© 2001 Clifton D. Healy

During the 1940s in the Midwest, in places such as Lincoln, Illinois and Joplin, Missouri, conservative Christians founded schools for the purposes of training men (and later women) for ministry roles in their constituent churches and for missionary work around the globe. These schools were part of a larger movement, sometimes called the "Bible college movement," whose purposes were to train their students in the interpretation of the Bible, in preaching and leading their churches, and in the multi-faceted skills necessary for ministering to their congregations. At first their curricula were narrowly focused on those areas of knowledge, but as social needs and movements developed, so, too, did their curricula. So, for example, in the sixties, responding to the growing youth population, these colleges began to "specialize" in their training, offering not only training in missions and church leadership, but also more narrowly on youth ministry. The growing popularity and acceptance of psychotherapy led these Bible colleges to add courses related to "counseling" to their offering of classes. Some of these colleges also began to expand their curricula into areas of general knowledge such as math and philosophy, and one college (Emmanuel School of Religion in Tennessee) added journalism courses. Due to a general resistance to ordaining women for ministry, these colleges began to offer, in cooperation with local "secular" colleges and universities, degrees in elementary school education. Computer and general business courses also found their way into course catalogs, so that in time some of the marketing of these schools revolved around the notion that one could earn one’s degree there, receiving both a general education and a biblically-based one.

However, while it was true that Bible courses and more general education courses were offered side-by-side, it was not true that the Bible colleges were offering their students a liberal arts education. Of course, they were not claiming to do so. But it was nonetheless clear that in the pedagogical paradigm of the Bible colleges, Christian education centered around Scripture and all other courses were contingent, if not derived, on that. One must have St Paul’s epistle to the Romans, but one also one needed to satisfy English requirements. Still, the English requirements were oriented around teaching biblical interpretation in translation, so sentence diagramming was de rigueur. Furthermore, one had to fulfill a requirement for a writing course. Once again, this was geared toward the communication of the Church’s message. Now while it was true that since English formed part of the elementary education degree, one did learn one’s Chaucer and read the latest edition of the Norton Anthology, even the elementary education degree was structured in such a way that students understood their chosen profession as a "mission field."

My point in this description of these schools is not to highlight any perceived deficiencies in their educational approach. Indeed, some of the most rigorous academic courses I took were in Greek and classes interpreting specific biblical books in these schools. Nor is it to question the legitimacy of their stated mission: the training of men and women for leadership in their constituent churches; a mission they fulfill with excellence. Rather, my point is to highlight a specific understanding of education and learning: that is, that true Christian education has as its core the understanding of Scripture, to which other areas of human knowledge are related either directly or derivatively.

This perspective, though its immediate causes had much to do with the modernist-fundamentalist debates in theology earlier in the twentieth century, is not new. Indeed, it is an understanding of education quite similar to the one Augustine sets out in his work, On Christian Doctrine. The point of his work is to provide parameters and clarify aspects of the interpretation of Scripture such that his readers may, in Paul’s words, "rightly divide the word of truth." As I will show, Augustine was hardly averse to most aspects of human knowledge in general, having experienced a conversion of sorts when reading Cicero’s now-lost work, Hortensius (Confessions, Bk III Ch 4), that later paved the way for his becoming a Christian. Nonetheless, Augustine argues that all things are rightly ordered when they are ordered toward the love of God. Insofar as those aspects of human knowledge turn our reason from God, they are to be rejected. Yet, since human knowledge can help us better understand those things of human experience that are referenced in Scripture, the learning of various extrabiblical subjects are useful. However, I will argue that while Augustine’s "program" of learning orders itself in relation to the Christian Scriptures and makes use of the wide array of human knowledge, it provides no mechanism for the advancement of human knowledge itself.

Augustine is widely recognized as a brilliant thinker. He was, prior to his ordination to the priesthood, a teacher of rhetoric. As he relates in his Confessions, he clearly was educated in a wide variety of the disciplines of his day. While it is true that his evaluation of the Greek poets and dramatists is not overly enthusiastic (Confessions Bk I Ch 16), his account suggests that this may be more a matter of the pedagogy he endured, and his inability in Greek, than to the subject matter itself. However, this is speculation. What is the case, for example, is that in his religious searching, having become disaffected with the Manicheaism with which he had aligned himself for some time, he looked for answers to the questions with which he struggled in "astrology," or what we today would know as astronomy (Confessions Bk IV Ch 3 and Bk V Ch 3).

Indeed, though he was not overly sanguine about certain philosophical schools, particularly the Academicians, nonetheless, philosophy in general, and the Platonic tradition of philosophy in particular, he valued highly. He saw many aspects of Platonic doctrine, for example, in the Prologue to the Gospel of John (Confession, Bk VII Ch 9).

This delight he found in philosophy at first moved him to consider the Christian Scriptures (primarily the Old Testament). But he soon found them lacking in literary and rhetorical value. Further, since much of it was then unintelligible to him, he set them aside as he continued his religious searching (Confessions Bk III Ch 5). Only later, when Bishop Ambrose assisted him in understanding various interpretive methods, particularly the allegorical (Confessions Bk VI, Ch 4), did he change his convictions on the importance and worth of the Christian Scriptures.

