Christmas and Kenosis in Pedagogy

I want to suggest that two aspects of the Son's entry into our world, his incarnation and self-emptying, are expressed in his people, as well, though on a much more rudimentary and limited level. Christ calls us to incarnate his truth in every cultural expression out of which we are born, as well as to grasp the essential paradox that when we lose ourselves, we are found; when we deny ourselves, we receive; and when we make ourselves last, God exalts us in due season. I believe this is true even in our learning.

The Church’s education, and therefore, its learning is always an extension of the incarnation, though not at the compromise of the Son's deity. (To put it more technical terms, theosis is never a violation of aseity, our continual growth in Christ will never cross the essential difference between God and his creation.) Jesus does not call us to a learning without context, without history, or without community. Instead, we are called to live and learn his truth in particular times and seasons, places and peoples.

Consider the kenosis of Christ. The Son made himself "nothing" for our sakes. We area called to do the same in imitation of him, though never at the deep metaphysical level that he did so. However, kenotic learning for us is also self-giving, self-emptying even. At times, learning which calls on us to experience great loss seeks to hold together mystery and mysterion, the unanswerable and the lately revealed. It embraces a willingness to suffer for learning, as well as a trust that our vulnerability in learning will be answered and prized. It may experience absence and longing--a dark night of the soul, as John of the Cross calls it.

Theology has traditionally advanced in two directions:

1. Via positiva, postive assertions about God's self-revelation in creation, with divine history culminating in Christ, and in scripture, as well as to a lesser extent in church history and tradition.
2. Via negativa, negative assertions about the limits of our creaturely assertions about God. We cannot claim to know God exhaustively. Our search for him often ends in our simply acknowledging that we can go no further using this or that image or vocabulary. What we have received is sufficient, but then neither are we God.

As Reinhard Hütter has argued, our positive assertions always need a hint of negative correction. We cannot speak of God exhaustively. We have to learn what our limits are. This is true about God's world, as well. Our studies end in mystery. I am not promoting a "god of the gaps" in which whatever we can not explain at the time must be attributed to God. On the contrary, everything known and unknown is God's. Rather, we need to acknowledge that the limits to our understanding are signs of our dependence on God.

In the Orthodox tradition, icons always attempt to be both--what can be known of God and of the final uncontainable mystery of God. What is beyond our knowing is always part and parcel with what we do know (95-110). Kenotic learning, likewise, recognizes that the transcendentals of the true, the good, and the beautiful, as ultimately grounded in God, can only be attended to in an iconic manner. Learning mystery is true learning. Everything that is possessed of what is glorious, righteous, or true will not speak to us exhaustively, as if we could control it. When we say what can be said and acknowledge what cannot, we are affirming our creatureliness, as well as our role as God's covenant people.

Incarnational learning is similar--an emptying, a taking on of the context, a missional trajectory that grows mature and complete in the process of undergoing the given task. Kenotic and incarnational learning share the notion that since being is communion, authentic learning is both individual and communal; indeed, the individual is a community, as the communal has at times an individual quality. Learning requires sacrifice and submission, a giving of one's self, a risking of one's identity and nature. At times, it means not understanding with any comprehensiveness the change that is taking place in yourself as the learner or in the learning community that you help form. It is only discovered in retrospect, having been the work of the Spirit all along.

By affirming that the incarnation and the self-emptying of Christ were eternal possibilities in the Son, and by suggesting that our own finite forms of these are part of the imitation of Christ we are called to, we recognize that these forms of learning with their vulnerability, dependency, and sacrifice are not post-lapsarian instruments that we must begrudge, but part of the nature of being human persons. We learn this way by God's design.

The Trinue Nature of Education

Love is that which transcends freedom and necessity, and the perfect outpouring of love in the Triune God is always a outward offering of divine love, so that just as the Father glorifies the Son and the Spirit, so do they each glorify the other members, the Godhead each receiving and dependent upon the other members for their divinity. This overflowing mystery of outward moving and self-differentiating love makes our own being and our own unity possible. The koinonia fellowship of the Trinity establishes an ontology of communion, of perfect shalom, which in turn establishes the very conditions of our very personhood.

