Lauren Winner recently coined the phrase "aromatheology" to describe Susan Ashbrook Harvey's Scenting Salvation, an account of Patristic worship and theology as being multi-sensory. What I like about the term is that it reminds us that our senses, made by our Creator, belong to our Creator. The pedagogical emphases on multi-media education need to transcend the pragmatic, as well as practice a careful discernment. The shape of a medium is its message, as Marshall MacLuhan used to warn us. The changes that each new technology brings to the human person are not de facto worthy of being embodied nor do they all guarantee good learning. Instead, they often contain a curriculum and a means of formation hidden in what they offer. Sound and sight, touch and taste, smell and our sense of gravity are another way our embodied existence must be understood for truly effective pedagogy And yet not just by using differing media for a media-glutted generation; rather, what is called for is a renewal of what our sensory faculty are actually for--the divine presence as meditated through the transcendentals of truth, goodness, and beauty. Can we consider a pedagogy of scent and touch?
For example, imagining our deaths and imagining our healing is what unction is about. The oil of anointing is a reminder of our dependence and our fragility. We are like smoke or the flowers of the field. To be anointed for healing is to engage in a meditation on our inutility. We cannot heal ourselves. We are even led to ponder our deaths. This contemplation of the dust of mortality is not Liebestot, the love of death and macabre culture. Instead, it is being before doing. This is an insight we need to return to on occasion in Christian education.
We exist first and foremost for the primary calling of Christ to himself. As Os Guinness puts it, "Calling is the truth that God calls us to himself so decisively that everything we are, everything we do, and everything we have is invested with a special devotion, dynamism, and direction lived out as a response to his summons and service." While I am not, of course, suggesting that every class begin with the physical anointing of our students' foreheads with oil (or ash)--amusing as that might be. I am suggesting that the physical, embodied nature of worship sacramentally prepares us for better encounters with the media of our classrooms, just as a worship that focuses solely on the inward experience of our students courts gnosticism and media deception, mistaking bells and whistles, sexy effects and sounds, for true transformative learning. We need to be sensitive to whether the aroma of our teaching is indeed a pleasing sacrifice to the nostrils of God.
This is as good a place as any to reflect on the place of prayer in learning--classroom, lab, in private, etcetera. Prayer is not a disavowal of the bodily life or the life of action, for contemplation and action are intimately tired together. A sacramental ethos of learning always stresses the participation and presence of learning, so our prayers in the classroom ought to be tied to the actual practice of teaching and learning we plan to undertake. They should not be vague, pious offerings that treat the spiritual life as somehow functionally divorced from learning. They should be recognitions of our utter dependence upon Christ the Logos for any real learning.
Showing posts with label disputation. Show all posts
Showing posts with label disputation. Show all posts
Wednesday, June 17, 2009
Thursday, June 4, 2009
Reason and the Mind of Christ
Obedience to Christ is based in the atonement. I would hold that the expatiation and moral models of the cross, both important emphases in their own right, are subsumed under the Patristic emphasis on Christ as victorious conqueror. He literally rules from the cross over the powers of the cosmos. The Epistle to the Colossians puts it this way:
And when you were dead in trespasses and the uncircumcision of your flesh, God made you alive together with him, when he forgave us all our trespasses, erasing the record that stood against us with its legal demands. He set this aside, nailing it to the cross. He disarmed the rulers and authorities and made a public example of them, triumphing over them in it. (2:13-15)
It should be clear by now that Christian pedagogy is never just cognitive, even if that element is at the forefront for most of us (musical performance, dance, visual art, and kinesiology excepted, of course.) We are engaging the already conquered principalities, "the cosmic powers of this present darkness" with weapons that are not flesh and blood (Eph 6:12). Having the mind of Christ means recognizing the wisdom and foolishness of the cross, an epistemic and responsive set of actions that stand as judgment on our own divided communities (and institutions) of faith. Christ has come and "proclaimed peace to you who were far off and peace to those who were near" (Eph 2:17). His mind is life and peace to us when we dwell on his established victory and when we then act upon it accordingly. This truth founds the necessary larger place for Christian teaching and doctrine in our university curriculum.
