The Epicurean doctrine of the soul stands as a direct challenge to classical Christian education, as it provides the most comprehensive philosophical ancestor to modern materialism. We might almost see the entire secular modern zeitgeist, so entrenched in the western world, as merely the long shadow of Epicureanism. This fact alone gives the lie to modernism’s grandiose claims of progress, enlightenment and deliverance from medieval superstition. Little do its adherents realize that they have unwittingly adopted the views of one ancient Greek philosopher against the others! 

How true it is what the writer of Ecclesiastes said, that there is nothing new under the sun, a statement that applies more often than we might think in the realm of ideas. As a side note, this fact provides a potent rationale for introducing our students to the Great Conversation in our classical Christian education model.

Epicurus (c. 341–270 BC) follows right after Aristotle as the founder of a new school called “The Garden,”the counter to his contemporary Zeno of Citium, the originator of Stoicism. The vast majority of Epicurus’ writings have been lost to us, with the exception of a few letters by Diogenes Laërtius, a list of maxims, and some scraps preserved in the arguments of later writers. He taught that the highest good is ataraxia (tranquility, or freedom from fear) and aponia (absence of pain), and he aimed to deliver his followers from the superstitious fear of death and the gods through his claims of a materialistic and atomistic universe.

The Roman Epicurean poet Lucretius (c. 99 – 55 BC) provides the fullest exposition of Epicurean thought through his 6 book didactic poem De Rerum Natura (“On the Nature of Things”). In it a pseudo-scientific vision of the universe as made up entirely of atoms is used to unravel the “superstition” of traditional religions, as well as the immortality of the soul. As could be imagined, the implications of his views for morality are immense. While he ends book 4 with a diatribe against romantic love and sexual desire as a source of immense suffering and madness, and a distraction from rational philosophical pursuits, it is hard to remove him from the charge of nihilistic amoralism, or at least unfettered hedonism. There is a reason the biblical quotation, “Let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we die,” becomes associated with Epicureanism (see Isaiah 22:13; Proverbs 23:35; Luke 12:19; 1 Corinthians 15:32).

While we must ultimately reject its conclusions regarding morality and mortality, we will, following the ghost of these ideas into the courtyard, glean valuable warnings as well as helpful insights regarding the educational impact of our fundamental beliefs and the intimate connection between the soul, the body, and the process of learning.

The Material and Corporeal Soul

The Epicurean soul is defined by its substance: it is material and corporeal. This atomistic view directly opposes Aristotle’s hylomorphism, discussed in the last article, which held the soul to be the form or the “first grade of actuality” of a natural body. In contrast, the substance or essence of the soul, for Epicurus, is not form but fine particles. In his De Anima, Aristotle had spent a whole section demolishing the atomic view of the soul propounded by Democritus long before. Epicurus revived this view of the mind or soul as minute particles spread throughout the body 

Epicurus maintained a strictly materialist (atomic) view of the soul, the gods and the eternal universe as a whole and so might be the first progenitor of the leading myth of modern secularism. The mind (animus) and the soul (anima) are a corporeal aggregate of atoms. Lucretius specifies that the soul is formed of “very minute, fine, and tiny particles” (p. 112) This corporeal nature dictates the soul’s function during life, defining the relationship between the body and mind:

“Now I say that mind and soul are held in union one with the other, and form of themselves a single nature, but that the head, as it were, and lord in the whole body is the reason, which we call mind or understanding, and it is firmly seated in the middle region of the breast…. The rest of the soul, spread abroad throughout the body, obeys and is moved at the will and inclination of the understanding” (Lucretius, De Rerum Natura III., p. 110).

According to Lucretius, the soul is intimately united with the body, being inextricably “linked on throughout veins, flesh, sinews, and bones” (p. 211). It’s hard not to be somewhat impressed by this stunning anticipation of the nervous system, even while we object to the ultimate conclusions of his philosophy.

The Soul as Biological Mechanism

Though the Epicurean view of the soul fails to account for the transcendent or divine aspect of the human person (the imago Dei), its emphasis on the materiality of the mind offers a surprising parallel to the modern discoveries of neuroscience and the physical substrata of cognition and sensation. It’s important to give the devil his due. Of course, we now locate the seat of the mind in the head rather than the chest–a view argued for later on by Galen, the 2nd century AD physician and philosopher, but the physical similarities of a central nervous system command center (animus – mind) and neural networks of a similar nature distributed throughout the body (anima – soul) are not inconsequential.

