Dorothy Day's Personalism--Some Resources

Since I don't have time to summarize the way personalism was worked out by Catholic Worker activist Dorothy Day, a few links are in order:

The Catholic Worker on Day's Personalism and Distributism

The Influence of Emmanuel Mounier upon Peter Maurin and Dorothy Day

Dorothy Day's Radical Hospitality (Baylor Center for Christian Ethics)

Simone Weil and Rootedness--Part 1

The French mystic and philosopher Simone Weil's last work, The Need for Roots, was written in 1943, the year of her death, and published posthumously in 1949, as well as being translated into English in 1952 with an introduction by T.S. Eliot. The Need for Roots offers a passionate call for helping the French return to a sense of true patriotism, tied not to the State, but to place and ideals. In the first part of the book, Weil explores briefly fourteen "needs of the soul" before focusing on her chief concern, the 15th and perhaps most comprehensive need--rootedness.

1. Order, by which Weil means a sense of epistemic coherence. The soul needs a sense that a balance of the forces of the universe exists, that they have a beauty to them, a rationality at some level.
2. Liberty, that is the ability to choose within a system of rules that we trust because they "emanate from a source of authority which is not looked upon as strange or hostile, but loved as something belonging to those placed under its direction." None are free unless they operate out of goodwill and obligation to others, she contends.
3. Obedience of a healthy sort is "necessary food for the soul," and the one who is forced to obey a tyrant must partake of the sickness of such a society.
4. Responsibility of a real sort, that is, of type that actually impacts the person and his or her fellows in a meaningful way.
5. Equality in degree of respect and with a degree of opportunity. There must also be a way for movement to take place up and down the ladder of social equilibrium.
6. Hierarchism, that is a proper veneration of one's superiors who are symbols of what we each desire.
7. Honor in being a part of a noble tradition with a proud past of examples of virtuous actions.
8. Punishment that restores the one who has moved outside the circle of obedience--fully for the one who is truly repentant, and partially for the one who refuses. "Punishment is a method for getting justice into the soul of the criminal by bodily suffering."
9. Freedom of Opinion, that is an unrestricted freedom to explore all opinions, though this pursuit is conducted by one who serves the truth.
10. Security from constant, debilitating fear or terror.
11. Risk that keeps one from boredom even while not descending into terror.
12. Private Property such as owning a piece of land and one's own tools, because these are the means of a necessary and bodily life.
13. Collective Property, a feeling of ownership in public monuments, parks, and ceremonies.
14. Truth: "The need for truth is more sacred than any other need," so we must do all we can to curtail lying in print or in public speech.
15. Rootedness. She defines rootedness in the following way:

"A human being has roots by virtue of his real, active and natural participation in the life of a community which preserves in living shape certain particular treasures of the past and certain particular expectations of the future. This participation is a natural one, in the sense that it is automatically brought about by place, conditions of birth, profession and social surroundings. Every human being needs to have multiple roots. It is necessary for him to draw wellnigh the whole of his moral, intellectual, and spiritual life by the way of the environment of which he forms a natural part."

"Good is the Flesh" by Brian Wren

What an amazing new hymn! Well worth pondering in it's Christ-centered and sacramental understanding of our bodily existence.

Good is the Flesh by Brian Wren

Good is the flesh that the Word has become,
good is the birthing, the milk in the breast,
good is the feeding, caressing and rest,
good is the body for knowing the world,
Good is the flesh that the Word has become.

Good is the body for knowing the world,
sensing the sunlight, the tug of the ground,
feeling, perceiving, within and around,
good is the body, from cradle to grave,
Good is the flesh that the Word has become.

Good is the body, from cradle to grave,
growing and aging, arousing, impaired,
happy in clothing, or lovingly bared,
good is the pleasure of God in our flesh,
Good is the flesh that the Word has become.

Good is the pleasure of God in our flesh,
longing in all, as in Jesus, to dwell,
glad of embracing, and tasting, and smell,
good is the body, for good and for God,
Good is the flesh that the Word has become.

from Bringing Many Names. Carol Stream: Hope, 1989.

Bridging the Two Cultures of C.P Snow--Part 4

So Snow held science to offer a this-worldly salvation, while Leavis in turn held to the humanities as the promise of salvation for the individual through culture. Is it possible for our students to partake of culture in a different way? Consider the following two areas of literary value: the nature of multicultural literature and the need for ecumenism in matters of taste. As to the first, I trust we are long past the canon wars of the 80's and 90's; however, one aspect of that later debate remains; namely, the question as to whether education in general, and the humanities in particular, function to free us from oppressive collectives or whether they must free us by acknowledging those communities of origin as essential to identity. Both, as we shall see, have their limitations. Charles Taylor in his famous essay, "The Politics of Recognition" notes that the politics of equal identity and dignity assume "universal human potential," as well as a concern with survival of the self. But increasingly this potential includes a politics of the equal recognition of one's identity group and of its survival. Survival policies seek to nurture--his word is "create"--continuing members (58).

Educational policies (such as canonical inclusion) work to protect collective identity from national structures that work against their continued importance. The difference-blind society, it can be charged, is actually highly discriminatory in its imposition of one kind of culture (43). Taylor notes, "The very idea of such a liberalism may be a kind of pragmatic contradiction, a particularism masquerading as the universal '" (44). We must face that even standards of worth are not transcultural (67). Taylor points out that by prejudging equal worth we already act on our Western standards as presupposing the correct ones. Ironically, our predisposition to finding all cultures of positive value actually flattens the actual horizons of encounter across cultures:

The peremptory demand for favorable judgments of worth is paradoxically -perhaps one should say tragically- homogenizing. For it implies that we already have the standards to make such judgments. The standards we have, however, are those of North Atlantic civilization. And so the judgments implicitly and unconsciously will cram the other into our categories. For instance, we will think if their "artists" as creating "works," which we then can include in our canon. By implicitly invoking our standards to judge all civilizations and cultures, the politics of difference can end up making everyone the same. (71)

I would contend that something like this happens in Arnold and Norton's treatment of culture as the religion of cultivation. Even if we bracket out the particular aspects of their life and thought that were highly prejudicial to non-Western societies, what remains is still a set of claims as to what constitutes cultivation and culture. They cannot step outside a particular judgment to what culture is, both in its pedagogical and purported descriptive summations. This phenomenon can be seen in the Snow-Leavis debate. Culture is judged by both authors in differing ways as salvific in that it imparts existential meaning (and or creature comfort) to help shore us up against a world "red in tooth and claw." One strand of history behind the discourse of salvation in Leavis and Snow is the creation of culture as a substitute for piety and the specialization of education into disciplines that undergirded, one could contend even helped create, science's disciplinary existence. They formed a subculture offering material salvation, of "more jam" as Leavis derided it. To judge faith as but one expression of the larger mythos of Kultur, indeed, perhaps even to accept "religion" as an ultimate sociological category, is to render it one humanism in the matrix of many.

