Church and education
By Rod Dreher
Rawlings School of Divinity
CLED 720: Biblical & Theological Foundations of Education
Genevieve Hamer
July 1, 2022
Church and education
Intellectualism versus anti-intellectualism
In contrast to Tertullian’s anti-intellectual attitude, a positive approach to intellectual
activities has also made itself heard from the beginning of the Christian church. It was perhaps
best expressed in the 11th century by St. Anselm of Canterbury in the formula fides quaerens
intellectum (“faith seeking understanding”). But well before Anselm, Christians maintained that
because people have been endowed with reason, they have an urge to express their experience
of faith intellectually, to translate the contents of faith into concepts, and to formulate beliefs
in a systematic understanding of the correlation between God, humankind, and creation.
This desire was exemplified by St. Justin Martyr, a professional philosopher and Christian
apologist of the 2nd century who saw Christian revelation as the fulfillment, not the
elimination, of philosophical understanding. Even before Justin Martyr, the author of the
Gospel According to John set the point of departure for the intellectual history of salvation with
his use of the term Logos to open the first chapter of the Gospel. The light of the Logos (the
Greek word means “word” or “reason,” in the sense of divine or universal reason permeating
the intelligible world) had made itself manifest in a number of sparks and seeds in human
history even before its incarnation in the person of Jesus Christ.
These contrasting opinions have stood in permanent tension with one another. In medieval
thought the elevation of Christian belief to the status of scientific universal knowledge was
dominant. Theology, called the queen of the sciences, became the instructor of the different
disciplines, organized according to the traditional classification of trivium (grammar, rhetoric,
and dialectic) and quadrivium (music, arithmetic, geometry, and astronomy) and incorporated
into the system of education as “servants of theology.” This system of education became part
of the structure of the universities that were founded in the 13th century.
With the Reformation there was widespread concern for education because the reformers
desired everyone to be able to read the Bible. Luther also argued that it was necessary for
society that its youth be educated. He held that it was the duty of civil authorities to compel
their subjects to keep their children in school so “that there will always be preachers, jurists,
pastors, writers, physicians, schoolmasters, and the like, for we cannot do without them.” This
stress on education was made evident by the founding of many colleges in North America in the
17th and 18th centuries by Protestants and by members the Society of Jesus, or Jesuits, a
Roman Catholic missionary and educational order.
Open conflict between science and theology occurred only when the traditional biblical
view of the world was seriously questioned, as in the case of the Italian astronomer Galileo
(1633). The principles of Galileo’s scientific research, however, were themselves the result of a
Christian idea of science and truth. The biblical faith in God as Creator and incarnate Redeemer
is an explicit affirmation of the goodness, reality, and contingency of the created world—
assumptions underlying scientific work. Positive tendencies concerning education and science
have always been dominant in the history of Christianity, even though the opposite attitude
arose occasionally during certain periods. Thus, the German astronomer Johannes Kepler
(1571–1630) spoke of celebrating God in science. In the 20th century, Pope John Paul II
maintained that he saw no contradiction between the findings of modern science and biblical
accounts of the Creation; he also declared the condemnation of Galileo to be an error and
encouraged the scientific search for truth.
The attitude that had been hostile toward intellectual endeavours was heard less
frequently after the Christian church became the church of the Roman Empire. But the
relationship between science and theology was attacked when the understanding of truth that
had been developed within theology was turned critically against the dogma of the church
itself. This occurred, for instance, after the natural sciences and theology had turned away from
total dependence upon tradition and directed their attention toward experience—observation
and experiment. A number of fundamental dogmatic principles and concepts were thus
questioned and eventually abandoned. The struggle concerning the theory of evolution has
been a conspicuous modern symptom of this trend.
The estrangement of theology and natural science in the modern period was a complex
development related to confessional controversies and wars in the 16th and 17th centuries and
philosophical perspectives in the 18th and 19th centuries. The epistemological foundation of
faith was radically challenged by the Scottish philosopher David Hume. Building upon Hume’s
work, the German philosopher Immanuel Kant advocated freedom from any heteronomous
authority, such as the church and dogmas, that could not be established by reason alone.
Scholars withdrew from the decisions of church authorities and were willing to subject
themselves only to critical reason and experience. The rationalism of the Enlightenment
appeared to be the answer of science to the claim of true faith that had been made by the
churches.
