Davenant House

For all the good that has come of “Christian worldview” discipleship in recent decades, too often it has relied on polemic generalizations, caricatures, and easy answers. This keeps those in its school dependent on being constantly fed superficial talking points, and its ethos is a shallow enthusiasm based on a brainy version of corporate-style team-building exercises. This serves an outlook wherein fundraising becomes the end rather than the means, and it doesn’t really serve the church or the commonwealth.

Wisdom, on the other hand, is possession of the principles of reality in the mind, illuminated by the Spirit-filled heart, and for the sake of the knowledge of God and glorifying Him. It isn’t a set of talking points whose representatives have to be constantly reprogrammed. Rather, it makes free men and women capable of prudence and virtuous practice who can lead as servant heroes. Christian wisdom is a gathering of truth in love of God, so as to embody and radiate it to the world.

The architects of classical Protestantism in the 16th and 17th centuries were masters of such holistic wisdom, using theology as the starting point for a loving attention to the natural world that God created and the human world of politics, art, and culture that they were called to equip and enrich. The Inklings and Francis Schaeffer, in his heyday, cultivated this wisdom, and changed the world. It it is this which we need in our own time, following in their footsteps.

Wisdom, unlike worldview, cannot be downloaded from a server or acquired from a video course. It requires a retrieval of the lost art of conversation and the cultivation of intellectually rich friendship. This is the vision for Davenant House.