As John Millbank has famously said, "The pathos of modern theology is its false humility. . . . once theology surrenders its claim to be a metadiscourse, it cannot any longer articulate the word of the creator God" (1). Either Kultur as anthropological culture or as incarnational history will function as the parameters for the others' meaning. Culture as a category of value already carries with it assumptions about the nature of humans, their purpose, happiness, morality, and so forth. Literary study defined as the study of cultural texts is not a neutral practice that is transferable from one social end to another.

This raises then the second issue: that of the possibility of an ecumenical view of beauty and art. If we do accept Christian faith as the point of functional discourse and not as an expression of Leavis, Trilling, and Norton's cultural salvation, can one avoid the trap Taylor has outlined above? Can a theological reading of a work of literature avoid flattening the work into a two-dimensional purpose? Can we remain open to the Other? Or as, Trilling admits in a sober moment, can we "no more escape from the cultural mode than we can escape from culture itself" (175).

Frank Burch Brown in his Good Taste, Bad Taste, and Christian Taste has suggested that such an openness is indeed possible, though "even ecumenical and inclusive Christian taste must also be in some ways discriminating" (25). Art objects, Brown contends, do not entirely self-generate their own values. Religious texts, for example, are informed by theological readings and practices. More specifically, for our purposes, Christian taste has to be shaped by the virtues of generosity and of charity, of gratitude and being easily taught (193). Such taste begins with a set of community practices, humbles itself in learning a differing set of practices, and eventually reaches a point where the text in question may transcend those cultures of taste in unpredictable ways. Indeed, following Taylor, to attempt to predict how would be to already close down part of what can be learned. Such pedagogy does not preclude our own soteriology. Brown notes, "life typically finds various and surprising ways of turning religious" (251). However, Christian taste must be informed by the enculturation of certain capacities with certain ends in mind. Not any old culture will do. In his reflections on culture, T. S. Eliot warns that at the heart of both individualism and collectivism there is the temptation to idolatry, as well as demonization of opponents:

But for most people, to be able to simplify issues so as to see only the definite external enemy, is extremely exhilarating, and brings about the bright eye and the springy step that go so well with the political uniform. This is an exhilaration that the Christian must deny himself. It comes from an artificial stimulant bound to have bad after-effects. It causes pride, either individual or collective, and pride brings its own doom. For only in humility, charity and purity- and most of all perhaps humility- can we be prepared to receive the grace of God without which human operations are vain. (75)

And thus, literary culture and teaching of a Christian sort must have as its end a purpose other than simply freeing the individual from a parochial ghetto of the mind, more than empowering the individual by recognizing his or her cultural worth, or more than creating a socially useful literature that honors material matters of economic justice and of scientific invention. Each of these may have their place within a larger practice, but that caritas of taste must be cultivated with the end of loving God and neighbor.

As André Maurois has said, "In literature as in love, we are astonished at what is chosen by others."

Complaint and Prayer

The Psalter models for us that the way of complaint is part of biblical fidelity and troth--at least a certain kind of complaint joined to an expectation of shalom. The psalmists complain to God, objecting that he could have and on the surface should have intervened in any number of horrific circumstances. The sheer weight of atrocity is often cited by them, speaking from a wounded position, an exhausted position. The believer says to God, "As best I can understand from my limited position you appear to have allowed horrible things to happen. Why? Should you do such a thing?"

Then, rather than walk away in disgust or disbelief, the believer waits on God. Believers protest from the ground of covenant—this is what God has promised us and who he is; therefore, should not God intervene? (i.e. Ps 44, 74, 88, 102, 142) This position at its best seeks to continue to affirm God’s mystery and goodness even amidst confusion and doubt. It has its own kind of eros, its own kind of ascending desire.

Likewise, this response holds it important to identify with the suffering of others, not to make light of their pain by seeking easily to explain it. This kind of sympathetic and confused covenantal response is loving, full of the charity of agape. The isms of the twentieth century remind us well of the failure and dangers of utopian visions. Our eschatological rationality should act in full awareness of the dangers of demagoguery, either in believing that we ourselves can change the world or in the furor of a people disappointed by that world. But this need not mean we do not reach out with the hands of love, offering the gospel of Christ.

With this in mind read (or pray) the following:

You have made us like sheep to be eaten and have scattered us among the nations.
You are selling your people for a trifle and are making no profit on the sale of them.
You have made us the scorn of our neighbors, a mockery and derision to those around us.
You have made us a byword among the nations, a laughing-stock among the peoples.
My humiliation is daily before me, and shame has covered my face;
Because of the taunts of the mockers and blasphemers, because of the enemy and avenger.
All this has come upon us; yet we have not forgotten you, nor have we betrayed your covenant.
Our heart never turned back, nor did our footsteps stray from your path;
Though you thrust us down into a place of misery, and covered us over with deep darkness.
If we have forgotten the Name of our God, or stretched out our hands to some strange god,
Will not God find it out? for he knows the secrets of the heart.
Indeed, for your sake we are killed all the day long; we are accounted as sheep for the slaughter.
Awake, O Lord! why are you sleeping? Arise! do not reject us for ever.
Why have you hidden your face and forgotten our affliction and oppression?
We sink down into the dust; our body cleaves to the ground.
Rise up, and help us, and save us, for the sake of your steadfast love.

Creating a Culture of Advent

There is more than one way to talk about expectation and education. We should remember as Christian educators and students that we are a people "outside the city" still awaiting the full vindication of God on that last of all days, and even in that vindication we expect our academic service and ministry to be tried by the fire of Christ's judgment seat. Our programs, lesson plans, and papers will be purged. What will remain of my own, I wonder?

The season of Advent, for example, stresses not only the first coming of Christ, but also the second coming. It is a season about being prepared, and such annual preparation is good for our academic calendar-driven mania. Advent reminds us that we are called to waiting, to patience between the first and second advents of our savior. To wait is to remember how fragile our egos, how empty our claims for ourselves are, how partial our self-concepts are. When we wait, we may be left alone for a season, staring into the silence, unable to be propped up by another's friendship or false praise or kind mercy. When we wait, we may face temptations to be afraid, to fear that God will not act. When we wait, we also face the temptation to onui, to boredom and to cynicism. In the midst of our longing and our vulnerability, we may even be tempted to disbelief, to wonder if any of this that we hold to is true at all.

