hegemony are ignored as hopelessly naive.
7
But as the authors of Who Killed Homer? suggest,
the Great Books of the ancient Greeks and Romans (through the mediation of Christian authors,
though they don't make this point) have given the West the foundations of its notions of basic
human equality, democracy, clear thinking, and ethics to name a few.
8
In fact, as these authors
make clear, the terms in which the Great Books canon is attacked today themselves come from
the Great Books of the ancients, and can be voiced freely because of the society they helped
create.
Most of what we think of as Christian theology is embedded in the Great Books, so we
should read them if we would understand our theology and that of those with whom we differ.
We also need to study the secular Great Books so that we might understand the issues to which
Christians were responding in their theology and the other contexts of the development of
theology.
This is critical, I think, to defining Evangelicalism's boundaries. How can we begin to do
so, on a theological level, if we don't understand clearly and fairly the positions of other
traditions? How can we be sure that we understand how our own tradition arose, and thus
properly affirm its strengths and address its weaknesses?
A study, for example, of Roman Catholic theology and literature over the centuries can
help affirm our differences at the same time as it checks a temptation to pride by showing how
7
Allan
Bloom,
The Closing of the American Mind (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987).
Dinesh DiSouza, Illiberal Education: The Politics of Race and Sex on Campus (New York: Free
Press, 1991).
8
Victor Davis Hanson and John Heath, Who Killed Homer? The Demise of Classical
Education and the Recovery of Greek Wisdom (NY: The Free Press, 1998).