The Communio Sanctorum and Diversity in Education--Part 2

Still, I am not rejecting the desire at the heart of the primitive church doctrine for purity and unity, but I am suggesting that this longing is better placed eschatologically in the Church's future. We are all on the way to God's promised "inheritance toward redemption as God's own people, to the praise of his glory" (Eph 1:14). Anabaptists were taking seriously the call to take a monastic Christianity of a sort into all of life; that is to bring the norms of discipleship before all disciples. The heroes of the faith, officially canonized or not by a church body, ought to be held up before our students as exemplary lives. This, too, is part of the great cloud of witnesses and the assembly of the firstborn and the spirits of the righteous made perfect. We are assisting our students' sanctification when we open up the possibility of thick ecumenism to them. Covenant faithfulness is seeking Holy Spirit fruitfulness, a habituation of ourselves by his work on us, and this takes place in the church community as God's temple and as a witness in the world. But the communion of saints reminds us that the church community is far larger than our local congregation or the newest popular devotional book.

However, this teaching of the communion of saints can be wrongly conducted as a loose history of ideas which is relativistic in spirit and nihilistic in practice. A sampling of ideas in modern university life often carries the implicit (if not explicit) message that there is no final, realizable truth, that all is culture ever changing and always subverting and sublimating the individual's evolutionary desires. The professor moves from idea to idea, era to era with nothing like judgment, unless it be to enshrine the assumptions of the contemporary superiority in matters of race, gender, statecraft, and so on. We end up as pedagogical voyeurs. To recognize as the people of God that our unity resides in the mystical Body of Christ yet also is an eschatological promise in which we place our hope is not to practice the infinite deferral of locating the truth. Instead, we recognize the Spirit of Truth present in us as taking up residence, yet we are still children of history, waiting for full redemption, on the way. A triune, diverse education must bind itself to a tradition and practice, a covenantal culture with a biblical purpose in view. Engaging the debate requires certain virtues and skills; it does not come naturally.