The Image of God in Education--Part 3

Nothing about this pedagogical model should demand that we treat all cultural creations and patterns as equally important or valuable. We are in a fallen world, now.

The Zeitgeist may be demonic.

Instead of the politics of recognition and equal identity and dignity, we need a Christian polity of learning that knows how to balance our non-negotiables with the embedded lessons in the wider world. It is the nature of convictions that some beliefs and practices are more long-lived than others. Some are more central to a tradition; some have greater explanatory power. Furthermore, some are so central, so justified, that we have strong expectation and thick confidence in their endurance as the hypergoods (to use Charles Taylor's term) that shape and reorient other goods, evaluating them and defining them. Reorientation and revaluation are in the nature of education. A hypergood can literally take something once considered a mark of excellence and make it a vice or a temptation.

In turn, some beliefs may be fundamentally destructive in their centrality. A Christian view of culture and of education sees an element in all cultures that is self-blinding to the truth, that is subject to the fallen powers, and that invests itself in false promises. However, cultural depravity and cultural vice neither suggests an imperial project that settles on only one all inclusive pedagogy as "civilized" nor a hard relativism which leaves it unexposed to critique from the outside. We can’t expect to learn one method of critique and learning and then apply it across the board to all global and disciplinary subjects or even to every particular historical moment. I would contend this is as true of the natural sciences as is it the social sciences and humanities.

But neither does this mean that every textual or pedagogical encounter carries equal weight or equal fecundity. This is why a certain preference for the Christian tradition is incumbent in Christian education. Wisdom is to take in the multiplicity of good counsel with its refracting diversity, especially when this diverse counsel comes from others along the same broad axis of understanding. The church's experience of diversity is like canonical diversity. It is not a hodge-podge of alterity and relativity, but an interacting set of close practices that complement and course correct each other over time guided by the gift of the Spirit. Our pedagogy is to search for the same--it must take in the diversity of the Christian church and the cultural embeddedness of its global existence, all the while recognizing incompleteness and need for mutual help in pursing the truth together.