"Therefore, my dear friends, flee from the worship of idols. I speak as to sensible people; judge for yourselves what I say. The cup of blessing that we bless, is it not a sharing in the blood of Christ? The bread that we break, is it not a sharing in the body of Christ? Because there is one bread, we who are many are one body, for we all partake of the one bread." (I Cor 10: 14-17)
In light of Graham Ward's point about our agency and action as individuals being embedded in spiritual practices, I wold like to focus for several posts on some of the spiritual practices of the Church and ask what they have to say to our lives as Christian educators. It is impossible to live liturgy alone. Let me return here to Dulles' notion of the Church as sacrament, arguing as well that Christian education is sacramental.
First, a few caveats: I am not terribly interested in engaging the debate between what makes something an ordinance or a sacrament of Christian worship and what makes something sacramental in the larger more open-ended sense. Nor am I particularly interested in investing the term with an inviolable necessity. I am only too aware, as my friend David Stricklin has observed, that the word "sacrament" does not easily roll off many a Baptist tongue. What the word does impart is a historical Christian sense that God can use the physical things of creation to point to and impart a measure of his gracious presence and help. Finally, I am not very uptight about whether we should number the official church sacraments as two, three, or seven. Instead, I would propose a charitable overview that allows for some ambiguity in the exact definitions and resources because I want to examine in brief how the sacramental nature of being Church does have an impact on our students' pedagogical development and is, therefore, worthy of examination in a Christian philosophy of teaching.
Let us begin, then, where we begin in the Christian life. Faith and obedience are at the heart of our baptisms. Baptism is a public sign of our entrance into Christ's church, a renunciation of the devil and all his works, and a passage from one world to the next. Paul in Romans speaks of it as the joining of our identity with Christ; our life is now added to the narrative of the cross, burial, and resurrection of Jesus:
Do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? Therefore we have been buried with him by baptism into death, so that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, so we too might walk in newness of life. For if we have been united with him in a death like his, we will certainly be united with him in a resurrection like his. (Rom 6:3-5)
Baptisms, then, are a commitment to a worldview embodied in a particular socio-cultural context, and therefore, for Christians they can also remind us of a commitment to an academic and/or liturgical community differing in fundamental ways from the secular academy. Yet stated simply this way, it is tempting to overlook that in baptism the action of grace is not something that we do but something that God imparts. As my former teacher Ralph Wood puts it:
A baptism by total immersion makes ever so vivid, this is God's act: we are drowned with Christ in a watery grave, plunged into the aboriginal chaos out of which God fashioned the cosmos, in order that we may be raised with Christ as new creations, emerging wet-haired from the waters of life like new-born babies.
The radical and decisive nature of our baptisms is ideally renewed each time we witness another's baptism.
Of course, the position I am advocating here is more familiar to British Baptists, who see baptism as the sacramental and normative act of conversion (e.g G.R. Beasley-Murray); this is a position admittedly alien to the experience of many U.S. Southern Baptists, who tend to let the altar call and commitment card serve as the initial public testimony. (The exception to this is the rush of excitement I’ve seen in congregations when noted sinners have turned to Jesus and been baptized.)
Nonetheless, I believe seeing baptism as sacramental is something that Baptists of all stripes in education can learn from. As John Colwell observes, sacraments are the sign of God's promise of grace; they function as seals of the divine freedom to act as he will yet the assurance that he always keeps his promises. Baptism is our pledge based on God's pledge to us that we are his, joined to Christ and his Body. We come to "indwell the gospel event." Pedagogically, our baptisms are reminders that the gospel is a call to martyrdom, to being a witness with its suffering, and this includes the "white martyrdom" of a life of costly service through study.
We must embrace, even if we also despise, the shame that may come with taking on the name of Christ in the larger academy, but also the general athletic striving of learning. The suffering, even humiliation, involved in learning mediates to us aspects of Christ's own suffering. The burial and birthing of baptism brings us close to the outpouring of love that Jesus gave us, so that we may enter into what John Milbank has called "the circularity of gift" that is the profound cruciform shape of the Christian life--a shape that Christian pedagogy cannot escape.
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