Ratio et Fidei--part 1

Nonetheless, despite what I've written in previous posts, the question can still be asked: what specific relationship do reason and faith have? Or perhaps better said, how does faith, as itself a species of reason, inform cognition and the larger patterns of tacit rationality that include intuition, emotion, context, and bodily sensorium?

Truth has a deep connection to being prophet, priest, and steward. The Christian begins with the knowledge that Jesus is the Logos incarnate. "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning. Through him all things were made. In him was life, and that life was the light of men. . . . The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. We have seen his glory, the glory of the One and Only, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth" (John 1:1-4, 14). When John (under the Holy Spirit's inspiration) applied logos to Christ, he was making a radical claim, though it is a matter of debate how Greek or Hebrew his understanding was. Logos in Greek philosophy is an impersonal rational order that directs and controls the universe. Thus, John can claim that through the Word "all things were made." But he can also state that "The Word became flesh." That impersonal force, he tells us, is actually a personal Being who entered history. Jesus came to show us what God is like.

Rationality I have argued in various ways so far is incarnate, kenotic, and revelatory. If John is also invoking the ancient Hebrew notion of wisdom, then to be "full of grace and truth" is to express all that Jewish tradition claimed for sophia. Hebrew truth is lived truth, never offered in the abstract alone. This is not the same as American pragmatism. Truth is always experiential, active, and enacted.

Educationally we are called to teach students to unpack the Christ-centered pattern of the universe. The concept of a logos suggests that reality is inherently linguistic in structure, that we need words to relate to, understand, and exist with the world. It equally implies that an order and harmony exists in creation that is uncoverable, and for this too, we need words. Wisdom is found in abiding by this structure and harmony, and in Christ alone is this experienced in any coherent fashion. Furthermore, it is Christ the Logos who shows us the pattern by which we relate to the cosmos and more importantly to the cosmos' Creator. Language only has meaning in the end because God has ordered the creation.

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."

Wisdom and Phronesis

Much that can be said of phronesis can be said of wisdom. It, too, has a kind of concrete, specific pattern of reasoning. Walter Bruggemann has noted that “[w]isdom is found in the experience of the world . . . a more qualified experience of the community." Wisdom both embraces what can be known and what cannot be known.

God is both the giver and withholder of knowledge. Wisdom, in all its variations, invites us to find a fit between our behavior and the divine order of the world we live in. Christians believe that God constructed the world with Wisdom at his side and, therefore, that there is a continuum between our personal lives and that of creation. They also believe that sophia is perfectly revealed in Christ; thus, while certain behavior leads to success, and other behavior leads to failure, christocentric obedience is at the heart of wise living. However, it is not quite so simple to say that we easily understand what success and failure add up to. Wisdom also teaches us what our limits are--what we do not understand, how blind we may be to God's true wisdom for our lives. Wisdom is kenotic and apophatic to a point.

There is, thus, more than one kind of wisdom. The kind of wisdom praised by Proverbs is practical. It amounts to a skill in living, an insight into varying circumstances, and a certain shrewdness in dealing with a variety of personalities. In this sense, it is very much like phornesis. This method of wisdom at its best is discipleship. More than the technical mastery of a few key insights, practical wisdom cultivates an internalized habit, a way of living in the world. Wisdom grows into a cultivated good-sense that sizes up situations, but as we have indicated above, the practice of wisdom only makes sense if the ethical pursuit that undergirds it is present.

Job and Ecclesiastes, on the other hand, teach us that wisdom has a limited potential. It cannot solve everything. God may leave us with questions, or we may discover that what we thought was wisdom breaks apart before the circumstances. These aspects of wisdom, then, are more interrogative in nature. The nature of God as both self-giving and concealing is exhibited in the systematic study of the universe. Kenotic learning, communal learning--these are not separate streams for phronetic learning.

Because of wisdom's practical side, some have suggested that the wisdom tradition of Ancient Israel is essentially neutral. There is some truth to this suggestion because many of the proverbs of Israel share the same kinds of concerns that other ancient wisdom traditions share. Proverbs' God-inspired editor was quite willing to adapt several Egyptian proverbs (cf. Prov 22:17ff.) Like its other Near eastern counterparts, the later chapters of Proverbs mainly teach ethical maxims and day-to-day management of circumstances.

Take, for example, the biblical portrait of the foolish and the wise. The fool is one who refuses apt words, who is lazy, and who is always undercuting others. The wise are those who speak fitting words, who care for others in the community, and who know how to avoid misunderstandings. These are observations that can be found in almost any culture. However, it would be a mistake to understand this wisdom as finally translatable from one context to another without phronetic reviewing. Israel's wisdom ultimately begins in the fear of God and has its confirmation in the Torah. Even supposedly "secular" insights are recontextualized within the worship and service of God. This suggests a manner for us in approaching the limited wisdom of human texts.

Practical wisdom is both inductive and deductive. It works by observing specific cases in life and applying general maxims to those circumstances, yet it also begins with a sense of divine revelation, for Yahweh has spoken to what is good and evil. Other texts, as a source of wisdom, can be evaluated from two complementary directions: 1) we can take an inductive approach that seeks to gather together principles for living from these sources, and 2) we can take a deductive approach that tests these examples by scripture and tradition.

This practice by itself can become rather reductive if we do not keep in mind, however, that wisdom also has an interrogative side. It asks questions to bring us to the end of our easy answers. We run the risk of a kind of "wisdom" that treats literature as ethical material to evaluate but then dispose of, as if literature were simply content to master. The impulse to wisdom, if it is shorn from its foundation in God, can prize itself for technique, for the ability to manipulate situations and manage persons. The author of Ecclesiastes reminds us that such an approach is finally empty; it is but grasping wind. Our attempts at achieving success are vain, for the end of the matter is to fear God (12:13).