As the source of motion, the mind must be nimble because, as he explains, “Nothing is seen to come to pass so swiftly as what the mind pictures to itself coming to pass and starts to do itself.” This nimble nature means the mind “is very fine in texture, and is made and formed of very tiny particles”(pp. 112-113). Moreover, the mind is seen to act physically upon the body:

“This same reasoning shows that the nature of mind and soul is bodily. For when it is seen to push on the limbs, to pluck the body from sleep, to change the countenance, and to guide and turn the whole man—none of which things we see can come to pass without touch, nor touch in its turn without body—must we not allow that mind and soul are formed of bodily nature?” (Lucretius, De Rerum Natura III., p. 111).

This description of the Mind (Animus) acting as the “monarch of life” (p. 119) that instantly initiates motion throughout the limbs highlights the importance of the physical mechanism of the body (what we now term the nervous system) in sensation and thought. The Epicureans, forced by their materialism to account for all consciousness through physics, explain that mental activity requires a delicate, highly mobile, and well-functioning corporeal nature. The fact that the mind is “distressed by the blow of bodily weapons” reinforces the inseparable bond between body and thought (p. 112).

Even without the benefit of magnetic resonance imaging, we can imagine how the experience of sensation itself might lead an ancient person to this conclusion. There must be some substance connecting my thoughts and will to my limbs. By comparison, Plato’s entirely non-material soul seems a bit farfetched and shadowy, while Aristotle’s hylomorphic soul might feel overly academic, with its complex distinction between form and substance. In a way it’s not surprising that the atomic conception of the soul survived Aristotle’s dismantling into the less philosophical Hellenistic era.

Mortality and the Pragmatic Pursuit of Tranquility

Epicureanism’s insistence on a proto-scientific and thoroughly materialistic account of the human soul serves a primarily pragmatic picture of death. The mind stuff simply disintegrates when the physical bonds holding it together are severed at death. Consciousness, an emergent phenomenon of life, which itself arose on its own, evolution-like, from an eternal, infinite universe full of swirling atoms, will simply cease with death.

The Epicurean position is absolute mortality. Since the mind and soul are material, they are subject to death and dissolution, contradicting the Aristotelean assertion that the rational soul or mind (nous) is “separable, impassible, unmixed and alone is immortal and eternal” (Aristotle, On the Soul, III. 5; p. 179). Lucretius argues that since the mind “can be changed by medicine,” it “has a mortal life” (p. 123).

An early adopter of the conservation of matter, Lucretius claims that the soul is “dissolved” into its constituent atoms upon death:

“Now therefore, since, when vessels are shattered, you behold the water flowing away on every side, and the liquid parting this way and that, and since cloud and smoke part asunder into air, you must believe that the soul too is scattered and passes away far more swiftly, and is dissolved more quickly into its first-bodies, when once it is withdrawn from a man’s limbs, and has departed.” (Lucretius, De Rerum Natura III., p. 209)

This doctrine aims to banish the “old fear of Acheron” and the “close bondage of religion” by confirming that death is nothing to us (p. 107).

Although there may be gods or a God, they are uninterested in us, and there is no afterlife, no Hades, and no eternal punishment. The fate of the atomic soul, therefore, establishes the profound ethical difference between Epicureanism and its philosophical predecessors, not to mention Christian theology. Right and wrong are not enforced by an impartial law of justice; there is no transcendence or final righting of wrongs, but only a hedonistic justification for virtue rather than vice as the most beneficial path. Yet, the Epicurean dedication to mental peace (ataraxia) does reveal a pragmatic insight that is nevertheless valuable to educators.

The Value of Physical and Mental Tranquility for Study

The Epicurean goal is pleasure (hedone), defined as the “absence of pain in the body and of trouble in the soul” (Epicurus, Letter to Menoeceus). While pleasure here is an end in itself, the means by which Epicureans achieve this—the dedication to study (for him primarily natural science)—does not devolve into all-out moral dissolution. This vision of ataraxia (tranquility) for the sake of pleasurable contemplation offers a positive pedagogical mandate: cultivating tranquility is necessary for serious intellectual work.

Lucretius urges his student, Memmius, to approach philosophy correctly:

“For the rest, do thou (Memmius), lend empty ears and a keen mind, severed from cares, to true philosophy, lest, before they are understood, you should leave aside in disdain my gifts set forth for you with unflagging zeal” (Lucretius, De Rerum Natura I., p. 62).

The acquisition of knowledge is explicitly linked to the maintenance of pleasure, in a way that is similar to Aristotle’s view of the contemplative life as the happiest. Of course, for Lucretius this vision is corrupted through his anti-religious bias: knowledge of nature (philosophy/natural science) is essential, as it banishes the fears of the gods and death, providing the highest pleasure. The ultimate success of philosophy is to save us from the “high seas and thick darkness, and enclose it in calm waters” (p. 186) This emphasis on intellectual calm, when recontextualized, provides a compelling ideal for classical Christian educators to encourage a state of mental quietude in their students, necessary for the contemplative work of learning.

