Is It Good?: The New Testament Confronts “Christian” Education1

Richard M. Gamble

Christian education is about more than educating Christians, or Christians educating other people, or even pious instruction in Christian doctrine, practice, and history. Christian education is a distinctive kind of education, captive to the authority of Christ. To be worthy of the name, though, Christian education must also educate. The label "Christian" is not enough to ensure Christian education. If we meet the second condition but not the first, we end up with secular education masquerading under the wrong label. If we meet the first condition but not the second, we end up with Christian training, or Christian marketing, or Christian entertainment, or Christian therapy, but not Christian education. This is the same point C. S. Lewis made about Christianity and literature ("Christianity" 1-11). In his essay by that name, Lewis compared the language and values of modern literary criticism with the worldview of the New Testament. He detected, he wrote, "a disquieting contrast between the whole circle of ideas used in modern criticism and certain ideas recurrent in the New Testament." He found "a repugnance of atmospheres, a discordance of notes, an incompatibility of temperaments." Modern criticism exalts the "creative," with its "spontaneity," "freedom," "originality," and "genius." It condemns the "derivative," with its "convention," "rules," "conformity," and "discipline." The New Testament, however, is, in Lewis's words, "out of tune with the language of modern criticism." It places the unfashionable idea of imitation at the center of Christian formation. Believers are not called to become more and more authentically themselves, but to become more and more like someone else. They are derivative, not original. Disciples are reflections of the Master, not spontaneous and creative. "In the New Testament," Lewis continues, "the art of life itself is the art of imitation" ("Christianity" 3-7).

Lewis's concerns echo those expressed a century before by John Henry Newman in The Idea of a University. Newman lamented that among the intellectuals of his day "there is a demand for a reckless originality of thought, and a sparkling plausibility of argument"-"a sort of repetition of the 'Quid novi?' of the Areopagus." (xlvi). Newman referred, of course, to the Apostle Paul's encounter with the Athenian intelligentsia in Acts 17 who were always looking for something new. Newman feared that modernity's restless fascination with the new was at war with the cultivation of sound habits of mind, such as reflection, judgment, effort, and steadiness of vision.

Lewis's identification of the incongruity between the modern "circle of ideas" and the New Testament is broadly applicable to the Christian university's efforts to integrate faith and learning. Regrettably, much of the message of Christian higher education is "out of tune" with the language of the New Testament. In shameless imitation of C. S. Lewis, then, I offer four unfashionable words for reconsideration and rehabilitation in the discourse of Christian higher education: tradition, imitation, discipline, and formation.

Tradition (More than Innovation)

Contemporary Christian higher education operates to a surprising degree within the categories and assumptions of the Scientific Revolution, the Enlightenment, and Romanticism. Enlightenment thought dichotomizes linearly between tradition and progress, past and future, offering liberation from the oppressive authority of history. Christianity, in contrast, does not operate within this progressive paradigm. It dichotomizes not between tradition and progress but between bad tradition and good tradition, between the tradition that Jesus condemned and the tradition that Paul embraced, between the tradition that misleads, blinds, and falsely binds and the tradition that guides, enlightens, and properly obligates. We need to be guarded against the first kind of tradition and set back on the path of the second.

It may shock my fellow Protestants to discover that the New Testament affirms tradition. D. H. Williams, in his book Retrieving the Tradition and Renewing Evangelicalism, raises several points about tradition in the Church that apply broadly to Christian higher education. He subtitles his book "A Primer for Suspicious Protestants," and I would also like to provoke suspicious Protestant educators just a bit. Williams sees a crisis of discontinuity in the Church, and it is clear, at least to my mind, that the Christian university faces its own related crisis of discontinuity. Both are afflicted with amnesia (9). Churches and universities are efficiently administered, technologically advanced, innovative, slick, and entertaining, but they are disconnected from the past and tyrannized by the New (10-11). They seem obsessed with innovation. "Tradition" at worst is dismissed as narrow-minded, outmoded, and boring, and at best is used as one more marketing angle among many. Authentic tradition, however, requires a decision to remember, a deliberate participation in the activity of receiving and delivering. Williams cites the Apostle Paul's use of the word paradosis in II Thessalonians 2:15: "stand firm and hold on to the traditions we passed on to you." This is an emphatic demand. Paradosis "means a transmission from one party to another, an exchange of some sort, implying living subjects." In the New Testament's and early Church's use of the word, Williams continues, tradition was "not something dead handed down, but living being handed over" (35). Receiving and giving form one living fabric of obligation.

