In the summer 2008 Wilson Quarterly, Wilfred McClay, SunTrust Chair of Humanities at the University of Tennessee, Chattanooga, calls us to consider once again the importance of study of the humanities, i.e. a collection of disciplines including literature and language, history, philosophy, comparative religion, ethics, history and theory of the arts – and related sub-disciplines and interdisciplinary realms of inquiry.

He provides a helpful account of the unique role of the humanities:

The distinctive task of the humanities, unlike the natural sciences and social sciences, is to grasp human things in human terms, without converting or reducing them to something else: not to physical laws, mechanical systems, biological drives, psychological disorders, social structures, and so on. The humanities attempt to understand the human condition from the inside, as it were, treating the human person as subject as well as object, agent as well as acted-upon.

Hence, the knowledge the humanities offers us is like no other, and cannot be replaced by scientific breakthroughs or superseded by advances in material knowledge.

It comes as no surprise that the humanities in higher education have suffered under the increased focus on technical proficiency and job skills preparation. Even so-called “liberal arts” institutions have followed the trend, not only reducing humanities majors but also reducing the expectations for students to take humanities courses. The common view is that such majors and such courses are simply not useful in the contemporary age.

McClay counters this view by arguing, not for the value of such “useless” things, but for the distinctive usefulness of the humanities in our age and every age.

If the humanities are the study of human things in human ways, then it follows that they function in culture as a kind of corrective or regulative mechanism, forcing upon our attention those features of our complex humanity that the given age may be neglecting or missing…they have always defined themselves in opposition.

In the Greek and Roman eras, the humanities stood against the reduction of the human to the animal, promoting “a rational nature that was assumed to be elevated above and distinct from that of mere animals.” During the Renaissance, the humanities brought renewed attention and delight in things human, not in contrast to the animal but to the divine.

By the 19th century, the emerging mathematical sciences tended “to picture the world and its phenomena ‘objectively’ and mechanistically, without reference to human subjectivity and meaning.” According to McClay, the humanities provided a crucial antidote, viewing the world and human beings very differently and preserving the distinctively human in “what seemed increasingly to be a soulless and materialistic age, dominated by large machines and larger social and economic mechanisms.”

So what is the distinctive challenge of our own age, standing against which we would be much aided by the humanities?

In our own age, the very category of “the human” is itself under attack, as philosophers decry the hierarchical distinction between humans and animals, or humans and nature, and postmodernists of various stripes proclaim the disappearance of the human “subject.”

The attack comes from many quarters and can be seen in a number of developments: human cloning, genetic engineering, species melding, body-parts manufacture, and eco-spiritual views of the earth and its inhabitants.

In the face of such challenges, the humanities are essential in “reminding us that the ancients knew things about humankind that modernity has failed to repeal, even if it has managed to forget them.” The stubborn capacity to understand and express ourselves humanly through the disciplines of the humanities serves to preserve the possibility of remembering and living out our distinctive place in the creation.

At Covenant, the humanities have always had a central and foundational place, certainly for the reasons that McClay urges but also for reasons directly related to our core mission. We affirm his call to resist the relentless temptation toward reductionism, recognizing the high value of those disciplines that do seek to understand human beings in non-human terms but also nurturing in our students the distinctively humane perspectives of literature and philosophy and history and the arts.

But we have an additional motivation: God has provided a magnificent written Word which reveals him to us in genre and forms which bear the marks of the humanities: historical narrative, story, poetry, metaphor, personal letters, public address, and didactic prose. As a college grounded in the Scriptures, committed to enabling our students to develop a biblical frame of reference for all of life, we have the joyful burden of ensuring that they have the capacities and abilities to read and understand the Bible in all its variegated truth and beauty.

The same capacities and abilities that help us stand against the anti-human reductionisms of our age enable us to know, love, and obey God through his Word. The humanities help us carry this burden; they are grand gifts from God himself, so that we might fulfill his creational and redemptive purpose as instruments of his grace and glory.