Modern research has observed a loss of higher-order thinking during an emotional crisis of fear, referring to it as stress-induced prefrontal cortex downregulation, which impairs executive functions like planning and logical judgment. This impairment occurs because a perceived threat triggers Sympathetic Nervous System activation and an amygdala hijack, forcing the brain to divert resources away from the complex thought processes of the Prefrontal Cortex and towards immediate survival responses. Essentially, the emotional, primal brain overrides the rational brain to prioritize fight-or-flight, leading to a temporary but significant cognitive deficit.

In a similar way, intense desire and craving activate the brain’s dopaminergic reward pathway, effectively causing reward-induced executive dysfunction where the subcortical reward centers override the rational Prefrontal Cortex; this results in a loss of top-down control and a short-sighted focus on immediate gratification over long-term consequence. The transcendent insight here, from Epicureanism to modern research, is the importance of cultivating a tranquil mind for the deeper and more lasting intellectual joy in learning. A lifestyle of emotional swings and sympathetic or dopaminergic overload is, after all, not a recipe for eudaimonia or human flourishing. As Charlotte Mason also emphasized, cultivating a vibrant life of the mind can be an important way of helping children avoid a life of moral debauchery imprisoned to less honorable sensual passions.

Furthermore, the Epicurean focus on a calm physical well-being highlights the importance of the material body for the work of learning. Epicurus teaches that “independence of outward things is a great good, not so as in all cases to use little, but so as to be contented with little if we have not much” (Epicurus, Letter to Menoeceus). This sober reasoning, aimed at securing “health of body and tranquillity of mind” is a pragmatic recognition that physical pain or excessive bodily wants are a hindrance to the sustained mental effort required for wisdom. We might see an agreement with Charlotte Mason’s insistence on the harmful effects of manipulating students into learning through a fear of punishments or the promise of rewards, as these actually undermine higher order thinking and genuine curiosity which has its own reward.

The Epicurean Legacy and the Materialist Ghost

Despite these practical insights regarding the physical substructure of sensation, the value of tranquility for study, and its limited moral applications, the Epicurean framework remains fundamentally flawed, leading directly to the philosophical dead ends that continue to haunt modern secular education.

The Epicurean reduction of man to mortal atoms necessitates a rejection of divine purpose, leading Lucretius to attack the teleological view of nature. The universe was created, not by a “foreseeing mind,” but by the chance “movements and unions of every kind” of atoms (Lucretius, De Rerum Natura I., p. 101).

If the soul is merely material, the quest for truth is limited to the pragmatic aim of avoiding fear and pain. This contrasts sharply with Aristotle’s elevation of the rational soul to contemplate necessary, unchanging truth (epistēmē and nous), culminating in philosophic wisdom (sophia). The reduction of the soul to mechanics anticipates the modern trend of reducing soul, mind and spirit to the mechanics of the amygdala, frontal lobes, and dopaminergic system. We do not contest these physical and physiological discoveries, but the philosophical (and religious!) claims are just that. The fact that there are connected physical processes underlying cognition do not and cannot prove that nothing spiritual or immaterial is present as well. 

And this is not even to mention that strict materialism has no way to account for truth itself or the mind’s perception of it. Philosophically, Epicureanism (like its descendant of secular materialism) provides the intellectual equivalent of a man climbing onto a large branch, facing the trunk of the tree, only to begin sawing off the branch he is lying on. How can material man, a mere jumble of atoms, perceive immaterial truth correctly? Epicurus simply abandoned Plato’s problem of accounting for the transcendentals; he did not solve it.

Likewise, the Epicurean system struggles to maintain objective morality, arguing that virtues are necessary only insofar as they prevent the individual from experiencing temporary breakdowns in the pursuit of his own pleasure. Justice, according to Epicurus, is not intrinsically good:

“Injustice is not in itself an evil, but only in its consequence, viz. the terror which is excited by apprehension that those appointed to punish such offenses will discover the injustice.” (Epicurus, Principal Doctrines)

If morality is merely a “compact” or a convention, it lacks the objective weight necessary for the integrated formation of the soul, which Plato defined as the pursuit of justice achieved through the proper ordering of the rational, spirited, and appetitive parts. Relativism in ethics follows hard on the heels of skeptical materialism.

Pedagogy and Warning: Lessons for the Classical Christian Educator

The Epicurean view serves as a powerful cautionary tale, highlighting how prioritizing mortal pleasure over transcendent purpose undermines the classical Christian mission.

While the Epicureans offered a remarkably acute understanding of how sensation and thought are linked to physical motion and the “fineness of texture” of the body’s material components, the reduction of the entire soul to this atomic mechanism is where the system collapses.

