If you attended the Society for Classical Learning conference this past summer in Charleston, South Carolina, you may have attended the plenary session with Jonathan T. Pennington. He presented on “Jesus the Classical Educator.” The presentation was drawn from his new book Jesus the Great Philosopher. I think this is a really important book that classical educators need to read and grapple with. In this and the following post I will review the book and lay out several of the ideas that we well worth your attention.

But first, a disclaimer. I am not an unbiased reader. Jonathan is a good friend. We both attended Trinity Evangelical Divinity School and later University of St Andrews. At both places he preceded me by a few years. At each stage he played a key mentoring role, helping me to consider studying overseas in Scotland and then introducing me to his and my doctoral supervisor, Richard Bauckham. There’s a real kinship Bauckham’s advisees share, striving for excellence in biblical scholarship while desiring to produce work that will prove valuable for the church. Prof. Pennington has been one of the leading lights among Bauckham’s students, so it’s exciting to see him produce a work that now speaks into the kind of project we are doing in our educational renewal movement.

Pennington is associate professor of New Testament Interpretation at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. has previously written extensively on the New Testament, publishing Heaven and Earth in the Gospel of Matthew, the research he had done during his PhD studies. He has written and contributed to several other books, including Reading the Gospels Wisely (Baker, 2012), The Sermon on the Mount and Human Flourishing (Baker, 2017) and Reading the New Testament as Christian Scripture with Con Campbell (Baker, 2020). With the publication of Jesus the Great Philosopher (Brazos, 2020), Pennington has shifted slightly away from writing exclusively academic biblical studies volumes and presenting ideas that have a more popular-level appeal. In this latest book you’ll find that Pennington is able to adeptly bring his scholarly prowess into connection with contemporary issues and cultural motifs.

Here in part 1 of this review, I’ll explore the foundational work he present on ancient and biblical wisdom. Later in part 2, we’ll see how he builds on this foundation to address matters such as the self-help industry, our current political discourse, perspectives on justice and the role of emotions in our lives.

The Renewal of the Ancient Philosophical Tradition

Pennington diagnoses a major problem in modern Christianity as a result of not viewing Jesus Christ as a philosopher. His major claim is that “there are four significant things that have happened to the church as a result of this loss of ‘philosophy’ language.” (Jesus the Great Philosopher 10) What are those four things. First, Christians experience disconnected lives. “Our Christian faith is often disconnected from other aspects of our human lives.” The Christian life today is compartmentalized such that we haven’t connected all aspects of our lives to an overarching philosophy of human flourishing centered on Christ Jesus. Second, Christians are prone to search for answers to life’s biggest questions from popular culture. “We naturally look to other sources – alternative gurus – to give us the wisdom needed to live flourishing lives, to find the Good Life.” It is all too easy to swipe open an iPhone to watch a YouTube video of a TED Talk than it is to pore over the text of the Bible. Third, Christians are untrained to answer the difficult questions of life. “We have stopped asking a set of big questions that Holy Scripture is seeking to answer.” I will delve into this third point in greater length in a moment. And fourth, Christians are not able to share the gospel in its fullness. “We have limited our witness to the world.” When we short circuit the philosophical power of the gospel, we actually miss out on the way redemption in Christ helps people makes sense of all of life.

Now, this matter of asking profound questions of the Bible is worthy of further deliberation. Pennington writes, “So, with our high view of Scripture in hand, we go to the Bible and ask important questions – religious, vertical questions – and that is good. But because of habits and training, we have stopped asking another set of questions – the human, horizontal, philosophical ones.” (15) To be clear, as Christians we have tended to approach our Bibles with a view to learn about God and then apply it to daily life. But our metaphysical musings have largely tended to not include a major set of philosophical questions. These questions include, “What is the nature of reality? How do we know this? What does it mean to be human? How do we order our relationships and emotions? How do we find true happiness?” (15) Notice how these questions are different than questions pertaining to doctrines of the Trinity, the sacraments or church order. Furthermore, we often skip from those heady theological insights to highly practical practices like daily Bible reading and listening to Christian music. The important questions that Pennington highlights enable the Christian to masterfully build lives of meaning and purpose in all domains of life.

The second chapter of Jesus the Great Philosopher traces the ancient philosophical tradition, identifying how philosophy wasn’t some esoteric, exclusive club. Instead, philosophy sought to guide people toward “true happiness; it was the vision for life itself.” (18) Pennington looks at the role of virtues in developing human flourishing. He explains what he calls the “four main compass points” of philosophy: metaphysics, epistemology, ethics and politics. (28) The renewal of the ancient philosophical tradition has been a key component of our own educational renewal movement. This chapter sets the stage for what comes next, an examination of the Bible in light of the major philosophical questions Pennington points to.

The Bible as an Ancient Philosophical Text

The Bible itself is shown to be a thoroughly philosophical text. Pennington spans both the Old and New Testaments demonstrating how the four compass-point questions are extensively present throughout the Bible. From creation to new creation, the Bible provides a grand view of the universe. Pennington writes, “This world that we experience is actually created and upheld by the incarnated and now-risen Jesus, in unity with God the Father. This is a radical metaphysical claim not only for Jews but also for Greeks and Romans, who also had a highly developed metaphysic of both the cosmos and humanity’s place in it.” (70) Biblical metaphysics also points to how all reality is moving toward an end or telos. History is “heading toward a restoration of what was lost, a restoration that will even supersede the goodness of the original creation.” (71)

How we know what we know is the domain of epistemology. Pennington shows how the Bible puts forward a consistent yet nuanced understanding of knowledge. In the ancient philosophical tradition, knowledge is experienced, practical and lived out (43). The garden shows how knowledge of God is experienced by walking with God. Yet sin through the fall obfuscates our ability to know God. The Old Testament establishes a pattern of “forgetting God and coming to know God again.” (44) The New Testament builds on this pattern by providing a pathway in Christ Jesus to truly know God. Our minds, clouded by the fall, are transformed through regeneration. “The knowledge of God the Father revealed in God the Son is only accessible through God the Spirit.” (73) This trinitarian formulation of biblical epistemology addresses how the all-encompassing nature of God – who is beyond our comprehension – can be knowns and experienced personally.

