Jesus Christ, Learning Teacher

Where Theology and Pedagogy Meet

Mark Chater

• Publisher: SCM Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780334059707
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

The Christian presence in education has never been more controversial. While some secularists oppose any form of religious involvement in schools or universities, some Christians also wonder why the churches are there. Conflicting narratives surround the purpose of Christian involvement in education. Yet at the heart of Christianity stands an educator, whose passion and resurrection can be understood afresh as learning.But what does it mean to say that Jesus was a teacher? If he was a good teacher, was he also a learner? Is today's Christian church learning? Can educators help the church to recover a 'learning Christ' who places learning at the heart of the Godhead and the church? How could the Christian churches take the educational significance of Jesus more seriously?Christian teachers often find themselves divided between a professional discourse on learning and making progress, and a theological vocabulary which they do not fully own, connecting only sporadically with their professional identity. This book helps educators to treat their teacher identity as a theological resource, rather than an obstacle, and in so doing to discover new insights on Christ which can be of relevance to the wider church and its mission.

Part I: First born

1. A teacher looks at Jesus: Baggage and biography

Introduction

Why would a teacher, whose lifelong career has been in education, attempt to write a work of Christology? This particular teacher has a bachelor degree in theology and a doctorate in theology and education, but has published no academic theology and is not a New Testament scholar. Mainly what I bring to Christology is a set of questions that a Christian educator asks. The aetiology of those questions is autobiographical, and in as much as this chapter contains aspects of personal memory, this is not so much because of any intrinsic interest in my life story. It is more because of an intention to demonstrate how an educator regards theology, and how a Christian educator brings a particular and perhaps unexpected hermeneutic to the task of understanding and following Christ.

In looking at Jesus we all have hermeneutical baggage, which may become either a burden or a gift. That was what Milan Machovec, in his groundbreaking A Marxist Looks at Jesus,1 a book I read as an undergraduate, taught me; it was as much about method in theology as it was about content. Later, work such as Kelly Brown Douglas’s The Black Christ2 and Marcella Althaus-Reid’s feminist and queer hermeneutics in Indecent Theology3 added to the tradition of bringing a particular identity to the study of Jesus – bringing it into the classroom, counting it as an enrichment of method, rather than being required to leave it outside in some doubtful attempt at the highly contestable notion of objectivity.

A teacher’s baggage is as particular as anyone else’s. Here is mine.

Some cognitive strands of Christian identity

Like most Christians, I do not consciously remember my own baptism. Despite its seismic significance in re-creating me as a child of God, participating in Christ’s death and resurrection, and inducting me on my first steps as a member of his church, nothing at all of the actual event stays with me. The certificate in my files is a cold record for such a vital event. In so far as I carry around any baptismal thoughts, they are related to the ritual I’ve seen countless times as an adult, for which I’ve helped to prepare parents, and witnessed being administered to their children. My own children, and the children of members of the parishes I’ve belonged to, are heirs of a ritual that I too received; they go through the same portal, and in so doing bring to mind the door that was opened to me. The identity conferred on them confirms mine. My understanding of baptism grew through their experience of it, not directly through my own.

In the middle-of-the-road Church of England parishes of my childhood and adolescence, the hymns we sang taught me a strange thing. Those that stirred me most deeply were ‘Immortal, invisible’, closely followed by ‘O worship the King, all glorious above’. Others in my juvenile ecclesiastical hit parade included ‘Lord enthroned in heavenly splendour’. What I have slowly realized throughout my Christian life is that those hymns all have in common a rich theological language coupled with a poetic restraint, a treading-around who God might be, that is sometimes called the via negativa or apophatic theology. The hymns achieve this through a number of stylistic mannerisms: by singing of what God is not, or by dwelling on how it is impossible for us to see God directly, or by heaping associated glory on that which is proximate to God, because God’s self cannot be glimpsed or described. Yet the language is not facile: the focus is still on God, not on how we feel about God.

As a child, singing the limits of human knowing, I was gazing right into the divine mystery. The power of the apophatic – ‘measureless might, ineffable love’,4 ‘though the lowliest form doth veil thee’5 – drew me ever more deeply into the mystery, as if it were a drama. And the colourful language lavished on the proximates – ‘his chariots of wrath the deep thunder clouds form, and dark is his path on the wings of the storm’,6 ‘stricken rock with streaming side’7 – paradoxically hid the divine splendour while also enabling me to intuit why it was hidden, yet still sense it. The metaphorical language, even when elaborate, was never a barrier. I did not understand the metaphors cognitively, and felt no need to. They exercised a gravitational pull towards a mysterious, enthralling, beautiful centre. In cultural terms I owe my lifelong desire for Christ to the poets and composers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and to the clergy who selected their hymns Sunday after Sunday.

There were daily and weekly religious routines set by my parents, both of them middle-class lay people. My mother taught me the words of prayers – the Our Father and the General Confession. My father wept in church sometimes, quietly, particularly on Good Fridays. I watched their sincere and unassuming faith practice, which they both kept up all their life, and observed it deepening as they reached old age. They could laugh gently over the church’s foibles, and they could be hurt when it let them down. They had some theological questions – the problem of evil came up regularly – but no theological language and no formal theological education. They relied mainly on institutions and formulas, but were no less genuine for it, and no less profound. The spiritual debt I owe them is for their lifelong habits of unashamed piety and their loving tolerance.

The other key influence was my aunt and godmother, who took the family’s middle-class Anglicanism and transplanted it in African soil – or, better, rediscovered and redefined it there. For 60 years she lived as a member of an African Christian community in Zimbabwe. The four prolonged visits I made there, between the ages of 18 and 55, gave me religious experiences of strangeness and familiarity. The liturgy and hymns were English, the language and way of singing was Shona, the spirituality Catholic and ancestral. In that (to me) strange culture I found the familiar convictions both revealed and occluded, the jewel of faith turning in her hand and glinting with new lights.

