153 - A "Post-Liberal" Christian Education?

A "Post-Liberal" Christian Education?
Craig Dykstra

CALVIN thought that God could do it alone, but for various reasons decided otherwise. He said, "God, who could in a moment perfect his own, nevertheless desires them to grow up onto [maturity] solely under the education of the church."¹ And he was pretty hard on those who would not avail themselves of this educational resource. After quoting Isaiah 59:21, he blustered: "From this it follows that all those who spurn the spiritual food, divinely extended to them through the hand of the church, deserve to perish in famine and hunger.² He held, to say the least, a rather high view of the place of the church's educational ministry in the Christian life.

I

I do not believe that anyone deserves to perish in famine and hunger, but I do understand why Calvin thought education is so important. It derives from his understanding of Christian faith itself. Faith does not come out of the blue. It does not suddenly arrive from beyond-at least not Christian faith. Christian faith is faith in a God who is known in history. God acted in the then and there, and continues to act in the here and now. To have faith is to know this God, to have confidence in this God, and to respond to this God with our lives. But we cannot know or trust or respond to this God unless we learn of God. And we cannot learn of God unless we are taught. "Faith comes from hearing" (Rom. 10: 17)-to use a quotation that Calvin cites on this same point.

In his most recent collection of essays and criticism, John Updike includes a brief piece about his memories of his high school in Shillington, Pennsylvania. He remembers the faculty fondly for the Latin they taught him, for their emphasis on English grammar, and for their general willingness "to encourage any talent that manifested itself in a child." And then he adds a comment about the art department: "My drawing and writing were allowed to go as far as they could, which is what education (e, out, + ducere, bring) is all about."³

¹ Institutes of the Christian Religion, 4.1.5.
² Ibid.
³ Hugging the Shore (New York: Alfred A. Knopf. 1983), p. 842.

154 - A "Post-Liberal" Christian Education?

The idea that education is all about "bringing out" is a dominant one. One sees this Latin etymology referred to regularly. And there are good reasons. Education does have to do with tapping the creative potential of the learners, of fostering the talents, initiative, and intuitive powers that each of us brings just by being alive. But an undialectical and overreaching emphasis on this side of the educational dynamic fails to consider how much education must have to do with molding, forming, and sheer informing-the first side of the education Updike remembers. It also hides what a dangerous and difficult thing education is.

One of our century's most creative writers, Flannery O'Connor, argued in an essay on the teaching of literature in the eighth grade that the English teacher

will be fulfilling his responsibility if he furnishes the student a guided opportunity, through the best writing of the past, to come, in time, to an understanding of the best writing of the present....

And if the student finds that this is not to his taste? Well, that is regrettable. Most regrettable. His taste should not be consulted: it is being formed.⁴

Education, she is saying, is the forming-not the educing-of taste through the informing of a mind. Even more, it is the forming of a person which happens when teachers help learners to pay disciplined attention to something they might otherwise never see-much less appreciate and appropriate personally.

When education is understood in this way, it becomes clear what an immense and difficult responsibility education is. Teaching becomes an activity which requires high moral courage. There is a boldness to it which is often lost on us. Packed into the word "education" are such immodest assumptions as: there is truth, reality, goodness, and beauty to be known and related to, and here is a way to it; there are various ways to know and to live, and without learning from what is taught here, you will be lost. Martin Buber once put it this way.

What we term education, conscious and willed, means a selection by man of the effective world; it means to give decisive effective power to a selection of the world which is concentrated and manifested in the educator.⁵

Education makes bold to claim that not all options, not all worlds, are equally effective, true, and good, but that in the educator are concentrated those which are. Education means choosing, and these choices are moral choices. Education involves selecting, and these selections require virtue. This, moreover, is all the more true for Christian education which makes the audacious claim that in the Christ whom it teaches is "the way, the truth, and the life."

The potential here for hubris, authoritarianism, even a kind o

⁴ Flannery O'Connor, Mystery and Manners (New York: Farrar. Straus and Giroux, 1961 ), p. 140.
⁵ Martin Buber, Between Man and Man, trans. R. G. Smith (New York: The Macmillan Co., 1965). p. 89.

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fascism of the soul is obviously enormous. Calvin recognized this when he immediately followed his section on education with one on the meaning and limits of this ministry. He quotes largely from Paul to the effect both that education does have this kind of power and that in all of it Paul does "not intend to credit to himself even a particle apart from God.... It is a sacrilege for man to claim any part of either for himself."⁶ One wonders if that really says enough, if it provides enough warning. It does hint, in any case, why Christian education is not just about faith, or toward faith. It suggests why Christian education requires faith. It requires faith as a kind of knowing which is actually in touch with what is most ultimately real and true. And it requires faith as a way of disciplined living which draws upon the power of God and of the Spirit in the church to keep us from falling into evil in relation to those whom we teach.