As Augustine grew older, his view on Scripture became even stronger, and he came to view human knowledge as disciplines that needed ordering to Scripture and Christian belief, rather than Christian belief and Scripture being ordered to human knowledge. For example, in his famous work, The City of God, the first half of the work (Books I-X) is a refutation of the claims of the earthly city that the gods should be worshipped either for temporal or eternal goods. He brings to bear a vast array of citations from the various authors of classical antiquity—Plato, Herodotus, Homer, Plutarch, and others, but especially Virgil—to show how the arguments of the proponents for the worshipping of the gods of the earthly city fail on their own terms. Clearly, Augustine could not have done this by merely studying Scripture, though Scripture does play a ubiquitous role in his arguments against the earthly city.

Of course, we may perhaps safely assume that much of Augustine’s knowledge of the authors of classical antiquity, among other subjects, came from the education he received in his youth and not primarily from the years after his conversion. In fact, it is notable that the philosophical dialogue form, modeled after Plato’s own dialogues, which Augustine utilizes in his works On Free Choice of the Will, Against the Academicians and The Teacher, he early on abandoned for more straightforward forms of writing. While this may have something to do with the constraints the dialogue format placed on his own exposition of his views, it may also be suggestive of his later explicit understanding of the relation of human knowledge to Scripture and Christian theology. For Augustine, in his own life, shows that human knowledge, when ordered to Scripture and the authority of the Church, can having significant impact on one’s understanding of Scripture, as well as on aspects of that human knowledge as well. It is not surprising, then, that as Augustine’s thought matured, he would attempt to clearly state the appropriate function of human knowledge for Christian thinking.

One of the clearest accounts that Augustine gives of this relation is in his work On Christian Doctrine, particularly Book II. In the work as a whole, Augustine is concerned to explicate the appropriate manner in which Christians may interpret Scripture and communicate that understanding. So the second and third books of On Christian Doctrine detail Augustine’s hermeneutical method, while the final book, appended some time later, covers Augustine’s rhetorical method, the proper Christian understanding necessary to communicating or teaching biblical interpretation.

While it is not necessary here to examine in detail Augustine’s understanding of what is human knowledge, and what role human reason plays in knowing, nonetheless, it will be helpful to provide a brief sketch. First of all, Augustine believes that reason by itself was insufficient apart from Scripture (see Confessions Bk VI Ch 5). As much an admirer of the Platonic tradition as Augustine was, he still asserts that Platonism is complemented and completed by Scripture (Confessions Bk VII Ch 17).

Part of the force of this conviction derives from Augustine’s views on authority. In Confessions Book VI, Chapter 5, and in his work, The Usefulness of Belief x.23, Augustine asserts that it is proper to believe on the basis of authority, without the demonstration of evidence. Augustine is not saying that human knowledge is useless, or in some way unimportant. Rather, he is asserting the propriety of belief in the face of claims that one should not believe that which could not be known.

Augustine points out that there are things we believe, though we do not know them, that the persons who claim to be our parents, are in fact, our parents. We have no basis for knowing this, but must accept it on authority. The end of human knowing is that knowledge which draws us closer to God. But God is not properly an object of knowledge. Thus, what is "known" about God is rather a set of "beliefs" about God. In the face of contradictory "beliefs" about God one has recourse only to the appropriate authority who can prescribe such beliefs (cf. The Usefulness of Belief vii.14-16, 19). We may believe things about God that are, indeed, true, though these beliefs are not properly knowledge. If we ourselves do not possess true beliefs about God, or are uncertain as to whether we do, we are obliged to seek out those authorities whose words and lives are ordered in such a way as to be consistent, and who are reputed generally to have come to true beliefs about God. Of course, Augustine quite obviously believes that the location par excellence for persons who desire to have true beliefs about God is the Church.

There are aspects of human knowledge which one can claim to truly know: the relationship of numbers, various rules of human reasoning, and so forth. Still, much of human learning is also predicated, in Augustine’s view, on such an ordering to authority. If one does not know rhetoric, for example, one must find that person who is reputed generally as an authority on oratory. Cicero is clearly one such individual (cf. The Usefulness of Belief vii.16).

The relations of these two areas, human knowledge and beliefs about God, are related in a hierarchy which orders them to God. Those persons or institutions that are generally reputed to have authoritative beliefs about God demand more of our focused attention than does the aggregate of human knowledge. God clearly is a greater good, being immutable and eternal, than are things rooted in the changing, temporal reality in which humans live. Specifically, if human knowledge is to be ordered properly, it is to be subordinate to the proper interpretation and understanding of Scripture, the inspired word of God written through the patriarchs and saints.

Now Scripture is not abundantly clear to human understanding. There are passages of Scripture which are obscure. This obscurity helps conquer pride and makes possible a certain kind of pleasure as our efforts to understand Scripture are fruitful (On Christian Doctrine Bk II Ch 6). Lodged in Augustine’s method for interpreting Scripture is his conception of "signs."