The materialist emphasis, though supporting the importance of attending to the physical health and nourishment of the body for learning, cannot account for the part of the soul (Aristotle’s nous) that is “incapable of being destroyed” and alone is “immortal and eternal”. By reducing the soul to a destructible material form, Epicureanism limits the student’s telos to the mortal pursuit of individual pleasure, contradicting the Christian view of the human person as being made for eternal communion with God and bodily resurrection.

Similarly, the Epicurean ideal of tranquility (ataraxia) is a desirable precursor to focused intellectual study, which the classical Christian educator can and should affirm under the general tradition of schole or leisure (see e.g., Pieper’s Leisure, the Basis of Culture or Chris Perrin’s The Schole Way). However, when this is made the ultimate end of life, it leads to the dangerous avoidance of necessary conflict and labor.

The Epicurean wise person limits desires and seeks simple, easily procured pleasures to “remove the pain of want” and “avoid conflict.” This stands against the classical ideal of training the soul (especially the spirited part) to embrace “physical training to endure pains and sufferings” and the toil necessary for growth. If we prioritize the elimination of distress above all else, we risk producing “unrighteous men, enslaved to their own prejudices and appetites,” who are unwilling to enter the labor and conflict required for both intellectual mastery and moral virtue. The Epicurean philosophy, by grounding the soul in atoms, ultimately confines humanity within the “deepset boundary-stone” of mortality, forever hindering the spiritual revolution of the mind required for true human flourishing.

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Aristotle. On the Soul. Translated by J. A. Smith. The Internet Classics Archive. Accessed October, 2025. http://classics.mit.edu//Aristotle/soul.html.

Epicurus. “Letter to Menoeceus.” Translated by Robert Drew Hicks. The Internet Classics Archive. Accessed October, 2025. classics.mit.edu/Epicurus/menoec.html. 

Epicurus. “Principal Doctrines.” Translated by Robert Drew Hicks. The Internet Classics Archive. Accessed October, 2025. classics.mit.edu/Epicurus/princdoc.html. Lucretius. Lucretius on the Nature of Things. Translated by Cyril Bailey. Oxford: At the Clarendon Press, 1910.

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Each cultural time period generates new challenges for this objective, and ours is no exception. While classical Christian education emerged in Christendom, an era of western history in which the Christian faith was the cultural paradigm, this is no longer the case today. The “Age of Faith” may continue to cast its shadow over western society, but Christianity has lost its cultural cachet.

What does it look like, then, for Christian schools to prepare students for this new era? We cannot simply look back to the last century, or the century before that, or even the millennium before that. The last one thousand years all share a quality that the two thousand twenty-sixth year of the Common Era (i.e. 2025) does not: they occurred in a time when the intellectual, political, and cultural powers of the day viewed Christianity as the authority. If Christian educators want to glean wisdom from the past that is relevant for today, they must go all the way back to the days before Christendom, a time when Christians lived as strangers in a pagan society. This would take them to the 2nd and 3rd centuries when the young Christian movement was finding its way under the persecuting yoke of the Roman Empire. 

This article will explore how the early church engaged its pagan world intellectually and culturally in order to offer insights for modern Christian educators. The reality is that the world we inhabit today is, in many ways, more similar to the 3rd century than it is to the 20th century. A new form of paganism has emerged–an odd amalgamation of modern science, romanticism, and modern politics. In order for Christian educators to prepare their students to engage a pagan world, they need to understand it, and consider how their Christian brothers and sisters engaged it before them.

A Modern Pagan Society

Do we really live in a pagan society? Surely this is an exaggeration. Paganism connotes the widespread practices of superstition, animal sacrifice, and the occult. Even if practices like reading horoscopes are on the rise, they are certainly not mainstream.

In Cultural Sanctification: Engaging the World Like the Early Church (Eerdmans 2024), Stephen O. Presley suggests that the secular direction our culture has trod is a new form of paganism. Referencing Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor’s renown work A Secular Age, Presley observes that Christianity has become intellectually suspect and morally bankrupt. In its place lies “expressive individualism,” a form of epistemological and moral relativism that prioritizes internal feelings over external norms. Not unlike the 2nd century, in which the Roman Empire permitted a plurality of religious options so long as one bowed the kneed to Caesar as Lord, so our culture celebrates a religious pluralism for each to worship as he or she pleases.

Interestingly, contemporary culture has somehow made peace between the materialism of modern science with the romanticist qualities of the expressive individualism mentioned above. Truth, we are told, can be found through the deliverances of the scientific method and the inner revelations of ”who one is inside.” In this way, our culture prizes the objective truth of modern science and the subjective truths of the psychological “self,” yet not in an internally coherent manner. A dizzying schizophrenic oscillation of the objective and subjective is the result, in which both are valued but not simultaneously. You can have Dr. Jekyll or Mr. Hyde, but not together. 

