The Education of Christian Faith : Critical and Literary Encounters with the New Testament

This study explores the taxing question of whether Christ-Learning should be an ongoing process by presenting examples of the critical and personal learning undertaken by minds exercised with scholarship, ecclesiology, poetry, the novel and sexuality. While the responses to faith in Christ of the seven chosen figures Richard Hooker, John Henry Newman, Robert Browning, William Faulkner, Rudyard Kipling, Friedrich Nietzsche and Oscar Wilde are highly personal, it is the theme of "education", which was at the heart of every Messianic achievement, that throws up confrontations to the orthodox approach to faith. These individuals are eminently representative of biography wrestling with what the New Testament Scripture first understood. Their experiences can be signified in a New Testament play on words: "emathen apathen" "suffering they learned, learning they suffered".