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."

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.

The Communio Sanctorum and Diversity in Education-- Part 1

In his work, Models of the Church, Avery Dulles draws our attention to seven ecclesiological possibilities:

1) institution;
2) mystical communion;
3) sacrament;
4) herald;
5) servant;
6) eschatology;
7) community of disciples.

Each of these, as an aspect of the Church's identity, also speaks to the nature of Christian education. As Dulles notes, a model of the Church as simply an institution can lead to passivity, legalism, and obstruction of the people's relationship with God, as well as of growth in theology and of charismata (43-44), yet it also expresses the nature of something being instituted, having legitimacy, regularity, and staying power. The institutions of the Church, such as its schools, carry both the dangers and strengths of this reality.

To speak of the Church as the herald of the gospel is to see how the preached Word calls us to account and gives us a message for others, while to note that the Church is a servant is to reinforce the call to social justice, sacrifice, and hospitality. Both of these aspects remind us that the end of Christian education is not just removing ignorance, it is also overcoming idolatry. It is conversion, transformation, metanoia. We pursue a cross-shaped pursuit of education without pneumatological power. The Christian university should also, then, see itself as an eschatological sign of what God intends for the cosmos. We can never be satisfied with business as usual. Our (perhaps inevitable) failures should grieve us.

I will address the notion of education as sacramental and as discipleship in later posts, for the moment I would like to address the Christian university as communion. Dulles point out that theologically the imagery of the Body of Christ tends to draw attention to the mystical divine life present in the Church, while the imagery of the people of God tends to be more sociological and earth-centered. Both are out of balance without the other.

As the Apostles Creed confesses, " Credo in . . .sanctorum communionem." ("I believe in the communion of saints.") A true evangelical--and Baptist, for that matter--catholicity embraces an evangelical recovery of the communio sanctorum, the communion of saints, and this calls for a sense both of our mystical connection to all the saints and an identity as God's people set aside for his purposes in this world. We should remind ourselves that the communio sanctorum is marked by koinonia fellowship and by covenant faithfulness. As the Epistle to the Hebrews cautions us,

Therefore, since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us also lay aside every weight and the sin that clings so closely, and let us run with perseverance the race that is set before us . . . you have come to Mount Zion and to the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem, and to innumerable angels in festal gathering, and to the assembly of the firstborn who are enrolled in heaven, and to God the judge of all, and to the spirits of the righteous made perfect, and to Jesus, the mediator of a new covenant, and to the sprinkled blood that speaks a better word than the blood of Abel. (Heb 11:1, 18-24)

We need in our particular branch of Baptist education a recovery of divine authority that resides in all Christian traditions and their peoples. We need to see its holiness. Such authority should extend beyond, but not be untethered from the ecumenical councils and creeds. Instead, it should grow as a tradition is meant to grow, pursuing the same telos as the sources, the well springs, of the Apostolic Faith.

This is not a denial that our "rule of faith" (the regula fidei) needs to arise primarily and originally from the scriptures, but it is an acceptance of the Spirit's presence in Church history. A Christian academic culture covenants with the larger, historic Body of Christ in all our manifestations. Certainly Anabaptist challenges to Christendom were in part about a recovery of the primitive church (i.e. the true church, the unspoiled church). This is a pursuit that in some of its forms many would suggest is not only impossible, but finally unbiblical. Instead, as I argued last month, thick ecumenism is not a denial of our differences; it requires the teaching of them. So not only should we study the texts of various Christian traditions past and present, we should invite their representatives to lecture and teach on campus.

The Image of God in Education--Part 4

Pentecost in Acts 2 is about the restoration of Babel. It is a bringing together of diverse, Spirit-inspired voices, no longer as a curse on the hubris of humanity, but as blessings of communication and fire. The Pentecostal, ecumenical catholicity of the Church reminds us that cultures are not completely incommensurable to each other. They can communicate across diverse languages and practices. Yet at that same, our particular denominational experience keeps in view the hard work of that communication. Cultural exchange is difficult not because translation is impossible but because languages favor certain economies of expression; they privilege certain words and their referents. The terms and vocabulary we favor shape the ease with which we discuss and debate certain ideas. Thus, learning calls for a "multi-lingual" attempt at learnign the language of other tribes.

