After several years of discussing the nature and possibility of Christian scholarship, a discussion prompted largely by evangelical scholars, Alan Wolfe wrote a piece for the Atlantic Monthly (October 2000) entitled "The Opening of the Evangelical Mind." The essay's title was promising and Wolfe gave reasonably high marks to Evangelical liberal arts colleges. But he did have one significant reservation. The creeds and doctrinal statements of these institutions were a detriment to full-blown academic excellence. As long as Christian schools insisted on confessional statements "that shut them off from genuine intellectual exchange," Wolfe warned, Christian scholars would "find it difficult" to develop "intellectually exciting institutions."
Wolfe's understanding of the inverse relationship between creedal theology and intellectual creativity will need to be revised if Nicholas P. Wolterstorff's new book, Educating for Life, is any indication. It is a stimulating and enjoyable collection of addresses that Wolterstorff, a longtime professor of philosophy at Calvin College who recently retired from Yale University (see "Between the Times" in Modern Reformation, July/August 2002), gave in Christian school settings over the course of his career. The editors have arranged the talks around four themes: 1) the nature of Christian education; 2) the challenges to Christian schools; 3) Christian learning in a pluralistic society; and 4) the purpose of Christian education.
Aside from answering the question, What makes an education Christian?, the book also provides answers to, What makes Nicholas Wolterstorff so smart? To be sure, readers will not agree with all of his arguments. But the book demonstrates that a family and church can be an incredibly fertile environment when oriented to the complexity of Christian teaching. According to Wolterstorff, his own family gatherings in rural Minnesota were filled with "Enormous discussions and arguments… , no predicting about what: about the sermon, about theology, about politics, about farming practices, about music, about why there weren't as many fish in the lakes…." What he learned in this setting was that "the Bible had to be interpreted; one could not just read it and let the meaning sink in. I was aware that I was being inducted into one among other patterns of interpretation, the pattern encapsulated in the Heidelberg Catechism." Of course, Wolterstorff made his own contributions to the tradition he inherited. But this collection of essays shows that theological rigor is no barrier but rather may actually encourage substantial learning.
