Thus, the following sections will offer a definition of Christian humanism and
point to its enduring relevance for Western culture, including our ideal of the
liberal arts university. This chapter will end, perhaps surprisingly, with a plea
for Christian liberal arts education, yet this endingflows naturally from the
historic analysis of this chapter: Western educational ideals have religious
roots. It makes eminent sense, therefore, to encourage and nourish the reli-
gious institutions where these original convictions supposedly still live so that
they may rejuvenate culture.
THE THEOLOGICAL ROOTS OF
CHRISTIAN HUMANISMChristian humanism begins with the Christological interpretation of Genesis
1:26–7. For New Testament and patristic authors, the Word becomeflesh
determines what it means to be‘made after the image and likeness of God’.
The concept of being made in God’s image was present in Jewish exegesis and
theology, but it gained an unprecedented prominence in Christian writings on
account of the incarnation. Too often this development is dismissed as the
Hellenization of Christianity. To be sure, the ancient Greco-Roman world also
talked about the image of God, and Christian apologists were well aware of
Platonic language about the mind’s assimilation to God.^29 One should not
forget, however, that for Christian apologists, appropriation meant conscious
transformation of received concepts into the Christian narrative. Nor ought
one to overlook that narrative’s dependence on the Hebraic religion. As Guy
Strousma reminds us, Christianity defeated the Greco-Roman cultural world
with‘Jewish weapons’.^30 These‘weapons’were faith in a sovereign, personal
God who created the worldex nihilo, and the embodied personhood afforded
by the idea of man made in the image of God.^31 A good argument can be made
that Christian theologians, with complete awareness of the Greek context,
stoodfirmly within the Jewish iconoclastic tradition that held humans up as
(^29) On Judaism, see‘The Jewish Paradigm’, in Norman Russell,The Doctrine of Deification in
the Greek Patristic Tradition(Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 53–78. He
shows that Philo, most likely following Antiochus of Ascalon (died 69BC), already placed Plato’s
forms into the mind of God and identified them with the logos, the creative wisdom of God
(Doctrine of Deification, 59).
(^30) Guy G. Strousma,The End of Sacrifice: Religious Transformations in Late Antiquity, trans.
Susan Emanuel (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 11.
(^31) Strousma,The End of Sacrifice, 23. Strousma also shows that, save for a few Platonizing
exceptions, the Christian definition of the person‘includes the body as much as the intellect’
(The End of Sacrifice, 23).
144 Jens Zimmermann