In 1989, theologian Robert Jenson (1930–1917) gave a lecture at Gustavus Adolphus College in Saint Peter, Minnesota. The lecture was titled “The Intellectual and the Church,” and was first published in the anthology Essays in Theology of Culture (Eerdmans, 1995). Jenson discussed that book on Volume 20 of the Journal, an interview that was re-issued as a Friday Feature in 2020. Below are the opening paragraphs from “The Intellectual and the Church.”

“The concept of ‘the intellectual’ is specific to the modern West and the West’s cultural colonies. To be an intellectual is not just to be intelligent, or even actively and persistently intelligent. A poet or other artist may or may not be an intellectual, without prejudice to the intelligence of his or her art. Nor indeed is even the person consumed like Socrates in the power of the mind thereby ‘an intellectual’; not Aquinas nor Plato nor Aristotle were ‘intellectuals.’ ‘Intellectuals’ are a historical class.

“The class of ‘intellectuals’ results from appropriation to created individuals of something always known in Western thought but through most of the West’s history considered divine rather than human: what Aristotle called the ‘agent’ intellect. Through the great premodern tradition, the created mind was not itself conceived as an agent, a doer of knowledge; the mind was rather a mirror of reality, or at most an eye, constituted in its knowing by what appears to and in it. Mirrors and eyes need light; to be mirrored or seen reality needs light. It was believed that God is the one who sheds that light. Insofar as ‘agent intellect’ pointed to an anthropological factor, it pointed to the place in us where God’s light shines.

“It is, in the tradition, God who is finally the intellect who is an agent of knowing, who makes things to be known. As the divine knower he grounds — in Christian theology, ‘creates’ — all things in their knowability. God, we may say, is the unmoved knower who just as knower is indeed also the mover of all things. When God is revealed as the Creator, then, insofar as knowing must be considered someone’s work, it must be God’s work.

“The modern West has been making the titanic experiment of claiming intelletual agency for created subjects. To be sure, not all of the original idea of agent intellect can with much plausibility be appropriated to creatures. The outcome of simply declaring ourselves agent intellects in the full sense would be the claim that we create the world by our knowing of it — though indeed just this claim is the hidden dynamic of some idealist proposals, and of hiddenly idealist proposals such as ‘deconstructionism.’ But such titanism always, though sometimes rather later than sooner, proves too much even for Adam’s descendants to sustain. If we give it up but still claim intellectual agency, we end in a very specific situation, three characteristics of which I will here mention.

“First, whereas God’s work as agent intellect is the world, our work as would-be agent intellects can at most be work on the work. Knowing as agency, predicated of created agents, can only be the work of explaining, clarifying, predicting, and the like.

“Second, we must note a nice irony: titanic knowing thus takes its place among many other sorts of work on the world in which created subjects are necessarily engaged. Putting this point together with the previous, we derive: ‘an intellectual’ is a kind of worker, the kind whose work on the world is knowing it in the modern active sense. Such a person may very well be an amateur; only in very decadent modernity is only the paid worker honorable.

“Third, a created agent intellect, unlike God, must include him or herself in the world on which he or she cognitively labors. Once this object of explanation, or whatever, comes into view, it is utterly fascinating. The physical sciences would probably have emerged in the West without the presence of intellectuals, but without such persons there would not have emerged those sciences and reflective enterprises of which the human person and human society are themselves the object.

“I have described the origin of ‘the intellectual’ in terms that may be taken as pejorative. And indeed I think it vital to understand the grave problematic of the intellectual’s claim and position. I do not, however, think we should repent of our history at this point, or try to escape from our historical situation. We should not, that is, wish that ‘the intellectual’ had not appeared. That some humans, at least during some periods of human history, labor on the world to explain it, to understand it, to get hold of it, is surely a good thing.

“So to the second term of my title: the church. The relation between the church and intellectuals is personal: the church is a community to which intellectuals may belong. It is such persons, baptized intellectuals, who are this essay’s remaining matter.

“Given created intellectual agency’s inevitable infatuation with itself, the intellectual who belongs to the church will promptly make this community, as his or her own community, an obsessive object of intellectual labor. It is the experience of centuries that thereby the intellectual regularly and promptly falls into conflict with the church and, if he or she remains faithful to the church, with him or herself. The problem, of course, is the claims the church makes, nearly all of which resist being worked over by created agent intellects.

“The church claims to be the body of Christ, though no amount of research discovers the slightest resemblance between the church and Christ or the church and a human body. The church claims to be holy and to make holy, despite a moral record that a created ‘ethicist’ — a notable variety of agent intellectual — cannot regard as wholly incommensurable with that of other collectives. And so on.

“For reasons falling outside the scope of this essay, the way in which churched intellectuals have mostly attempted to manage this problem has been by cutting back the claims of the church. To remain with my instances, ‘body of Christ’ will be interpreted as ‘a metaphor’ and ‘holiness’ will be postponed for heaven. The strategy has been unremittingly counterproductive; every diminution of the church’s difficult claims has only served to make those remaining yet more offensive.

