Professor Joshua Blander, Ph.D., Researches Humility Development with Biola University and Christian Scholars Foundation Grants

Professor Joshua Blander, Ph.D., assistant professor of philosophy at The King’s College, recently returned from a workshop and conference on Jewish Philosophical Theology at the Herzl Institute in Jerusalem, where he was able to continue work on a long-term research project on the role and cultivation of the virtue of humility in the Christian life. The workshop and conference were both organized by Dr. Yoram Hazony and the Herzl Institute, through funding from the Templeton Foundation. Associate professor of biblical and theological studies Dru Johnson, Ph.D., also played a key role in organizing these events as a co-organizer.

Blander’s work on the subject of humility is distinctive; he is not seeking only to provide a theoretical account of what the virtue is, but is also working to understand its practical implications and how it can be cultivated in the lives of contemporary Christians. He hopes that this research will serve as the foundation of a college-level curriculum that takes this investigation of humility out of the realm of ideas and into the sphere of practical Christian virtue.

The project has garnered significant attention in Christian philosophy, well beyond his attendance at the workshop and conference in Jerusalem. Over the past academic year, Blander was awarded two grants—a Fellowship at the Biola University Center for Christian Thought (another Templeton-funded program) and a grant from the Christian Scholars Foundation—for his research. He spent the first semester of the 2016-17 academic year at Biola University, engaging with fellow professors such as Dr. Jason Baehr, author of two scholarly books on intellectual virtue, and Dr. Steve Porter, who has authored several books on the relationship between theology and psychology.

“At Biola, I got to interact with people working on Aquinas, people working on ancient history, and people working on empirical psychology. It was incredibly valuable to have those interdisciplinary interactions and to see that there’s a space and a need for thinking about humility in philosophy that’s deeply informed by Scripture,” Blander says.

For Blander, research that is deliberately focused on character formation matches up perfectly with The King’s College’s mission to “prepare principled leaders.” He recognizes widespread cultural rejection and ignorance of the virtue of humility and its relationship to human flourishing. In a world that seems to demand self-promotion as the price of success, the whole concept of humility can seem insipid, he says. Yet Christianity and Scripture prominently teach that Christ humbled himself, and if “[w]e are supposed to imitate Christ, and if Christ in fact humbled Himself, then the invitation of Christ is an invitation to humility,” Blander says. In fact, Blander argues, humility appears throughout Scripture, including in God’s self-presentation in Hebrew Scripture, a crucial idea in Blander’s research that made the workshop in Jerusalem such an exciting opportunity. The challenge is to clarify that humility does not equate to timidity or having a low assessment of oneself, but is rather a summons to a new kind of excellence—excellence for the sake of others, not oneself, even when that service to others might involve cultural or personal shame or some other type of loss in status.

In his time teaching at King’s, Blander has consistently sought to spur his students towards the development of virtue as well as towards knowledge of the subject. This passion for his students as holistic beings, not simply as intellects, is what initially motivated him to investigate the virtue of humility, as he saw a great deal of confusion about the concept—not only with his classroom, but in the culture, and even in the Western philosophical tradition as a whole, in which humility is often either condemned as slavish or is softened past recognition. “There are some views today in which humility is simply proper self-assessment,”  Blander says. “But that just doesn’t square with how radical it was for Jesus and St. Paul to suggest that this is actually a virtue, and it just doesn’t fit with what Jesus describes and what Paul describes as humility. So it raised some real concerns for me about whether we’re identifying the right thing as the virtue of humility.”

After his time at Biola, Blander continued work on the topic through his grant from the Christian Scholars Foundation. Upon receiving  Blander’s application, the Foundation was so interested in the project that they created a special category of grant specifically to fund it, demonstrating a deep interest in the larger Christian community in this kind of work.

In the course of his research,  Blander explored not just the philosophic and religious treatments of humility after Christ, he examined the Old Testament as well, looking for ways to understand how the virtue of humility was expressed prior to the Incarnation. He acknowledges that this is where he finds himself in the midst of a very subtle, centuries-old philosophical disagreement, but it is also where he is pioneering an innovative perspective on the virtue of humility. “I’m very interested in thinking of God as a moral exemplar, and that we ought to see much more connection between our own character and God’s character.” This idea of looking to God as a model of moral character, not simply as a distributor of laws, makes up the backbone of  Blander’s work on humility.

In Jerusalem, Blander was able to engage more deeply with other scholars, including Johnson, on the question of how Christians ought to interact with Scripture on philosophical questions about virtues like humility. He anticipates these conversations continuing both in and out of the classroom in the coming school year. “Humility was rejected in the ancient world as a vice. Today, it gets rejected as being submissive. But this idea of humility lies at the heart of the Christian vision. This is as distinctive as it gets.”

President Gregory A. Thornbury, Ph.D., said, “Joshua Blander’s work is exactly the kind of faculty engagement King’s seeks to cultivate: intellectually robust, innovative, and Christ-focused. Dr. Blander’s research on virtue is a natural outgrowth of his approach to teaching, which challenges students to grow in character and virtue as well as academic excellence. I look forward to the continuance of Dr. Blander’s research, and to the conversations about the nature of Christian leadership and virtue that it will generate at King’s.”