Christian Education as a Cognitive Minority (Part 2)
CARL E. ZYLSTRA
“Hey, Hey, Ho, Ho, Western Civ Has Got to Go”. It’s been 30 years since protesters on the Stanford University campus grabbed national attention with that chant. Of course they were referring to the introductory required course on “Western Civilization” that most universities required as a building block for education in the western intellectual tradition of which they were supposedly the guardians. Yet the underlying impulse was a lot deeper and, only three decades later it’s clear that universities have pretty much relinquished any claim to their traditional role as keepers of the cultural flame that ran back to the Greco-Roman foundations of western thought and culture. In fact, as the 21st century gets underway, the intellectual establishment seems to have launched a deliberate, aggressive, and accelerating effort to dismantle what remains of what once was assumed as the common ground of western cultural culture, thought, and discourse.
Now the point of this post is not to debate whether that move is good or bad. The only point stressed here is that this is something truly new, and not merely in degree but in essence. As educators we don’t stand simply in the midst of some modest revision of the cultural assumptions. We find ourselves, rather, in the throes of a wholesale deconstruction of a multi-millennial-old thought tradition on which “Western Civilization” was built. And the question raised in the first installment of this series was whether a thought tradition that is still rooted and shaped by a similarly multi-millennial, ancient Book has any place to stand apart from honestly accepting its new role as simply a cognitive minority that will play, at best, a minor role in the public discourse built on the new cultural norms that are emerging from the ashes of Western thought.
Don’t misunderstand me. I’m not pining for the “good old days” of a supposedly Christian hegemony over western culture. In fact, I spent the first decades of my career arguing that Western civilization never had been half as Christian as many of its devout acolytes had assumed. And yet it cannot be denied that for at least 1500 years the major debates within Western thought either engaged, refuted, or attempted to incorporate Christian thinking that emerged out of the biblical tradition. And it is that very lengthy era that has rather indisputably now come to an end. Or at least so it seems to me – and, I would argue, to many of the most thoughtful observers of our present cultural and intellectual foundations.
To understand how seismic the shift is that we confront today, we only need take a cursory glance over the history of how Christian worldview came to be interwoven with Western culture in the first place. When the Christian era began, paganism ruled everywhere, notably in the Mediterranean world in which Rome dominated and Greek thought prevailed. Jews were pushed into a corner and the Christians who transformed and expanded Hebraic thought had to figure out just where they fit into that dominant way of thinking.
The New Testament, no less than the Old, is concerned with establishing the Christian community as a true cognitive minority. Indeed, the Apostle Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians begins by outlining its purpose to show early Christians what it meant to live as a cognitive minority where they were no longer at home in Jewish thought but certainly did not synchronize with Greek thought either. By design it is a letter that describes how to live in clear distinction from the prevailing “wisdom of the world” and the mere traditions of the old Hebraic religion. And far from being an intellectual screed, this is a “pastoral epistle” declaring that the “wisdom of God is . . . wiser than human wisdom” and that, despite the prevailing dominance of both Jewish tradition and Greek philosophy, that divine wisdom is also “stronger than human strength.” The author is explicit that being what we would call a cognitive minority is nothing to be regretted because the fact that “the world in its wisdom does not know God” describes a situation that is itself part of the “wisdom of God” (1 Corinthians 1.20 – 25).
However, in the centuries that immediately followed, something quite amazing happened in the developing Greco-Roman intellectual tradition. In less than 500 years Christianity would transform the dominant culture to the extent that the Judeo-Christian worldview largely took over as the prevailing framework for Western thought. Christians argue over whether that development was good or bad. The point of this essay is that, for good or ill, that is, in fact, what happened.
It was truly a culture shaking moment when Constantine issued the Edict of Milan (AD 313) insuring that Christianity and its worldview now would, for the first time, have a place in the Roman public square and consequently, contrary to the historical setting of the New Testament, a Christian worldview could finally come in from the cold.
And, as they say, the rest was history. Christian thought rapidly moved from Constantinian tolerance to officially recognized dominance with the Theodosian Edict of Thessalonica (AD 380). Although as Will Durant points out, it wasn’t until Justinian’s reforms during the 6th century that biblical worldview became the foundation for many, if not most, western law traditions.
More recently two American legal scholars, Steven D. Smith and Anthony T. Kronman have summarized this history and pointed out that the trajectory of increasing dominance by the Christian worldview as a foundation for the Western law, thought, and culture, has now finally come to a crashing halt. Particularly noteworthy is that Smith, as a Christian, thinks that’s really kind of a bad development for both “Pagans and Christians in the City”, as he titled his book. Kronman, by contrast, thinks this is a splendid turn of affairs, at least from his published perspective, which he titled “Confessions of Converted Pagan.”
What’s important for Christian educators is to acknowledge the common conclusion of both Kronman and Smith. For the first time since Constantine, biblically structured ways of thinking simply no longer fit within present day western intellectual thought. It’s no longer a question of people disagreeing with the biblical perspective. Rather, the dominant culture now considers biblically based thought to be utter foolishness if, in fact, they understand it at all. That’s why it ought to be no surprise when the question is seriously raised whether “Christian education” is not really an oxymoron that has no right to accreditation as true education or financial support as anything other than cultish indoctrination.
So whether you are alarmed by what you see, or find even this historical summary to be just an interesting topic for late evening discussion and debate, the bottom line is that, one way or the other, Christian education as developed in the West today rather indisputably finds itself in a setting dramatically different in kind from anything it has seen in the past 1500 years. The biblical worldview has not only lost any sort of favored position. Today it has become a cognitive minority that is barely any longer understood in the salons of cultural and intellectual elites.
And for the purposes of this series of essays, the real significance of this cultural upheaval is the reexamination now required on the part of Christian educators who are truly committed to shaping thought on the basis of the biblical worldview. It will be necessary for them to reassess just what is their place in this current culture, or if there even is a place for them at all. Actually, if Kronman and Smith are right, we are pretty much back to where to the early Corinthians were, as an island of cognitive minority striving to take its place in a sea of pagan intellectual and cultural assumptions.
As Raymond De Souza put it at the beginning of this decade, “the rise of liberal democracy provided space for the Church to live as an evangelizer of culture rather than as a holder of power. Whether the rise of secular fundamentalism will permit that to continue is now a pressing question.” The same question certainly holds for the enterprise of Christian education.
At the same time, as I commented in part one of this series, perhaps this intellectual earthquake together with its attendant cultural destruction will turn out to be a true blessing for the enterprise of building authentically, biblically shaped education. After all, it’s taken 1500 years but we’re finally once again in the same setting that both Old and New Testament writers faced as they first articulated, to use the Apostle’s words, the “wisdom of God” in a culturally and intellectually hostile world. Perhaps, now, finally, we will be able to understand our biblical teaching with a dramatically renewed clarity and shape our educational leadership accordingly.
And perhaps there is no better place to begin exercising that leadership than by engaging precisely the key cultural issue that the biblical writers also highlighted as the critical battlefield in the ongoing contest between pagan and biblical worldviews, namely human sexuality. That will be the third installment in this series.
Carl E. Zylstra previously served as president of Dordt College in Sioux Center, Iowa. A highly respected educator, he is the current vice-chair of the IACE Board of Directors.