Intellectual Humility as the Pathway to Interdependent Learning in Christian Higher Education

Intégrité: A Faith and Learning Journal Vol. 19, No. 2 (Fall 2020): 8-19

Intellectual Humility as the Pathway to Interdependent Learning in Christian Higher Education

Kyle A. Schenkewitz Mount St. Joseph University Cincinnati, OH

Trevor Hurd, a recent college graduate, reflected that he was “taught to challenge nearly every assumption and adopt an attitude of intellectual humility that encourages a pragmatic approach to life that is likely to be fruitful for years to come” (Hurd). Wishfully, I would like to think that my Introduction to Philosophy course was part of his experience, especially the development of intellectual humility. Regardless of my personal impact, Hurd’s emphasis on intellectual humility within the academic community is an explicit reference to a value that is often only implied. In this essay, I will argue that intellectual humility is a virtue ideally situated to the college learning environment and one that must be modeled and practiced as part of students’ academic growth in the intellectual community. First, I will examine the primary philosophical depictions of intellectual humility. I will then explore the specific role intellectual humility can play in a Christian perspective on interdependent education and growth in knowledge. Finally, I will demonstrate how intellectual humility and interdependent learning can shape course learning objectives and enhance pedagogical techniques in institutions of Christian higher education.

Intellectual Humility as a Virtue

Intellectual humility is one of several intellectual virtues. A virtue, generally, is an excellent trait of human character. For Aristotle, virtues are either moral or intellectual. An intellectual virtue is an excellence in wisdom and understanding (23). Roberts and Wood define them as “acquired bases of excellent intellectual functioning...” (Intellectual Virtues 60). Jason Baehr connects several intellectual virtues to beneficial qualities of learning that can “help students learn to ask good questions (curiosity), take up alternative standpoints (open-mindedness), notice important details (attentiveness), take intellectual risks (intellectual courage), and persist in the face of intellectual challenges (intellectual tenacity)” (“Introduction” 4). Intellectual humility, as an intellectual virtue, must be an essential aspect of an excellent thinker. Intellectual humility is characteristic of a person who is well-formed in their cognitive process. In contemporary philosophy, three prominent depictions of intellectual humility stand out. However, following the critique of Hill, Dunnington, and

Hall, I also want to press forward with a more distinctly Christian conception of intellectual humility. The first view, put forward by Roberts and Wood, characterizes intellectual humility as low concern for status or self-importance. Citing the examples of Jesus of Nazareth and G.E. Moore, they characterize the motivation of humility as “an unusually low concern for status coordinated with an intense concern for some apparent good” (Intellectual Virtues 241). In an earlier essay, Roberts and Wood contrast humility to arrogance and proposed that humility “is a disposition not to make unwarranted intellectual entitlement claims on the basis of one’s (supposed) superiority or excellence” (“Humility and Epistemic Goods” 271). In their account, the virtue of humility is opposed to numerous other virtues as well, including vanity, conceit, and pretentiousness (258). Humility itself does not connote epistemic goods, but fosters “intellectual ends when it is conjoined, in a personality, with other epistemic virtues” (271). In their estimation, “The humble intellectual–that is, the one who lacks to an unusual extent the impulses of vanity, arrogance, domination, self-complacency, and the like–will have a special freedom and suppleness of action and judgement that promote his or her epistemic ends” (279). For Roberts and Wood, intellectual humility is characterized by a lack of a number of vices that stem from an elevated view of oneself. The second view, from Whitcomb, Battaly, Baehr, and Howard-Snyder, centers intellectual humility upon the owning of one’s limitations. These authors distinguish between proper pride and proper humility, whereas “proper pride is having the right stance towards one’s strengths; humility is having the right stance toward one’s limitations. Intellectual humility, then, is having the right stance towards one’s intellectual limitations” (8). Their article discusses the ways in which one’s intellectual limitations must be “owned” by each individual. The intellectual humble person must navigate between the intellectual vides of being arrogant and being servile. Intellectual Humility accords a measured confidence in one’s knowledge and beliefs. The humble person maintains “a disposition to be aware (even if just implicitly) of one’s limitations, for them to come to mind when the occasion calls for it” (8). In owning one’s intellectual limitations, the person with intellectual humility develops a “dispositional profile” in which she believes and accepts her limitations, is able to admit those limitations to others when appropriate and may experience regret without hostility concerning her limitations (8-10). In the third view, Ian Church identifies his perspective as the Doxastic Account of Intellectual Humility and defines it as “the virtue of accurately tracking what one could non-culpably take to be the positive epistemic status of one’s own beliefs” (427). His account is a response to “serious worries” he identifies in the low concern for status and the limitations-owning accounts above (415). In Church’s view, the intellectually humble person is self-critical with regard to the tenacity with which she holds her beliefs and, to the best of her ability, attempts to find the mean between intellectual vices of arrogance and servility. More recently, Church has explored the ways in which his view of Intellectual Humility affects religious beliefs and commitments. On his view, being intellectually humble does not necessitate being conciliatory, but “someone

