Although I've promised a blog entry on Christian women in academia, I'd like to simply give a small foretaste of that post in the following extract. This comes from a position paper of sorts of mine on Christian education in the liberal arts and application to literature. The sections below concern a liberal arts education and literature.
Please note that because I come from a Reformed perspective, that is the one expressed in this essay; my views may of course be applicable to other traditions.
Some initial questions for discussion: What do you think about Christian education in general? Should Christian teachers be focusing on teaching in Christian schools or in the secular sphere? Should it be a requirement for Christian parents to put their children in Christian schools?
Here is the extract:
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The liberal arts are about life skills not about job skills. Although we are not to neglect practical preparation for employment, teaching in a liberal arts context promotes deep questions and conversations to enable students to open up issues and agendas to the transforming work of Christ. We therefore focus on teaching students to be responsible, passionate, conscientious and imaginative people who will take these skills into whatever context they find themselves. The Oxford English Dictionary defines ‘liberal arts’ as: ‘Directed to general intellectual enlargement and refinement; not narrowly restricted to the requirements of technical or professional training’.
The liberal arts are about community not about scholastic ladder-climbing. The liberal arts allow us, as both students and teachers, to pursue learning and Christ together within the context of community. Rather than divvying up a college into departments that function apart from and without reference to one another, a liberal arts education favours interdisciplinarity over strict subject-matter boundaries and rather than focus on dissemination of a body of knowledge from teacher (as sage) to student (as peon), it involves both student and teacher in a mutual quest for knowledge. The liberal arts as an example of Reformed Christian higher education are about freedom to explore together knowledge of God, his creation, our fellow human beings and ourselves. Here, as we seek to worship ‘in spirit and in truth’ (John 4:23-24) we realise that biology, literature and history all narrate the human condition differently and as we come to each of these stories, new perspectives on who God is, our relationship to Him and our work in His world are opened up and explored. This is within a context that values learning, not because it primarily serves an end, but that through learning we learn to delight in the bountiful gifts of intellect, moral sentiment, will and emotion with which God created us. Thus doing my job well, for both teacher and student, is critical to my fulfilment as a human being because we are made in the image of God.
The liberal arts are about servanthood.
Another definition that is helpful to our understanding of the liberal arts as an outpouring of our position as Reformed Christians is in the OED’s definition of ‘liberal’ as: ‘free in bestowing; bountiful, generous, [and] open-hearted’. As Christian scholars and teachers, the way in which we practice the liberal arts should reflect our understanding of creation, fall and redemption, which, in turn, has repercussions for the way in which we do our work. We are to be ‘bountiful, generous, and open-hearted’ in our use of knowledge and in our dissemination of it, not because our sympathies are naturally capacious but, as an act of worship, an act of gratitude to Christ. Because we have been given so many ‘good gifts’ , our gratitude should manifest itself so that Reformed Christian educators:
• Understand and teach truth. Jesus told his disciples that ‘If you abide in my word, […] you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free’ (John 8:32). As educators concerned with letting our students seek truth freely, we must know Jesus and seek to let Him shine through our teaching.
• Teach with humility. John the Baptist understood his position in relation to Jesus when he stated, ‘He must increase, but I must decrease’ (John 3:30). Our teaching should make Jesus more clear while making our own knowledge and scholarship pale in comparison to His work of redemption.
• Teach with passion. Because we are to ‘work as for the Lord and not to men’ (Col. 3:23), our teaching should be our best work and we should carry it out with joy.
• Teach with mission. Our teaching should enable students to catch a vision for how God works and to understand the greatness of the gospel. We must remember that our teaching is not only part of our own part in the cultural mandate but also that it is to enable students to ‘go out into all the world to make disciples’ (Matt. 28:19).
Application to Literature
Teaching literature from a Reformed perspective likewise recognises the goodness of creation, its corruption and that redemption is offered as a gift of grace. All literary work, Christian or non-Christian, as an artistic reflection of its culture and in its use of narrative, reflects the creative work of God. When we focus on words – teasing out their meaning, getting the gift a story offers, opening new perspectives to us through reading – it enables us to see how we bear the image, however faintly, of the Word made flesh. Although literature opens us up to investigate how it is a creative activity, one based in the doctrine of creation, so also does it illustrate participation in the fall. This Word ‘dwelt among us’ in all of our fallenness; he considered himself nothing but took the form of a servant (Phil. 2). Thus sometimes our experience of reading literature does not glory in the mystery of creation and creativity, but rather reflects our own sordid state. In this too, we learn more of God and more of ourselves. Literature also presents us with our need of redemption, often through presentation of our fallenness, even though there seems no recourse to redemption within the world of the novel.
Besides teaching us more of God as creator and of our need of redemption, reading thoughtfully also teaches us how to be agents of cultural renewal. I’d like to offer a few ways in which literature does this.
Literature invites us to pause. In a world consumed with prestige and busyness, stopping for whatever reason is often unthinkable. In the mad dash to get ahead of the next person we lose both our creative instincts and the reason for our work in the first place. The activity of reading when done in community opens us up to nuances in diction, history, and cultural context that prompt discussion concerning the state of human nature, how and why we create stories and how meaning is made. Pondering beauty in the form of literature hones our creative, appreciative and critical faculties while opening up questions about meaning and character.
Literature ushers us into delight. God incarnate took on both our physical and linguistic mediums and significantly, taught his followers through parables. He could have given treatises but instead, he used stories. In the process of reading, discussing and writing about literature, we come face to face with delight; in an era of educational distinctives concerned more with products, outcomes and prestige, delight becomes at least a tertiary concern. Susan Manning notes, ‘Despite their undoubted usefulness as cultural evidence, however, literary texts do in one fundamental respect have a different status from the other kinds of cultural material considered in English departments. That is pleasure’ . By acknowledging this pleasure, not in a hedonistic fashion, but couching it within a knowledge of God as Creator, we participate as the image-bearers of God as emissaries of the Word.
Literature engages our sympathetic imagination. As we study story, we learn more of God, the master storyteller and through an unfolding of narrative, our imagination is opened. Reading also exposes us to many worldviews vastly different from our own and thus brings us face-to-face with the other; being motivated by the good news of Christ, we are not quick to judge but instead are quick to bestow compassion on the broken, confused and misguided. Reading then initiates repercussions for ethical thinking and ethical action. As we begin to understand what life looks like from another perspective and as our imaginations are opened to these possibilities, we are able to remove our cultural lenses to instead see with the mind of Christ. Reflections in the classroom, by opening our imagination to another point of view, prepares us to ‘go into all the world and make disciples of men’, not because we are better than them, but that we are like them – we are ‘those who dwelt in a land of deep darkness’ and because ‘on them has light shined’ (Isa. 9:2), we cannot help but give ‘reason for the hope that is in [us]’ (I Pet. 3:15).
