R. Paul Stevens has drawn attention to the ways in which the munera of Christ as King, as Prophet, and as Priest are given further, if mediated and limited, expression in the Church. Each role of Christ's works itself out in the Church as Chrst's Body. What might these three roles teach us about Christian education?
The “prophethood of all believers” begins in the Spirit’s outpouring in Acts chapter 2; the prophecy of Joel that “your sons and daughters shall prophesy, and your young men shall see visions, and your old men shall dream dreams” (2:17) is fulfilled and a new pneumalogical order is inaugurated. The Church as herald, or as prophet, is reflected in the authoritative teaching and preaching of scripture, but also extends out to its witness in the cosmos. All Christians are to function prophetically at some level as signs of God’s intended salvation for the creation.
Certainly, this role for Christian educators does not necessitate always being at odds with the larger scholarly community, eschewing every opportunity for consensus, bridge-building, or even political networking. But it may demand all of these at times. It certainly should shape the rationale for these choices. The advancement of personal careers for a Christian educator is subsumed to a larger service to the just and true, and this Augustinian ordering of our loves ought to be something we also impart to our students.
Being heralds of the gospel does not always take the same form in every career. If our research and teaching is not disinterested, neither is it simple polemics. Prophetic witness in academics may include the courage to speak to the emperor’s new clothes, be that in the academy or in the Christian classroom. Yet that witness should take all the balance and thoughtfulness that mark good college-level teaching and writing. Indeed, these skills are virtues endemic to being a herald.
Prophetic teaching, however, is not the only end of Christian proclamation. The missio dei extends beyond this into the way we live as reformed and renewed people within God's full-orbed creation. The danger of looking at the mission of Christian education as only prophetic is that we can fall back into the instrumentalism of reason and the tribalism of belief. We begin to treat teaching and research as if their sole purpose were really a platform for something else, much as Christians are sometimes tempted to treat their jobs as venues for personal evangelism.
This later practice in the workplace can be a very shorted-sighted definition of the Great Commission, reducing the gospel to personal conversion or perhaps to certain concerns of social justice. The same is true if we treat our fidelity in Christian education as always an explicit expression of theological matters within the discipline. We cannot lose sight of how mathematics, political science, biology, visual art, etcetera are grounded in God’s purposes for creation. Love of the subject in itself still has an overarching telos that grounds its validity, namely, that of love of God and love of neighbor, loves which includes God’s creation.
Now, I don’t mean by this point to reduce evangelism to a second-class discipline; rather, I mean to place it as the natural outcome of discipleship rather than as an end in itself. The call to baptism in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit is a call to a new way of living, an entrance into the new humanity, to become the "third species" the patristic fathers and mothers sometimes spoke of.
A prophetic role, then, can be accorded to both Christian university teaching and research. Moreover, they can speak back and forth to each other sharing this role. We do well to conceive of our research needing the course correction and passion of good teaching, for it grounds our scholarship in the world of the classroom. Even the most arcane of disciplines has something to say as a public, as a normative set of claims to what constitutes the worthwhile and the virtuous.
We are, perhaps, more accustomed to thinking of the way that new research can shape the direction of our teaching, but to see research as potentially prophetic is to recognize its need to submit itself to Truth. Cut off from prophetic truth, our research can grow vapid, even trapped in its own theory, but conceived as the servant of teaching, our research then is shaped by the telos of God's mission.
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