Epistemology leads to ethics, or an understanding of right and wrong. The heartbeat of ethical thinking in both the ancient philosophical tradition of the Greeks and Romans as well as the Bible is virtue. We’ve written at length about virtues and habits here at Educational Renaissance. And Pennington confirms the high congruence between ancient and biblical wisdom. “An ethics of virtue, which is shared by ancient philosophy and the Bible, focuses on the development of our sensibilities, values, and habits.” (47) Ethics is not about adherence to a set of rules or mere obedience to a command. Instead, the virtue ethic of the Bible is characterized by imitation and agency. “Virtue ethics focuses not just on the external issues of right and wrong but on our interior person and our development to be a certain kind of people. In the Bible, this means becoming more like God himself.” (75) It is clear, then, that ethical reasoning is highly dependent on one’s epistemology. True knowledge of God provides both insight into what it means to be good and direction about how to live out the good in our lives.

The fourth big idea considered from a biblical perspective is politics. Even though this word is perceived negatively in modern culture, there is a rich philosophical tradition standing behind the political structures of Western society. If we want human flourishing to occur in a stable and sustainable way, we need to consider the societal structures and institutions that are consistent with ancient and biblical wisdom. One of the principles Pennington brings out is that “humans need friends.” Even if we our metaphysics, epistemology and ethics worked out, if we are alone, we simply cannot experience the kind of good life we might otherwise experience in fellowship with others. Pennington writes, “This older, constructive aspect of ‘politics’ was a natural and crucial aspect of the ancient philosophical perspective because the philosophers understood that (1) flourishing is not possible apart from societal stability and structures that promoted beauty, goodness, and virtue; and (2) humans need each other to flourish.” (48)

Such ideas as the rule of law, justice and limited government stem from Hebrew political philosophy. In the ancient Near East as well as Greek and Roman societies, kings and emperors founded imperials cults, insisting on being worshipped as gods. But “the Hebrews’ ultimate allegiance was to God himself, not to the human king.” (49-50) In the New Testament, this idea gets expanded into what might be called “dual citizenship.” (166) We will expand on this in part 2 of this review. But for now we can point to a distinctively Christian political philosophy that promotes involvement in our earthly society, yet our allegiance lies with our heavenly kingdom. As worshipers of the one true God, we have a philosophy of “a politeia rooted in the just and good way.” (50) But the Bible does not promote some sort of separatist alternative society, it seeks the just and the good for all nations. Pennington writes, “This divinely revealed political philosophy was not just for the sake of the Hebrew people but was also a model for all the nations. It is a picture of how the true God has structured the cosmos and the means by which humans may experience flourishing or shalom.” (50)

A Synthesis of Ancient and Biblical Wisdom

Thus far we have covered almost half of Pennington’s book. In part 2 we will look at how will expands this basis of ancient and biblical wisdom bringing it into conversation with some of the big issues we face in our modern era. And as we think about what has been covered so far, a few considerations can already be formulated.

First, as a classical Christian educational movement, we have the obligation to bring together ancient wisdom and biblical wisdom. What Pennington highlights are the areas of congruence between ancient near Eastern, Greek and Roman philosophy and the Old and New Testaments. Now, we must be aware that not all we find in non-biblical and non-Christian sources will agree with biblical convictions. However, there is a synthesis we can achieve when we examine sources of knowledge with courage and humility, looking for truth wherever it may be found. The catchphrase, “All truth is God’s truth” is relevant here. Students trained with this impulse to search for truth wherever it may be found will have the tools to think biblically when encountering not only the great works of the Western tradition, but even interact with non-Western writings.

Second, the approach Pennington takes in arriving at his synthesis points to the whole-life relevance of ancient and biblical wisdom. The liability of placing such powerful texts in the hands of teachers and students alike is that the level of analysis remains abstract and theoretical. I know this is something I needed to overcome in my professional role in biblical studies. Analyzing the text with more and more sophisticated models of interpretation can stimulate the mind but can also leave the heart cold. The motto on my school’s crest reads veritas pro vita, “truth for life.” This is not merely truth for truth’s sake, but truth for the sake of living lives of meaning, purpose and direction. As we arrive at a synthesis of ancient and biblical wisdom, there ought to be practical wisdom that shows us how to live out the gospel day to day.

Finally, we cannot live out lives of meaning, purpose and direction apart from the one who calls himself the way, the truth and the life. Pennington’s formulation of Jesus as the great philosopher places our Lord and savior at the center of this grand synthesis of ancient and biblical wisdom. God has made his revealed wisdom personal through the incarnation of The Word. The personal nature of divine wisdom then is received in us through our encounter with Christ Jesus, the author and perfecter of our faith.

So, I clearly haven’t finished my review yet, but already you can sense how highly I recommend this book. If you are an educator who wants to contemplate how to bring together spiritual formation and classical curriculum, I think this book is well worth your time and attention.