Unfortunately, this locale has also been too often a source of great divisions among us. Paul's appeal to the Corinthians, "that all of you be in agreement and that there be no divisions among you," called for unity "in the same mind and the same purpose" (1 Cor 1:10). Indeed, Paul's appeal to the foolishness of the cross was meant to counter this miserable failure of proud claims to special wisdom among the church there: "Where is the one who is wise? Where is the scribe? Where is the debater of this age?" (1:20) Of course, too easily such teaching can play back into the anti-intellectualism that Mark Noll has called "the scandal of the evangelical mind." But at the same time, it should call us to humbled and weaned hearts upon our mother's breast (Ps 131) when we focus our cognitive, embodied selves in community on the work of the reigning Christ. The mystic Richard Rolle offers this observation:
I counsel you this: never forget the name of Jesus, but keep it in your heart day and night, as our most special and precious treasure. Love it more than your own life, and root it in your mind. Love Jesus, for He it is who made you, and who bought you back again at so expensive a price. Give your heart to Him, for it belongs to Him. And set your affection on his name, Jesus, which means "health."
No evil thing can hold sway in the heart of one who keeps Jesus faithfully in mind. For his name chases away devils and destroys temptations, puts away wicked fears and vices, and cleanses the thought-life. Whoever loves this name truly is full of God's grace and spiritual virtues, enjoying spiritual comfort in this life, and when such persons die they are taken up into the orders of angels, there to look upon Him whom they have loved in joy that has no end.
The mind of Christ conquers us when we make him the center of our contemplation, a contemplation which radiates out into the whole academy of our investigations, teaching, and learning. This holy radiant center is the energy that fuels a politics and ecclesiology of forgiveness, which we need so desperately in the academy.
A politics and economics of forgiveness affirms us each individually precisely as you or I sacrifice our pride for the other: "If compassion is knowingly to put oneself at risk for the sake of the other, then self-disposessive virtue is predicated upon a prior state of self-possession" (Oliver Davies). The cross's kenosis in us affirms our own true identities, ones which we need not hold on to in academic battles, battles fought so hard because they are over so little, as the saying goes. Instead, recognizing even the justice of our hatreds at times, we transcend them in the hospitality and demand of the gospel.
In this sense, the biblical vision is inclusive. Miroslav Volf has written on the particular "Catholic" (or universal) personality that Christianity affords its followers. The Church, as the biblical revelation teaches, will be made up of every ethnoi, every identity group. In this sense, Christianity practices what Volf calls "exclusion and embrace." It has its own particular identity, yet it also is inclusive of all -- "whosoever will, may come."
And when you were dead in trespasses and the uncircumcision of your flesh, God made you alive together with him, when he forgave us all our trespasses, erasing the record that stood against us with its legal demands. He set this aside, nailing it to the cross. He disarmed the rulers and authorities and made a public example of them, triumphing over them in it. (2:13-15)
It should be clear by now that Christian pedagogy is never just cognitive, even if that element is at the forefront for most of us (musical performance, dance, visual art, and kinesiology excepted, of course.) We are engaging the already conquered principalities, "the cosmic powers of this present darkness" with weapons that are not flesh and blood (Eph 6:12). Having the mind of Christ means recognizing the wisdom and foolishness of the cross, an epistemic and responsive set of actions that stand as judgment on our own divided communities (and institutions) of faith. Christ has come and "proclaimed peace to you who were far off and peace to those who were near" (Eph 2:17). His mind is life and peace to us when we dwell on his established victory and when we then act upon it accordingly. This truth founds the necessary larger place for Christian teaching and doctrine in our university curriculum.
Unfortunately, this locale has also been too often a source of great divisions among us. Paul's appeal to the Corinthians, "that all of you be in agreement and that there be no divisions among you," called for unity "in the same mind and the same purpose" (1 Cor 1:10). Indeed, Paul's appeal to the foolishness of the cross was meant to counter this miserable failure of proud claims to special wisdom among the church there: "Where is the one who is wise? Where is the scribe? Where is the debater of this age?" (1:20) Of course, too easily such teaching can play back into the anti-intellectualism that Mark Noll has called "the scandal of the evangelical mind." But at the same time, it should call us to humbled and weaned hearts upon our mother's breast (Ps 131) when we focus our cognitive, embodied selves in community on the work of the reigning Christ. The mystic Richard Rolle offers this observation:
I counsel you this: never forget the name of Jesus, but keep it in your heart day and night, as our most special and precious treasure. Love it more than your own life, and root it in your mind. Love Jesus, for He it is who made you, and who bought you back again at so expensive a price. Give your heart to Him, for it belongs to Him. And set your affection on his name, Jesus, which means "health."