The Pentecostal experience is always a diverse one, for while something like Jürgen Habermas' ideal speech situation arises within it, it need not be accomplished by a liberal public sphere that actually elevates modern individualism and the state’s best interests. We may desire in education to be guided by the dictates of a common reason and common rules of dialogue; however, each moment of contact, of understanding or confusion, is unique though not as an atomic solitary. We should be in education always striving toward a dialogue bounded by faith, hope, and love. This requires a more intuitive, flexible learning, not one subject to predetermined limits as to how conversation will advance.

It does have in mind a certain character of learning. Like any good drama, there are some expected qualitative outcomes to the performance. The Church advances in understanding together with mutual discipleship and holy agape. Our education should have both sides of this cautious truth-seeking at its center. There is, then, an ethic of multi-cultural education, but I would argue that it is not to be found in relativism nor in a supposed neutral secular marketplace of ideas. Instead, a particular practice of incarnational learning must undergird our cultural negotiations, and this calls for humility of learning, even while eschewing a relativism of “equal regard” that hides from itself its worldview. In short, we come to the conversation with a particular set of stories already in place. The language, views, and assumptions of each culture are not left at the door; they are not artifically shifted out by the "rationality" of modern Western Enlightenment. They are each partners in education, even as one tradition acts as the host to the conversation.

Thick Ecumenism--A Better Model Than Mere Christianity

What kind of confessional model should shape the Christianity in question at a Christian college? My students often appeal to a broadly defined general Christian belief, something not unlike C.S. Lewis' notion of "mere Christianity." Yet I would contend that there are reasons why this general belief system is not enough. Consider the idea of "thick ecumenism."

Thick ecumenism begins with something like a thin consensus of common confession, a "mere Christianity," but it cannot stay there because the central doctrines of the faith intersect and branch out in their numerous implications for all of life. Instead, ecumenism promotes a conversation among the Christian traditions, searching for points of commonality and difference, but not as a simple exercise in comparative theology, liturgy, or spirituality. In other words, we are teaching and confessing our faith within certain traditions of the Christian faith. I teach at a Baptist school; my friend teaches at a Presbyterian one. We certainly share much in common, but there are differences, and these differences are interwoven with our basic beliefs. What I believe about church and dissent interacts with my understanding of salvation and God and sin, as does his beliefs. Yet we dialogue in hope. The hope is that our conversation will mutually illumine all involved and that this illumination will offer a continued course correction in doctrinal development and polity.

Kevin J. Vanhoozer in his work The Drama of Doctrine employs the dramatic image of table fellowship in which the varying interpretative traditions and practices come with their noisy conversation to sup together, not just for a rowdy table-pounding boasting match, nor for a polite "no offense intended" high tea, but for a true family meal. Vanhoozer points out that this family diversity has its very legitimacy in the "Pentecostal plurality" of scripture's own canonical diversity. We sup together that we might become stronger together. We are about more than sampling each other's dishes in smorgasbord gluttony; we are learning to "taste" better by cultivating together a culinary delight in all that is true and beautiful (272-278)

While such a gourmet practice in the academy certainly gives pride of place to Christian tradition, it also contains an inclusive search out beyond that tradition. Thick ecumenism must teach the larger global conversation, one in which in its Christian strands also move out to encompass the ideological contexts where the faith struggles to exist as martyr and as witness. However, we should keep in mind that this pedagogical multiplicity is also not a simple confirmation of diversity for diversity's sake, a multi-cultural and global sampling that really privileges Western notions of individual identity as the trump card of libertarian values, what Stanley Fish has derisively labeled "boutique multiculturalism." Neither is it a blind relativism that refuses to evaluate the actions and ethics of the other.

Instead, ecumenism longs to fulfill the promise of Pentecost, that by speaking in many tongues the gospel reverses the curse of Babel. Thick ecumenism suggests not only a method by which to explore diversity but also a larger purpose that can guide pedagogical decision-making, admittedly one with a lot of hard work in listening and learning.