II

The move toward an understanding of education as forming and informing (rather than only bringing out) may seem to be just another manifestation of the "back to basics" temper that seems current. I am not sure that it is, but even if that were the case it would not tell us much. "Back to basics" is more of a mood than a direction.⁷ There is a sense of nostalgia about it. And nostalgia always has more the air of a lost past than a promising future to it. There is a yearning for direction; but who knows what that direction is. "Back to basics" doesn't tell us where to go. It just tells us we do not want to be where we are.

Something else is going on here, I think. It has to do with the development of a post-liberal theology, and maybe even a post-liberal church. There are complicated ways of articulating this development,' but, at the risk of caricature, it can be put simply. Culturally, theologically, ecclcsiologically, and educationally, the criterion for truth in a pre-liberal age is authority.⁸ A student asks, "Why"? And the teacher's response is, "Because I say so!" (or because the Bible says so, or the book says so, etc.). This kind of pre-liberal way of thinking is gone. It is gone in the culture. in theology, in the church, in child-rearing, and in education. Even those who resist its going-and there are still many are uneasy, because they know that even if authority is the only foundation they have, it is not enough. It is too easy to challenge, and to the challenge there is no comeback but force and power.

The shift beyond authority is the shift to liberalism, modernity. Instead of authority, there is experiment, experience, radical questioning, individualism, and relativism. The virtues of the liberal culture are

⁶ Institutes, 4.1.6.
⁷ Two of the best articulations of it are. to my mind. George Lindbeck. The Nature Of Doctrine-Religion and Theology in a Posiliberal Age (Philadelphia: Westminster Press. 1984) and Edward Farley, Ecclesial Reflection. An Anatomy of Theological Method (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1982).
⁸ As Farley (Ibid., p. 113) puts it, "classical criteriology, displaces evidence with authority and inquiry with citation."

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well-known and much appreciated. But there is a dark side as well. In a liberal culture, no one knows anything for sure. Culture becomes human expression, theology becomes the translation of ancient symbols and mythology into contemporary experience, church becomes the gathering of the like-minded, and education becomes a therapy which allows the individual true self to emerge. In such a world, tradition is antiquarian, conviction gives way to cynicism, human attachments are contracts rather than commitments, community is hungered for but unattainable, and the future seems more and more just barely sustainable. No wonder the nostalgia for authority and power.

The period we are now in, some argue, is one of transition. Liberal culture is self-destructing of its own incipient violence and despair. What a post-liberal culture will look like-if it can even come to pass-is not clear. What it will require on the part of theology, the church, and its education, however, is the emergence of a new way of seeing the world, and a new way of understanding ourselves, that combines both a recovery and re-appropriation of ancient Christian sources and a meeting of the contemporary situation in their light-but without any authoritarian presuppositions. This is different from trying to resurrect an old culture. It is also different from simply mining ancient sources for their relevance to today's world. It is rather a matter of being so formed by them (perhaps even converted by them) that we come to see and understand and act as people whose very lives are already modified by them, and thus freshly enabled to engage the contemporary situation on new grounds.

George Lindbeck thinks this will not happen until the culture first undergoes a still longer and more radical period of "dechristianization" than we have already witnessed. In the present, the churches are, he argues, far more accommodations to than shapers of the culture. It will take more time before it can become clear to both the church and the wider society that Western liberal culture and Christianity are not one and the same thing. Until then, Christian faith can hardly appear to many as a real alternative. This. he says, is why we have such difficulty attracting even our own children's attention. Christian faith seems to them to be just so much more of the same stuff they soak in from the culture as a whole, day in and day out. And even when we get their attention, Lindbeck charges, we "generally prove wholly incapable of providing effective instruction in distinctively Christian language and practice." ⁹ It may be, he suggests, only when Christians are reduced to a small minority that "they will need for the sake of survival to form communities that strive without traditionalist rigidity to cultivate their native tongue and learn to act accordingly." ¹⁰

Whether or not "dechristianization" is a necessary prelude to an effective, vital Christian education, it is surely true that the Christian education we have will have to become both more serious and more

⁹ The Nature of Doctrine, p. 133.
¹⁰ Ibid., pp. 133-34.

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radical in its aims, its understanding, and its practice. This will not happen except insofar as the church finds itself in real need of it. I think the church may be starting to feel the need.

III

The current issue of THEOLOGY TODAY brings together a number of authors who, in their previous writings and work in the church, have shown unusual interest in the educational ministry of the church. None of them is a professor of Christian education or professional educator in the ordinary sense. Intellectually, they are theologians, biblical scholars, historians. Professionally, there are among them seminary professors (and a seminary president), a parish pastor, and a college chaplain. They bring their own concerns and backgrounds to this fundamental issue and say it the way they see it. I am sure that not all of them would want to be identified as "post-liberals" (a rather uninviting moniker, in any case). But they all worry about our present form of Christian education, and are not nostalgic about the "old days." And, like Calvin, they all take education seriously.