Quotes From Literature of non-LDS Scholars

Lewis, C. S.

What we want is not more little books about Christianity, but more little books by Christians on other subjects, with their Christianity latent.

Lewis, C. S.

The Abolition of Man, or, Reflections on Education With Special Reference to the Teaching of English in the Upper Forms of Schools. New York: MacMillan, 1947.

Until quite modern times all teachers and even all men believed the universe to be such that certain emotional reactions on our part could be either congruous or incongruous to it--believed, in fact, that objects did not merely receive, but could merit, our approval or disapproval, our reverence, or our contempt. . . . St. Augustine defines virtue as ordo amoris, the ordinate condition of the affections in which every object is accorded that kind and degree of love which is appropriate to it. Aristotle says that the aim of education is to make the pupil like and dislike what he ought. When the age for reflective thought comes, the pupil who has been thus trained in 'ordinate affections' or 'just sentiments' will easily find the first principles in Ethics: but to the corrupt man they will never be visible at all and he can make no progress in that science. Plato before him said the same . . . . In early Hinduism that conduct in men which can be called good consists in conformity to, or almost participation in, the Rta--that great ritual or pattern of nature and supernature which is revealed alike in the cosmic order, the moral virtues . . . . As Plato said that the Good was 'beyond existence' and Wordsworth that through virtue the stars were strong, so the Indian masters say that the gods themselves are born of the Rta and obey it. The Chinese also speak of . . . the Tao. It is the reality beyond all predicates, the abyss that was before the Creator Himself. It is Nature, it is the Way, the Road . . . The ancient Jews likewise praise the Law as being 'true.' . . . What is common to them all . . . is the doctrine of objective value, the belief that certain attitudes are really true, and others really false, to the kind of thing the universe is and the things we are. (pp. 25-29)

Luther, Martin

I am much afraid that schools will prove to be wide gates to hell unless they diligently labor in explaining the Holy Scriptures, engraving them in the hearts of youth. I advise no one to place his child where the Scriptures do not reign paramount. Every institution in which men are not constantly occupied with the Word of God must become corrupt.

Maritain, Jacques

Do not say that a Christian art is impossible. Say rather that it is difficult, doubly difficult - fourfold difficult, because it is difficult to be an artist and very difficult to be a Christian, and because the total difficulty is not simply the sum but the product of these two difficulties multiplied by one another: for it is a question of harmonizing two absolutes. Say that the difficulty becomes tremendous when the entire age lives far from Christ, for the artist is greatly dependent upon the spirit of his time. But has courage ever been lacking on earth?

If you want to make a Christian work, then be a Christian and simply try to make a beautiful work, into which your heart will pass; do not try to 'make Christian.'

Do not make the absurd attempt to dissociate in yourself the artist and the Christian. They are one, if you are truly Christian, and if your art is not isolated from your soul by some system of aesthetics.

But apply only the artist to the work; precisely because the artist and the Christian are one, the work will derive wholly from each of them.

Marsden, George M.

The Soul of the American University: From Protestant Establishment to Established Nonbelief. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994).

Persons concerned about the place of religion in American life might be particularly concerned that the largely voluntary and commendable disestablishment of religion has led to the virtual establishment of nonbelief, or the near exclusion of religious perspectives from dominant academic life. While American universities today allow individuals free exercise of religion in parts of their lives that do not touch the heart of the university, they tend to exclude or discriminate against relating explicit religious perspectives to intellectual life. In other words, the free exercise of religion does not extend to the dominant intellectual centers of our culture. So much are these exclusions taken for granted, as simply part of the definition of academic life, that many people do not even view them as strange. Nor do they think it odd that such exclusion is typically justified in the names of academic freedom and free inquiry. (p. 6)

Moberley, Sir Walter

The Crisis in the University. London: SCM Press, 1949.

A praiseworthy reticence in the expression of one's innermost convictions is one thing: to have no such convictions to express is another . . . a refusal to grow up and to come to grips with a reality which might make claims on us. (p. 51)

. . .

It is related that the philosophical faculty of a great American university, on acquiring a new building for their home, proposed to have inscribed over the main entrance the Protagorean saying, 'Man is the measure of all things.' The President of the university however thought otherwise; and when they returned to work after the long vacation, the words they actually found were, "What is man that Thou art mindful of him?" (p. 55)

. . .