can be intellectually virtuous, intellectually humble without suspending belief in the face of peer disagreement; someone can be intellectually humble while being dogmatic and uncompromising in one’s religious beliefs” (“Intellectual Humility and Religious Belief” 229-230). Church attempts to place intellectual humility and religious belief in a constructive tension such that one’s beliefs remain firm while one also recognizes and respects the challenge of difference. In response to the three views presented above, Hill, Dunnington, and Hall contend that the philosophical discussion concerning the essence of intellectual humility has ignored an important religious component. Their critique is centered upon the ways in which religious dimensions, such as the Christian notion of dependence on God, need to be included in accounts of intellectual humility. They demonstrate how “a Christian theist might experience the three predominant markers of intellectual humility found in the philosophical literature–low status concern, owning of limitations, and proper beliefs–in distinctive ways” (199). They draw from Dunnington’s work on Augustine to elaborate how intellectual humility takes on a specific “grammar” based upon one’s religious commitments and, in Augustine’s case, is characterized by glad intellectual dependence on God. Each of the views outlined above seems to grasp an essential quality of intellectual humility and each provides avenues for fruitful educational benefits. With Roberts and Wood, I affirm that intellectually humble person does not seek knowledge to gain fame or glory. Likewise, with Whitcomb, recognition of one’s limitations is vitally important. With Church, I too want to affirm a confidence in one’s beliefs, especially when one has evaluated one’s beliefs as fully as humanly possible. Intellectual humility allows students to maintain their views and remain persons of conviction while also being open-minded and receptive to the beliefs of others. The intellectually humble person recognizes their limitations and embraces the effects of learning beside others. The intellectually humble person understands that their own beliefs will change because of this experience, but such change is not necessarily a contradiction. Learning beside different others may deepen, strengthen, and more fully integrate one’s beliefs in an everwidening understanding and appreciation of the world we inhabit. The intellectually humble person recognizes that he may be mistaken or misinformed on some area of knowledge or belief and, being disabused of this error, may result in a more coherent and consistent perspective. As a Christian believer and teacher in Christian higher education, I am inclined to follow Hill, Dunnington, and Hall’s suggestion to adopt the philosophical definitions above as markers of humility that are rooted in a deeper truth about human beings, our creatureliness. Roberts and Wood signal this centrality as well, stating, “Because of the belief that we are creatures of a loving God, we are encouraged to stress our dependence and thus our interdependence in a way that Aristotle, for example, does not” (Intellectual Virtues 67). Intellectual humility, in a Christian context, stems from our creatureliness. Because we are created by God our status-seeking already has a limit, our limitations are already evident, and our ultimate beliefs are of a transcendent divine being. As creatures we depend on God for our very being, but we also depend on other creatures for our physical and intellectual flourishing. A learning community that is formed in

Christian intellectual humility acknowledges both our human createdness as a shared starting point that reinforces the interdependent nature of our intellectual growth.