The New Testament also reminds us that human wisdom, conceived of in yet another way, with all its pretensions, may end up seeing God's wisdom as foolishness. Human wisdom has its noetic blindness, after all. Erasmus suggested as much when he observed that those of the world and those of God each believe the other to be insane:

For those who, despising all earthly things and even life itself, embrace the heavenly philosophy with all their heart, seem insane to those for whom nothing is pleasant but the earthly and perishable. He who pours out his inheritance for the poor is insane in the opinion of the man who places the defense of his life in riches. The man who, for the Gospel, willingly exposes himself to exile, poverty, imprisonment, torturing, and death, in hope of eternal blessedness, is a lunatic for the man who does not believe that, after this life, there is a more blessed one for the pious. He who spurns the honors of princes and of the people so as to obtain glory with God, is mad for those who really are mad.

To pour out your life on something other than the brightest, richest, and most powerful makes no sense to the person who does not believe in an eternal reward or the one who does not think bliss is possible with God. In some sense, then, human wisdom is also a matter of control beliefs, those essential assumptions that shape the rest of the way we see and understand existence. This is one reason that a Christian may evaluate a work of text in very different fashion from a person of another persuasion.

The practice of disputation, then, faces the question of commensurability, but as I suggested above, this occurs within a position, not from a supposedly, objective "positionless" space.

Disputation as a Moral Virtue

A Christian academic practice that employs disputation must do so within a certain moral practice and intent to develop certain habits of reasoning. There is much for us to learn from the virtue-ethic tradition. The Aristotelian concept of phronesis, or practical reasoning, has formed the nucleus of some significant twentieth-century reflection on the nature of moral reasoning and virtue, and it provides a good model of what we should be trying to achieve.

Phronesis is concrete; it is not theoretical generalization; instead, it works itself out anew in each new practical set of circumstances. Phronesis operates on a case-by-case basis not in the pure realm of theory but with a sense of this is what the situation calls for. Disputation in a classroom, a public debate, or even over coffee should be more than two people ranting and emoting. It should be a skill learned that has certain postive purposes. A good dispute is phronetic because it is not just an internalized set of thinking skills. It is more like a habit of interpretation based on a long formed practice. It is a virtue, which as Augustine pointed out, "is a good habit consonant with our nature." We form phronesis through practice, and this requires a concrete pattern within which to do so.

Here is where we can also learn from the Thomist tradition that adapted Aristotle to Christian concerns. Thomas Aquinas defines a virtue as

An operative habit essentially good, as distinguished from vice, an operative habit essentially evil. Now a habit is a quality in itself difficult of change, disposing well or ill the subject in which it resides, either directly in itself or in relation to its operation. An operative habit is a quality residing in a power or faculty in itself indifferent to this or that line of action, but determined by the habit to this rather than to that kind of acts. Virtue then has this in common with vice, that it disposes a potency to a certain determined activity; but it differs specifically from it in that it disposes it to good acts, i.e. acts in consonance with right reason (Summa 2.55.2).

In other words, virtues are

a) good habits that predispose us to good actions;
b) they represent a certain mature good quality made resident in a person;
c) they are in accord with correct reason and reasoning.

For Aquinas the cardinal virtue of prudentia is the habitual judgment of how best to respond in ever new circumstances. Education, I would contend, is about cultural, intellectual, and moral prudentia. An education that fails to translate into life's new circumstances is ultimately a failure of phronesis. We are seeking to teach a form of disputation not just to self-perpetuate our careers and studies, but to pursue a particular set of qualities that have as their end an ability to explore the truth, to convince others of the right actions at hand, to clarify misunderstanding, and so on. This raises particular concerns for the Christian. What exactly is the structure of reasoning and faith? Are they on a level playing field?

John Henry Newman argued in his last book The Grammar of Ascent that we begin not by reasoning but by apprehending the object, which then gains our assent. We only later begin to unpack the implied details of what we have given our assent to. We often believe what we cannot understand and what we cannot exhaustively comprehend or prove. Conviction is something we all grow into over time. His point is that faith is rational in the same way other matters are rational. Most of life is about commitments made on trust in others' credibility.

This says much about Christian education. We do not reason our way to faith; we begin with its assumptions (ala' Anselm's fides quaerens intellectum--faith seeking understanding). Concrete reasonings are not ultimate tests, but they are sufficient tests in practical reasoning. Newman divides forms of assent into two types:

1. Notional assent, which includes profession, credence, opinion, presumption, and speculation;
2. Real assent, which is imaginative certainty given to what we experience in the real world.

Beliefs in what the Church teaches are forms of assent both notional and real. We gain certitude--a state of mind--all the time by directing ourselves and giving ourselves towards particular truths, and this lived involvement with the object of our assent gives our certitude a quality of irreversibility. It is not our job as educators to disabuse our students of their traditions and convictions, though that will happen at times in the process of exploring the truth together. Rather, we are to help them when possible to work within their tradition to pursue the true, good, and beautiful in such a way that those goods are clarified and the false versions once held are cast aside.

Christian education operates as a way of reinforcing the Christian faith, not by an unquestioning repetition of only certain denominational dogmas, but by a debated, thick ecumenism practiced in true covenant community. We all have an illative sense, a faculty of theoretical reasoning that judges the validity of inferences in much that same way that our prudence (prudentia, phronesis) judges life practically. This theoretical faculty includes a sense of judging what authorities we can give our trust to.

All good reason, if you will, is based on some measure of faith, and all true faith has some measure of rationality in it. Christian education understands this truth. Our warranted presuppositions framework and proceed from our faith.

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.

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.