Christianity, on the other hand, is paradoxically where the objective and subjective meet. “In the Beginning was the Word,” the Gospel of John tells us, and “…and the Word became flesh.” Simon Kennedy, a research fellow at the University of Queensland in Australia, makes this point in Against Worldview: Reimagining Christian Formation as Growth in Wisdom (Lexham Press 2024). In this book, Kennedy argues for a new way of thinking about Christian worldview, underscoring that only God possesses the authoritative Christian worldview. Humans can develop a Christian worldview, subjectively speaking, but only through seeking a true apprehension of objective reality “that is obtained through the process of learning about God, the self, and the world (15). 

Even while the objective and subjective remain unreconciled in contemporary culture, there is a third ingredient we must consider: modern politics. One quality of a secular society, again, according to Charles Taylor, is the “buffered self,” the idea that cosmic and spiritual forces do not impact everyday life. If this is the case, there is an authority and power vacuum, one that is quickly being filled by modern politics. We could see this phenomonon in the most recent election: the desperation, angst, and fear-mongering that occurred throughout the process. Both sides of the aisle used rhetoric in a way to indicate that democracy was on the line and that only their ballot nomination could save us. Many people today longing for good news about peace and security look not to their churches, but to their political leaders. The new hope is in public policy, elected officials, and the preservation of democracy as we know it.

The effect of the amalgamation of expressive individualism (truth is found inside), scientific materialism (the physical world is all there is), and modern politics (only effective government can save us) is the new paganism. This paganism rejects a transcendent creator over and above all things, and replaces him with a worldview of immanence. This immanence takes normally good things in this world–the individual self, scientific method, and democratic government–and deifies them. In order to equip students to engage our neo-pagan world, let us now examine how the early church did so long ago. 

To Sanctify a Culture

In his book cited above, Stephen Presley argues that the early church’s model for engaging the pagan culture of the day was not isolation or confrontation, but sanctification. The earliest Christians were living in a world in which Caesar was king, and the empire promised peace through strength. Perpetual violence, sexual license, unbridled leisure, and oppression of the weak were core elements of this ancient culture. Christians were required to think prudently and biblically about how they would navigate such a world while being faithful to Christ.

Presley proposes that the posture these early Christians adopted was one of cultural sanctification. He writes, “Cultural sanctification recognizes that Christians are necessarily embedded within their culture and must seek sanctification (both personal and corporate) in a way that draws upon the forms and features of their environment to transform them by pursuing virtue” (12). In other words, Christians should continue to live in their local communities, engaging in normal cultural practices (so long as they are not sinful), even as they determine when to abstain, holding fast to their identity as pilgrims destined for an eternal home.

Presley then goes on to offer five ways the early church engaged in this “slow and steady process of living faithfully and seeking sanctification both personally and corporately in ways that transform the culture” (20). 

First, the early church crafted a distinct Christian identity. Through catechesis and worship, believers grew to understand who they were individually and communally as followers of Christ in a Roman world. They understood that even though they lived in a largely pagan society, Caesar did not lay claim to their ultimate identity.

Second, early Christians lived out a political theology in which they submitted to civil authorities and worked to be active citizens. They took seriously the teaching of Jesus to “Render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s” even as they faithfullly worshiped God as the supreme authority over all things. Moreover, they understood that their ultimate citizenship is in heaven.

Third, the early church navigated the intellectual climate of its day with wisdom and eloquence. The church developed its own public intellectuals, equipped to evaluate the dominant ideas of the day and provide a defense for the Christian faith. These Christian intellectuals, such as Irenaeus and Origen, did not cave to the attacks on their faith, but instead provided persuasive arguments and responses.

Fourth, these believers engaged in public life with humility, compassion, and courage. They did not abstain from contributing to society in normal ways–having jobs, partaking in innocent leisure, having families, or even serving in the military. Rather, they participated in these societal functions with wisdom and virtue. In addition, they displayed exceptional compassion, caring for the poor and marginalized of society.

Finally, the early church was resolute in its hope in the coming kingdom of God. While their neighbors trusted in the glory of the Roman Empire, early Christians rooted their faith in the salvation they received through Christ and put their hope in the future resurrection. This hope served as a north star for them, guiding them through the complexities of living in a pagan society with a clear vision for the future.

Through these five avenues, early Christians avoided isolation, such as “the Benedict Option,” and confrontation, attempting to seize the empire for themselves. Instead, they learned to live under the authority of the Roman Empire and engage a contemporary pagan culture, while not abandoning their faith in Christ and commitment to Christian virtue. 