As John Zizioulas has observed, "Being is communion;" we are persons because we move to transcend ourselves by finding ourselves in others and by offering ourselves to them. Or as Charles Taylor has observed, the most important aspects of our selves are found in relation with others not in isolation. We cannot even speak of ourselves rightly without acknowledging the debt we owe to all that defines us and gives us life. This is true because in a more profound, perfect way this same shared personality is found in God. Christ, eternally begotten of the Father is ever a fountain of love. The Spirit ever proceeds from the Father and through the Son as the love outpouring between them. We, too, in embodied ways are also “ekstastic” beings--we go out of ourselves for others' benefit, and in turn our very selves are based on others going out to us (Stanley Greenz 131-139). The joy of our existence is in fulfilling our personhood woven together with God and others and the creation itself. Such a web of existence reveals some essential aspects of education:

First, sociality is essential to the structure of the universe and, therefore, to teaching, especially the psychology of sociality and its eschatological possibilities for learning. Our desires and bonds of community are intended for the end of perfect fellowship and blessing in God, and we best change with that end in mind. Personal fulfillment is intinamtely related to our place in the web of relationships that make us who we are. Christians should mistrust models of education based on excessive competition, as well as academic environments that promote distrust and "dog eat dog" scholarship.

Second, our capacity for receiving and understanding truth, dependent upon the communicative virtues, is also a matter of the social nature of love in all its facets. The capacities that make good communication possible make great love possible, and together they offer a picture of the academy not as a place of self-advancement or ego-driven competition, but as one of the sharing of research and learning with the end of agape in ourselves and for God and others before us.

Third, the perfect shalom in the blessedness of the Godhead is part of the future promised us by the Christ-event. Until the Messiah completes his people in their maturity, presenting them to the Father, when all will be all in all, we are longing to recover some measure of that lost charity of relations and by his grace, modeling it. We are ever learning anew to love and loving in order that we might learn. Our pedagogies cannot overlook the interpersonal nature of teaching, learning, and acting, which we are ever seeking to settle into.

Fourth, being a "servant-leader" implies forming dispositions of giving and receiving well the gifts that are in all aspects of study. A personal relationship is always mediated with existing tangible objects and subjects. We don’t serve in the abstract; neither do we learn with theory alone before us. Theory is a form of praxis, not a foundation for action, but an implicate of practices with histories. The learner does not exist in some auto-didactic damnation of total isolation and self-reference. Such would be the solipsist's self-imposed nightmare. "Which way I fly am Hell; Myself am Hell," intoned Milton's Satan.

Phrases like "learning community" and "service learning" have become a bit trite through overuse, but their truth is ever true. We mirror God's fellowship when we image God together, and we image God together when we learn together. The question that remains before us as Christian educators is whether our teaching promotes this eschatological testimony found in discipleship groupings or a modern pedagogy of selves "delivered" from the oppressive “soul cages” of families, towns, and churches.

'til Divorce Do We Part?

Historian of law and religion John Witte, Jr. describes four models of marriage in the Western Christian tradition that have had an important impact on early marriage, divorce, and family law in the United States.

1) Within Roman Catholic tradition, marriage has been understood as a sacrament that, while a natural and contractual association of a man and a woman for the purposes of propagation, childrearing, and companionship, is primarily a spiritual union that brings grace to the couple and to those touched by their marriage. Such marriages might be annulled, but they can not be dissolved by divorce.

The three major streams of magisterial Protestantism each in turn rejected Catholic sacramentalism, but often borrowed many particulars from Catholic canon law.

2) Lutheranism stressed that the Christian life shares in two kingdoms, an earthly, political one and a spiritual, heavenly one. Marriage is a natural and civil institution, and thus both marriage and divorce are earthly, public acts that involve the judge, the magistrate, and the priest. In turn,

3) Calvinism stressed marriage as a covenant that involves the whole community--parents, witnesses, the minister, and the magistrate. As an act that shares in the creation, marriage has in mind the spiritual and moral well-being of the couple and of their children. God is a part of every covenant. Even though divorce might become necessary in cases in which the covenant has been broken, it is a serious undertaking, and it must encounter a large number of barriers to prevent easy suits.

4) Anglicanism pictured marriage as a little commonwealth in which the serious covenant with one's spouse serves not only to teach the couple the moral and spiritual virtues, but also to act as a "seedbed and seminary" for the local church, polity, and community in these virtues. Divorce was almost entirely prohibited in this tradition.

Arising in the 18th century, the Enlightenment view of marriage was often to void the sacramental and covenantal assumptions about marriage for purely contractual ones representing a voluntary bargain between two persons with agreed-upon terms and time limits. This view argued for the removal of conditions of parental consent, community witness, or ecclesiastical blessing. While these notions only marginally made their presence known in the U.S. during the 19th century, by the mid-20th century they became more and more predominant with divorce becoming easier and easier to obtain, especially after the rise of no-fault divorce and more fluid definitions of marriage and consensual relationships.

