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That "the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom" (Ps. 111:10) and also "the beginning of knowledge" (Prov. 1:7) is indicative of a necessary and ongoing reciprocity, moreover, between our acquisition of knowledge and the getting of wisdom. It is irrational, on this account, to blame universities for the moral blindness of some they have "educated." Every educational project, including Christian ones, should declare a truth about its own limits: that no education will of itself preserve us from carnality, greed, and fraud. Moral intelligence does not follow from analytical intelligence; it precedes it, and, when married to it wittingly, as the second chapter of Proverbs is at pains to teach, the student is far likelier in the end "to understand righteousness and justice, equity and every good path." But even then it requires an act of the will to fear God and keep his commandments such that this understanding is put into reliable practice. Kierkegaard was not wide of the mark when he quipped that it just isn't the same thing to say to someone, "You should live accountably" as to say, "You should live accountably; there is a Last Judgment coming."

Many are the educational theories that have imagined learning to be the sufficient condition of virtue. Hegel was not the first to assert that "education is the art of making men ethical" or to think that it "shows men the way to a second birth." Even when the experimental results have been repeatedly disconfirming, there have been eager apologists for this wobbly hypothesis. Bertrand Russell thought that poor education makes us "lazy, cowardly, hard-hearted and stupid," and that better methods "must give us the opposite virtues." Thoughtfully diagnostic educational critics of the late 20th century (e.g., Allan Bloom, George Steiner) have clung to similar wan hopes.

The time is ripe for Christian educators to draw more directly upon the perdurable strengths of biblical tradition as we take up our own part in addressing both a problem and a diagnosis with which we do not in fact dissent—and of which we also remain susceptible. We need to practice a learning that is deep, and dedicated to wisdom as its goal, but discerning enough to know where wisdom and knowledge alike must begin if right action is to follow.

Copyright © 2002 by the author or Christianity Today International/Books & Culture magazine.
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