and Christian intellectuals as a last gasp of Christian social involvement, with
visions of a grand humanist programme already fading away. If he is right,
then that historical moment marked an end of a political and social dynamic
that was crucial to the earliest Renaissance humanist. Moreover, Jacobs iso-
lates this postwar period as a brief re-emergence of Christian humanism after
centuries of a more secular republic of letters, possessing a more profound
anti-clericalism andfigures such as Hobbs and Spinoza and increasingly
separated from the biblical studies that were once central to the humanist
republic, but were now segregated from broader culture and turned into a
highly specialized pursuit.
In Samuel Johnson, to return to him, we see a gap between private devotion
and the public language of ethics that would have been foreign to earlier
Christian humanists. I really do not want to agree with my colleague that
Christian humanism is best treated now in the past tense. And I do know this
much: the values and resources of Christian humanism remain as vital as ever
for Christian thinkers and artists and are needed more now than in any time
previously. Christian humanism, and I give each word in this term its equal
weight, is a bridge for our cultural, intellectual, and artistic pursuits that we
cannot afford to neglect. First, Christian humanism provides us with a vision,
and more practically a template, for a faithful life of a mind irradiated by faith.
German theologian Helmut Thielicke understood well the importance of
maintaining a faith that knows how to apply knowledge:‘Knowledge, techno-
logical knowledge at any rate is no longer the problem but when the knowing
human being loses his faith he becomes a problem to himself. Knowledge and
faith belong together, for knowledge without faith creates fear.’^65 He might
have been readingHamletorDr Faustjust before he wrote that.
A great model for us is the fearless enthusiasm of the Renaissance humanist
for that pagan legacy they were recovering and synthesizing with their Chris-
tian outlooks and withfinally more revered Christian texts. Nick Wolterstorff
acknowledges the importance of this attitude for Christian education and
scholarship when he states,‘the Christian scholar participates as Christian in
those social practices that are the disciplines. Those practices are not a project
of the Christian community, nor are they the project of some anti-Christian
community, they are human; they belong to all of us together—just as the state
is not for Christians or for non-Christians but for all of us together.’He
concludes,‘The Christian voice will be a voice of charity; it will honor all
human beings, as Peter puts it in his letter in the New Testament. It will never
be abusive. But there is also a more subtle matter to be raised here. The voice
(^65) Helmut Thielicke,Christ and the Meaning of Life: Sermons and Meditations, trans. John
W. Doberstein (London: James Clark, 1965), 195.
Christian Humanism’s Legacy in Renaissance Poetry 191