But this waiting, this "being put on hold" is good for us. In our flattened-out economy of instant everything, we need to learn to wait in silence. Silence is an important preparation for learning, a fertile field sowed in both peace and suffering. To create a culture of Advent is to place our honors and awards within the context of eternity, to see them as gifts to be given away. They are accolades in the academy that we sometimes achieve in sweat and tears and sleepless nights, yet they are finally still gifts--not paper and parchment we can hold on to forever. It is better to wear them lightly as Thomas, Archbishop Beckett secretly wore a hairshirt under his Canterbury robes. We either undertake this voluntarily or what we are left with is finally a far more painful separation. T.S. Eliot's masterful Little Gidding reflects on this strange choice of persecution or of apostasy:

Who then devised the torment? Love.
Love is the unfamiliar Name
Behind the hands that wove
The intolerable shirt of flame
Which human power cannot remove.
We only live, only suspire
Consumed by either fire or fire (sec. IV).

This I admit seems entirely counter-intuitive to the mission of higher education. We are accustomed to the work of words and knowledge. To consider that our calling might deserve divine wrath seems offensive at best, and possibly sadomasochistic. Paul warns us, however, that "[w]e know that we all possess knowledge. Knowledge puffs up, but love builds up. The man who thinks he knows something does not yet know as he ought to know" (I Cor. 8:1-2). We need to go without; we need to find ourselves alone; we need to be left with ourselves trembling before the throne of the Almighty Judge and before the Master of All Things.

During our waiting, we remember that we need Jesus to come and to tear down our career pretenses, to curse our pedagogical inadequacies, and to pronounce a warning to our inflated souls in order that we might be saved. Only when we give ourselves over to such a place can we receive the blessing of renewal that God has for us, including the form it must take in the academy. Only when we ourselves are aware of our own limitations, our self-deceptions, and our sin are we then prepared to extend the promise of God's good peace, his good wholeness, his honor to others. Only then can we begin to see our students and teachers as Christ sees them. May this prayer be our own:

May God be merciful to us and bless us,show us the light of his countenance and come to us.
May your ways be known upon earth,your saving health among all nations.
May the peoples praise you, O God; let all the peoples praise you.
May the nations be glad and sing for joy, for you judge the peoples with equity and guide all the nations upon earth.
May the peoples praise you, O God; let all the peoples praise you.
The earth has brought forth her increase; may God, our own God, give us his blessing.
May God give us his blessing, and may all the ends of the earth stand in awe of him (Psalm 67, BCP)

Advent, after all, means "appearing." We are each to prepare our hearts to be images of God, to be an advent of Christ--an appearing of Christ-- in our circle of influence, wherever that may be. The nations need his saving health. If the primary ontological reality is participation (caritas), then a history based on power abuse is a partial history, a history of evil only as negation. We look for our eschatological bodies to be perfect and to behold the beatific vision. What we are is not lost but refined.

A culture of Advent is a culture of forgiveness, living in two times: the past offense and God's completed restoration held together but the later like a counterpoint revising the former's meaning. Our final unction is a pledge of our final healing. The beatific vision need not be understood as a static vision that privileges the theoretical disciplines over the applied as more reflective of the eschaton's final state. If the energies of God are active, ever circulating in love, then as the children realize in C.S. Lewis' The Last Battle, we can go forever "further up and further in."

Anxiety and Expectation

What does it mean to long for the end times, for the apocalypse? And why is it that all cultures seem to have some variation of a story about the end of life and time? Definitions are perhaps in order here. An apocalypse, first and foremost, is a narrative of the world, both present and to come. It tells a story of both what we long for and therefore, what currently we do not. Apocalupsis means an “unveiling” or revelation. In that sense, eschatological expectation still awaits decisive moments of victory, even if already declared. We are longing for an end to the wickedness, evil, and grief of the world. We look for the promise of judgment, as well as the promise of the universe made new and renewed.

Bernard McGinn's definition of apocalypse is fairly typical and quite comprehensive:

“Apocalypse" is a genre of revelatory literature with a narrative framework, in which a revelation is mediated by an otherworldly being to a human recipient, disclosing a transcendent reality which is both temporal, in so far as it envisages eschatological salvation, and spatial, in so far as it involves another, supernatural world.

Thus, apocalypses reach both into the future and into the heavenlies. They bring together the future ahead of us and the eternal above and outside of us. They long for the merging of the two: the holy and everlasting realm comes to earth, touches down into the time-bound realm to remake it in the image of the eternal.

Of course, it is possible to treat apocalyptic longing as nothing but a species of sublimated and anthropological longing. Just as something that humans do to help make this pain-filled world a little more bearable. Frank Kermode, for example, notes how apocalyptic thought nearly always operates out of the “fiction of transition,” the belief that the writer’s own era is a period between the golden past and the coming restoration. The present era becomes a saeculum, an era in providential history, subject at present to “intemporal agony” as it awaits its salvation. Such a conception of the age as a period of transition lends also itself to a feeling of pent-up waiting. One is continually denied what has been promised. Apocalyptic endings, in this view, always end in anger and frustration.

But surely the answer for Christians is not a refusal of the ending or a transposition of it into nothing but a small meditation on our personal deaths, as important as that can be. We cannot privatize the apocalypse. We hold out hope for God to judge this world and make a new heaven and earth not just for ourselves but for all creation--humans, other species, the ecosystems themselves.

An apocalypse is a theodicy (i.e. an answer to the problem of evil) and, therefore, a meditation upon one large aspect of the educational project as well. An apocalypse answers the problem of evil by tying a description of the world’s evil to hope in God’s actions and trust in God’s justice. It suggests that the problem of evil is answered by the decisive, future answer that God will give—an eradication of all that offends. Likewise, it trusts that the end result will be so decisive, so embarrassingly bountiful, as in some way to compensate or reconfigure what has come before. An apocalypse, even in its stark ash and blood of destruction and judgment, is finally an epistemology of abundance. God will not leave us to ourselves, nor will he leave the evil of existence without a flood of good that promises to drown (baptize, if you will) and cleanse the sin-stained world.

Thus, apocalypse is also a word for justice. As Stephen O’Leary observes, “Evil is or will be justified and made sensible in the ultimate destiny of the cosmos." Experientially in the present, an apocalypse is a theodicy because it offers the resources to name and manage evil's ability to unhinge the rationality of our lives. Life makes sense again when we understand at least in part what the end will be to the story. But an apocalypse is not just an existential moment of deep and dependent awareness; it is also a socio-psychological response and one that can be defensive in nature. Apocalypse operates as a “resistance to the powers that be," as Paul Fiddes puts it. And because it often gives voice to the disenfranchised, it challenges the “imperial speech” that “all is well."