Intellectual Humility in a Christian Perspective

As a virtue, intellectual humility should exhibit the markers of low concern for status, owning of limitations, and well tracked attitudes towards one’s beliefs, but in a Christian context intellectual humility also affects how and why one learns. In my own Christian tradition, the Book of Common Prayer contains a prayer for schools and colleges that illustrates the aim of Christian higher education: O Eternal God, bless all schools, colleges, and universities, that they may be lively centers for sound learning, new discovery and the pursuit of wisdom; and grant that those who teach and those who learn may find you to be the source of all truth; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen (824). In this prayer, learning, discovering, and pursuing are the central activities of education, but the motivation is for each individual in the institution to see all truth as rooted in God. For Christian institutions of higher education, making these aspects of the academic life explicit can help clarify method and purpose of learning in community. Building on the example of Jesus and Augustine, I will explore how intellectual humility in a Christian perspective provides a framework to understand ourselves as creatures who are dependent upon others for knowledge, the conditions in which we can appropriately seek knowledge, and the proper end of our knowledge as love for God and God’s creation. Christian higher education is motivated, at least historically and nominally, by the ethos established in the person of Jesus Christ. The humility of Jesus’ life was not a servile existence. Even from a cursory reading of the Gospels, Jesus lived a life that was firm, assertive, bold, decisive, self-possessed, and even confrontational. Jesus modeled Christian intellectual humility in living a life of confidence and conviction that was motivated by love. Jesus’s life and actions were founded on his understanding of the dual command to love one’s neighbor and to love God. Sometimes loving our neighbor is expressed as a desire to understand the plant and animal life of our ecosystem. Sometimes loving our neighbor is a study of the sociological and economic effects of political decisions. Loving our neighbor can be expressed through the development of new vaccines and therapies for diseases. In a learning community, we can love our neighbors by helping them appreciate perspectives that differ from their own or respectfully questioning their assumptions. As educators, we know that intellectual growth and improvement is stimulated by challenge. When debate and struggle are tempered with intellectual humility, they become an essential part of the learning process and illustrate how our learning requires interaction with others. If an institution of Christian higher education is modeled on the humility of Jesus, then the learning communities it fosters seek a knowledge of creation that is also grounded in love of God.

Jesus is described in Philippians 3 as one who “humbled himself.” In the incarnation, Jesus, the creating Word of God, humbled himself and took on the form of a servant to engage with the world of his own creation. Following Roberts and Wood, the humility of Jesus is marked by low concern for his status and a willingness to be with creation and redeem creation. Jesus exemplifies a humility that engages with creation to know and be known by creation. Norman Wirzba states, “God became a human creature so that in Jesus God could show us how to better imagine and fully become creatures ourselves” (23). To be a Christian is to follow Jesus in the way of humility, a humility that is deeply engaged in the world. Christian humility becomes intellectual humility when we begin with the knowledge that we ourselves were created to know both the created world and the Creator. In college courses, students and teachers gather to meet and explore creation and creaturely life together. We learn about mathematics, biology, business, and religion as elements of our created world. If we acknowledge the created nature we share with our objects of study, we can relate to them anew as fellow creatures that are loved and redeemed by God. The world around us becomes our neighbor and our teacher. As we grow in knowledge of God’s creation, we grow in the knowledge of the God of creation. We depend on the heavens to continue to declare the glory of God (Psalm 19:1) so that we might come to a deeper understanding and appreciation of both the heavens and God’s glory. Christian intellectual humility attends to the created world as God’s own, as reflective of God’s love, and as intended to be known and loved as such. In his Confessions, Augustine further exemplifies how Christian intellectual humility is centered on human creatureliness and our desire to know and love God. Augustine’s Confessions are an autobiographical prayer to God in which we read about the young bishop’s life, education, and conversion. The narrative structure of Confessions is a wandering soul seeking rest in knowledge about himself and the world around him. Much like today’s college students, Augustine was searching for a truth that could integrate all of his acquired knowledge and experiences. Eager to learn and grow, Augustine looked for meaning in his intellectual accomplishments only to find those experiences unfulfilling. Augustine was educated in rhetoric, spent time in the Manichean religious sect, and read Neoplatonic philosophy. His search finally led him to Christian faith and an understanding of God as the ground of all being. Augustine introduced his Confessions with a reflection on the truth in which he could rest, “Or should I say, rather, that I should not exist if I were not in you, from whom are all things? Yes. Lord, that is the truth, that is indeed the truth” (5). Recognizing the truth of his created nature reframed all of Augustine’s knowledge and intellectual pursuits. This framework situates the intellectually humble student as one of God’s creatures seeking God’s truth among God’s creation. In Christian higher education, the foundation of our knowledge and being in God is an essential starting point for our academic endeavor to study creaturely life. For Augustine, one must first learn to love God as the beginning and end of all life and knowledge before one can love the objects of knowledge appropriately. Intellectual humility reorients our desire for knowledge and keeps

