|
I am interested in education particularly
from the standpoint of the deep sadness I feel when seeing students in
theological declamations from the very day they are ordained. They will
never know as much theology as they do in their senior year of seminary.
Ten years later their general culture has been localized; their reading
has been vastly diminished; their effort to understand what is going on
in principal fields of inquiry New Testament, church history,
theology-is in many cases nonexistent. In places where I have been asked
to help in adult education, I have tested this observation by bluntly
putting a question to the group: "How many of you have read a New
Testament introduction since you left the seminary?" Fewer than 10 per
cent will raise a hand. In the
ministry we somehow have the feeling that the intellectual, historical
and literary part of our preparation is something that can be deposited
in us, or stuffed into us, in a period of three or four years; and we
presume to run a whole lifetime on the original tankful.
When suddenly I had the job dropped in my
lap of teaching Christian ethics, I had never read an entire textbook on
the topic, and I knew it was too late to start scrounging around through
10 or 12 such books. So I thought
of a way to make the whole process of ethical thinking concrete. I
selected four or five pieces of contemporary literature having ethical
problems as themes, and then dismissed the class to read. I remember I
gave the students Conrad's Lord Jim, Hemingway's The Old Man
and the Sea, a series of short stories by Chekhov, Ibsen's The
Master Builder and Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman. The
dramatic content of these works revolves around a moral core: a moral
problem, a failure, an act of dishonor or betrayal, a vague sense of a
meaningless life. Having read the
material, the students were ready to hear me talk about ethics and what
canons of obedience are appropriate for the Christian message. I didn't
have to spark interest in the ethical questions; that was done by the
artists. I would use the same
approach for continuing education. That is, don't start off simply with
lectures, but find some way to evoke the kind of question that requires
a better answer than the students have received from their earlier
education. For instance, why not send out reprints of a case study that
concludes with an agonizing problem in medical ethics about whether to
prolong life or let die. Ask, "At what point is the problem ethical,
Christian? What has God got to do with the matter?" This is real
education. There are few things
more futile than answering questions no one is asking. When I am called
on to do two or three evenings with a group of people, whenever I know
far enough ahead, I say to the inviter, "If you will have your people
read a couple of things I will send you, then I will come." Otherwise, I
come and am expected to be a kind of high-level entertainer. Well, I
have enough debts, and my rent is steep enough that I would gladly take
the money for it, but I don't feel good about it. The people are not
sitting there open, precise, sharpened-up to hear someone address a
pressing question. People do not
always respond as I might wish. For example, I was once asked by a group
of pastors to discuss Reginald Fuller's The Formation of the
Resurrection Narratives and responses to it. And I said, "I will not
come unless you promise, every last one of you, to read Reginald Fuller"
(this was months ahead of the event). The group inviting me had about 90
members, but only about 40 said they would read the book. (I went
anyway.) However, the 40 who said they would do it and did spent a
day in discussion and then wanted another. It was a real educational
experience for them. I served in the capacity of ink; they were the
blotter. How can one's college
years be spent in such a way that they are not a period of diminishment
from religious understanding or a laming of true piety? Most students at
our denominational schools have come from families in which, with
greater or lesser intensity, the Christian tradition has been
represented. In college a student presumably multiplies his or her
person, joins the human race, moves away from a province into a great
world. These are years of growth in which the individual progresses from
a personally centered idea of the self into a notion of
selfhood that is constituted by a vaster and profounder world than
he or she knew as a child. The college years should indeed offer the
opportunity for such opening outward.
Now while this growth is taking place, the
whole religious tradition comes under scrutiny; in fact, it often comes
under such scrutiny as leads to its rejection. Often this happens
because the student's religious tradition may not seem able to keep pace
in its intellectual structure with what he or she is learning in
college. During such a period, what a student's intellectual maturation
demands is an expanding doctrine of God. The simpler doctrine of God
that is rightly and necessarily the one we learn as children remains
tightly enfolded within the language, within categories that are simply
incapable of filling the space of one's growing intellectual experience.