On the fundamental religious issue [the existence of God], the modern university intends to be, and supposes it is, neutral, but it is not. Certainly it neither inculcates nor expressly repudiates belief in God. But it does what is far more deadly than open rejection; it ignores Him. . . . If in your organization, your curriculum, and your communal customs and ways of life, you leave God out, you teach with tremendous force that, for most people and at most times, He does not count. (pp. 55, 56)

. . .

It is a fallacy to suppose that by omitting a subject you teach nothing about it. On the contrary you teach that it is to be omitted, and that it is therefore a matter of secondary importance. And you teach this not openly and explicitly, which would invite criticism; you simply take it for granted and thereby insinuate it silently, insidiously, and all but irresistibly. (p. 56)

. . .

Our predicament then is this. Most students go through our universities without ever having been forced to exercise their minds on the issues which are really momentous. Under the guise of academic neutrality they are subtly conditioned to unthinking acquiescence in the social and political status quo and in a secularism on which they have never seriously reflected. Owing to the prevailing fragmentation of studies, they are not challenged to decide responsibly on a life-purpose or equipped to make such a decision wisely. They are not incited to disentangle and examine critically the assumptions and emotional attitudes underlying the particular studies they pursue, the profession for which they are preparing, the ethical judgments they are accustomed to make, and the political or religious convictions they hold. Fundamentally they are uneducated. (p. 70)

. . .

To dwell on such aridity would be odiously pharisaical if it were not accompanied by an overwhelming sense that we, professing Christians, are in the same condemnation. We share the same routine of life with our non-Christian fellows, and, like them, we have been at home in it. We have breathed the exhausted air with little more sense of strain than they. In lecture-room or laboratory, in common room or committee room, our motives, our objectives and our methods, have not been noticeably different from theirs. We are only now beginning to wake to the contradiction between our creed and many of the tacit, communal, assumptions which govern our working lives. (p. 264)

. . .

But apart from the special case of the Faculty of Theology, our chief concern is with the practical duties and opportunities of Christian teachers or administrators. As such, we shall never be able to play any creative part unless we begin by realizing vividly the false position in which we now are. Clearly our Christian faith should be the unifying principle and the supreme motive force of all our main activities. But in most of our professional work it is not, and, as things are at the moment, perhaps it cannot be. That God the Father Almighty is maker of heaven and earth, that our Lord Jesus Christ came down from heaven for us men and for our salvation, that He was crucified and rose again and will come again with glory to judge the quick and the dead, that God the Holy Ghost is the lord and giver of life, and that we are to look for the life of the world to come; these may be sacred convictions in our private lives, but in the common life and study of the university in which we take part they are at the most 'inert truths.' Its tacit assumptions and habitual practices are much what they would be if we were not Christians at all. In their daily world physicists, biologists, engineers, historians, philosophers, professors of language and literature or of medicine 'have no need of that hypothesis,' and, in Rome, we find ourselves automatically doing as Rome does. When the late Lord Birkenhead once attempted incongruously to champion the souls of Christian peoples, he was rudely greeted with 'Chuck it, Smith!' So long as we are involved in this double life, any commendation by us of a Christian outlook is open to a like, shattering, rejoinder. (p. 398)

Myers, Edward D.

Education in the Perspective of History. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1960.

The basic controlling belief of the earliest civilizations in their growth periods was the belief that the goal and purpose of education was that of bringing man into harmony with the cosmic spiritual order, of bringing him to a realization and awareness that his own individual self is akin to the ultimate reality, or may recognize and somehow become like that reality. Education, under this controlling belief, was fundamentally moral training--character training of the mind. And this education was reserved for those who had shown themselves worthy to receive it, as it was imparted by those who had, in their lives, shown themselves to be superior. (p. 264)

Palmer, Parker J.

To Know as We Are Known: A Spirituality of Education. San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1983.

In Christian tradition, truth is not a concept that "works" but an incarnation that lives. The "Word" our knowledge seeks is not a verbal construct but a reality in history and the flesh. Christian tradition understands truth to be embodied in personal terms, the terms of one who said, "I am the way, and the truth, and the life." Where conventional education deals with abstract and impersonal facts and theories, an education shaped by Christian spirituality draws us toward incarnate and personal truth. In this education we come to know the world not simply as an objectified system of empirical objects in logical connection with each other, but as an organic body of personal relations and responses, a living and evolving community of creativity and compassion. Education of this sort means more than teaching the facts and learning the reasons so we can manipulate life toward our ends. It means being drawn into personal responsiveness and accountability to each other and the world of which we are a part. (pp. 14-15)