it firmly fixed on our telos, the God of all truth. In Book 10 of Confessions, Augustine recalled his investigation of the created world in search of the ground of his being. In a poetic interlude, he questioned the earth, the sea, the creatures, and the heavenly bodies. From each, he learned that they are not God but were made by God. By investigating creation, he learned of the Creator. In investigating himself, he came to know himself as a creature, dependent upon God. His knowing and loving the world around him lifted his intellectual gaze to the One beyond creation (270). As a Christian convert, he had found the end of his searching and the One toward which all his knowing and learning was driven. In an ideal learning community guided by Christian intellectual humility, students connect with one another as creatures with a shared appetite for knowledge. Their collaborative search of creaturely life has love of God as its true end. Craig Boyd investigated how Augustine differentiated his notion of virtue from the Roman view of his day. For Augustine, the difference was the end which it sought. Boyd states, “The only morally virtuous end at which we should aim is the love of God. All other motives are morally deficient” (250). This notion fits well with Augustine’s recollection of seeking God in the world of creatures only to be redirected inward to find God in himself as a being created by God. In this sense, even as we grow in knowledge of the world around us, we come to greater knowledge of ourselves and the God who is the source of our being. Augustine’s intellectual efforts led him to the foundation of knowledge, but he also knew how easily his love for God can be misdirected toward God’s creation. Augustine was very clear about the ways in which our desire for knowledge and love of self can distract and disorient us. The created world could also lead to an inappropriate love of creation, one that supplants love for God and one that centers upon a love for one’s own glory or acquisition. In Book 10, Augustine explained how the senses can lead to “concupiscence of the mind, a frivolous, avid curiosity.” Here he described curiosity in a very specific and vicious sense, quite different from the way we might use it today. Citing 1 John 2:16, Augustine called curiosity a “concupiscence of the eyes” because “firsthand information” about the world comes through the eyes and “the eyes are paramount among the senses in acquiring information” (311). We might note here the cognitive dimension of curiosity as a vice. For Augustine, curiosity acquired information about the world in such a way that it “masquerades as a zeal for knowledge and learning” (311). He further described this desire as “a lust to experience and find out” (312). Curiosity’s end, as Augustine understood it, is the obtaining of knowledge for the sake of the self. Curiosity is the pursuit of knowledge devoid of intellectual humility. In James K.A. Smith’s recent book On the Road with Saint Augustine, he explains that “Curiosity, for Augustine, is not the spirit of inquiry we prize and encourage; rather, it is a kind of quest for knowledge that doesn’t know what it’s for–a knowing for knowing’s sake, we might say, or perhaps more to the point, knowing for the sake of being known as someone who knows. For Augustine. The reason I want to know is an indicator of the sort of love that motivates my learning” (143-44). When our knowing

arises from a pursuit of glory, or a failure to recognize our dependence on others, or is held too tenaciously, we make an idol of our knowledge. While Augustine portrayed the pursuit of knowledge without intellectual humility, Paul Griffiths, also drawing from Augustine, aptly describes the virtuous contrast. He distinguishes between two different types of intellectual appetite, curiositas and studiositas. Griffiths uses the term “intellectual appetites” to describe the innate desire to know. A person’s intellectual appetites can be formed through careful catechesis or training. These appetites “can be formed or deformed, shaped into something elegant and orderly or warped into something ugly and chaotic” (112). While curiositas is a malformed intellect that seeks to own what it knows, studiousitas, being well-formed, attends to its knowledge as a gift (20). The studious person’s intellectual appetite “is rooted in wonder and had intimacy with some creature or ensemble of creatures as its end. Knowledge, in turn, on its Christian construal, is a particular kind of intimacy between one creature and another” (125). This intimate connection of knowing another creature “is an intensification of their shared creaturely intimacy as participants in God” (130). The studious person resists gathering knowledge as a possession because she recognizes a kinship with the objects of knowledge. The studious person acknowledges in the other a “more fundamental participation present in the order of being—participation in God, that is—shared by knower and known” (131). Intellectual humility that is rooted in the createdness of all things understands that our knowledge is not ours to own but is God’s. We may freely participate in knowing God’s creation, but we must also know it as God’s creation. Creation is offered to us as a gift in which we may participate and grow in knowledge and love, but our knowledge and love must ultimately be directed to God, the giver of all good things. For teachers in Christian higher education, we give away knowledge as a gift to our students. Yet, the giving away of this gift is a sharing in which both student and teacher interact intimately with another (58). This gift, when properly received, leads us back to love of Creator and creature alike. On this model, the vocation of Christian education regards knowledge of creation as a gift of interdependency between creatures and the Creator. Christian educators can then utilize this conception of intellectual humility in course construction and implementation.