Though Augustine explores in somewhat more detail what signs are, their relation and function, in The Teacher, I will focus on his explanation of them relative to biblical interpretation in On Christian Doctrine. Augustine divides signs, as they pertain to Scripture, into two kinds: "ambiguous signs" (which he discusses in the third book), and "unknown signs" (which are the focus of the second book). He classifies unknown signs in two ways: figurative signs, that refer to both their "conventional" object and to a derivative, or contingent, object; and proper signs, that refer directly to the object they signify. Some signs fit both descriptions. For example the word "ox" can function as a proper sign and refer directly to the animal which "ox" signifies. But the word "ox" can be a figurative sign as well. "Ox" can refer immediately to the animal which "ox" signifies, but can have a distant referent of "evangelist" as in Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians (9:9) where he uses "ox" in a way we would call metaphorically to refer to a preacher of the Gospel who deserves remuneration for his work as a preacher, just as the Torah commanded the Israelites not to muzzle the ox while it was treading out the grain.

Now it is just this aspect of unknown signs, both proper and figurative, that Augustine asserts human knowledge is to be directed. That is to say, human knowledge helps us understand Scripture as various subjects are brought to bear on obscure passages. Hebrew, Greek and Latin, as well as grammar, aid us in being able to learn unknown proper signs, that we may read Scripture (On Christian Doctrine Bk II Ch 11). Human knowledge can also aid us in interpreting Scripture with reference to unknown signs which are figurative through knowledge of things such as animals, minerals, plants, numbers, music (On Christian Doctrine Bk II Ch 16). With this knowledge we can better understand what Jesus means when he says we are to be wise as serpents, or when Scriptures describe the heavenly city as having streets of gold, or the parable of the mustard seed, the significance of the number ten, or the command to sing and make music in our hearts.

Augustine’s view on the relation of knowledge to Scripture was influential through the Middle Ages, and, as I described above, in our own day, though perhaps not directly. It provides a means for both the preservation of human knowledge, and for intelligent and nuanced understandings of Scripture that are faithful in some way to Scripture and to the strictures of human knowing. Although I am not competent to trace connections between Augustine’s views and the preservation in the monasteries of manuscripts of "secular" learning, there are some superficial suggestive connections. But while giving Augustine the proper acknowledgement for the positive influence of his views and their usefulness to the Church, there is one particularly important weakness in those views.

Augustine provides a rationale for the preservation and handing down of human knowledge, but there is no apparent mechanism in his argument for the expansion of human knowledge. If knowledge must be ordered to Scripture, then those areas of human knowledge that do not relate to Scripture need not be studied, though admittedly if such a list exists it would be excessively brief. More to the point, under Augustine’s model, one need look to human knowledge only in ad hoc, as opposed to systematic, ways. One does not, for example, study zoology, perhaps come to a scientifically useful etiological explanation that posits material origins for the existence of certain species, then approach Scripture and interpret it in light of those views. Rather, for Augustine, one would take the Scriptural account as primary (though not necessarily literal) and approach zoology from the standpoint of God as creator. Following Augustine’s model, one studies so as to confirm Scripture.

This method is derivative and ultimately does not provide a justification for the advance human knowledge. There is no mechanism by which one may determine whether or not one has learned all one needs to understand Scripture. If an obscure passage is reasonably "explained" or illumined by the available knowledge, then there does not appear to be any incentive is there to further the limits of knowledge of that subject.

In the final analysis, I would argue that Augustine’s view of the relationship of knowledge to Scripture fails on its own terms. If human knowledge about a particular aspect or passage of Scripture is incomplete, but has proven useful and illuminative, it runs the risk of ossifying ignorance as there is no incentive provided for further study. Furthermore, two items of knowledge conflict with one another, and human reason cannot adjudicate between the contradictory elements, and further, if one of the elements proves useful to Scriptural interpretation, there is no mechanism aside from Scriptural or ecclesiastical authority by which one may determine which view is true, if either are. One then risks accepting the false in ignorance, well meaning though it be. Incomplete and inaccurate as human knowledge is at any given point in history, the end result of Augustine’s project is the obscurantism he appears eager to diffuse.

In my view, the only remedy for Augustine’s model, or for those of the Bible colleges, is to subordinate human knowledge to God, as opposed to Scripture. This may appear on the face of it to be little more than theological slight of hand. But if the end to which all human goods are to be ordered is God, it seems to follow that human knowledge is included in that rubric. While determining how to settle conflicts between human knowledge and Scripture, let alone how to know when such conflicts are real as opposed to apparent, is difficult and complex, it need not deter the change of focus. Certainly one will need to explore more fully the questions of authority and reason, and the limits of each as they relate to one another. But the view Augustine proposes which binds the limits of human knowledge to the pages of Scripture is not, in my estimation, a fruitful one.

Augustine. Augustine: Confessions, The City of God, On Christian Doctrine. Chicago:

Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc. 1952.

________. Confessions, 2 vols. Tr by William Watts. Cambridge: Harvard University

Press, 1912.

________. The Usefulness of Belief. Class Handout. n. d., n. p.

© 2001 Clifton D. Healy

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