However, neither lamentation nor castigation
of the students is the right way to get at the problem. The way to do
that is to ask the faculty to come together to talk about theological
enrichment and growth in theological discourse. In fact, these teachers
were probably victims of the same circumstances during their own college
years. I meet many faculty people
who, despite the enormously sophisticated research they do, are living
with an adolescent or childhood notion of God, which is seemingly unable
to open any discourse with their learned discipline. Therefore they
simply create a compartment. On Sunday they are devout, pious
Christians. During the rest of the week they are physicists, chemists,
biologists or whatnot, and there is no intersection or crossover among
the categories in which they live.
Fundamentally, one cannot live in this fragmented way. One may seem to
bring it off. But the first result of these sealed compartments of
discourse is that one's own area of specialty suffers. Second, the
interior stress creates an intolerable personality tension (one which I
have sensed in many of my university colleagues).
Thus the church-related college and its
faculty must make conscious efforts to incorporate high-level
theological study into the institution's general curriculum. For,
indeed, the Christian faith is entirely capable of the ever more
capacious interpretation that can parallel a student's or a teacher's
expanding needs and understandings.
Wherever did we get the idea that only the
"childish" is available or accessible to children? Where did we get the
notion that only the absurdly reduced symbol is open to the child's
imagination? We teach the children to sing "This is my Father's world,"
which is a good theological statement, but then we follow it up with
little stories about the pansies and the kitty cats. Children can also
know something beyond playthings.
Students eventually come to us at the seminary in such a riddled
condition, with such an inadequate theology, because we have not thought
the growing child's mind capable of including larger references to the
meaning of the Word of God and the church.
Our humane education has shriveled under the
pressure of our bureaucratic obligations. Our humanity itself becomes
bureaucratized, routinized. This shrinkage of our educated and clerical
humanity is one of the most discouraging aspects of my life. It is not
that I expect the clergy to become theologians in the professional
sense, though every ordained one should be a theologian. Nor do I expect
them to be great scholars. But I do expect them to be alive human
beings; and I do not find this aliveness in proper intensity among many
of today's improperly educated clergy.
When I refer to intellectual content, I do
not mean big words. For example, consider St. Augustine's sentence,
"Thou has made us for thyself, 0 Lord; and our hearts are restless until
they rest in thee." That is not incomprehensible to anyone. But how many
preachers might reach or explore the depths of it with the common
people? I preach to congregations of working people as much as I do to
those at colleges and universities. And I preach the same sermons. I
might use illustrative material that is more appropriate and
intelligible and evocative here than there, but the content of the
thought is the same. By intellectual I do not mean abstract, multi
syllabic, cerebrally impenetrable. I mean reflective articulating the
way something is. That can actually be done very simply.
If you ask me what makes a good teacher, I
can tell you that he or she gives off the notion, "What I'm talking
about is enormously important and alluring and exciting, and I wish you
knew more about it." When that happens in a classroom, there is
something worthwhile going on. I
remember a great, great teacher I once knew. He was a little, wispy,
absentminded fellow who taught Romantic and Victorian poetry. The rest
of the faculty regarded him as somewhat odd, and he was. He was so
wrapped up in 19th-century pastoral poetry that he didn't pay much
attention to grades. Therefore all the football players took his
courses. One day I sat in on one of
his classes. At the end of the period, the professor said, in his soft
voice, "Next Friday, gentlemen, you will have read when you come to my
class, 'The Intimations of Immortality,' by Wordsworth. I wish you to
come with your minds gloriously adorned." The funny thing was that those
hulking, generally not-too-bright football players made the effort. For
the man took the students more seriously than they took themselves. He
didn't see why a fellow who was a tackle on Saturday shouldn't love
Wordsworth. He invested his students with his confidence and the
possibility that Wordsworth is every person's possession. This is
teaching at its best. College
faculty should be educated persons. This is often not the case. Many of
them are trained not educated. You can train dogs to jump, and you
can train people to report what is going on in chemistry and transmit
that information. But education means training the mind to unfold to the
multiple facets of human existence with some appreciation, eagerness and
joy. It is, in essence, the opposite of being dull. We've got plenty of
trained, dull people on our faculties, but not many educated people.
Copyright 1984
CHRISTIAN CENTURY. Reproduced
by permission from the February 1-8, 1984 issue of the CHRISTIAN
CENTURY. Subscriptions: $49/year from P.O. Box 378, Mt. Morris, IL
61054. 1-800-208-4097 |