No evil thing can hold sway in the heart of one who keeps Jesus faithfully in mind. For his name chases away devils and destroys temptations, puts away wicked fears and vices, and cleanses the thought-life. Whoever loves this name truly is full of God's grace and spiritual virtues, enjoying spiritual comfort in this life, and when such persons die they are taken up into the orders of angels, there to look upon Him whom they have loved in joy that has no end.
The mind of Christ conquers us when we make him the center of our contemplation, a contemplation which radiates out into the whole academy of our investigations, teaching, and learning. This holy radiant center is the energy that fuels a politics and ecclesiology of forgiveness, which we need so desperately in the academy.
A politics and economics of forgiveness affirms us each individually precisely as you or I sacrifice our pride for the other: "If compassion is knowingly to put oneself at risk for the sake of the other, then self-disposessive virtue is predicated upon a prior state of self-possession" (Oliver Davies). The cross's kenosis in us affirms our own true identities, ones which we need not hold on to in academic battles, battles fought so hard because they are over so little, as the saying goes. Instead, recognizing even the justice of our hatreds at times, we transcend them in the hospitality and demand of the gospel.
In this sense, the biblical vision is inclusive. Miroslav Volf has written on the particular "Catholic" (or universal) personality that Christianity affords its followers. The Church, as the biblical revelation teaches, will be made up of every ethnoi, every identity group. In this sense, Christianity practices what Volf calls "exclusion and embrace." It has its own particular identity, yet it also is inclusive of all -- "whosoever will, may come."
Wednesday, June 3, 2009
Disputation as a Moral Virtue
A Christian academic practice that employs disputation must do so within a certain moral practice and intent to develop certain habits of reasoning. There is much for us to learn from the virtue-ethic tradition. The Aristotelian concept of phronesis, or practical reasoning, has formed the nucleus of some significant twentieth-century reflection on the nature of moral reasoning and virtue, and it provides a good model of what we should be trying to achieve.
Phronesis is concrete; it is not theoretical generalization; instead, it works itself out anew in each new practical set of circumstances. Phronesis operates on a case-by-case basis not in the pure realm of theory but with a sense of this is what the situation calls for. Disputation in a classroom, a public debate, or even over coffee should be more than two people ranting and emoting. It should be a skill learned that has certain postive purposes. A good dispute is phronetic because it is not just an internalized set of thinking skills. It is more like a habit of interpretation based on a long formed practice. It is a virtue, which as Augustine pointed out, "is a good habit consonant with our nature." We form phronesis through practice, and this requires a concrete pattern within which to do so.
Here is where we can also learn from the Thomist tradition that adapted Aristotle to Christian concerns. Thomas Aquinas defines a virtue as
An operative habit essentially good, as distinguished from vice, an operative habit essentially evil. Now a habit is a quality in itself difficult of change, disposing well or ill the subject in which it resides, either directly in itself or in relation to its operation. An operative habit is a quality residing in a power or faculty in itself indifferent to this or that line of action, but determined by the habit to this rather than to that kind of acts. Virtue then has this in common with vice, that it disposes a potency to a certain determined activity; but it differs specifically from it in that it disposes it to good acts, i.e. acts in consonance with right reason (Summa 2.55.2).
In other words, virtues are
a) good habits that predispose us to good actions;
b) they represent a certain mature good quality made resident in a person;
c) they are in accord with correct reason and reasoning.
For Aquinas the cardinal virtue of prudentia is the habitual judgment of how best to respond in ever new circumstances. Education, I would contend, is about cultural, intellectual, and moral prudentia. An education that fails to translate into life's new circumstances is ultimately a failure of phronesis. We are seeking to teach a form of disputation not just to self-perpetuate our careers and studies, but to pursue a particular set of qualities that have as their end an ability to explore the truth, to convince others of the right actions at hand, to clarify misunderstanding, and so on. This raises particular concerns for the Christian. What exactly is the structure of reasoning and faith? Are they on a level playing field?
John Henry Newman argued in his last book The Grammar of Ascent that we begin not by reasoning but by apprehending the object, which then gains our assent. We only later begin to unpack the implied details of what we have given our assent to. We often believe what we cannot understand and what we cannot exhaustively comprehend or prove. Conviction is something we all grow into over time. His point is that faith is rational in the same way other matters are rational. Most of life is about commitments made on trust in others' credibility.
