Introduction
Jens Zimmermann
Christ is the Logos, in whom the whole human race has a portion, and all
who have lived according to this Logos are Christians, even though, like
Socrates and Heraclitus among the Greeks, they are accounted godless.
(Justin Martyr,ApologiaI.46).OUR HUMANIST HERITAGEWhat is Christian humanism and why should anyone care? A simple, albeit
insufficient, answer to this question is cultural literacy. Secular humanism and
its religious antecedents comprise a vital root of Western culture. Religious
ideas about human nature, especially Christian ones, and their further devel-
opment through the process of secularization are deeply embedded in our
cultural narrative, and have shaped our collective understanding of human
dignity, human rights, and social responsibility. Hence, one important reason
for reflecting on the idea of humanism in general, and on Christian humanism
in particular, is the need for self-understanding. Christian humanism is
intrinsic to how we see ourselves, and the essays in this volume should make
readers aware of how much humanism shapes our implicitly held assumptions
about what it means to be human.
At the same time, the plethora of ideas within our culture that identify
themselves as humanistic indicates the elusiveness of this term. What does
humanism mean? Almost any intellectual movement of note in the Western
cultural narrative has been labelled as‘humanism’: the literature mentions
patristic humanism, scholastic humanism, Renaissance humanism, and the
German educational humanism of (Friedrich Immanuel) Niethammer, Hegel,
Schleiermacher, Alexander von Humboldt, and Wilhelm Dilthey (which define
our idea of the university to this day). In addition, wefind Marxist humanism,