Apocalypse is a call to social action and community formation, to praise and repentance. In short, to worship.

The Formative Role of Congregational Worship

"Sunday morning is the practice of a counter-life through counter-speech" -- Walter Brueggeman

Our ethical lives, as I've suggested in a number of posts lately, are best understood in a narrative that has key moments; they are full of defining events, as well as continual movement and development. Our personal plots, our characters' origins, climaxes, and dénouements, occur within particular settings that give shape and meaning to our stories. This is assuredly true of Christian tradition. There is a direct connection between the practice of congregational life and liturgy and the practice of Christian higher learning. The pursuit of Christian education must have as its end the good of worship because worship restores the practice of university learning to its original meaningful good.

Debra Dean Murphy notes that in worship, we practice being a certain kind of person; the same is true of classroom learning. True knowledge is committed to action, practice, habit, even ritual. For the Christian, such knowledge is at the heart of worship--it is doxological, Eucharistic, and liturgical. We are learning "to live by the story that has called [us] into existence." We cannot be outside the Christian story to truly experientially know it; instead, we must practice it.

True education is performative and therefore, transformative. Nisi crediertis, non intelligitis. (Unless you have believed, you will not understand.) Communion with God and his people and the pursuit of truth are not separate for the Christian--conversion is life-long because the relationship with God and others is life-long. True knowledge, then, involves desire for the other and is dependent upon the other (i.e. God). The typical pattern of congregational worship teaches us an alternative language that helps us resist the fallen powers of this world, which are expressed as false worldviews and as false social structures. This congregational pattern is participatory--it involves learning a language and a bodily habit. It involves learning to see, imagine, and practice the world differently than how our culture sees and enacts it. According to Murphy, in place of planned obsolescence, self-dependence, and a "myth of scarcity," Christian worship offers a pattern of ritual return:

1. Entrance: Gathering for worship and opening worship initiates us into another way of understanding the world, by its nature deeply physical. Its liturgical space, rituals, and scriptural and traditional imagery set us apart as a separate community.
   
2. Proclamation and response: The church in worship seeks a Holy Spirit-guided, mutual discerning of the scriptures as the Word of God. The Bible rightly interprets the world, instead of the reverse. Preaching and teaching are acts of holy imagination. They are also invitations to a corporate knowledge that begins by abiding in the triune life of God.
   
3. Thanksgiving and communion: All prayer has a corporate, transformative aspect to it, but we need to do a better job teaching ourselves what prayer does so that it can truly shape our identities. In the same way the "prayer" of the Lord's Supper is an expression of the mystery of God and, therefore, is essential to our identities in Christ.
   
4. Sending forth: The act of ending worship, especially with a prayer of blessing or commissioning, reminds us that our worship is our ethic; it is our condition rather than simply a source of ethical reflection. We are called to live out on a day-to-day basis all that our baptisms (i.e. our commitments to Christ) imply, and this is a life of worship in all its aspects--including the work of worldview transformation, the sharing of the gospel, and the work of justice in all its expressions.

We are formed and shaped by the practices that we submit ourselves to intellectually, emotionally, intuitionally, bodily, and socially, yet this pursuit of worship through education is finally dependent upon the Creator who transcends us and yet freely offers himself in Christ and in the Holy Spirit. Glen Stassen and David Gushee have labeled this triune character formation which is social and sacramental, and therefore, which is obedient in its liturgical dependence, as "[p]articipative grace." The cooperation of God's people with the in-breaking of his eschatological reign neither claims for itself a works-based righteousness nor acquiesces to moral passivity. Instead, it is the evidence of the work of the Holy Spirit on the heart of the faithful Christian. It is centered on the kind of virtuous habits the Christian internalizes and practices. It cannot be isolated as a topic for discussion only; it must arise out of internally reflective practices and commitments.

The actions commanded by Jesus' Sermon on the Mount, for example, are spiritually formative--they remake our hearts and whole persons when we practice them in grace. "Character is shaped in community, and that means churches must be communities, not mere preaching stations. . . . [K]oinonia . . combines the meaning of community and fellowship with the meaning of service" (Stassen 61). It seems to me that such an understanding can be embraced by both Catholic and Lutheran, by both Calvinist and Arminian. The debate as to whether God's righteousness is judicially designated or covenantally received, as well as whether it is infused or imparted, justifying us before and/or during the process of sanctification, certainly impinges on this question, but all these positions can accommodate the practical reality that (to quote Bono of U2) grace "she travels outside of karma."

Pedagogy and Friendship

John Henry Newman understood only too well that professors influence students; the question is not if influence will take place but what kind of influence. He held that a pedagogy without the friendship of professor and student can only expect an environment of distrust and hostility: "An academic system without the personal influence of teachers upon pupils is an arctic winter; it will create an ice-bound, petrified, cast-iron University and nothing else."

Strangely, this is a result that many in the modern university not only accept as normal but practice as a virtue. The pedagogical practices inherent in Alasdair MacIntyre's encyclopedic method and the genealogical critiques may not know it, but they exist in ethical practices, though ones gone terribly array. Their methods of objective distance and power distrust have been made more believable by being offered in an ethical and pedagogical environment that reinforces their claims-- its very structure, at once supposedly objective yet lacking in anything like a curricular common vision.

Mark Schewn places much of the blame for this at the heart of the nineteenth-century German research institution, as well as the Weberian distrust of emotion and relationship in university education. Phillia, Weber holds, always pollutes the objectivity necessary for true research. But is this really the case?

Michel Polanyi observed that research is more intuitive in nature than is mostly admitted, and it is often passed along in non-verbalized ways to its new initiates. He called this "conviviality," the communication of true knowledge on the inarticulate level. Such knowledge involves a fair level of trust between teacher and student, and is therefore, essentially a-critical in nature. As such it is a tacit knowing: "We must now recognize belief once more as the source of all knowledge. Tacit assent and intellectual passions, the sharing of an idiom and of cultural heritage . . . No intelligence, however critical or original, can operate outside such a fiduciary framework."

The modern university by its overt distrust of friendship creates a world where encyclopedia and genealogy tragically seem true, though at the most human level they must continue to teach and research despite this, living off the cultural capital of intellectual honesty, collegiality, freedom of conscience, trust in rational discourse, scholarly discipline, a dependence on continuity with the past, even the desire for mentorship between student and teacher--all ethical practices which must be taken on faith, as Polanyi observes, even when honored in the breach.