Seek the Welfare

In our modern pagan society, the church has a new opportunity to live out its identity in this way. The idea of cultural sanctification allows believers to approach culture, not as a world to flee or fight, but to help flourish. This approach is reminiscent of the Lord’s instruction to the Jewish exiles in Babylon back in the 6th century:

Thus says the Lord of hosts, the God of Israel, to all the exiles whom I have sent into exile from Jerusalem to Babylon: Build houses and live in them; plant gardens and eat their produce. Take wives and have sons and daughters; take wives for your sons, and give your daughters in marriage, that they may bear sons and daughters; multiply there, and do not decrease. But seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you into exile, and pray to the Lord on its behalf, for in its welfare you will find your welfare.

Jeremiah 29: 4-7 (ESV)

Here God commands his people to seek the welfare of the city, to contribute to its flourishing and success. Rather than waiting idly by for the eventual return to Israel, he instructs them to lead responsible lives, to engage in the culture, and to be productive members of the city. Moreover, he encourages them to pray for the city, remaining faithful to their Jewish identity even while they seek the city’s welfare.

In today’s pagan society, opportunities abound for Christians to embed themselves in culture while seeking to sanctify it. Christians simply committing to living virtuously will offer a stabilizing force for society and will set the church apart as a unique community. Engaging as active citizens and finding ways to serve in their neighborhoods is an additional way Christians can live out their calling to an unbelieving culture as God’s people. Finally, remaining conscious of prevailing ideologies of the day that run counter to Christianity, especially expressive individualism and what Carl Trueman calls the triumph of the modern self, will prove essential for preserving biblical doctrine.

These practices are all elements of an ancient Christian way of engaging a pagan culture, cultural sanctification, which “…sees Christians embedded within their culture but seeking sanctification so as to promote virtue and reject vice in their personal lives, in the church and in the activities and institutions of the surrounding world” (164). 

Insights for Christian Educators Today

What does it look like for Christian educators today to pursue this vision of cultural sanctification for their graduates?

Let me offer three suggestions.

First, Christian educators should reclaim the classical vision of education, which is the pursuit of wisdom and cultivation of virtue. The most important work teachers can do today, in partnership with parents, is to train students to be wise and discerning, both regarding intellectual ideas and practical day-to-day decisions. Presley’s observation regarding the virtuous lives of early Christians is profound, and yet, we must remember that virtue does not happen by accident. A virtuous persons is formed through the intentional cultivation of moral habits over the long-term. While grades, college acceptances, and accolades have their place, the cultivation of virtue must remain at the center of what Christian schools aim to do.

Second, Christian educators should equip graduates to grapple intellectually with the cultural ideas of the day. The way this occurred in the classical tradition is through training students in the liberal arts, the tools of learning. Modern education today is preoccupied with the pragmatic. Popular-level literature, worksheets, and 1:1 tablets is the strategy today for moving students from grade to grade. But for students to truly understand and evaluate competing ideologies, they need more than to study the “right answers.” They need to think through the ideas themselves, learn to define their terms, apply basic principles of logic, and debate opposing views.

Finally, Christian educators must infuse graduates with a theology of life that is grounded in scripture and tethered to a local church. It is no accident that Presley’s list regarding how the early church engaged culture begins with identity. If students are going to engage in cultural sanctification, they need to have clarity regarding their own life purpose. A robust theology of life provides students with the fundamentals of who they are in Christ, the different phases and stations of life they can expect to navigate, and a focus on the importance of staying connected to a local church.

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Keller had a gift for making complex things simple for ordinary people to understand. This made him a great teacher. It did not matter whether he was distilling the philosophical theology of Jonathan Edwards or the secularization analysis of Charles Taylor. He communicated these ideas with fairness and clarity, all in a conversational, winsome tone. 

This, of course, was all part of his strategy. Keller spent the bulk of his life ministering in New York City, arguably the hub of secularism in the United States. He knew he was dealing with an educated, achievement-oriented audience that was, at the same time, critical toward Christianity. To minister to them effectively, he would need to disrupt their assumptions about faith in the modern world. This meant not only knowing Scripture, but knowing New Yorkers. He would need to live where they live, see what they see, and hear what they hear. Then he would need to translate the message of the gospel accordingly, a process called “contextualization,” for which Keller would become a master in a class of his own.

As a classical educator, I cannot help but see parallels to my own work. I am trying to pass on the hallmark contributions of a tradition to the next generation. This includes intellectual skills, such as the liberal arts, yes, but even deeper, the affections of the heart and longings of the soul. I am trying to form students to be wise, virtuous, and eloquent followers of Christ. To do such work requires an element of disruption–disruption against modern assumptions about education, secular assumptions about knowledge, and cultural assumptions about identity. To share this vision requires seeking to understand parents and students in my community and translating the value of a classical liberal arts education for those who have ears to hear. 

