example they
encouraged artists and musicians to follow their
vocations in
representing the truth of Scripture
in human terms. Of course
these men were flawed. Erasmus, for instance, chose
to remain a
Roman Catholic and debated bitterly with Luther. No doubt many
believers today would disagree with Erasmus and
Luther too on
some points, but is their work to be ignored and
their integrity
transgressed by today's ignorance?
Peculiarly, television preachers and film
lecturers and writers
of predigested history books often fail to deal
with Erasmus and
other Christian humanists. But history is not to be
bent to suit
one's prejudice; nor does a word like
"humanism" lose its primary
meaning just because it is adopted by atheistic
naturalists. The
Ethical
Culture Society, the British Humanist Association, and the
publishers of Free Inquiry have corrupted
the word "humanism,"
and the nature of "language laziness" is
such that, once a word has
been commandeered and its usage made familiar, it is
all but
impossible to redeem that word from corruption and
restore its
historic meaning. Such corruption is witnessed in
the now-stan-
dard use of "gay"
to mean "homosexual." "Humanism" is another
word worthy of redemption.
In a 1972 book, The Way They Should Go,
this writer offered
the phrase "Christian artists and
scholars" as a palliative to anyone
who might gag over "Christian humanists.
" He was too timid to call
for a revival of the spirit of Christian humanism
by name—Chris-
tian humanism as exemplified
by saints and singers, artists, and
poets since the day of Pentecost. Today this writer
hopes to atone
for that blunder by issuing a call for Christian
humanists, a chal-
lenge to thinking Christians
everywhere to reclaim for God the life
A Call for Christian
Humanism 203
of the mind, the world of imagination, the things
of the spirit. This
is a call for Christians to begin enjoying the
abundant life promised
them—their utterly human and dependent walk with
Jesus
Christ.
To heed this call, Christian educators are needed at every
level and in every sphere who understand the legacy of
Christian
humanism and are not ashamed of their inheritance
as modern
Christian humanists. Such leaders are needed
to point the way to a
Christian renaissance.
But while many Christian educators know their
purpose,
many in the church have grown suspicious of their
supposed
erudition. What will win them to an enlightened
understanding of
God's benediction on learning? Only an unremitting
allegiance to
Jesus
Christ revealed in the Word of God. Erasmus—towering
thinker that he was—could nonetheless write the
following:
I utterly disagree with those who do not want
the Holy Scriptures to
be read by the uneducated
in their own language, as though Christ's
teaching was so obscure that it
could hardly be understood even by a
handful of theologians, or as
though the strength of Christian
religion consisted in men's
ignorance of it.... I hope the farmer
may sing snatches of
Scripture at his plough, that the weaver may
hum bits of Scriptures to
the tune of his shuttle, that the traveler
may lighten the weariness
of his journey with stories from the
Scripture. 10
This is the vision of the true Christian
humanist.11 At Dallas
Theological
Seminary, at The Stony Brook School, throughout
formal Christian education—wherever Jesus Christ is
professed—
teachers and students alike should labor to
regain that vision of
their predecessors. Christians today are challenged
to join with
Paul
and Timothy, with Justin Martyr and Jerome, with Augustine
and Alcuin, with Calvin
and Knox, with Luther and Erasmus, with
Comenius and Milton, with T S. Eliot and C. S.
Lewis, with
Christian humanists all. May Christians join
together in renewed
commitment to their treasured task as conservators
and pro-
claimers of the good news.
Editor's Note
This is the third in a series of four articles
delivered by the author as
the W H. Griffith Thomas Lectures at
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Bibliotheca Sacra -
July-September 1986
Notes
1 E
Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby (New
York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1925),
p. 182.
2
Bernard M. W. Knox, Oedipus at
1957),
p. 45.
3 Ibid.,
p. 161.
4 Free
Inquiry 1 (Winter 1980/81), cover page.
5
H. Richard Niebuhr,
Christ and Culture (New York: Harper and Row, 1956),
p. 33.
6
Augustine, On Christian Doctrine,
trans. D. W Robertson, Jr. (
Bobbs-Merrill Co., 1958), p. 54.
7
For an expanded treatment of this
problem, see E. Harris Harbison, The
Chris-
tian Scholar in the Age of
the Reformation (
1956).
This writer is happy to acknowledge his debt to Harbison's scholarship. The
opening paragraph of his book reads: "The
Christian scholar-like the Christian
poet, the Christian musician, or the Christian
scientist-has always run the risk of
being dismissed as an anomaly. What has learning to
do with salvation of the soul,
or satisfaction of the mind with peace of the
spirit? ... Yet the fact is that almost
from the beginning of Christianity there have been
those who pursued learning as
a Christian calling, in the belief that they were
following God's will" (p. 1).
8 See ibid., chap. 3, "Erasmus," pp. 69-102; and H. C.
Porter, "Introduction,"
Erasmus and
9
"The Idea of a Christian
Society" in Christianity and Culture (
Harcourt,
Brace, and World, 1949), p. 22.
10
Harbison, The Christian Scholar in the Age of the Reformation,
pp. 100-101.
11 For
further reading on this topic, see "A Christian Humanist Manifesto," ed.
James
I. Packer et al., Eternity, January 1982, pp. 15-22. See also James I.
Packer
and Thomas Howard, Christianity: The True
Humanism (
1985).
This
material is cited with gracious permission from:
Dr.
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