[I]t’s not my business what my students do with the knowledge and skills I give them, least of all when it comes to their own spiritual lives or lack thereof. What is my business is giving them the tools they need to take stock of the cultural inheritance that has, for better or worse, been forced on us all, in different ways and to varying degrees, and to open the door for them to consciously and creatively reappropriate elements of that inheritance if they choose or else articulate their reasons for rejecting it entirely. To my mind, such a goal is not only compatible with liberal education, but it is at the very core of what we try to do in the humanities: to help our students come to the point of making their own critical and informed judgments about their stance toward their cultural inheritance, or put differently, to be active rather than passive in their relationship to culture.
I understand that for many, dealing with the Christian aspect of our cultural heritage may be too emotionally charged for a variety of reasons, either because of traumas associated with religion or else because of the fear of "losing one’s faith" through critical investigation. I am very conscious of that reality, and for that reason I would never propose making a course in theology a general education requirement at a secular institution and would in fact fight against any such proposal. Yet even if we can choose to avoid a class on Christian thought, none of us can choose not to have been born into a culture that has been deeply informed by Christianity. There are very good reasons to wish we had not been chosen for this particular inheritance, reasons that should be obvious to us all. Nevertheless, we owe it to ourselves to at least take an inventory. That’s how I view my teaching of the Christian tradition — helping my students to take an inventory. They can’t go back in time and decide not to have received some form of Christian inheritance, in all the varied ways they have received it, but I would hope that after taking my class they are in a better position to decide what to do with it.
The stock of ideas that make up our cultural inheritance includes a hefty amount of Christian ones. A university education that seeks to make its students not only more informed, but better critical thinkers, should definitely include these ideas. Setting them out honestly, which includes being critical of them, makes these young men and women more aware of what it means to be children of the western cultural tradition.
I would add that many survey classes in western thought could benefit from a more rounded approach. For example, teaching Descartes as the first "modern" thinker (his Meditations and Discourse on Method are usually the first texts read in a class on "modern philosophy" could benefit from making clear that such a designation is arbitrary; Descartes himself would have no idea what it would mean) includes the caveat that he saw himself as providing a better approach to talking about God and a better metaphysics than the Scholastics. Teaching Hegel without any reference to the impact of the Napoleonic Wars misses the reality that he lived, as the old saw had it, in interesting times, and was reacting to them. Far too often "intellectual history" that fails to set ideas firmly within the larger milieu in which they are articulated makes of them a "thing", free-floating, inhuman, rather than all-too-human responses to a received heritage in a particular political, social, and cultural setting. We can adopt the thought, for example, of Plato (one of my fellow students at Catholic University of America considered himself a thoroughgoing Platonist), but we should do so only with the understanding that Plato was an Athenian living two and a half millennia ago; he was responding as much to his time and place as any one.
As Charles Taylor makes abundantly clear, the past few hundred years of western intellectual life includes not only Christian theology and thought; it also includes countervailing ideas that pushed Christian thought further and further from its pride of place. I think any class on the history of Christian thought should also include this reality as well.
The complexity of the intellectual inheritance of we children of the west should, given even a passing glance via a survey class, provide the opportunity to understand that the narratives we often choose are only partial and artificial. That doesn't mean they cannot inform our lives. It only means that we should always be aware that we should never lay claim to any cultural narrative, be it Christian, Jewish, or secular, without an awareness that it is not the sum total of the meaning of what it means to be fully human.
Offering a class such as the one outlined and defended in this article would go a long way toward more fully presenting our cultural inheritance and giving young men and women tools with which to be more honestly children of the west.
