Robert Littlejohn and Charles T. Evans. Wisdom and Eloquence: A Christian Paradign for Classical Learning. Wheaton: Crossway, 2006.
In Wisdom and Eloquence Robert Littlejohn and Charles Evans connect the classical tradition of education to a Christian outlook on the goals of education. Both Littlejohn and Evans are leaders and practitioners within the classical Christian movement. Littlejohn’s background is in the field of biology and after serving as a vice president at Covenant College, he now serves as head of school at Trinity Academy in Raleigh, NC. Evans is an instructor in education at Vanderbilt and Covenant College as well as a private school consultant through Better Schools, a company he founded.
Wisdom and Eloquence contributes to the the ever-growing body of literature associated with the emerging classical Christian school movement, which seeks to recover the educational ideals of Western civilization’s tradition prior to its dismantling in the progressive era. Now with postmodernism having arisen and taken root, the erosion of truth due to relativism makes the need for two educational values imperative: wisdom and eloquence. Students must acquire a perspective based on the norms of truth, beauty and goodness along with the ability to speak into today’s marketplace of ideas.
Paradigmatic is Augustine’s delineation of training in wisdom being based first in scriptural knowledge and then in “everything else.” A properly trained Christian must also acquire skill as an orator. The book then expresses the fundamental importance to teach a Christian worldview, drawing upon the insights of Kuyper and Schaeffer that all aspects of life ought to be shaped by a Christ-centered view of life. Littlejohn and Evans lay out a paradigm for understanding the perspective of Scripture containing a narrative trajectory in the Old and New Testaments summarized in four movements: Creation, Fall, Redemption, Consummation. They devote several pages to elucidating these four movements, grounding them in their biblical and theological perspectives.This is a highly commendable paradigm, enabling teachers and students of the Bible to acquire both a knowledge of the scriptural narrative and a sense of their own participation within that narrative. We ourselves are created and fallen beings, our redemption accomplished in Christ, and awaiting the consummation of God’s salvific plan. They helpfully distinguish church and school environment, articulating that a school cannot serve the role of the church, but is nonetheless a domain well equipped for discipleship. Their biblical-theological framework promotes a formational educational environment, encompassing the educational curricula outlined in the remainder of the book.
Littlejohn and Evans carefully spell out the meaning and structure of the seven liberal arts. The trivium, containing grammar, dialectic and rhetoric, and the quadrivium, composed of arithmetic, geometry, astronomy and music, are broken down into their constituent disciplines. Building on Dorothy Sayers’ essay, “The Lost Tools of Learning” (1947), they promote her insights about the need for a classical framework lost in the upheavals of progressivism and two world wars, but they also veer away from Sayers’ approach that connected the trivium to stages of cognitive development. As Jason points out in his post, “The Classical Distinction Between an Art and a Science,” our authors view the trivium as subjects, which falls short of a more robust understanding of the trivium. Viewed as subjects, the classical Christian movement runs the risk of educating without a coherent method.
This book serves as a helpful guide to those new to the classical Christian movement or practitioners within the movement to understand its overarching structure and guiding principles. Much of the contents are practical in nature, whether exemplifying worthwhile school traditions to incorporate or navigating the science versus religion debate in the curriculum of the natural sciences. Littlejohn and Evans provide great insight in a personable style. While the biblical worldview section provides a necessary gateway to effectively ground the liberal arts tradition in a Christian school environment, the two sections felt disconnected. I would have liked to see how the liberal arts tradition flows from a biblical, Christ-centered worldview, and how the liberal arts tradition is ideally suited to Christian discipleship. Venerable names such as Augustine, Calvin, Kuyper and Lewis are foundational to our authors’ educational vision. I was surprised to find little consideration for what the Bible promotes regarding education, although Paul’s imperative to “be transformed by the renewing of your mind” is prominent in the introduction. These are likely the desires of a biblical scholar to have further levels of engagement here, and such desiderata should not detract from the value of this book, especially in taking seriously a biblical paradigm of educational formation.