Foundational Issues in Christian Education

An Introduction in Evangelical Perspective

Pazmiño, Robert W.

• Publisher: Baker Academic
• Year: 2008
• ISBN:
  9781441211255
• Edition: 3
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

For almost twenty years, Foundational Issues in Christian Education has been a key text for many Christian education courses. Its perceptive analysis coupled with clear writing make it a resource without peer. In the book, Christian education expert Robert Pazmiño guides readers through a comprehensive discussion of the interdisciplinary foundations of Christian education, calling all Christian educators to reevaluate the fundamentals of their discipline. "A careful exploration of foundations, " writes Pazmiño, "is essential before specifying principles and guidelines for practice." This updated edition includes interaction with professional developments over the past ten years and appendixes that assess the impact of postmodernism as an educational philosophy. In addition, each chapter includes "points to ponder" for personal reflection or classroom use.

1

Biblical Foundations

To think responsibly about and practice education from a distinctly evangelical theological position, Christians, and in particular Christian educators, must carefully examine the biblical foundations for Christian education. Scripture is the essential source for understanding distinctively Christian elements in education. Therefore, it is crucial that the Christian educator’s thoughts and practices be guided by God’s revealed truths as he or she seeks to be obedient to Christ in the task of education. Christians are subject to a confusing plurality of educational theories in contemporary society. In such a situation, the exploration of biblical foundations provides an essential standard for judging education. The examination of these foundations does not result in a sterile or rigid theory and practice, devoid of diversity and creativity. Rather, Christian education patterned on biblical foundations provides for a dynamic and diverse educational experience.

Several foundations can be identified in both the Old and the New Testaments. These biblical sources provide models or approaches even at the basic level of a commonsense reading of the text. All educators have models or approaches that guide their thought and practice. In most cases, these models remain unexamined. The challenge for Christians is to examine their models for education, to make them explicit, and to undergird them with biblical foundations. The models suggested by various biblical foundations provide guides with which to consider past, present, and future educational efforts. What follows is a sampling of foundations that must be elaborated by educators in various settings, making use of more extensive critical, canonical, and contextual studies.1

The Old Testament

The Old Testament provides a wide variety of historical and communal settings in which to explore the nature of teaching and learning within the faith community. The work of the Latin American educator Matías Preiswerk is particularly insightful in identifying the various agents who were engaged in education. They included prophets, priests and Levites, wise persons or sages, scribes and rabbis, along with the people themselves as a nation. Each educational agent had a distinct purpose, content, method, and institutional expression as summarized in table 1 below.2

TABLE 1
Education in the Old Testament
Focus on the Educational Agents

Beyond this summary, it is instructive to consider the particular emphases in major portions of the Hebrew Scripture, or Old Testament. The book of Deuteronomy stresses passing on the basic content and norms essential for the life of the faith community. Walter Brueggemann identifies this component of the Old Testament canon as the ethos of the Torah, the disclosure of that which is binding upon the faith community.3 In the Christian faith community, the evangelical heritage has stressed the transmission of these basics. Instruction in traditional and accepted ways or heritage provides continuity across the generations, especially in times of transition and change.4 The transformation made possible by the recovery of this heritage is described in Psalm 78 and the book of Nehemiah. New life and joy are experienced by the entire nation in returning to the source of their faith. The Wisdom literature embodies how the norms of faith relate to particular questions and issues of the day. Wisdom is required to relate faith demands to particular contexts. The counsel of wise persons guides the connection of faith to life. Brueggemann identifies this component of the Old Testament canon as logos, the discernment of practical wisdom for life that provides meaning and order.5 Finally, the words of the prophets explore the social dimension of faith and decry breaches in faithfulness both within and beyond the faith community. The prophets are the social educators of their times, and they disclose the passion of God with their timely words that confront and hopefully heal the nation and its leaders. Brueggemann calls this portion of the canon pathos, which brings disruption to the life of the faith community or nation in the service of justice and righteousness.6 One additional element identified and not emphasized by Brueggemann, but of significance for the formation of faith, is the place of doxology, the place of praise and joy that denotes the embrace of believers by God and their embrace of God.7 Each of these portions of Scripture is instructive for educational thought and practice in contemporary contexts.

The Book of Deuteronomy

Within the Torah, the book of Deuteronomy stands out as one that outlines the norms for the faith community to follow and teach to the rising generations. In Deuteronomy 6:1–2, 4–9, Moses is described as exhorting the people of Israel to remember God’s activities in their history, to teach God’s commands, and, above all, to love, fear, and serve God:

These are the commands, decrees and laws the LORD your God directed me to teach you to observe in the land that you are crossing the Jordan to possess, so that you, your children and their children after them may fear the LORD your God as long as you live by keeping all his decrees and commands that I give you, and so that you may enjoy long life.

Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God, the LORD is one. Love the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength. These commandments that I give you today are to be upon your hearts. Impress them on your children. Talk about them when you sit at home and when you walk along the road, when you lie down and when you get up. Tie them as symbols on your hands and bind them on your foreheads. Write them on the doorframes of your houses and on your gates.

Moses’s teaching called the believing community to relate their faith in God to all of life. This passage from Deuteronomy provides insights about the goals, the teacher, the student, the content, and the setting of biblical education.8

The educational mandate of Deuteronomy 6:4–9 requires passing on the commandments of God to the next generation. Its ultimate goal is to foster the love of God expressed in loyalty and obedience. To love God is to answer to a unique claim (6:4), to be obedient (11:1–22; 30:20), to keep God’s commandments (10:12; 11:1, 22; 19:9), to heed them and to hear God’s voice (11:13; 30:16), and to serve (10:12; 11:1, 13). In each of these passages, the word love refers to obedience from the heart involving all of one’s being.9 Jesus echoes this relationship between love and obedience in John 14:15: “If you love me, you will obey what I command.”