It is no accident that our confidence in facts has grown as our religious faith has declined--the faith, I mean, that world has been created for us. We no longer see ourselves as recipients of the world as gift; we no longer regard knowing as a way of receiving and celebrating and using that gift. The knower now stands like a master builder in the midst of chaos, trying to fashion a world fit for human habitation. Now we alone are the creators; with our facts we make reality; the only reality we have is one made of those facts. (p. 22)

Our persistent attraction to objectivist teaching and learning is the saga of Adam and Eve in history, not myth. We want a kind of knowledge that eliminates mystery and puts us in charge of an object-world. Above all, we want to avoid a knowledge that calls for our own conversion. We want to know in ways that allow us to convert the world--but we do not want to be known in ways that require us to change as well . . . [But] To learn is to face transformation. (pp. 39-40)

To know truth we must follow it with our lives. (p. 43)

To teach is to create a space in which obedience to truth is practiced. (p. 69)

Pestalozzi, Johann Heinrich

Significant Contributions to the History of Psychology 1750-1920: How Gertrude Teaches Her Children; Pestalozzi's Educational Writings (Daniel N. Robinson, Ed.). Washington D. C.: University Publications of America, 1977.

Faith in God is not the consequence of training and education; it is the consciousness of the pure and the simple, who with innocent ear listen to Nature's voice and know that God is their Father. Childlike obedience is not the result of a finished education; it is the very beginning, the foundation thereof. (p. 24)

Plantinga, Alvin

"Spiritual Autobiography." Unpublished paper. University of Notre Dame. March, 1992.

Calvin [College] was a splendid place for a serious student of philosophy. At Calvin then (as now) the life of the mind was a serious matter. There was no toleration of intellectual sloppiness and little interest in the mindless fads . . . that regularly sweep academia; rigor and seriousness were the order of the day. What was genuinely distinctive about Calvin, however, was the combination of intellectual rigor with profound interest in the bearing of Christianity on scholarship. There was a serious and determined effort to ask and answer the question of the relation between scholarship, academic endeavor and the life of the mind, on the one hand, and the Christian faith on the other. We students were confronted regularly and often with such questions as what form a distinctively Christian philosophy would take, whether there could be a Christian novel, how Christianity bore on poetry, art, music, psychology, history, and science. How would genuinely Christian literature differ from non-Christian? Obviously Christianity is relevant to such disciplines as psychology and sociology; but how does it bear on physics and chemistry? And what about mathematics itself, that austere bastion of rationality? What difference (if any) does being a Christian make to the theory and practice of mathematics? There were general convictions that Christianity is indeed profoundly relevant to the whole of the intellectual life including the various sciences (although not much agreement as to just how it is relevant). This conviction still animates Calvin College, and it is a conviction I share. Serious intellectual work and religious allegiance, I believe, are inevitably intertwined. There is no such thing as religiously neutral intellectual endeavor--or rather there is no such thing as serious, substantial and relatively complete intellectual endeavor that is religiously neutral. I endorse this claim, although it isn't easy to see how to establish it, or how to develop and articulate it in detail. (p. 11)

Ruskin, John

Education does not mean teaching people what they do not know; it means teaching them to behave as they do not behave. It is not teaching youths the shapes of letters and the tricks of numbers and then leaving them to turn their arithmetic to roguery and their literature to lust. It means, on the contrary, training them into the perfect exercise and kindly continence of their bodies and souls. It is a painful, continual, and difficult work to be done by kindness, by watching, by warning, by precept, by praise, and above all, by example.

Schumacher, E. F.

A Guide for the Perplexed. New York: Harper & Row, 1977.

The maps I was given [in school] advised me that virtually all my ancestors, until quite recently, had been rather pathetic illusionists who conducted their lives on the basis of irrational beliefs and absurd superstitions. Even illustrious scientists, like Johannes Kepler or Isaac Newton, apparently spent most of their time and energy on nonsensical studies of nonexisting things. Enormous amounts of hard-earned wealth had been squandered throughout history to the honor and glory of imaginary deities, not only by my European forebears, but by all peoples, in all parts of the world, at all times. Everywhere thousands of seemingly healthy men and women had subjected themselves to utterly meaningless restrictions, like voluntary fasting; tormented themselves by celibacy; wasted their time on pilgrimages, fantastic rituals, reiterated prayers, and so forth; turning their backs on reality--and some do it even in this enlightened age--all for nothing, all out of ignorance and stupidity; none of it to be taken seriously today, except of course as museum pieces. From what a history of error we had emerged! What a history of taking for real what every modern child knew to be totally unreal and imaginary! Our entire past, until quite recently, was today fit only for museums, where people could satisfy their curiosity about the oddity and incompetence of earlier generations. What our ancestors had written, also, was in the main fit only for storage in libraries, where historians and other specialists could study these relics and write books about them, the knowledge of the past being considered interesting and occasionally thrilling but of no particular value for learning to cope with the problems of the present. (pp. 1-2)

Solzhenitsyn, Aleksander

"The Exhausted West." Harvard Magazine, July-August 1978. pp. 21-26.

