The notion that “faith” and “learning” need to be “integrated” is a slippery proposition. Sometimes it is embraced unthinkingly; sometimes it is dismissed precipitously. One assumption sometimes latent in the claim that we need to integrate Christ and academia is that there is an unbridgeable gulf between “Christian” and “non-Christian” thought.
However, there is a rich vein in the history of the Christian church of making wise and godly use of Pagan learning, a tradition that starts at least as far back as Daniel and the wisdom literature. So for instance a proportion of the book of Proverbs is vanishingly close, if not identical, to wisdom literature circulating in other ancient cultures, primarily Egyptian. Does that mean it’s less part of God’s word? Not at all, no more than it means that all Egyptian literature is part of God’s word.
Augustine is a great model of “integration” here. In On Christian Doctrine (II.40.60) he emphasizes that
if those who are called philosophers, and especially the Platonists, have said aught that is true and in harmony with our faith, we are not only not to shrink from it, but to claim it for our own use from those who have unlawful possession of it.
And a little earlier in the same book (II.18.28) he writes this:
we ought not to refuse to learn letters because they say that Mercury discovered them. Nor (because they have dedicated temples to Justice and Virtue, and prefer to worship in the form of stones things that ought to have their place in the heart) ought we on that account to forsake justice and virtue. Nay, but let every good and true Christian understand that wherever truth may be found, it belongs to his Master; and while he recognizes and acknowledges the truth, even in their religious literature, let him reject the figments of superstition.
To defend Christianity is therefore not always to reject everything that does not carry a Christian label. There is much to affirm in “non-Christian” thought (though as I explain in my book on Michel Foucault and the Bible, it is not to be affirmed in a “linear” way). Why ever would we think it otherwise, when God “has put eternity into man’s heart, yet so that he cannot find out what God has done from the beginning to the end” (Ecclesiastes 3:11), and when “what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them. For his invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made. So they are without excuse.” (Romans 1:19-20)? When Paul quotes Epimenides and Aratus/Cleanthes on Mars Hill in Acts 17, he is practising and sanctifying the principle that Augustine would later articulate.