In this article, I will highlight parallels between the late Dr. Timothy Keller’s ministry and the values of classical education. Having recently finished reading Collin Hansen’s newly published Timothy Keller: His Spiritual and Intellectual Formation (Zondervan, 2023), I have observed aspects of Keller’s approach that are deeply relevant for classical educators today. While I have no knowledge that Keller himself was a proponent of classical education, I can imagine he would appreciate the values we share.

A Love for Reading  

I begin with the fact that Tim Keller was a bibliophile. He simply loved to read. By the age of three, Keller was reading on his own. Growing up, he delighted in reading entry after entry in the encyclopedia, enjoying history and non-fiction as well. His family had a collection of Rudyard Kipling’s works that he would read along with seminal works from the Bronte sisters. 

Keller studied religion at Bucknell, a liberal arts college in Pennsylvania, and began doing parachurch ministry with InterVarsity. Here he developed a heart for evangelism and helping non-believers see the truth and veracity of the Christian faith. During this time, Keller experienced the teaching of a professor who would become a lifelong mentor to him: Ed Clowney, the first president of Westminster Theological Seminary. 

As part of an InterVarsity outreach, Clowney once gave a series of evangelistic talks, interacting with the existentialist philosophy of Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus (Hansen 23). In this way, Clowney illustrated what Tim Keller would later add to his own skillset: interacting with the leading intellectual ideas of the day through a biblical, gospel-shaped lens. Around this same time, InterVarsity Press published Colin Brown’s Philosophy and the Christian Faith, along with similiar types of books, covering the writings of Thomas Aquinas, Rene Descartes, David Hume, Immanuel Kant, Georg W. F. Hegel, Soren Kierkegaard, Friedrich Nietsche, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Karl Barth, and Francis Schaeffer. As Hansen puts it, “For a precocious student such as Keller, the high-level philosophical engagement of these InterVarsity authors showed him you could be intellectually serious and also a Christian” (25).

This first parallel I observe between Keller and classical education is about a love for the written word, supplied through both Christian and secular authors. All truth is God’s truth, and humanity across cultures receives a common grace from the Lord to discover this truth and inscribe it into books. Keller’s love for reading books, along with newspaper articles, journals, magazines, plays, and short stories, enabled him to speak so knowledgeably and connect so naturally with a wide audience.

The Power of Imagination

It is hard to write an article on Tim Keller without mentioning the Inklings, a group of Oxford literary enthusiasts who would meet to discuss and share their work with one another. Keller read the Inklings, especially C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien, along with their forerunners G.K. Chesterton and George MacDonald. 

Through the works of the Inklings, especially The Chronicles of Narnia and The Lord of the Rings trilogy, Keller encountered the power of story and imagination for shaping one’s faith. Lewis famously described the Christian story as the “true myth” in that it is the underlying story behind all stories and myths. The only difference is that it is actually true. The biblical storyline of creation-fall-redemption-restoration is present across cultural literary traditions, and the fulfillment of these stories is the gospel of Jesus Christ. In this way, all stories worth their salt borrow in some way from the story. 

Similarly, Tolkien’s idea of a “eucatastrophe” points to the gospel notion of an unexpected turn of events for the better. This, of course, is what makes fairy tales so great. Just when things look like they can only get darker, the hero comes in to save the day. Just when it appears all is lost, the beast is transformed, the ugly duckling becomes a swan, and the princess awakes. In the gospel, this is precisely what happens through the person and work of Christ. Hansen writes, “Lewis gave Keller a model for wide reading and clear thinking. Lewis challenged Keller to deploy vivid illustrations for public apologetics in defense of Christian claims to truth and beauty…Tolkien gave him ways to talk about work, to talk about hope, to talk about the stories we all hope will come true someday” (53).

I have yet very few classical educators who have not read (and loved) the Inklings. My explanation for this is that classicists love stories. Stories touch our hearts and seize our imaginations in a way that didactic instruction simply fails to do. They embody perennial ideas and unchanging values in characters and plots that we cannot forget. Stories point us to truths about reality that are more certain than empirical facts and more tested than results from the lab.

As Keller found ministering to New Yorkers who needed to be re-enchanted with the gospel, telling stories and using vivid illustrations utilize the imagination to grasp the greatest story of them all. He himself said, “The gospel story is the story of wonder from which all other fairy tales and stories of wonder take their cues” (57). This is the power of Christian imagination.

Learning in Community

Through the Inklings, Keller came to appreciate the role of imagination for the Christian. But going back to his days of evangelism and apologetics in college, leading people to faith in Christ, especially through overcoming doubt, was a lifelong passion. To support this process, Keller discovered the importance of learning in community, a third parallel I see with classical educators.

