{"id":537,"date":"2007-03-27T08:03:02","date_gmt":"2007-03-27T16:03:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/tgdarkly.com\/blog\/?p=523"},"modified":"2007-03-27T08:03:02","modified_gmt":"2007-03-27T16:03:02","slug":"incarnational-humanism-and-the-passionate-intellect-book-review","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/2007\/03\/27\/incarnational-humanism-and-the-passionate-intellect-book-review\/","title":{"rendered":"Incarnational Humanism and "The Passionate Intellect" — Book Review"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Passionate Intellect: Incarnational Humanism and the Future of University Education<\/a><\/p>\n

By Norman Klassen and Jens Zimmerman
\nBaker Academic (2006)
\nISBN 0-8010-2734-9<\/p>\n

This book is explores the themes of whether, and how, Christians can develop a rich and passionate life of the mind. Although it is written for Christian students bound for university, it is useful for any Christian who is serious about the intellectual life.<\/p>\n

One of the authors\u2019 goals is to defuse the \u201cwarfare\u201d mentality concerning faith and \u201csecular\u201d learning that some Christians, particularly those who are not very mature in the faith, often seem to develop. They propose to do this through the model of \u201cIncarnational Humanism.\u201d <\/p>\n

\u201cIncarnational Humanism\u201d takes the incarnation of Christ as a starting point for a Christian approach to learning. \u201cIn Christ,\u201d the authors state, \u201call fragmentation ends and a new humanity begins, a new creation in which all knowledge is united (or taken captive, as Paul puts it) under the lordship of Christ because in him the divine and the human are firmly joined forever.\u201d The pattern of the incarnation suggests that we should expect to find that truth is not \u201can abstract, timeless concept,\u201d but rather is mediated through human language, culture, and tradition. Therefore, Christians should not be afraid of truth located outside the hermetically sealed world of our particular religious subcultures. <\/p>\n

In short, the authors place a Kuyperian notion of \u201ccommon grace,\u201d as mediated for generations of Christian college students by Arthur Holmes\u2019 famous dictum that \u201cAll Truth is God\u2019s Truth,\u201d into the postmodern context. While the authors thus acknowledge the postmodern turn, they firmly deny the destructive Nietzschean postmodernism, evident in figures such as Michael Foucault, that rejects any notion of classical humanism in favor of a heuristic of power relationships. <\/p>\n

The answer the authors suggest to Nietzsche and Foucault, however, is not a resurgent Christian rationalism dusted off from the fundamentalist-modernist controversy. Rather, they hearken back to the sort of humanism that is evident in many of the Church\u2019s great minds, such as Augustine, Aquinas, Luther, and Calvin, prior to the Enlightenment. In this classical Christian humanism, truth is more than power \u2013 indeed, truth in many ways is the antithesis of power \u2013 because the divine Truth became man and gave himself for us.<\/p>\n

There are many riches in this book. The phrase \u201cIncarnational Humanism\u201d is a beautiful one that deserves broad attention, and it is high time that \u201cAll Truth is God\u2019s Truth\u201d be given a postmodern reading. There is also, however, a glaring weakness in the authors\u2019 arguments: they do not deal adequately with the effects of sin. A model of truth that hearkens back to Augustine, but that glides over any reading of Augustine\u2019s thoughts on sin, will not present a thoroughly Christian<\/em> humanism. <\/p>\n

I wish the authors had acknowledged the tension between the incarnation and human sinfulness, and had contextualized it, as scripture and the Christian humanist tradition do, within the \u201calready \/ not yet\u201d of the Kingdom of God. Nevertheless, this is a valuable addition to the literature on the intellectual life as a Christian vocation. Let us hope that a holistic, incarnational understanding of faith and learning once again infuses the Church, rather than the rationalist, atomistic, confrontational approaches that so often seem to dominate our thinking.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Passionate Intellect: Incarnational Humanism and the Future of University Education By Norman Klassen and Jens Zimmerman Baker Academic (2006) ISBN 0-8010-2734-9 This book is explores the themes of whether, and how, Christians can develop a rich and passionate life of the mind. Although it is written for Christian students bound for university, it is […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[10,3,26,4,6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-537","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-academic","category-books-and-film","category-science-technology","category-spirituality","category-theology"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p824rZ-8F","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/537","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=537"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/537\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=537"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=537"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=537"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}