Practical implications of Intellectual Humility in Christian Higher Education

Intellectual humility in a Christian perspective acknowledges the limited and creaturely nature of our humanity and pursues knowledge with the goal of a deeper and more intimate understanding of God. Intellectual pursuits are never solitary enterprises but are grounded in our creaturely dependence on others to grow in knowledge. Intellectual humility forms groups of students into learning communities in a collaborative search for truth. It trains students to recognize their own limited perspective and system of beliefs as integral to the learning of others and to share their understanding with measured confidence. Instruction of intellectual humility in higher education learning communities must be intentional

and explicit and its benefits must be evident. Still, how can this conception of education inform what teachers do in the classroom? How can a better understanding of intellectual humility shape courses and enhance pedagogy? In this section of the paper, I will discuss how intellectual humility shapes the learning outcomes, objectives, and activities of my courses. I will also illustrate how I incorporate intellectual humility in the classroom to build an interdependent learning community that promotes intellectual growth. Course learning outcomes are the backbone of a college course. The weekly learning objectives and activities students complete should be building blocks toward the learning outcomes for the course. These learning outcomes must be measurable, concrete, and specific. Developing course learning outcomes that focus on intellectual humility can enable teachers to imbed intellectual humility in the very structure of their course, emphasize intellectual humility as a regularly occurring objective, and build assignments and activities that incorporate intellectual humility. For instance, consider the following course learning outcome for a course on Environmental Ethics at a Christian college: Students will compare their own religious or philosophical perspective with the Christian notion of creation and engage in constructive dialogue with others whose perspective may differ. This learning outcome has active and measurable verbs to assess student learning. It features a concrete and specific context in which this learning objective is to be fulfilled. It also engages students in the practice of intellectual humility by making the Christian notion of creation central to the objective and emphasizing that a student’s perspective must be in conversation with others. In order to fulfill this outcome, I employ a peer-review learning objective that is structured around critical engagement with the written work of others. I employ peer review to guard against the potential vice of curiositas and help students to see their academic work as adding their unique perspective to a larger conversation. My guidelines for peer review of papers includes the following criteria: “Asking critical questions, offering support, helping clarify, and pushing back on unstated assumptions are all characteristic of a good response. Do so gently and with respect and care to help improve the thinking and learning of our philosophical community.” With these guidelines in place, I create an environment where students put their best analytical work forward and expect a response that will challenge them. As an author, students begin to recognize that their work on a topic is limited to their own perspective and experience and that there will always be more questions to be answered and other perspectives to consider. As a peer responder, students learn to read with the desire to understand others, but also to help make their partner’s thoughts and ideas clearer and well defined. At each stage the student pairs are focused on helping one another become better students and writers. Each student’s focus shifts from being solely concerned about their research project and must include the work of their neighbor. Each author is then required to incorporate their peer’s response into their final paper. Perhaps they have a new facet to include or an objection to refute. Students work collaboratively with others to strengthen one another’s work, even amid disagreement.

Students in my courses should be very comfortable with peer review and response because they are engaged in online discussion forum activities that require interaction with their own posts as well as replying to the posts of others. Each week I assign a discussion question related to our week’s reading schedule. After students have posted their response, they are required to reply to two peer posts. These replies have the following rubric expectations: Replies fully engage in the perspective of others with analysis and critique that respectfully expands or builds upon their initial post. These interactions instill a sense of communal discussion because students know that others will be reading and replying to their posts. In order to complete the cycle, I also require each student to reply back to two peers’ comments on their original post. I want students to have the opportunity to better define their own ideas or make clarifications, but I also want them to be able to defend their stance. Intellectual humility involves knowing one’s limitations, but it also includes an appropriate level of confidence in one’s perspective and an ability to defend one’s views. I have yet to encounter bullying or dismissal of peer ideas in these online discussions. Students have tended to be uncritical with their peers’ posts and prefer to embrace and support one another. I have had to encourage a higher level of scrutiny and analysis in these peer interactions. Overall, my students have been very keen to interact in civil discussion online. Beyond my course outcomes, objectives, and activities, I also utilize intellectual humility in my face to face interactions with students. I want my courses to be collaborative learning environments where students learn from one another and me as we delve into reading and discussing religion and philosophy texts. Along the way, I have realized that some of the intellectual habits I expected students to utilize in my courses needed to be explained and modeled. For instance, in my recent Philosophy of Religion course, I struggled to motivate my Christian students to read texts supporting atheism, my skeptical students to read accounts of mystical religious experience, and my religiously conservative students to wrestle with portrayals of God that push beyond the theological boundaries of confirmation class. I addressed this situation by organizing a short lecture on the skill of reading with charity. My explanation of the Golden Rule of Reading, “read others as you would like to be read,” helped students consider each text as written by an author with her own unique perspective, agenda, and historical and philosophical context. Charitable reading requires students consider a text’s strongest and most credible arguments, not merely seek to find and exploit the weakest link in the reasoning. Charitable reading assumes each text we read has something to teach us, even if it is only a better conception of our disagreement with the author. Only after such an intentional and disciplined reading would my students be ready to offer a critique and response to our readings. This direct explanation of what I had previously assumed of my students allowed them to better grasp how they should engage with the course material. It also clarified the goal of our class discussions. As we conversed about these texts in class, we were not gathered just to express our own opinions about religion and the divine, but we were learning to listen to the questions these authors had posed as well as the answers they had to offer through their writing.