Note how in Henry James' story, "The Figure in the Carpet" that once the narrator experiences knowledge as utility and as mastery, it soon replaces joy and delight in the love of learning:

[W]hat now occurred was simply that my new intelligence and vain preoccupation damaged my liking. I not only failed to run a general intention to earth, I found myself missing the subordinate intentions I had formerly enjoyed. His books didn't even remain the charming things they had been for me; the exasperation of my search put me out of conceit of them. Instead of being a pleasure the more they became a resource the less; for from the moment I was unable to follow up the author's hint I of course felt it a point of honour not to make use professionally of my knowledge of them. I had no knowledge - nobody had any. It was humiliating, but I could bear it - they only annoyed me now. At last they even bored me, and I accounted for my confusion - perversely, I allow - by the idea that Vereker had made a fool of me. The buried treasure was a bad joke, the general intention a monstrous pose (293).

Treating your education in a purely instrumental way is to succumb to the encyclopedia project of which MacIntyre warned, which only too quickly leads to the distrust and suspicion of genealogy. Such a disposition of mind and heart can occur in any educational environment, but the modern ethical chaos of individualism only lends it a deeper epistemic credulity. We have literally created academic structures that make the modern and post-modern assertions feel true, even as our humanity must struggle against them. As such, these structures are traditions who have hidden from themselves their former purpose for existence, living in a practice that once had the higher end of the love of knowledge from a dedication to the truth as the gift of God.

This current state of things suggests that Christian institutions of higher learning need to be cognizant and intentional about friendships between faculty and students. Learning is not just factual but intuitive and initiatory. Mentoring is often a two-way street because education is founded on the practice of submission, initiation, cultivation, and eventual contribution and clarification. As Jaroslav Pelikan reminds us,

The moment of truth comes . . . [as] the student begins to arrive at conclusions different from those of the master, as the largely unilateral power relationship of apprenticeship gradually yields, or should yield, in a healthy relationship--to authentic community and a deepening collegiality between teacher and student . . . it is a rite of passage filled with joy and fulfillment for all concerned, as well as with moments of deep anxiety.

What renders this "moment of truth" and "rite of passage" meaningful is a shared commitment to something like the academic ideal, a belief in freedom of inquiry as an essential aspect of our true humanness. As such, it demands of us personal virtues, fiduciary skills of trust and time, and they can exist for a season in systems of thought that mitigate against themselves.

Yet the cultures of encyclopedia and genealogy are finally pedagogically incoherent. These virtues cannot stand by themselves for very long. What they need is the larger theistic framework of the purpose of knowledge and of intellectual service to humanity to render their academic ideal an ultimately meaningful practice. Faithfulness in this context means an investment in others; it requires a certain speed--a slow listening and speaking that "hears" the tacit dimension in the other person. We all have favorite teachers in our lives, and those of us in higher education can each recall very significant professors who shaped our future callings, answered our questions, guided our thinking, assuaged our doubts, and disturbed our complacency.

In a Christian context, we need the hypergood, the telos, or final end we are pursuing set before us always, what the Westminster Confession so lovingly made proverbially:

Question 1: What is the chief and highest end of man?
Answer: Man's chief and highest end is to glorify God, and fully to enjoy him forever.

Our Fragile Selves & Unction

Lauren Winner recently coined the phrase "aromatheology" to describe Susan Ashbrook Harvey's Scenting Salvation, an account of Patristic worship and theology as being multi-sensory. What I like about the term is that it reminds us that our senses, made by our Creator, belong to our Creator. The pedagogical emphases on multi-media education need to transcend the pragmatic, as well as practice a careful discernment. The shape of a medium is its message, as Marshall MacLuhan used to warn us. The changes that each new technology brings to the human person are not de facto worthy of being embodied nor do they all guarantee good learning. Instead, they often contain a curriculum and a means of formation hidden in what they offer. Sound and sight, touch and taste, smell and our sense of gravity are another way our embodied existence must be understood for truly effective pedagogy And yet not just by using differing media for a media-glutted generation; rather, what is called for is a renewal of what our sensory faculty are actually for--the divine presence as meditated through the transcendentals of truth, goodness, and beauty. Can we consider a pedagogy of scent and touch?

For example, imagining our deaths and imagining our healing is what unction is about. The oil of anointing is a reminder of our dependence and our fragility. We are like smoke or the flowers of the field. To be anointed for healing is to engage in a meditation on our inutility. We cannot heal ourselves. We are even led to ponder our deaths. This contemplation of the dust of mortality is not Liebestot, the love of death and macabre culture. Instead, it is being before doing. This is an insight we need to return to on occasion in Christian education.

We exist first and foremost for the primary calling of Christ to himself. As Os Guinness puts it, "Calling is the truth that God calls us to himself so decisively that everything we are, everything we do, and everything we have is invested with a special devotion, dynamism, and direction lived out as a response to his summons and service." While I am not, of course, suggesting that every class begin with the physical anointing of our students' foreheads with oil (or ash)--amusing as that might be. I am suggesting that the physical, embodied nature of worship sacramentally prepares us for better encounters with the media of our classrooms, just as a worship that focuses solely on the inward experience of our students courts gnosticism and media deception, mistaking bells and whistles, sexy effects and sounds, for true transformative learning. We need to be sensitive to whether the aroma of our teaching is indeed a pleasing sacrifice to the nostrils of God.

This is as good a place as any to reflect on the place of prayer in learning--classroom, lab, in private, etcetera. Prayer is not a disavowal of the bodily life or the life of action, for contemplation and action are intimately tired together. A sacramental ethos of learning always stresses the participation and presence of learning, so our prayers in the classroom ought to be tied to the actual practice of teaching and learning we plan to undertake. They should not be vague, pious offerings that treat the spiritual life as somehow functionally divorced from learning. They should be recognitions of our utter dependence upon Christ the Logos for any real learning.

Lenten Pedagogy -- part 4

As Christ's faithful bride, as his priests for this world, we are called to extend hands of mercy to those in need. This is a high calling wherever it is practiced. I have often toyed with the idea of introducing a speaker by talking about his or her character qualities, by calling attention to what God has done in a person’s life despite himself, or by calling attention to the testimony of love from those nearest her. Of course, such doesn’t easily fit the genre of introductions, and it could come across as too precious.

Likewise, there are certain virtues in showing gratitude to someone for their accomplishments, yet how do we work within an academic hierarchy of honors, awards, and padded vitas while remembering that the Man of Sorrows had no place to rest his head? John Mogabgab has written,

Far from removing us from the messiness of the world, spiritual formation plunges us into the middle of the world's rage and suffering. It was to this place of pain and bewilderment that Jesus Christ was sent as a visible image of the invisible God . . . Through us love is extended to the furthest recesses of human sorrow and need. God's love for the world--in us because we are in Jesus Christ--becomes a sign of hope and a source of transformation in the world.