While Tim never visited L’Abri, the famous retreat center for intellectual pilgrims nestled in the Swiss Alps, he did spend time with R.C. Sproul at the Ligonier Valley Study Center in Pennsylvania. The vision for Sproul’s center, modeled after Francis Schaeffer’s L’Abri, was to provide an affordable and hospitable space for college students to think, pray, study, and work with their hands. The goals was the cultivated integration of faith and reason. Emerging during the 1960’s and 70’s, these centers were safe havens for counter-culture seekers and doubters. Students could come to study under the guidance of Christian pastors and professors, and encounter a case for faith that resonated with them through an appeal to modern art, literature, and philosophy. 

The idea of seeking wisdom in the context of doing life together resonates for many classical educators. While classical schools range in size, make-up, and resources, there is an underlying value for pursuing deep relationships. There is this sense, when teaching in a classical classroom, that we are pursuing truth together. Yes, the teacher may come to the table with some expertise to share, but really, teacher and student mutually submit themselves to the authority and transcendence of objective truth, goodness, and beauty. In this communal pursuit, fellow pilgrims on the journey learn as much about one another as they do about what they are studying. When done properly, the tension of faith and doubt is honored, not eliminated, and tough questions about life, faith, suffering, and purpose come to the surface. Hansen writes, “Tim sought to replicate this kind of community inside the church–hospitable and evangelistic, intellectual and earthy (64).

Faith in a Secular Age

A final parallel between Tim Keller and classical educators is the desire to be orthodox yet modern. Both Keller and classicists embrace the resources of church history as assets, not impediments, for leading lives of faith in the 21st century. This includes particular creeds, doctrines, and traditions. At the same time, both Keller and classicists seek to be modern, believing whole-heartedly that God is at work in the church and culture today. The calling of a Christian is neither to flee from culture nor to succumb to it, but rather, to care for it.

The phrase “orthodox yet modern” itself comes from Herman Bavinck, a Dutch neo-Calvinist who greatly influenced Keller. As a Presbyterian and reformed theologian, Keller subscribed to the reformed tradition of theology, reading the likes of John Calvin, John Owen, Jonathan Edwards, and Abraham Kuyper. Central to the neo-Calvinist view is the idea that faith extends across culture. As Hansen puts it, “Believers cannot withdraw from the modern world but must engage every aspect, from art to business to politics to family to education, with a distinct worldview built on a historic Christian faith” (66).

Abraham Kuyper, the pioneer of neo-Calvinism, famously declared, “No single piece of our mental world is to be sealed off from the rest and there is not a square inch in the whole domain of human existence over which Christ, who is sovereign over all, does not cry: ‘Mine!’” In this quotation, we see parallels to our own classical, Christian approach to the liberal arts. If Christ is indeed sovereign over all creation, then he is sovereign over all disciplines. Whether one is studying the humane or natural sciences, knowledge discovered by way of grace common to the believer and unbeliever alike, is ultimately knowledge whose source is Christ.

This idea of common grace, paradigmatically observed in Romans 1, means that all people possess some seed of knowledge of God in their hearts. Those that deny the existence of God simply suppress this knowledge. Thus, the job of the apologist is not to offer proofs for the existence of God, but rather to demonstrate how Christianity explains what unbelievers “know with their hearts but deny with their lips” (91). This occurs through identifying inconsistencies in the worldview of an unbeliever, an approach called presuppositional apologetics.

How the Trivium Can Help

For classical educators, we are preparing students through the Trivium to study the truth (grammar), reason about the truth (dialectic), and speak the truth (rhetoric). But in a secular society that no longer takes its cues from the Enlightenment, appeals to objective truth are no longer effective. Our postmodern culture has freed itself from modernistic appeals to universal rationality and empirical evidence. People believe all sorts of things that cannot be proved by modern science–human rights, convictions about justice, personal identity, and longings for meaning–to name a few. We therefore ned to help people see, through the arts of the Trivium, that their intuitions about these metaphysical realities require a foundation that is also metaphysical. This is the need for transcendence.

What Tim Keller has shed especially clear pastoral light on is that the empty promises of secular modernity are equally empty in secular postmodernity. Truth is indeed not knowable by human reason alone. But it becomes available when received as a gracious gift from God. To be known and loved– not by how much one knows or how well one loves, but by a creator who ultimately knows and loves– this is the message our world needs to hear today. The task of the classical educator, then, is to wield the liberal arts to reveal this reality and go on to proclaim “the true myth,” the ultimate story, and invite others into the new community, marked not by good people or bad people, but by what Keller calls, “new people.” 

Conclusion

In this article, I have sough to demonstrate parallels between the ministry of Tim Keller and the work of classical educators today. So many of the tactics Tim Keller used in his ministry align with our own work of helping students encounter the living God through a faith integrated with all domains of knowledge and fueled through the power of imagination. May the legacy of Keller continue as we seek to raise up disciples of Christ who love God with their minds, and proclaim the gospel in a secular time in which people are so desperately looking for good, perhaps surprising, news.

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