In a nutshell: Christian humanism as the essential resource for faithful engagement in the modern university
Presentation at the national meeting of the Consortium of Christian Study Centers, July 2026, Upper House, University of Wisconsin—Madison
HWOL subscribers will recognize the main arguments in this talk; but here they are further developed, carved to the concision of a ten-minute talk, and made to speak directly to the mission of the Christian study center movement:
Christian humanism: Introduction and connection to the university’s dominant disciplines
Christian humanism is a modern label for a long tradition of wisdom about the nature, purpose, and flourishing of human beings in relation to each other and to the world. Historically, we particularly see Christian humanism at work wherever Christians have applied the Incarnation to questions of human culture.
To pick just a few exemplars, the tradition stretched from Justin Martyr, Athanasius, and Irenaeus through Aquinas, Erasmus, and Calvin, before encountering a variety of serious challenges from the Enlightenment through the twentieth century. After the dehumanizing ideologies of the World Wars, a concerted recovery arose among such thinkers as CS Lewis, Jacques Maritain, and Simone Weil, which has been carried on in the thought of John Paul II and Benedict XVI and a variety of Protestant and Orthodox scholars.
Christian humanism bridges church and academy as it mines Scripture and tradition on questions (among others) of human material and social flourishing—also the chief preoccupations of the modern university.
This tradition speaks not only to the humanities and arts, but also to STEM and professional disciplines and the social sciences. Christian humanism intersects these latter disciplines at two primary points:
First, as such scholars as Gary Ferngren, Edward Grant, Harold Berman, Rodney Stark, Mary Hirschfeld, Richard Southern, and Charles Homer Haskins have shown, we cannot properly understand modern healthcare, science, technology, law, economics, or even higher education itself without tracing the history of Christian humanist ideas.
Second, STEM, professional disciplines, and the social sciences unavoidably raise for students and faculty alike big questions of human nature and purpose, such as “What is humanity?” “What is the world and how are we to relate to it?” and “What is the good life, lived well in society with others?”
Where the utilitarian, naturalist multiversity addresses such questions, it does so from a variety of intellectual separations, while the Christian humanist tradition, on the contrary, provides grounds for integrative understanding.
Specifically, we find four fronts of inquiry marked by this tension between secular separation and Christian integration. These are epistemology, ontology, anthropology, and ethics. On each of these fronts, Christian humanists have preserved unities that modern secular thought has largely lost:
First is the front of epistemology, which asks, “How do we know the world?”
Christian humanists have believed that the logos, the rational Word of God (think of John 1 – but it was a pre-existent Greek concept), both made the world and is implanted in every human mind. And because our minds participate in God’s rational, stable, orderly logos, we may thus naturally understand the world in its rationality, stability, and orderliness. There is a capital-R “Real” out there and our minds can access it truly and fruitfully. This logos teaching also opened a serious and persistent dialogue with non-Christian knowledge-sources.
But we moderns have fallen into the contrary belief, introduced by the ancient Greek skeptics, revived by the late medieval nominalists, and picked up by some modern idealist philosophers, that our general concepts of things are merely subjective—categories just of our own minds, lacking any reliable connection to an answering rationality in the world outside our heads. This modern idealism separates our minds from the world, eroding our ability to see the world’s objective truth, goodness, and beauty.
And this brings us to the second front, ontology, which asks, “What is the nature of things—of ‘being’—most fundamentally?”
Christian humanists have believed that all created things, though distinct from God, nonetheless participate in qualities of God. In his Abolition of Man, CS Lewis’s Tao, usually interpreted as a depiction of objective moral value, is actually a larger ontological construct. The moral law, Lewis is saying in Christian humanist key, is a facet of being itself, the very substance of the natural world as it reflects and participates in the divine mind. To dwell within the Tao is to participate in God, who is the objective goodness, truth, and beauty of all natural things.
We moderns, on the other hand, think of the world as neutral, non-spiritual, not participating in any truth, goodness, or beauty beyond itself. The university’s dominant naturalistic ontology tends to frame the world as a random concatenation of atoms—not an ordered cosmos but rather a chance-driven chaos—a sort of billiards-table onto which units of passive matter are thrown and interact randomly and purposelessly without rational guidance. While on the front of epistemology, modernity separates the mind from the world, on the front of ontology, it separates the world from God. The world is unattached to any higher reality from which it derives qualities and meaning.
Again, these first two tensioned fronts speak directly to science as practiced in the university. Taking epistemology and ontology together, Christian critics have observed that though a trust in our own reason is the necessary a priori for scientific pursuits through empirical method, our reason cannot itself be explained in purely empirical terms. In other words, the naturalist world, devoid of beliefs about metaphysical Reality, cannot satisfactorily ground scientific research, because it removes any plausible basis for trusting reason itself—the kind of basis the traditional logos belief provides. Science requires a faith that our reason is competent to discern some answering rationality in the world.
Third is the front of anthropology, which asks, “What are humans—our nature, purpose, and flourishing?”
Christian humanists have believed that our nature and purpose derives uniquely from the creator God. Uniquely because, first, unlike the rest of creation, God created humans “in his image,” and second, he incarnated himself not as a rock or a plant, but as one of us. Christian humanists have believed that the incarnation shows us not only God but also ourselves, in our original, intended perfection.
In contrast, we moderns tend to think of humanity in one or more reductive categories – not as God-created and God-loved beings whose end is eternal communion with him, but rather as merely material, or mechanical, or biological, or psychological, or social, or economic beings defined only with reference to natural and social ends. Separated from our own nature and purpose as imaged in the God-man unity of Christ, modernity struggles to anchor a meaningful human life.