This to me seems a profound statement of what Christian education in general, and honors education in particular, should seek to accomplish. Service learning cannot truly be effective without formation in the spiritual disciplines that form our capacities. If we wish to serve as the imago dei, we must embrace the sacramental nature of our confession and discipline. Service learning to be truly sacramental must grow out of baptism and communion, vocation and the nuptial meaning of our bodies, and it must be the product, as well as the instrument, of repentance.

Lenten Pedagogy -- part 3

Consecration is an important element of Christian education, especially when we are tempted to look for greener pastures during the stressful times of grading and writing that every semester brings. Gerald May puts it this way:

Consecration means dedication to God. It occurs when we claim our deepest desire for God, beneath, above, and beyond all other things. We may not understand the full meaning of consecration: the ups and downs, the joys and agonies of the journey that must follow. And certainly we will be unable to grasp the overarching cosmic meaning of our small assent, the joy it gives to God, the deepening love it will bring to humanity, the . . . covenant it has enriched. But our yes comes from some bare recollection of all these things. In a tiny space our hearts can say yes.

Confession and spiritual mortification call us to self-examination that we may forget ourselves and to alms-giving that we may gain great blessings. Monks often take a vow of stability, pledging to stay in the place their life has been planted. While I am certainly not arguing that professors or students should never change universities, I do think we need to acknowledge that certain aspects of our growth require the suffering of endurance and the humility of choosing perhaps the lesser of places, at least in some academics' estimation. Calvin sees a similar kind of stability in the very vocations we are called to by God:

The last thing to be observed is, that the Lord enjoins every one of us, in all the actions of life, to have respect to our own calling. He knows the boiling restlessness of the human mind, the fickleness with which it is borne hither and thither, its eagerness to hold opposites at one time in its grasp, its ambition.

Therefore, lest all things should be thrown into confusion by our folly and rashness, he has assigned distinct duties to each in the different modes of life. And that no one may presume to overstep his proper limits, he has distinguished the different modes of life by the name of callings. Every man's mode of life, therefore, is a kind of station assigned him by the Lord that he may not be always driven about at random. (Institutes 3.10.6)

While Calvin’s model is perhaps more static than our lives necessitate, there is a real truth to this; namely, we are tempted by selfish motives that drive, even infect, our noble callings. This native presumption of the fallen mind can only too easily be attested to in education, so the gift of stability has much to pedagogically commend it. When we train in God’s kingdom, we are not training for ourselves alone, but for the needs of a hurting world, and this is true of the end and purpose of our teaching and the Christian educational project as a whole.

This training includes a counter-cultural approach to success. We need, I need, a self-check each time I blanch before those teaching at Yale, Princeton, or Oxford.

Lenten Pedagogy -- part 2

Having authority carries with it its own spiritual dangers. Leading carries the temptation to forget our dependence on others. As a teacher, one can easily become accustomed to students doing what you say or agreeing with you because you control the grade.

We need a practice of self-confrontation. We need to confess our sins, remember who we are, and most importantly renew our dependence on the larger work of the kingdom of God. The classic disciplines of the Church—fasting, prayer, study, corporate worship, silence, service, and so on--when we engage in them, we do so not to punish ourselves in unhealthy ways, but so that we might better conform to the person of Jesus. Such practices are a call to holy exercise. As Paul says, “I discipline my body like an athlete, training it to do what it should. Otherwise, I fear that after preaching to others I myself might be disqualified.” There are, of course, good ways and bad ways to exercise.

Richard Swinburne has noted that in the Christian faith a Lenten principle is deeply pervasive. Human beings have trouble rightly ordering their desires; we take things that are good and turn them into idols. We hold on to what is simply ours to steward. We take too much of what should be shared. We hoard when only a little is needed. This is why scripture teaches that Christians must fast, give to those in need, and learn to suffer the little irritants of life. This is also why we at times may be called to endure the death of some of our most cherished dreams and desires. We must at times intentionally frustrate those desires because they influence us more than they should.

Even those things that are otherwise good can not always be indulged. We must enter the desert of the spirit so that we may receive the wellsprings of life. This is certainly true of the kind of discipline and decision-making that are necessary for effective study and scholarship. We limit part of ourselves, that is we consecrate ourselves in order to be changed by God, so that we may truly partake of all that is his.

Vocational Desire

Are there other ways to talk about desire and learning? It may seem strange to think of there being a connubial quality to being a professor of a subject, but I would suggest that there is. Profession is not a knowledge-free telos, not a presuppositionless learning or teaching; it is a commitment, a marriage of ourselves to a subject that we treat with anything other than dignity and respect at our own peril.

Nicholas Wolterstorff has spoken of "eirenic learning," that is learning that promotes peace, ala' shalom. What are the covenantal qualities of vocation, then? Can there be, for example, an erotics of vocation, that is a study of how our gender and our desires shape us through the passionate drama of distance, proximity, embrace, and consummation as they apply in our teaching, research, and evaluation? Our gendered, bodily identities play roles outside our marriage, including in the extended ways that we practice fatherhood and motherhood. Even those who are gifted with singleness—themselves signs of the kingdom to come, bring their nurturing selves into their vocations. This is certainly true of the work of teaching, This is not only the case with the legal and ethical parameters of in loco parentis, but also with the more general way in which we inhabit a parental meaning in our friendships with students, as well as in mentorships and in general teaching.

Can one also speak of a desire within the aesthetics of education?

Animal, plant, flower, tree, spice, water, oil, honey--all such symbols imply the physicality of our desires and lovemaking, yet these very metaphors employed by Song of Songs also suggest a quality beyond this--a psychological and moral and aesthetic flowering. Similarly, Christian desire is in both separation and in fulfillment, not in continual separation as the heretical medieval notion of romance implies. The Christian love story of Christ for his Church provides a narrative for our own love stories to tell themselves by. The allegorical readings of Canticles as a story of God and Israel, Christ and the Church, or God and the soul are not entirely misplaced. They imply something important about the way we romance God via our studies. I will speak more on this below; for the moment, let me draw attention to George Herbert's lovely sonnet on this exchange of divine desire and worth:

Immortal Heat, O let thy greater flame
Attract the lesser to it: Let those fires,
Which shall consume the world, first make it tame;
And kindle in our hearts such true desires,

As may consume our lusts, and make thee way.
Then shall our hearts pant thee; then shall our brain
All her invention on thine Altar lay,
And there in hymns send back thy fire again:

Our eyes shall see thee, which before saw dust;
Dust blown by wit, till that they both were blind:
Thou shalt recover all thy goods in kind,
Who wert disseized by usurping lust:

All knees shall bow to thee; all wits shall rise,
And praise him who did make and mend our eyes.