This says much about Christian education. We do not reason our way to faith; we begin with its assumptions (ala' Anselm's fides quaerens intellectum--faith seeking understanding). Concrete reasonings are not ultimate tests, but they are sufficient tests in practical reasoning. Newman divides forms of assent into two types:
Christian education operates as a way of reinforcing the Christian faith, not by an unquestioning repetition of only certain denominational dogmas, but by a debated, thick ecumenism practiced in true covenant community. We all have an illative sense, a faculty of theoretical reasoning that judges the validity of inferences in much that same way that our prudence (prudentia, phronesis) judges life practically. This theoretical faculty includes a sense of judging what authorities we can give our trust to.
All good reason, if you will, is based on some measure of faith, and all true faith has some measure of rationality in it. Christian education understands this truth. Our warranted presuppositions framework and proceed from our faith.
Phronesis is concrete; it is not theoretical generalization; instead, it works itself out anew in each new practical set of circumstances. Phronesis operates on a case-by-case basis not in the pure realm of theory but with a sense of this is what the situation calls for. Disputation in a classroom, a public debate, or even over coffee should be more than two people ranting and emoting. It should be a skill learned that has certain postive purposes. A good dispute is phronetic because it is not just an internalized set of thinking skills. It is more like a habit of interpretation based on a long formed practice. It is a virtue, which as Augustine pointed out, "is a good habit consonant with our nature." We form phronesis through practice, and this requires a concrete pattern within which to do so.
Here is where we can also learn from the Thomist tradition that adapted Aristotle to Christian concerns. Thomas Aquinas defines a virtue as
An operative habit essentially good, as distinguished from vice, an operative habit essentially evil. Now a habit is a quality in itself difficult of change, disposing well or ill the subject in which it resides, either directly in itself or in relation to its operation. An operative habit is a quality residing in a power or faculty in itself indifferent to this or that line of action, but determined by the habit to this rather than to that kind of acts. Virtue then has this in common with vice, that it disposes a potency to a certain determined activity; but it differs specifically from it in that it disposes it to good acts, i.e. acts in consonance with right reason (Summa 2.55.2).
In other words, virtues are
a) good habits that predispose us to good actions;
b) they represent a certain mature good quality made resident in a person;
c) they are in accord with correct reason and reasoning.
For Aquinas the cardinal virtue of prudentia is the habitual judgment of how best to respond in ever new circumstances. Education, I would contend, is about cultural, intellectual, and moral prudentia. An education that fails to translate into life's new circumstances is ultimately a failure of phronesis. We are seeking to teach a form of disputation not just to self-perpetuate our careers and studies, but to pursue a particular set of qualities that have as their end an ability to explore the truth, to convince others of the right actions at hand, to clarify misunderstanding, and so on. This raises particular concerns for the Christian. What exactly is the structure of reasoning and faith? Are they on a level playing field?
John Henry Newman argued in his last book The Grammar of Ascent that we begin not by reasoning but by apprehending the object, which then gains our assent. We only later begin to unpack the implied details of what we have given our assent to. We often believe what we cannot understand and what we cannot exhaustively comprehend or prove. Conviction is something we all grow into over time. His point is that faith is rational in the same way other matters are rational. Most of life is about commitments made on trust in others' credibility.
This says much about Christian education. We do not reason our way to faith; we begin with its assumptions (ala' Anselm's fides quaerens intellectum--faith seeking understanding). Concrete reasonings are not ultimate tests, but they are sufficient tests in practical reasoning. Newman divides forms of assent into two types:
- Notional assent, which includes profession, credence, opinion, presumption, and speculation;
- Real assent, which is imaginative certainty given to what we experience in the real world.
Christian education operates as a way of reinforcing the Christian faith, not by an unquestioning repetition of only certain denominational dogmas, but by a debated, thick ecumenism practiced in true covenant community. We all have an illative sense, a faculty of theoretical reasoning that judges the validity of inferences in much that same way that our prudence (prudentia, phronesis) judges life practically. This theoretical faculty includes a sense of judging what authorities we can give our trust to.
All good reason, if you will, is based on some measure of faith, and all true faith has some measure of rationality in it. Christian education understands this truth. Our warranted presuppositions framework and proceed from our faith.
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