Christian Humanism: Some Helpful Explanations
In the current edition of Image, the impeccable quarterly of art, faith, and mystery, editor and publisher Gregory Wolfe suggests that Christians reconsider the value of the Renaissance. In the process, he makes valuable elucidations of central ideas within Christian Humanism. Here are excerpts from Wolfe’s essay:
[I]t has been shown that many of the greatest Renaissance thinkers and artists were already at work trying to find a new synthesis of self and cosmos and bring healing to modern consciousness. The conditions they faced were strikingly like our own.
The rediscovery of pagan culture involved the question of how to approach the dialogue between secular and sacred. As the Christian humanists argued for the importance of learning from pagan culture, they deepened the theology of the Incarnation, attacking the sort of dualism that compartmentalizes experience and denies the unity of truth. “For Erasmus wisdom does not consist in despoiling a humiliated paganism, but in collaborating pedagogically with its highest expression,” writes [Marjorie O’Rourke] Boyle.
The age of exploration began the process of globalization, and while the record of western engagement with other cultures has been checkered at best, the greatest religious order to emerge out of the Renaissance — the Jesuits — offered some of the most humane forms of intercultural exchange on record, including the mission to the Guarani’ in South America, recounted in the film The Mission. The Jesuit missionaries to China dressed as Mandarins and learned both the language and Confucianism before breathing a word about Jesus….
At the risk of some anachronism, I think it can be argued that the struggle between hell-for-leather Reformers and reactionary Catholics during this period can be seen in the light of what have recently been dubbed the “culture wars.” Eventually, these conflicts would erupt into shooting wars that would engulf Europe in an orgy of division and destruction for over a century. What gets lost in dwelling on this conflagration are the achievements of the humanists on both sides of theological divide: the emergence of biblical criticism and philology, the first stirrings of the discipline of history, pleas for tolerance and understanding of Jews, and programs for the education of women.
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2 comments:
Colossians 2 Message
8-10Watch out for people who try to dazzle you with big words and intellectual double-talk. They want to drag you off into endless arguments that never amount to anything. They spread their ideas through the empty traditions of human beings and the empty superstitions of spirit beings. But that's not the way of Christ. Everything of God gets expressed in him, so you can see and hear him clearly. You don't need a telescope, a microscope, or a horoscope to realize the fullness of Christ, and the emptiness of the universe without him. When you come to him, that fullness comes together for you, too. His power extends over everything.
As much as I love Eugene Peterson and his Message translation, this passage seems misguided compared not only to the New American Standard and New International Version translations, but also to some obvious matters. Telescopes and microscopes are wonderful because they help us see the expressions of Christ, Father, and Spirit. Furthermore, without Christ, there would be no universe, so what's this about being able realize the emptiness of the universe without him? Of course, as a mental state, one could reckon it empty I guess, but one could reckon himself Santa Claus, too, without any bearing on reality.
I'm baffled that this passage is sent as a counterpoint to the post on Christian Humanism (especially considering the moving and instructive passages concerning the Incarnation in the first two chapters of Colossian), but I realize the passage I quoted from Image is not thorough enough. This might help clarify things:
"Christian humanism is the interest in human persons and the positive affirmation of human life and culture which stems from the Christian faith....Christian humanism seeks to understand the whole range of human experience in the light of God's revelation to humanity in the person and work of Jesus Christ....The good news, or gospel of Christ, is the primary source of Christian humanism, not Christianity as an historical religion nor the church as a hierarchical, authoritarian institution." -- from the introduction to "Readings in Christian Humanism" (Augsburg Publishing House, 1982), edited by Joseph M. Shaw, R.W. Franklin, Harris Kaasa, and Charles W. Buzicky.
Or, consider this example I first heard in an interview with Gregory Wolfe, the editor of Image:
1. Conservative Protestants tend to emphasize the vertical relationship between the individual and God. In the process, they risk Gnosticism's belittling of the material order, (as well as an individualistic empahsis instead of a community emphasis). And yet God created it all and called it "good," including human beings and their hardwired tendencies toward social, artist and cultural expressions.
2. Liberal Christians of all varieties tend to emphasize the horizontal relationships between the individual and other people, especially those in need, in the sense of social justice movements. In the process, they risk emphasizing human effort as a cure to human problems. And yet the Bible and its interpretation within Christian tradition indicate that human beings are fallen and need the sanctifying, long-term work of the Holy Spirit to do truly good works. (And in orthodox Christian theology, even the good deeds of the atheist are the result of two things: the immanent, sustaining presence of God in His Creation, and the fact that the atheist is made in the image of God, so despite being fallen like everyone else, the atheist will reflect his Creator in some ways.)
Christian Humanism strives to make the sign of the cross by reaching upward AND outward, thus seeking "to understand the whole range of human experience in the light of God's revelation to humanity in the person and work of Jesus Christ."
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cheers,
Colin
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