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.