What does this brief history have to teach us about the nature of marriage, divorce, and family law? Any thoughts?

Althusius and Federalism as Grand Design

Interesting piece on Johannes Althusius' Politica Methodice Digesta.

http://www.jcpa.org/dje/articles2/althus-fed.htm

It discusses his views of federalism, covenantal government, constitutional soverignity, natural associations that bridge public and private life, as well as civil law that nonetheless is guided by religious insights.

Christian History and General Contracts (Part 2)

Puritan covenant theology gave rise to several changes in contract law: 1) a reconception of contracts as covenantal relationships with a deep structure of order, sin, and salvation; 2) a move from contracts as moral considerations to considerations of contractual bargaining; and 3) a stricter enforcement of these in terms of the breach of bargains.

While by the 17th century, contract law had been somewhat simplified in England, "assumpsit was essentially an action for breach of (a unilateral) promise, not breach of (a bilateral) contract in the modern sense, and the required consideration was conceived in terms of the moral justification and purpose of the promise." The Puritans in general were distrustful of the criteria of equity used by canon law courts, for they felt it was too inconsistent and left too much power in the hands of judges. Under their influence, contract law shifted:

1. from breach of promise to breach of a bargain as the basis for (a more interdependent)liability;
2. from the cause of the motive and purpose of a contract to "the price paid by the promisee for the promise of the promisor;"
3. and from questions of moral fault to those of absolute obligation.

(Berman points out that under Puritan law a person could be forced to pay rent on land even if the property were not fit for habitation!)

Yet we cannot forget that for the Puritans, contacts were no mere secular promises; they were binding covenants of a personal nature, conceived in closely-tied communities, and executed before a God of order. Likewise, they were made by sinful people subject to corruption who needed objective, consistent laws to hold them to account, and they were part of a larger vision of covenants within every order of society that bound the people into a commonwealth of grace and salvation.

Thus, though the Puritan conception of contract law introduced parties into the conception of obligations, they did not make the move that later Enlightenment theories would make:

In the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, these older theories of contract law were secularized, in the sense that their religious foundations were replaced by a conception based not on faith in a transcendent reason and a transcendent will, from which human reason and will are derived and to which they are responsible, but rather on the inherent freedom of each individual to exercise his own autonomous reason and will, subject only to considerations of social utility.

I am not at all convinced that this shift was a beneficial one, and from a Christian perspective, might even be considered modern idolatry. What have we lost in these transitions, especially in the way we conceive of the rationality, equity, and covenantal nature of our contracts and obligations?

Christian History and General Contracts (Part 1)

Law historian Harold J. Berman in one of his final essays before his death last year examined two streams of the Christian sources of general contract law: medieval canon law and Puritan covenant law.

In medieval canon law, contracts were conceived as having two sides to them: 1) the obligation of an oath before God and 2) legal liability conceived as protecting the rights of the obligee. Since the promise was understood as made ultimately to God, it created an obligation to the Church, too; thus, ecclesiastical courts could become involved. This created a further question: what makes a morally obligatory promise also legally binding? 11th century canon jurists concluded that it must be reasonable and equitable, and they offered a number of factors as to how this could be determined:

• even an informal promise could be legally binding provided it was fair and equitable;
• no fraud was involved by either party;
• no duress was involved against both or either party;
• neither party was mistaken concerning the circumstances of the pledge;
• no silence had given rise to mistaken inferences;
• no third-party beneficiary's rights were impinged;
• the contract was subject to reformation in the light of justice;
• that good faith was present in the construction, interpretation, and execution of the contract;
• in dubis pro debitore: the laws are to be applied in favor of the debtor;
• that the contract is not otherwise unconscionable.

Berman cites as an example the distinction canon law made between normal profit-making and nominal interest charges and shameful price-gauging and usury (i.e. excessive interest). He concludes:

Our modern Western contract law did not start from the proposition that every individual has a moral right to dispose of his property by means of making promises, and that in the interest of justice a promise should be legally enforced unless it offends reason or public policy. Our contract law started, on the contrary, from the theory that a promise created an obligation to God, and that for the salvation of souls God instituted the ecclesiastical and secular courts with the task, in part, of enforcing contractual obligations to the extent that such obligations are just.