Unless the Lord Builds the House: Shared Foundations for Christian Education
By Andrew Kern.
CiRCE Institute, 2024.
Paperback, 118 pages, $20.99.
Reviewed by Jesse Hake.
Andrew Kern’s vision for education in Unless the Lord Builds the House is as expansive and as elemental as it can be. Insisting that “every created thing is like the temple in that it has within it an inner mystery, a name or identity, that we must revere if we desire to know that thing rightly,” Kern writes that we must let students see “things shine forth from that inner mystery so that we can encounter them.” Students and teachers “are created to enjoy that shining forth.” The result of such learning is that “we are inspired to love: to desire union with the object of our love and to seek its blessing.” Kern is an author gutsy enough to subtitle a book “Shared Foundations for Christian Education,” and then spend every page unpacking a profound theology of revelation grounded in the layer typologies of the biblical temple.
There is little that is explicitly or exclusively about education within this book, but Kern has always opposed reductionism or any failure to see the whole for its parts. He has been a visionary leader in the renewal of classical Christian education since founding The CiRCE Institute in 1996 and co-authoring the 1997 book Classical Education: The Movement Sweeping America with Gene Edward Veith, Jr. This book is currently available in a 2024 third edition from the Capital Research Center. This book also helped to connect classical educators early in the renewal with Norms & Nobility: A Treatise on Education by David Hicks (first published in 1981 and now available in a second 2024 edition from Rowman & Littlefield as well as releasing soon in audiobook format from Classical Academic Press). Hicks received the annual Russell Kirk Paideia Prize awarded by the CiRCE Institute and continues to write for classical educators in his newest book The Stones Cry Out, as well as The Tyrant Julius Caesar. As someone making continual connections and pointing the way, Kern has always called upon the highest ends and deepest foundations inherent to the human vocations of teaching and learning.
Unless the Lord Builds the House is full of beautiful passages. God “reveals Himself to us in the play of light on a tree that has burst through the edge of a mountain road, in the clouds that form and part over the ocean, and in the labors of an ant.” However, the book is more than just beautiful turns of phrase and clear reminders. In addition, it unpacks a dense theology of how God is revealed through all of creation following the patterns of temple, light, and logos. These typologies or patterns give way to many practical insights as well. Some of them are pastoral in nature. Although we “often hurt the things we love” and “frequently interrupt the union that we seek with that object,” we find that “our love creates in us a willingness, if not an eagerness, to be corrected, to repent, and to turn ourselves back toward the inner wonder that shines forth in the face of the object we love.”
As is already apparent, this is largely a book about love: “To put it simply: the holy place is where we fall in love.” Teachers fail if “the glory never shines” and students can “never respond to it.” Kern is refreshingly idealistic while also clear and careful with his uncompromising vision. Concerned that some might think he is “sloppy” in his talk about love, Kern clarifies “a rather important point” about the two primary terms for love in Greek. Defining eros as “a desire to be united in a fitting manner to the person or thing loved” and agape as “a determination not to harm but to bless the person or thing loved,” Kern goes on to note that “unfortunately, the word eros is overly sexualized in our culture, so it may feel uncomfortable to apply it to other relations.” However, this does not dissuade Kern from defending eros for all others because “the essential energy of eros is desire for union, and there is almost always an appropriate union between things.” Kern would be supported in this point by Erik Varden’s recent book Chastity: Reconciliation of the Senses, but Kern writes with few citations and maintains a free-flowing and accessible prose. He concludes this brief excursus by calling for a harmony of both eros and agape in all of our relationships:
The virtuous person combines her two desires for fitting union and for blessing. When she does so, she becomes the means by which the second desire (blessings) is accomplished through the first (union) and the first is reinforced by the second. That is the love God has for us, the love of the holy men and women who make the world worth living in, and the love we should strive for in all our relationships. It seems to me that perfect happiness must be the perfect union of those two loves.
Although communicated with clear and winsome language, nothing that Kern relates is easy to apply without wisdom and even a little holiness. Kern demands the fullness of a properly Christian vision for reality and relationships. He insists that teachers must enable students to see God’s own fearful presence within every person and even every thing created by God. Kern extends this, finally, to all art and other things created by us as God’s image bearers. In arguing that everything is made after the model of the temple with God’s own presence occupying the innermost Holy of Holies, Kern says that we confront “an analogy that can almost sound like a blasphemy.” God constitutes the interior wisdom of each created thing, and in knowing anything in creation, we are coming into the fearful presence of God:
If the word “fear” seems odd to you, think of it as that sense of awe that enters our soul when we begin to perceive something awesome like, say, a child: how inexpressible its wonder, how infinite its worth. . . Perhaps it is more like being in love. Fear is the realization that a thing possesses its own glory.
. . . All of our reflections on God and His works must begin with the fear and trembling that fill us when we see them in His glory resting on the mercy seat. Only God “fully understands” the inner mystery and wonder of His essence and His words. Only He fully perceives the glory of the things He has made, their deepest meaning, their greatest use, and their fullest enjoyment. For us this knowledge is always deferred, even for things we humans make, like sentences, paintings, songs, or meals.
Starting from the Holy of Holies, Kern unpacks a four-part tabernacle structure that includes the Holy Place, the Courtyard, and the Camp. These are each analogous to two-directional stages of engagement and learning where we contemplate the external principles to help us glimpse the inner glory in others and labor in the light of the glories we have seen and must learn to respect in each other. Kern layers on the meanings here as he also draws out parallel four-part structures found within light and logos. All creatures stand in relation to the Creator and to their fellow creatures within these three parallel sets of four layers or stages of revelation, encounter, and knowing. The epistemological implications and pedagogical principles are clear and profound but not often made explicit. If anything, there is a little more expounded by way of epistemology in terms of how we learn and the way in which reason is only productive when guided by love.
There are beautiful passages regarding the Camp where Kern speaks of repentance and restoration as part of the work of learning what surrounds us and perceiving God’s glory in all of our fellow creatures. The book’s sweeping and human scope feels like a manual for church or parish life. Kern makes it clear in the “Epilogue” that he intends the book for an expansive “preamble or prelude” to future writing on education that will provide more by way of application and particular examples. What he has written here, however, is abundantly applicable to all relationships and all of life, and it certainly includes the teacher and the student in any home or school setting.
For those who already know and love Kern as a speaker and writer, this book will be a rich delight. Its insights reward the reader on every page. Those not familiar with Kern, however, may be taken aback by the extent of his reveling in layered analogies, intricate structures, and ultimate mysteries. His quirky and self-effacing humor is likely a bit of a love it or hate it reality as well, and in this book it is on full display with an extended passage about how best to give a puppy to a child, in which Kern starts with a negative example that is apparently autobiographical.
Such possible foibles aside, however, this is a book that delivers far more than it promises. It beautifully and practically unpacks the famous passage from C.S. Lewis’s The Weight of Glory about how “it is a serious thing to live in a society of possible gods and goddesses” and how “you have never talked to a mere mortal.” Indeed, as Lewis continued, “it is immortals whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub, and exploit—immortal horrors or everlasting splendours.” Kern will leave you refreshed and ready for the labors of teaching in a home or classroom of possible gods and goddesses who are, already, veiled temples of the living God.
Jesse Hake holds a masters degree in history from the University of St Andrews in Scotland. He has served since 2019 as the director of the teacher training platform ClassicalU.com and was a principal at Logos Academy (York, Pennsylvania) before that. He resides with his wife and three children in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania.
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