“It may, of course, be that the reason intellectuals have trouble in the church is that they do not belong there, whether because their enterprise is misguided or because the church’ claims cannot stand their scrutiny. Let me, however, make a different suggestion: the reason intellectuals have difficulty in the church is not that the church’s claims have been too great, but that the church as it has presented itself in Western history has claimed too little.

“The Western church has by and large vacillated between two opposed but equally pusillanimous self-presentations: as an institution to administer something called ‘grace’ or as a voluntary association of religiously like-minded persons. Predicated of an entity of either sort, the church’s claims must indeed be offensive to intellectual agency. Clearly the church administers lots of things, but that these are precisely God’s grace will hardly yield to any amount of investigation. Nor is it likely that a voluntary association of religious types can sustain a claim to be the human body of God. For the church to accommodate an internal community of intellectual workers, she will have to understand herself far more grandly than the Western church has customarily done.

“To see just how grandly, let us ask once again, Who is the agent intellect? Neither the original pagan identification of intellectual agency with the divine nor the modern West’s identification of intellectual agency with a certain creaturely labor will do for Christian thinking. The one finally implies an identity between the divine and a certain location in human subjectivity; the other in fact mandates the disappearance of God from the epistemological picture and eventually the degradation of the intellect. But in the church’s most vigorous periods of self-assertion, she has in effect claimed that she is the agent intellect, the place from which both reality and the mind that seeks reality are illumined.

“If this claim is true, there is indeed a final identity of human and divine knowing at the point of cognitive agency, but this identity is communally mediated. No individual created consciousness is or encompasses God’s light. The mind that knows the world and just so makes the world knowable is not in us, but we are indeed in it, as we live in the community of the church.

“For the church is the place where human community is already in this world meshed with the triune community that is God. According to the gospel, it is the destiny of created minds to be included in the life that the Father and the Son live in their Spirit; the claim of the church is to anticipate this divine-human community, to be a ‘down payment’ on the Kingdom of God. To our present concern: thus the church is the place where our destined participation in the cognitive life of God is already in action, so that from this communal context we can see things as they are.

“The church is actual as her liturgy. It is in her prayer and sacrifice that the church turns to and moves into her relationships in God. The actuality of the church as the home for intellect is the dramatic and sensual density of her liturgical action, as all modes of created entity are thereby brought into the mutual knowing of the Father and the Son and you and me, in the processions and the icons and the singing and the smoke, and of course above all as the bread and wine and water. The status of the intellectual is not undone by this insight, but is much transformed. As individuals within the illumining community, intellectuals remain mere workers as before. But from their place within the community of God’s active knowing, they may labor with a bright light shining on their work.”

—from Robert Jenson, Essays in Theology of Culture (Eerdmans, 1995). Members may be interested in listening to a reading of a much-cited First Things article by Jenson: “How the World Lost Its Story.”

Related reading and listening

  1. The need for robust Christian intellectual life — In this lecture, Robert Benne surveys the contemporary landscape in which Christian scholars attempt to integrate their faith and their intellectual life. (43 minutes)
  2. Treating Truth with sovereign respect — Henri de Lubac on the urgency of intellectual activity
  3. The academy’s deconstruction of both person and community — Marion Montgomery on cultivating “a deportment of intellect governed by a continuing concern for the truth of things”
  4. Fuller and truer ways of being — Zena Hitz on some of the blessings of the love of learning
  5. Trails, furrows, and bookish virtues — Zena Hitz offers some rich reflections on the remarkable feature of human life that is the love of learning. (16 minutes)
  6. Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 152 — FEATURED GUESTS: Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn, Jeffrey Bilbro, Zena Hitz, James L. Nolan, Jr., Bishop Robert Barron, and Jason Blakely
  7. Religious pluralism & the calling of Christian intellectuals — From our archives, Robert Wilken talks about religious pluralism in Christian history, and Robert Jenson discusses his essay on the calling of Christian intellectuals. (25 minutes)
  8. Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 141 — FEATURED GUESTS: Grant Wythoff, Susanna Lee, Gerald R. Mcdermott, Carlos Eire, Kelly Kapic, and James Matthew Wilson
  9. Robert W. Jenson: “How the World Lost Its Story” — Theologian Robert W. Jenson describes how a postmodern world is characterized by the loss of a conviction that we inhabit a “narratable world” that exists coherently outside of ourselves. (40 minutes)
  10. Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 110 — FEATURED GUESTS: Kevin Belmonte, David Lyle Jeffrey and Gregory Maillet, Mark Noll, Alan Jacobs, and Jonathan Chaplin
  11. Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 96 — FEATURED GUESTS: David A. Smith, Kiku Adatto, Elvin T. Lim, David Naugle, Richard Stivers, and John Betz
  12. Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 86 — FEATURED GUESTS: Roger Lundin, Lawrence Buell, Harold K. Bush, Jr., Katherine Shaw Spaht, Steven L. Nock, Norman Klassen, and Jens Zimmermann
  13. Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 78 — FEATURED GUESTS: Mark Bauerlein, Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn, Sam Van Eman, Thomas de Zengotita, Eugene McCarraher, and John Witte, Jr.
  14. Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 20 — FEATURED GUESTS: Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Robert D. Richardson, Jr., Roger Lundin, Wilfred McClay, Andrew A. Tadie, Robert Jenson, Ted Prescott, and Ted Libbey

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