The fourth and final front is ethics, which asks, “How are we to live?”
On this front Christian humanists have believed, first, that the image of God we bear is actually a vocation to represent him in the world, living by his commandments to cultivate and keep the earth and to love God and neighbor. These laws are the primordial objective grounds for ethics. Second, Christian humanists have taught that to live our image-bearing vocation well requires character formation: we must not just master practical skills or decide in our minds to obey abstract ethical laws, but also engage in disciplined, graced formation of settled dispositions, known in the tradition as “virtues.” For the Christian humanists, education has always been formative paideia pursued in light of the Christian story. It is “Christ-formation” – character growth in the image of the full, true humanity exemplified in Christ.
On the other hand, having taken a skeptical or idealist view of the mind-world relation and a godless “billiards-table” view of the world’s being, we moderns have set our actions on earth adrift from any known universal qualities of the world and human nature that could guide them. Religion and morality have become privatized, with the realm of value exiled from the reliable realm of scientifically observable fact and relegated to our own individual minds and hearts.
Ethics are thus not only separated from any objective truths about the world, God, and ourselves, but also removed from the Christianized Aristotelian virtue tradition that guided Christians’ moral life for most of two millennia. We can no longer find life guidance in any truths about human nature, and any beliefs we may have about morality are believed to extend only as far as our own subjectivities. Ethical guidance has now shifted from formative communal practice based on shared convictions as to objective truth and goodness, to individually posited rational principles—such as the Kantian categorical imperative or some utilitarian calculus.
Theological foundation and conclusion
To conclude, for Christian humanism the Incarnation grounds our knowledge about humanity, the world, and God. The Incarnation is fundamentally unifying, joining together God and humanity. It thus reinforces epistemological realism, participatory ontology, and an anthropology of image-bearing and eternal communion with God—such that, in C. S. Lewis’s famous phrase, “you have never met a mere mortal.”
And finally, ethically, through the Incarnation as the revelation of the unfallen imago dei, Christian humanism also joins all humanity as equal in dignity and worth, whatever our varied capacities, thus providing “important religious roots for education, tolerance, fair economic practices, philanthropy, and humane politics” [Jens Zimmermann, Re-Envisioning Christian Humanism: Education and the Restoration of Humanity (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017), 12].
In fact, the Christian humanist tradition contains an entire philosophy of human culture and culture-making. It reminds us that God cares not just for our spiritual needs, but also our material and social needs, and that he does so, as Luther taught, through the work we all do in the particular vocations that refract the one vocation of image-bearing—the preparation for those particular vocations being the focus of the current utilitarian university as it serves its students.
[Not said, but expressed afterwards in post-session conversation with others:]
In short, if Christian study centers hope to speak to the university in the language of, and out of the concerns of, faith, it must retrieve the Christian humanist tradition that directly addresses the this-worldly concerns of the university as it now is—utilitarian, naturalist, pluralist, focused on credentialing for work sectors that serve the material and social flourishing of humanity—rather than as we may romantically wish it were: a perennial haven for “the liberal arts.” This tradition is the meeting-place between the world-denying and the world-affirming sides of Christianity, and thus it is the deposit of the faith that can be accessed on behalf of those laboring in the vineyards of the modern university.
Bibliography
Overviews and Studies of Christian Humanism
Jens Zimmermann, Incarnational Humanism: A Philosophy of Culture for the Church in the World (IVP Academic, 2012)
Jens Zimmermann, What Is Christian Humanism?: Recovering a Human Society (IVP Academic, forthcoming in October 2026)
Alan Jacobs, The Year of Our Lord 1943: Christian Humanism in an Age of Crisis (Oxford University Press, 2018)
R. W. Franklin and Joseph M. Shaw, The Case for Christian Humanism (Eerdmans, 1991)
R. W. Franklin, Joseph M. Shaw, et al, Readings in Christian Humanism (Fortress Press, 1982)
Angus Ritchie and Nick Spenser, The Case for Christian Humanism (Theos, 2014; https://www.theosthinktank.co.uk/research/2014/12/05/the-case-for-christian-humanism)
Chris R. Armstrong, “The Christian Humanism of C. S. Lewis’s Abolition of Man,” (Journal of Religion, Culture & Democracy, December, 2023; https://jrcd.scholasticahq.com/article/90878-the-christian-humanism-of-c-s-lewis-s-_abolition-of-man_)
Chris R. Armstrong, “C. S. Lewis’s Modern Christian Humanist Retrieval of the Premodern Real,” Modern Theology [special issue], ed. J. Zimmermann, ed. (forthcoming, 2026)
Disciplinary and Sectoral Impacts of Christian Humanism
Gary B. Ferngren, Medicine and Health Care in Early Christianity (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009)
Edward Grant, The Foundations of Modern Science in the Middle Ages: Their Religious, Institutional and Intellectual Contexts (Cambridge University Press, 1996)
Harold J. Berman, Law and Revolution: The Formation of the Western Legal Tradition (Harvard University Press, 1983) and Law and Revolution, II: The Impact of the Protestant Reformations on the Western Legal Tradition (Harvard University Press [Belknap], 2003)
Rodney Stark, The Victory of Reason (Random House, 2007)
Mary Hirschfeld, Aquinas and the Market: Toward a Humane Economy (Harvard University Press, 2018)
Richard Southern, Scholastic Humanism and the Unification of Europe (Wiley-Blackwell, 1997)
Charles Homer Haskins, The Rise of Universities (Cornell University Press, 1957)
Tom Holland, Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World (Basic Books, 2021)