Ratio et Fidei -- part 3

Stephen K. Moroney has attempted to offer a more complete model of the ways in which sin and rationality impact the Christian:

1. Our minds engage knowledge in both subjective and objective ways, though perhaps the two are finally intermingled.
2. God, humanity, and creation can all be treated as both subjects and objects.
3. The regenerate mind or new nature, the communities which shape our knowledge, and individual traits of our personalities all have a part in this rational engagement.

This question of personal capacity and personal caprice is joined to covenant community, a community formed by God's Spirit and expressed in the Church. Rationality and ecclesiology are deeply joined for Christian conviction and teaching, and as such, must develop and use wisely the vocabulary of Christian insight into the world.

Rationality begins with the disciple's trust that the master has something to offer, and this trust is absolutely necessary to develop the skills intrinsic to ever understanding the truth in practice. Critical thinking that never trusts in authorities is incapable of anything like critical realism. There is no engaging the reality that is there until the capacity to embrace both theory and practice is in place. Not even this committed involvement suggests a uniform pedagogy for all learners. As Paul Griffiths points out, a teacher cannot adopt "identical argumentative strategies" for differing persons with different stages of "catechetical preparation" (152). This is especially a disturbing question when we deal with resistant learners, ones who have a "volitional depravity" that robs them continually of the humility necessary to undertake the discipline in question. The psychikos are not neutral but rebellious, even when willfully blind to that interior antagonism.

Nonetheless, as Reinhold Hütter has reasoned, our mental judgments can be redeemed. This restoration comes about alongside a "metaphysics of creation: "[a] knowledge of creatures that is not directed to its dutiful end, namely, the knowledge of God, is a distorted, sinful knowledge. . . . sinful knowledge by its lack of reference to and reverence for the One who grants being in the first place."

Curiosity is not always a virtue; it sometimes kills the cat when he takes to sniffing poison. A reorientation of our desire to answer questions must be directed to the contemplation of God and God's good creation, including the creaturely component called humanism. A metaphysics of creation and an ordering of our loves centers upon the contemplation of God and the signs of his goodness.

When Christian education does this it resists the critical distance so prized by the modern university; instead, it enters into a divine dance of desire, partaking of the proximity and distance of the lover, ever drawing into delight, not curious, but committed and ecstatic. The offering of God's presence and the offering of his perceived absence are both acts of one who would seduce us with his own divine, The triune community of love, and approaches to God and his truth are both intertwined as freedom and obedience are always mixed in love.

In such a vision of education, nihilism is replaced with laughter.