Reviewed by Peter Schuurman, Educational Missions Leader

Norman Klassen and Jens Zimmermann. The Passionate Intellect: Incarnational Humanism and the Future of University Education. Baker Academic, 2006.

The crisis of the university today is a crisis of calling.  A senior humanities professor confessed at an educational conference, “I have no idea why I teach what I teach.”  His confession could well be said of the whole enterprise of the university itself.  How did we get to such a sorry state?

This book offers a conversation around that question.  Not only because it blesses thinking as a legitimate calling for the Christian, but because it argues that Christians can contribute to the vitality of the university in a significant way.  From the opening chapter entitled “Can Christians Think?” to the final notes “Incarnational Humanism and Common Grace” there is a deep affirmation of learning and teaching as a gift from God intended for the good of the world.

The Passionate Intellect is a guide to both the intellectual culture of the university and its long history since the medieval humanists like Aquinas.  The authors, who teach English on a Christian university campus, trace the story of humanism from its holistic medieval Christian beginnings through its transposition in the arrogance of Enlightenment to the current crisis of postmodern fragmentation and despair.  The chapters are not only brief, clear and concise, but they offer study questions at the end. 

Early Christian humanism, the authors maintain, fused faith with learning in a natural way.  “Study”, from the Latin studium, can be translated as “desire.”  This is ultimately a desire for God, whom we learn about through all the things he has made.  All thinking and learning therefore takes place in a relational context, an assumption that was lost in the age of so-called disinterested reason.

The authors distinguish between Christian incarnational humanism and the literary humanism (“reading good books makes good people”) and dehumanizing secular scientific humanism (“the more rational and empirical we can be the better off we are”).  They trace how a dualism developed as these two camps divided into the humanities and sciences, eventually landed us in postmodern anti-humanism (eg. Foucault).  While humanistic postmodernism (Levinas) offers some hope, without a grounding in Jesus Christ our humanism floats on its own and we have no way to fully critique other traditions in the university.

The final chapter on common grace offers conversation on how much Christians can learn from others in the pluralistic setting of the postmodern university.  They caution us to deep humility, encourage interdisciplinary work, and call students to resist the instrumental view of education that sees learning as the purchasing of technical training and a passport to privilege.

I found this book to be a great introduction to the history and culture of the university, and from a Reformed-like worldview perspective.  It is accessible in its readability but does not over-generalize, taking its cues from specific thinkers like Aquinas, Heidegger, Foucault, and Levinas all the way through. It is also a challenge to evangelicals—not only to think more rigorously, but to think in a more catholic context.  They argue, for example, that C. S. Lewis is much more Catholic than evangelical—especially when it comes to what we can learn from others in the pluralistic setting of campus.

If you can get a group of upper-year students, grad students, or faculty to take this one on, you won’t regret it.  To say the least, it is a staple for campus ministers in our tradition of faith and articulates a story which establishes the basis for our mission on campus today.