We were learning to follow arguments from their premises to their conclusions. We were learning to analyze and critique texts based upon our individual understandings. We were each bringing our own interpretations and responses to the classroom for comparison and dialogue. We were practicing intellectual humility as a learning community that recognizes how the unique contribution of each author and each student adds to our collective learning. We were recognizing our dependence on one another for the flourishing of our intellectual life. Students whose intellectual activity has been shaped by intellectual humility are equipped to appreciate the beliefs of others and share their own with confidence. Finally, in a college classroom, especially in religion and philosophy courses, a student’s personal beliefs are continually at work in their interpretation and analysis of texts and ideas. The diversity of views encountered in a classroom can be daunting for many students. In their course reading, discussion, and research, students interact with ideas that may conflict with their own deeply held beliefs. While these experiences can be unsettling, intellectual humility can empower students to explore new ideas and information, to remain open to opposing viewpoints, and to imagine new ways to integrate what they learn into a more accurate understanding of the world. In my experience, when students become receptive to an opposing viewpoint, they often come to a better understanding of their own position. For example, in my Ethics course my students must construct an argument that addresses an issue like euthanasia or legalization of drugs. As they gather resources, I encourage them to consider arguing in favor of the position they would normally oppose, the position counter to their own belief. Without fail, the students willing to walk in the shoes of their opponent report feeling they have a better grasp of the issue, can relate better to someone whose position differs from their own, and are more confident in holding and sharing their beliefs. They understand that being open to an argument or viewpoint does not entail adoption. These students also recognize their dependence on different perspectives to their intellectual growth. In a learning community trained in intellectual humility, challenging one’s beliefs about the world allows students to further explore why they hold certain beliefs and how to integrate new knowledge and experiences into their own belief structure. The result can be a more resolved and resilient system of beliefs and illustrates the importance of respectful encounters with a diverse curriculum. Intellectual humility can enhance a student’s intellectual growth by encouraging them to seriously consider ideas with which they disagree and to appreciate views that differ from their own.

Conclusion

Intellectual humility is an essential virtue for Christian higher education. In the Christian tradition, especially in Augustine, the way in which a person regards knowledge and the objects of knowledge is vitally important. For Augustine, all human knowledge begins with our own created nature, examines

the world of creation, and flourishes into love for God. Because all knowledge is rooted in the giftedness of creation, knowledge must be held with a certain type of love that is tempered by humility. Because all truth and all being stems ultimately from God, all knowledge and truth ultimately points back to God. Thus, for Augustine, our comportment with respect to what we learn dictates how we understand our relationship to that knowledge and how it is regarded by the knower. In a Christian context, intellectual humility orients both one’s desire for knowledge of creation and the knowledge itself toward a love for God and a renewed love for creation. Intellectual humility can profoundly shape how we conceive of Christian higher education and how we teach our courses. Acknowledging our createdness can allow teachers to shape their classrooms into an interdependent venture of individuals with distinct perspectives. It can instill respect for the experiences and contributions of others. Intellectual humility can also redirect students away from self-centered ambition and back toward their role in the classroom as peer learners. Returning briefly to my Philosophy of Religion course, when I taught my students to read charitably, I was providing them a set of practices to habituate, like reading to understand another’s perspective and avoid making caricatures of arguments. I was also creating a space for them to bring their charitable readings of the text into conversation with their similarly trained peers. The habit of charitable reading was training in intellectual humility. These students were learning to treat both text and peers as gifts of knowledge. These gifts, when properly received, ultimately lead them back to love of Creator and creature alike.

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