Our desires, wherever they may be located are not controlled per se by suppressing them--though there is a time and place for this, as well--but more often they are subsumed in the greater fire. "Usurping lust" is consumed in the great passion of the Trinity. While there is no marriage in heaven, our loves there are absorbed into the heavenly resurrection, and this end of our nuptial, bodily selves is worth remembering in an academic world that is finally so very subject to the temptation of disembodiment. Our journey into the love of a field of knowledge, with its parallels to marriage, also includes love's comic aspects.

Love’s comedy always renders us vulnerable and, thus, keeps us humble.

Spousal Love and the Nuptial Body

Last year, I had the privilege of performing the wedding of two DBU students that I had taught in several of my classes. I found myself moved with deep gratitude for playing a part in their lives, as well as remembering again the deep commitment of my own marriage. The opportunity also gave me a chance to reflect more on the nature of marriage, and I believe there are connections to be drawn between this aspect of sacramental life and education.

This is what Jesus said of marriage: "[F]rom the beginning of creation, “God made them male and female.” “For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh.” So they are no longer two, but one flesh. Therefore what God has joined together, let no one separate."(Mark 10:6-9). Jesus taught that marriage forms something new. Two people from different families become one flesh, and what God has brought into existence, no human court of justice has the right to unravel. When Jesus reminded his culture of this truth, he had in mind the model of Genesis. If humanity is the crown of creation, marriage is the jewel on that crown.

"Flesh of my flesh, bone of my bone," Adam tells Eve. The nuptial meaning of the body is part of ourselves; we image God together male and female and are always the image of God in communion by helping one another, through mutual support and mutual definition. Our bodies literally point to the mutual dependence and community we were created for. Our contingent being is good; we have a sense of our finite dependency before the fall of humanity. "Ens et bonum convertuntur (being and the good are convertible)" as John Paul II observes (29).

These are important truths to remember in college-level education. The sexuality of ourselves and our students is part and parcel of who we are. Here, I am not necessarily trying to engage certain norms or stereotypes of gendered behavior, though I think there is some truth to these matters. Instead, I am trying to reflect on how we cannot treat intellectual and ethical formation in isolation from the nuptial aspects of ourselves.

In Genesis, humans are separated out from other animals; we may be bodies among other bodies, but we are far more. We are given our bodies to till and subdue creation, to be stewards of a world, wards of the king chosen to care for his prized estates. Our bodies are ethical, sacramental, aesthetic, social, and erotic. They present ourselves to the world and the world to us. Our bodies were created to aid in the fullness of shalom and the complete multi-faceted communication of being to being, but that bodily gift has been marred in our fallenness. We were created to express love, and our freedom was given to make true love of God and God's creatures possible. To be a body is to be a living soul, not a slave of our physical desires. We were, thus, originally free from the constraint of overpowering instinct.

That this is now too often the reverse is something we must keep in mind in the educational process, though it is hardly something we must address openly in most courses. Tom Wolfe's recent novel, I Am Charlotte Simmons, is only one sobering account of the culture of pornocracy on many campuses. Charlotte’s journey into an academic and residential culture of relativism and fornication should give us all pause, whether we teach in a state or private institution.

God promises us cleansing, for we are each Christ's bride (Eph 5:26-27). We are called to learn to lay aside shame and return to the right gift of our bodies in marriage. We are also called to relearn that our nuptial meaning is a pledge of respecting the bodies of others. This the meaning of pledging wedding vows before witnesses. In mutuality we learn "the reciprocity of the donation" (JP II). The gifts of ourselves, our gendered, nuptial bodies, are tied to a new purifying of our motives and in marriage a new vulnerability in our lovemaking.

The culture of "hooking up," of nearly anonymous sex leads to a loss of ourselves; we lose part of who we actually are. Lust desacralizes the body's sacramental sign. It also reduces the meaning of our erotic actions to a far less complex communication. Being human, it can still be quite complex, but once something less than reductive enters, it begins to be something else, with all the human brokenness our culture tries to hide from itself. We need to struggle with this dimension to education, even if it makes us quite uncomfortable. As professors, we need not be surprised when this part of existence enters our students' academic struggles.

Sex is not to be separated from love, family, and our responsibility to our community. Strong marriages and strong families make strong neighborhoods and town. Marriage is one of life's original blessings--prosperity, comfort, joy, long life, In the scriptures, marriage is a picture of giving and gratitude and mutual dependence, for "a marriage with conditions is no true marriage" (John Colwell). In this sense, the marriages of faculty, staff, and administration--not to mention those of students--ought to be signs of the true uses of our humanity. Christian marriage is a work of restoration, and this makes it profoundly counter-cultural. We are meant to model for all people what Christ intends for his Church as his Bride. This means we must learn to fully and truly accept each other, receiving each other for who we are in our brokenness and in our health. We were created for the experience of giving and receiving in the blessedness of trust and wholeness. When we truly live for the other person we help them along the way to a full possession of who they were meant to be.

Eucharistic Discernment

"The Eucharist is a celebration of plenitude; it is a recognition of God's provision. It is a challenge to all politics of scarcity. Here at this table, the truth about God's world is told: there is enough. We need not hoard out of fear that there will be too little. We need not fight to get what others have. There is enough. God will provide. God will redeem."--Scott Bader-Saye

When we ask in the Lord's Prayer for "our daily bread," we are asking for more than physical sustenance, for our subsistence is found in a constant renewal of revelation. This revelation is found in both word and table. The Table of the Lord, the Lord's Supper, should be far more central to Protestant Free Church worship than it most often is. God freely offers to reveal himself, and the heart of this revelation is in the Word of God, who is Christ, offered in preaching (as well as all aspects of scripture) and in the Lord's Supper. The Supper is one place that Christians can learn greater discernment of the presence of Christ in his people, and this extends out by implication to the project of a Christian college.

P. T. Forsyth has quipped, "Memorials are meant for heroes who have perished," but this is a bit mean perhaps. A memorial is also a biblical remembrance. The Greek word for remembrance, anamnesis, can be translated "recall by making present." To "remember something" in this way is not to treat it as something that no longer has any relevance to our lives. When the Jews remember the Passover; when Christians remember the Lord's Supper, we are not saying, "Oh well, that was then; this is now." No, when we recall the deeds of God, we are making them present. Or better said, the Spirit is making them present in our discernment. The act of remembrance is a prayer of sorts that God might re-member us. We are no longer spectators outside of a performance. We are worshippers; we are participants in some sense in the drama of God's salvation.