In the early democracies, as in American democracy at the time of its birth, all individual human rights were granted because man is God's creature. That is, freedom was given to the individual conditionally, in the assumption of his constant religious responsibility. Such was the heritage of the preceding thousand years. Two hundred, or even fifty, years ago, it would have seemed quite impossible, in America, that an individual could be granted boundless freedom simply for the satisfaction of his instincts or whims. Subsequently, however, all such limitations were discarded everywhere in the West; a total liberation occurred from the moral heritage of Christian centuries, with their great reserves of mercy and sacrifice. State systems were becoming increasingly and totally materialistic. The West ended up by truly enforcing human rights, sometimes even excessively, but man's sense of responsibility to God and society grew dimmer and dimmer. In the past decades, the legalistically selfish aspect of the Western approach and thinking has reached its final dimension, and the world wound up in a harsh spiritual crisis and a political impasse. All the glorified technological achievements of Progress, including the conquest of outer space, do not redeem the twentieth century's moral poverty, which no one could imagine even as late as in the nineteenth century. (pp. 25, 26).

. . .

If humanism were right in declaring that man is born only to be happy, he would not be born to die. Since his body is doomed to die, his task on earth evidently must be of a more spiritual nature. It cannot be unrestrained enjoyment of everyday life. It cannot be the search for the best ways to obtain material goods and then cheerfully to get the most out of them. It has to be the fulfillment of a permanent, earnest duty, so that one's life journey may become an experience of moral growth, so that one may leave life a better human being than one started it. It is imperative to review the table of widespread human values. Its present incorrectness is astounding. It is not possible that assessment of the President's performance be reduced to the question of how much money one makes or of unlimited availability of gasoline. Only voluntary, inspired self-restraint can raise man above the world stream of materialism. (p. 26)

Weaver, Richard M.

"Reflections of Modernity." BYU Speeches. May 15, 1961.

Most of my academic career has been devoted to the teaching of rhetoric -- the art of composition and expression. People far less directly connected with that field than I am could tell you that in the past several decades rhetoric has suffered a disastrous loss of prestige. In some of the universities it is regarded as a kind of scullery maid course which can be turned over to just about anybody. I am not interested in covering up this loss of prestige. I am interested in examining into the causes of it, which I believe to be far more ominous than most people suppose.

If you explain to the man in the street what it is that a course in rhetoric endeavors to do, he is as likely as not to exclaim: "Oh, I see; it's a course in how to make propaganda." Now it seems to me that there are some very general causes behind that misunderstanding, and that they are closely related to what I have been calling the evil factors in modernity.

We could begin by examining the reaction of the man in the street: "It's only propaganda." This looks like a reaction in favor of honesty, but if one pursues it just a little, he finds that it rests upon presuppositions that are nothing less than calamitous. The equating of rhetoric with propaganda is one of the surest signs that the modern world is trying to bid goodbye to religion and morality and indeed to any idea of normative standards of conduct. For the thing that such people really hold against rhetoric is that it is trying to persuade men. And who in this day of skepticism and moral relativism can presume that he knows enough about anything to undertake to persuade anybody? The very fact that a man is trying to exert some imaginative and emotional force upon somebody else is taken as proof that he is up to something guilty. By the uncritical application of certain dogmas many of our people have arrived at this absurd position: that to be in favor of anything is to be prejudiced in the opposite direction. Rhetorical expression therefore deals in prejudice and in nothing else. And no man has a right to prejudices, much less the right to put his prejudices off on somebody else.

It is most amazing how people have gotten themselves into such a blind alley of thinking. For the most obvious thing of all is that when man was given the gift of speech -- or when he developed it, if you prefer that account of the matter -- it was for the purpose of teaching and persuading. Without the use of speech for these purposes, imagine what would become of prophecy, of leadership, of instruction on all levels, and indeed of all that daily intercourse by which we decide our private affairs. (pp. 9-10)