Christian Education And The Idea of a Religious Revival

THE CHRISTIAN IDEA OF EDUCATION, a seminar at Kent School, including papers and discussions by Stephen F. Bayne, Jr., Georges Florovsky, E. Harris Harbison, Jacques Maritain, John Courtney Murray, Reinhold Niebuhr, Alan Paton, William G. Pollard, and Massey H. Shepherd, Jr.; edited by Edmund Fuller, Yale University Press, 265 pages, $4.50.

1957 years late, Christianity is becoming all the rage. Everybody is going to church, talking about God, and trying not to talk about Strontium 90. Kirkegaard is out in paperback, and Aristotle is out in left field. President Pusey has announced the importance of the Divinity School, while Billy Graham converts thousands in Madison Square Garden.

According to most Christian thinkers, this religious renaissance signifies the bankruptcy of secular rationalism. But whether the revival indicates that a Christian Renaissance is imminent or shows only that a drowning man will grab anything which comes to hand, is imponderable.

Most of the thinkers represented in the Kent School symposium believe that while revivalism is seldom Christian in any important sense, it can be the beginning of a real cultural baptism. Their arguments, best presented in the papers by Florovsky, Murray, Pollard, and Niebuhr, are fascinating, if unconvincing.

Pollard believes that Western culture oscillates between its Judaeo-Christian roots and its Graeco-Roman roots. At most times it is so firmly embedded in one tradition that the other cannot even be understood. Thus the Middle Ages Christianized Aristotle, while the modern age has secularized Jesus. In certain eras, the dominant viewpoint is no longer adequate for coping with reality, and men again grasp the full meaning of the alternative, thereby creating a mysterious Rennaissance. Thus the Alexandrine world was converted to Christianity; thus the Middle Ages were converted to Hellenism; thus the modern Alexandria will be converted once again to Christianity.

This theory raises two questions. What kind of analogy is there between Alexandria and Cambridge? Does this analogy indicate that Christianity may again prove the resolution of tensions?

In discussing the first question, Murray and Niebuhr are particularly relevant. Murray suggests the example of Origen, who was the first man to devise a truly Christian education, that is, an education which tried to subsume all knowledge into the Christian Revelation. Origen felt that only the man who had mastered all the intricacies of Hellenic thought could hope to convert Alexandria. And so he set to work to incorporate the rationalism, pluralism, secularism, the skeptical positivistic tradition which emphasized what men knew over what he did not know, the world of Alexandria's Academy and Library, the anomic world of hedonistic despair about which we have been complaining since the Industrial Revolution, the world of Matthew Arnold or i.e., The Cambridge Review.

But the analogy is imperfect. Origen was operating on a corpse. It is possible that modern society will not be ready for conversion until it has made the cultural corpse dangerously radio-active. Perhaps Western civilization has not yet reached the condition of Alexandria. Perhaps we are living in the last days of the Republic. Today we are not quite desperate. We are ready to have just one more fling at nationalism and egotism and secularism, one more bid to create paradise on earth by harnessing the atom. After we have blown ourselves to smithereens, then we will admit defeat and begin to look for the good life in some other context.

Moreover, the Christian tool is no so suitable for contemporary patients as it was for the ancients. We are not an exact duplicate of the Alexandrian Academy. Our modern dilemma is not purely Hellenic, for we have already incorporated Christian elements such as the concept of time as going somewhere. This notion of progress, of the future justifying the present, of a paradise for which today's effort must be directed, this division of ends and means which has created totalitarian ideology, is of Biblical origin. A Moscow Purge has more in common with a Catholic Inquisition to save souls, than a trial of Socrates for disturbing the polis.

Other elements, such as naturalism, can be found in Alexandria, but were of minor importance there. It is quite true that a few Hellenes conducted experiments, believed in empiricism, and were interested in efficient causes. But Stoicism replaced Epicurus; Plato and Aristotle succeeded the atomists. Bacon's empirical inheritance came not so much from the ancients as from the alchemists, who, more than any good Greek, committed the sin of hubris in seeking to impose the human will on the natural order.

Arbitrary Construct

Thus to my Hegelian sensibility, the pendulum theory appears an arbitrary construct. Western culture incorporates not only Biblical and Hellenic elements, but also Gothic. It takes up parts of these traditions and discards others. The classical Renaissance did not simply resurrect the Ancients in their old form. Gibbon dressed his Romans and his Christians as neo-classicists, and while Hellenism dominated the synthesis, it did not emerge pure. Consequently, it hardly seems likely that the impending transformation will be accomplished with a religion designed for the Hellenic Babel.

Dr. Pollard suggests the difficulty. It has been so long since we have had a Christian culture that 1957 can hardly understand the Christian revelation. When these men talk about life after death, resurrection, judgment, and God, their words sound hollow. There is no reference to a common experience except despair. There are no shared meanings, because such things can only grow in a community in which such concepts are imminent facts.

The Christian vision must therefore be translated into terms which will have connotations appropriate to the contemporary context, and this translation has not been accomplished. It must rid itself of what applied only in the ancient world and must come armed against the idolatries of the twentieth century, not the first century.

This translation will be more radical than a Revised Standard Version or a competent sermon explaining Scripture. It will have to be the translation which Paul accomplished when he gave Jesus to the non-Judaic world, or the transla tion accomplished by Aquinas, who incorporated the systematic requirements of medieval metaphysics. It will, perhaps, be a translation as radical as that given Judaism by Jesus, or the Veda by Gotama.

Task of Each Epoch

The task of every historical epoch is perhaps very close to Hegel's picture: the formation of The Perennial Philosophy in terms which can give the people of that time the electric sense of life which is contained in functioning religious inspiration or an integrated culture.

The cure for contemporary troubles would therefore hardly appear to lie in an attempt to revivify the Bible or reanimate the Christian revelation. The Christian heritage proved incapable of answering Bacon and Diderot. And while these men failed to provide a lasting alternative, they defined the work of any future religion. No future synthesis can simply ignore the problems raised by empirical science or temporal Utopianism. It must incorporate these elements into a new vision, making its Revelation relevant to contemporary dilemmas.

And so to talk of Christian education is, as Pollard suggests, quite fruitless, because Christian education requires Christian educators, and a Christian society. And we have few Christian educators because the Church is no longer talking a language which illuminates problems confronting the Academy. We have no Christian society because Christianity has failed to say and do anything finally effective about science and progress. We can only begin to talk about Christian education after we know what we mean by Christianity, and that word has not had an imminent experiential reference for four centuries.

If the Churches are trying to revive Medievalism, we must ask whether they have removed the shortcomings which led to the classical Renaissance.

Need to Define Order

If, on the other hand, the Churches are trying to create a new Christian order, then the first business at hand is to define that order and forget the educational experiment for a few centuries. What, for instance, is the contemporary world supposed to understand by the Christian use of the word "God"? How are we to take statements about heaven and hell or the day of judgment? When these questions can be answered in ways which move men to live again, then we can talk about Christian education