The great Jewish Rabbi Gamaliel said, "In every generation a man must so regard himself as if he came forth himself from Egypt. [. . .] And you shall tell your son on that day saying, "It is because of that which the Lord did for me when I came forth from Egypt." As Scripture exhorts us, "For as often as you eat this bread and drink the cup, you proclaim the Lord’s death until he comes." Christ's sacrifice upon the cross, "once for all time" as the Book of Hebrews tells us, is ever present in us his people. This participation mediates to us profound truths, especially the spiritual unity of Christ in his people, and this is deeply important to Christian pedagogy. As a professor, for example, I must learn to discern the Lord's presence in other Christians in the classroom, as well as in any truth or truth-telling that takes place.

The Baptist preacher C.H. Spurgeon reminds us, as well: real presence means spiritual nourishment, the experience of being filled. I would contend that regular partaking of communion prepares us all for academic and intellectual nourishment--present in the gathered community of Christian learning, as well as in the content of that learning. Am I saying that the regular taking of communion will prepare the student for intellectual discernment? Yes, if rightly received and discerned: "Man is what he eats" (Alexsander Schmemann).

Now, of course, we can and often do resist this. I am not professing a kind of pedagogical or ethical ex opere operato. It is important to remember that grace is everywhere but that it is not available under all conditions, and the nourishment of Christ's presence in the Eucharist opens us up to the gifts of discernment that we need in order to recognize the voice of God in other aspects of our daily living. Eucharist means "thanksgiving," and we need to recall that learning should be possessed by gratitude. Teaching and presence go together, as the gifts and creatures of Supper and Water remind us:

The Eucharist is the site at which the community of the baptized and the work of the Holy Spirit are joined to effect the transformation of persons into an image of the divine fellowship of the Triune God. The Eucharist produces a people who live out of the giftedness of their creatureliness, who make actual the love and generosity, fellowship and freedom that characterize the life of God (1 Corinthians 11). Baptism initiates us into and the Eucharist sustains us in the life we were created for; participation in the ceaseless flow of caritas between Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

This passage by Debra Dean Murphy teaches that the Eucharist is at the heart of the Trinity's engraced world--the words of institution call us to remember that all matter is finally God-dependent. Just as there should be an open table in learning, so should the partaking be open. This, then, is at the heart of interpersonal and interrelational learning. As the Lord's Supper offers a different polis from our world's, so should the politics of the Christian classroom be a different politics. Communion is a sign of community. The love affair of the Trinity imparts to us the grace we need to love each other in the academic life.

Baptism, Renunciation, and Renewal

"Therefore, my dear friends, flee from the worship of idols. I speak as to sensible people; judge for yourselves what I say. The cup of blessing that we bless, is it not a sharing in the blood of Christ? The bread that we break, is it not a sharing in the body of Christ? Because there is one bread, we who are many are one body, for we all partake of the one bread." (I Cor 10: 14-17)

In light of Graham Ward's point about our agency and action as individuals being embedded in spiritual practices, I wold like to focus for several posts on some of the spiritual practices of the Church and ask what they have to say to our lives as Christian educators. It is impossible to live liturgy alone. Let me return here to Dulles' notion of the Church as sacrament, arguing as well that Christian education is sacramental.

First, a few caveats: I am not terribly interested in engaging the debate between what makes something an ordinance or a sacrament of Christian worship and what makes something sacramental in the larger more open-ended sense. Nor am I particularly interested in investing the term with an inviolable necessity. I am only too aware, as my friend David Stricklin has observed, that the word "sacrament" does not easily roll off many a Baptist tongue. What the word does impart is a historical Christian sense that God can use the physical things of creation to point to and impart a measure of his gracious presence and help. Finally, I am not very uptight about whether we should number the official church sacraments as two, three, or seven. Instead, I would propose a charitable overview that allows for some ambiguity in the exact definitions and resources because I want to examine in brief how the sacramental nature of being Church does have an impact on our students' pedagogical development and is, therefore, worthy of examination in a Christian philosophy of teaching.

Let us begin, then, where we begin in the Christian life. Faith and obedience are at the heart of our baptisms. Baptism is a public sign of our entrance into Christ's church, a renunciation of the devil and all his works, and a passage from one world to the next. Paul in Romans speaks of it as the joining of our identity with Christ; our life is now added to the narrative of the cross, burial, and resurrection of Jesus:

Do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? Therefore we have been buried with him by baptism into death, so that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, so we too might walk in newness of life. For if we have been united with him in a death like his, we will certainly be united with him in a resurrection like his. (Rom 6:3-5)

Baptisms, then, are a commitment to a worldview embodied in a particular socio-cultural context, and therefore, for Christians they can also remind us of a commitment to an academic and/or liturgical community differing in fundamental ways from the secular academy. Yet stated simply this way, it is tempting to overlook that in baptism the action of grace is not something that we do but something that God imparts. As my former teacher Ralph Wood puts it:

A baptism by total immersion makes ever so vivid, this is God's act: we are drowned with Christ in a watery grave, plunged into the aboriginal chaos out of which God fashioned the cosmos, in order that we may be raised with Christ as new creations, emerging wet-haired from the waters of life like new-born babies.

The radical and decisive nature of our baptisms is ideally renewed each time we witness another's baptism.

Of course, the position I am advocating here is more familiar to British Baptists, who see baptism as the sacramental and normative act of conversion (e.g G.R. Beasley-Murray); this is a position admittedly alien to the experience of many U.S. Southern Baptists, who tend to let the altar call and commitment card serve as the initial public testimony. (The exception to this is the rush of excitement I’ve seen in congregations when noted sinners have turned to Jesus and been baptized.)

Nonetheless, I believe seeing baptism as sacramental is something that Baptists of all stripes in education can learn from. As John Colwell observes, sacraments are the sign of God's promise of grace; they function as seals of the divine freedom to act as he will yet the assurance that he always keeps his promises. Baptism is our pledge based on God's pledge to us that we are his, joined to Christ and his Body. We come to "indwell the gospel event." Pedagogically, our baptisms are reminders that the gospel is a call to martyrdom, to being a witness with its suffering, and this includes the "white martyrdom" of a life of costly service through study.

We must embrace, even if we also despise, the shame that may come with taking on the name of Christ in the larger academy, but also the general athletic striving of learning. The suffering, even humiliation, involved in learning mediates to us aspects of Christ's own suffering. The burial and birthing of baptism brings us close to the outpouring of love that Jesus gave us, so that we may enter into what John Milbank has called "the circularity of gift" that is the profound cruciform shape of the Christian life--a shape that Christian pedagogy cannot escape.