I experienced baptism long before I understood it; I rejoiced in treading the via negativa long before I knew what the words meant or how the language was formed; I sensed my parents’ untutored faith and followed their routines long before I studied it academically or lived it existentially; and I glimpsed how culture lays a palimpsest over religious insight, now disclosing, now effacing. Because of this experience, I am grateful to all the adults – the pastors, composers, educators, and my family – who have given me substantial theology and have held back from trying to tell me everything. The adults around me, including in parish and school, exercised that self-restraint with fidelity. The trust they placed in the power of rich language and repeated ritual, their poetic delicacy in pointing to a mystery without presuming to define it neatly, and above all their trusting in time, life experience and divine providence to guide me along, now seem to be hallmarks of rich, responsible and respectful theological education in practice. On the whole, they avoided the twin mistakes of condescension – making it all too simple, too nice, too child-centred – and overexplanation – attempting to explain and qualify every ritual act, every puzzling text. Others have been less fortunate than me: those twin mistakes are very visible in many contemporary churches and schools.

Only twice have I embraced theologies of absolute certainty. Both occasions were intense conversion experiences, once in my late teens to evangelicalism, the other in my late twenties to Roman Catholicism. On both occasions the spell of certainty was short-lived, as the questions and ambiguities came crowding back in, like old friends seeking to reconnect with me, clamouring to enrich and complicate my life. Those two periods of certainty now seem like inoculations: today, whenever I visit a church or meet a Christian wrapped in their own certainty, I find little to attract me and much to cause alarm. Other than those times, my Christian life has been one of incremental revelation: learning, forgetting, learning again a little more deeply; moving through cycles of arrogance and humility; having my angle of vision shifted by infinitesimal nudges, so that I would see a text or a ritual differently – a cycle made of small steps, very familiar to educators,8 and also to mystics.9

Over time, I have learnt that God in Christ is both knowable and unknowable to us: a state of affairs described in Jewish and Christian Scripture.10 In the same way, any good teacher is both clear and opaque to learners. This, I think, is how we are drawn onwards. The only way by which theology moves and people receive new revelations is by learning. Revelation can change learning but cannot bypass it.

Christian and teacher identity

That theology is one tangled skein, in which the beginnings and endings are hard to find and the journey full of twists and knots, has been a repeated lesson. Reading the Bible as a teenager, it was so easy to latch on to a sentence and act out a mono-focal relationship to that bit of text, for fear of endless confusion. At the very edge of my vision, prodding but never speaking, was a question that I could not even articulate: how does all this fit together? How does grace fit with sin? How do miracles and the kingdom make a difference here, now? The questions did occasionally throw me off course; what brought me back was ritual, habit, and later submitting to the disciplinary yoke of theology.

Theology at university gave me the gift of applying questions in an organized way and knowing that others had been there before. I knew that fundamentalist certainty had nothing more to give me when I heard its exponents pitying me for studying theology and warning me that it might damage my faith. In doing so they had played a card that revealed the weakness of their hand. In God’s dispensation, the complexities of theology, the perils of trying to understand, no matter how frightening they might be, could never separate us from the love of God.

That skein had a subtle unity that kept slipping into and out of view. In my final year, some fellow students and I were by then on friendly enough terms with a few of our tutors to be able to discuss theology informally with them, and one evening we met up over a drink. Our faculty of theology was then divided into five departments: Old Testament, New Testament, ecclesiastical history, systematic theology, and practical theology with Christian ethics. It was a deeply conventional arrangement, long since reorganized (this was the early 1980s). In our studies we imbibed mainly from systematic theology and ecclesiastical history, but in our spare time we read liberation theology: feminist, Latino, and emerging black and queer theologies. We wanted to ask our tutors: how is it that we learn about the social dimensions of the kingdom in Christian ethics? Why do we not learn about them in systematic theology and church history? How is it that we learn about the uses and misuses of Scripture in practical theology, instead of encountering them as hermeneutical problems in Old and New Testament? Essentially we were asking for a liberationist reconstruction of theology, enacted through a reorganization of the faculty. It was a perfectly amicable discussion. One of our tutors said, ‘I agree with you’, but then, ‘It will never happen’. That evening I learnt something about the theological structures that exist inside the minds of Christians, and how difficult it is to question the structures in the academy or the church, let alone cha...

Table of contents

• Title page
• Copyright information
• Contents
• Dedication
• Acknowledgements
• Foreword
• Introduction: Jesus Christ, learning teacher – is that even possible?
• Part I: First born
• 1. A teacher looks at Jesus: Baggage and biography
• 2. A teacher looks at the church: Hermeneutics and education
• 3. The dance of theology and pedagogy
• 4. Getting to know him
• Part 2: Learning teacher
• 5. The other side of you: The risen Christ as trickster teacher
• 6. Go and learn the meaning of the words: The roots and formation of a teacher
• 7. You have heard it said: A teacher of hermeneutics
• 8. Destroy this temple: The significance of location in Jesus’ teaching
• 9. The lesson that fails: Was Matthew’s Jesus a good teacher?
• 10. How shall we picture the kingdom? Reflections on a critical incident
• 11. Now at last you are speaking clearly: John’s Jesus as a teacher of light
• Part 3: How our hearts burned within us
• 12. Writing an educational Christ
• 13. Teaching as sacrament of salvation
• 14. Towards an educational economy of the Trinity and the church
• Postscript and proposals: Where pedagogy and theology meet