The love of God is expressed in obedience to God’s commandments and in giving oneself wholly (heart, soul, mind, and strength). Teaching is to be incisive in challenging hearers to such a total life response to God characterized by heartfelt devotion. This teaching was the particular responsibility of parents, yet this goal has significance for all forms of education.

In the ultimate sense, God is the teacher in biblical education. God is the author and discloser of all truth, and both teachers and students alike stand under this truth. God calls teachers and students to understand, grow in, and obey God’s revealed Word. In this passage and throughout the biblical record, teachers are responsible as stewards and proclaimers of God’s truth. This truth can be communicated in a variety of ways, always involving a relational dimension. A relationship of love, trust, openness, honesty, acceptance, caring, support, forgiveness, correction, and affirmation is to characterize interactions between teachers and students.10 Teachers, like parents, are called upon to model the love of God, which they hope to encourage students to follow.

Through the teaching and example of the teacher, the student is called to understanding, growth, and obedience in relation to God’s revealed Word. While the teacher is encouraged to diligently and incisively teach, it is assumed that the student will be open and willing to receive this instruction. Other passages of Scripture, in particular the book of Proverbs, provide clear injunctions for children to be attentive to the instruction of their parents. The teachers in the context of Jewish life were primarily the parents, and Deuteronomy 6 therefore focuses on this primary role. But this perspective has implications for other educational relationships beyond the home, as was the case in postexilic synagogue schools.

The essential content of biblical education in Deuteronomy 6 is the commandments, decrees, and laws of God that Moses was directed to teach. But this content is vitally related to the whole of life. The content of God’s revelation is to be taught or impressed upon students, to be talked about at various times, to be tied and bound upon one’s body, and to be written in public and readily observed locations. Truth is to be integrated into all of life and is to affect the moment-to-moment and day-to-day existence of the people of God. This content is both foundational and radical. It is foundational in providing the basic truth and structure on which all else must be built. It is radical in providing the roots from which all life is nourished or affected. Thus both stability and growth are assured to the extent that the content of education is based on God’s revelation.

The setting for teaching described in this passage includes all those situations in which parents can impress upon their children the commandments of God. There are various occasions when this is to be done: when sitting at home, when walking along the road, when lying down, and when getting up. God’s commandments are to be present even as symbols on people’s hands and foreheads and the doorframes of houses and gates. The whole of life provides situations in which persons can be discipled and nurtured in the ways of God, recognizing that God is the ultimate teacher for humanity.

The primary focus in Deuteronomy 6 is parents and their essential role in education. Despite the multiplicity of educational influences today, parents are still the primary educators who actively or passively determine what influences their children. The challenge is for the Christian church to equip parents for their roles as ministers and educators in their homes and to assist them in the choice of other educational influences in the lives of their children. Parents need the support and guidance of leaders in their faith communities.

In Deuteronomy 6, Moses exhorts the people of Israel to remember and to teach. The context for this teaching is the home, in which persons learn to relate their faith in God to all of life. Because of the contemporary tendency to compartmentalize life, faith is often relegated to those limited occasions when one is involved in church-related activities, typically confined to a few hours on Sunday mornings. The book of Deuteronomy demonstrates that faith in God is related to all of life. Wherever faithful persons interact, there is an occasion for Christian education—provided this interaction is deliberate, systematic, and sustained.11

Education entails conscious planning, implementing, and evaluating of educational experiences. Intentionality in Christian education involves the effort to share biblical content, to grapple with its implications for life, and to suggest avenues for appropriate response. A similar point is emphasized in James 2:14–17. This approach has been advocated by Lawrence O. Richards, whose conceptions have clarified the place of nonformal and informal aspects of education.12 Richards largely depends on a socialization or enculturation model for education that focuses on education for life.13

Richards assumes that the values of formal education will be implicitly addressed in the Christian community; however, it is clear that these values must be planned in educational ministries that enable persons to move beyond a community norm, in a prophetic sense, as well as nurturing them in the ways of a particular community. Prophetic education calls persons and communities to be accountable to biblical norms and demands at points where sin, injustice, and oppression are evident, where the life of the home or nurturing community is critiqued rather than affirmed. These two foci—affirmation and critique—are patterned after the blessings and warnings of God’s covenant (see Deuteronomy 27–28) with all humanity. These foci are implied in Deuteronomy 6, which emphasizes attentiveness to God’s commands and parental instruction.

Affirmation and critique are as essential in today’s contexts as they were in biblical times. Thus, while a family or community may faithfully pass on to the next generation the truth of God through its socialization and enculturation processes, this transmission may also at key points need correction and reorientation. Formal education can often serve as a vehicle for correction and reorientation of the efforts of a particular home or community. Likewise, a particular home or community may minister to an agency of formal education, such as when parents take an active role in the policies and goals of a Sunday, private, or public school.

Deuteronomy 3...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Introduction
• 1. Biblical Foundations
• 2. Theological Foundations
• 3. Philosophical Foundations
• 4. Historical Foundations
• 5. Sociological Foundations
• 6. Psychological Foundations
• 7. Curricular Foundations
• Appendix A: Singing the Lord’s Song in a Foreign Land— Proclaiming Truth in a Postmodern Setting
• Appendix B: Crossing over to Postmodernity— Educational Invitations
• Postscript
• Select Bibliography