Anthony, Michael J., and Warren S. Benson. Exploring the History and Philosophy of Christian Education: Principles for the 21^st Century. Grand Rapids: Kregel, 2003. Pp. 443. $22.99.

Michael Anthony, professor of Christian Education and vice provost at the Talbot School of Theology, Biola University, and the late Warren Benson, professor of Christian Education and Leadership at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary have undertaken a very worthy project in this book. It is surely overdue in the field of Christian education. It is too bad that the results are not more worthy of praise.

The authors attempt to guide the reader through four thousand years of pedagogical highlights from Western civilization with an eye toward resourcing Christian education practitioners. They use a four-part format for each chapter: a schematic orientation to world historical context, an analysis of key themes and figures, some implications for the practice of educational ministry today, and a bibliography. They can be applauded for their commitment to dealing with educational ideas in historical context and for attempting to make historical and philosophical resources relevant to the practice of contemporary educational ministry. They are at their best when depicting conservative evangelical efforts in Christian education in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Given their theological commitments, they present a surprisingly nuanced treatment of humanism in education and the contributions of Horace Bushnell to Christian education. The final chapter also provides some helpful rationale and guidelines for developing a personal philosophy of ministry.

Unfortunately, the shortcomings of the book far outweigh its merits. There are several historical inaccuracies and omissions in this book. For example, the early church catechumenate never produced a “standardized curriculum” that greatly influenced the Reformers; the catechumenate was a varied phenomenon that all but disappeared for a thousand years in Western Christianity. The discussion of Calvin's contribution to the church's educational ministry repeats tired old clichés about predestination and theological dictatorship; the significant and enduring contributions to the field of educational ministry by the Genevan reformer are hardly touched. Not all the leaders of the Enlightenment “sought to establish a worldview totally devoid of God”; thinkers like Rousseau and Kant sought to reframe belief in God in rational and moral terms. The Declaration of Independence and the Constitution were hardly efforts by the founding fathers to “establish a Christian order” in America; a goodly number of the founding fathers were committed Deists who had no use for the historic Christian faith as articulated by Nicaea and Chalcedon. There are also some glaring omissions. For example, it is simply beyond me how they could completely omit the role of Presbyterians in a discussion of denominational contributions to American education in the Middle Colonies. In the contemporary era the authors fail to make even passing reference to the significant contributions to the field of Christian education by figures like James E. Loder and James W. Fowler. Also, the bibliographic references provided at the end of each chapter tend to have a high density of materials that are both dated and largely derivative from other conservative evangelical sources; there are very few references to primary sources. Finally, the authors' pervasive use of gender-exclusive language for human beings and frequent use of cutesy pietistic commentary make the book difficult to read and even harder to take seriously as an exercise in responsible scholarship in the field of Christian education.

To be sure, a project of this scope will always suffer from a certain amount of caricature and hermeneutical bias; this book has plenty of both. Of the three reasons given for why it is important to study the history and philosophy of Christian education—prophylaxis, armament, and intentionality—the first two gave this reader pause. Their phobia of spiritual infection caused by exposure to godless culture and their use of this study as a call to (evangelistic) arms leave the impression this project can only be justified as a defensive warding off of spiritual contamination or as a tool of evangelistic witness to lost souls. The tendentious theological judgments found at nearly every turn may well be satisfactory to intensely conservative evangelicals who opine for a perfectly flawless Bible and a spiritually pure church set over and against a fallen society with its supposedly valueless public school system. Astonishingly, the authors claim at any number of points to know exactly what God was doing in particular historical eras. One wonders how the authors have come to know the intimate details of divine activity in any given historical epoch with such blithe certainty. Christian educators who do not share their theological commitments may well find Anthony and Benson's views on history and contemporary cultural contexts of educational ministry problematic, if not downright offensive.

I really want to like this book. Unfortunately, with the exception of a few brief moments of insight, this book often reads rather like a collection of sanctimonious homilies on historical themes. It falls far short of its promise and left this reader hungry for more substantial fare. I would be hard pressed to recommend this book as a sound piece of scholarship in the history and philosophy of Christian education. I suppose that it would be fair to say that it could have been worse; but it should have been a whole lot better.

Gordon S. Mikoski
Princeton Theological Seminary