This pattern is familiar to us from Paul's description of the preaching of the gospel, his brief creedal affirmations, and especially his handling of the sacrament of the Lord's Supper (I Cor. 11:23, I Cor. 15:1-4, I Thes. 2:13). More than three centuries later, St. Augustine affirmed this continuity. In On Christian Doctrine, he asked, quoting I Corinthians 4:7, "What have we which we have not received? And if we have received, why do we glory as if we had not received it?" (7) As always, Augustine points us to the life of gratitude, a reminder that our posture toward tradition may be more of a moral question than an intellectual one. The Enlightenment presuppositions about the past and progress simply will not do as a model for Christian education. Mere forward movement through time proves nothing. The New Testament does not speak this language. Nevertheless, as David Martin writes in Tracts against the Times, "The field of education.feels the need to produce bogus innovation in order to show that it emulates the scientific paradigm; similarly so the Church. In this way the notion of passing on a good from generation to generation is undermined" (147).

In The Abolition of Man, Lewis asks us to ponder whether the present generation ought to have power over the past by rejecting the tradition that the past faithfully preserved (69-72). Similarly, ought the present generation also have power over the future by deciding on behalf of posterity to discard x or y from the tradition? Just because something is old does not mean it is good, but neither does it mean it is bad. We still need a principle of selection, but that is a topic for another paper. What I am asking for at this point is a posture toward tradition, a habit of mind that does not preemptively dismiss the past based on some misguided notion of progress. G. K. Chesterton's wisdom is helpful here. He writes:

The great intellectual tradition that comes down to us from Pythagoras and Plato was never interrupted or lost through such trifles as the sack of Rome, the triumph of Attila or all the barbarian invasions of the Dark Ages. It was only lost after the introduction of printing, the discovery of America, the founding of the Royal Society and all the enlightenment of the Renaissance and the modern world. It was there, if anywhere, that there was lost or impatiently snapped the long thin delicate thread that had descended from distant antiquity; the thread of that unusual human hobby; the habit of thinking. (58)

Imitation (More than Originality)

In the New Testament, tradition is wound together with imitation, my second word for rehabilitation. Imitation is so closely related to tradition that it is dealt with easily. Contrary to Romanticism's doctrines of originality and innovation, the New Testament unabashedly affirms imitation in a way that jars with modern presuppositions. It presents what could be called a chain of imitation. Paul exhorts the church at Corinth to imitate him and his ways (I Cor. 4:16-17) because Paul himself is an imitator of Christ (I Cor. 11:1). To the Ephesians Paul said, "Be imitators of God, therefore, as dearly loved children and live a life of love, just as Christ loved us." (Eph. 5:1-2).2 Paul presents himself as a pattern in greatest detail in his letter to the Philippians: "Whatever you have learned or received or heard from me, or seen in me-put it into practice" (Phil. 4:9a). He commends the Thessalonian Christians, "You became imitators of us and of the Lord; in spite of severe suffering, you welcomed the message with the joy given by the Holy Spirit" (I Thess. 1:6). Note the threading together of imitation with giving and receiving. The same grouping of tradition, receiving, and imitation also appears in II Thessalonians 3:6-7.

Imitation of Christ calls us away from imitation of the world. We are instructed not to be conformed to this world, but to be transformed but the renewal of our minds. Students with renewed minds, though, will be misfits and non-conformists. And this requires courage. They are to be the salt of the earth, and we need to make them as salty as possible. In his biography of Thomas Aquinas, Chesterton offers this advice: "[The saint] will generally be found restoring the world to sanity by exaggerating whatever the world neglects, which is by no means always the same element in every age" (5). "It is the paradox of history," he continues, "that each generation is converted by the saint who contradicts it most" (6). In a world awash in individualism, self-assertion, rule-breaking, and impatience with limits, Christians are called to a kind of conformity, called to be imitators of God, and of Christ, and of Paul, and of other believers (Hebrews 6:12).

Discipline (More than Spontaneity)

Tradition and imitation require models and patterns, and conformity to those models and patterns through discipline. In place of boundaries, rules, and mastery, modern education and the culture in general tend to emphasize untrammeled freedom, rule-breaking, and spontaneity. Advertising lures us to color outside the lines and to live without rules. Modern education values originality, self-expression, and assertiveness. As Lewis writes, modern education teaches students a habit of mind that is debunking, cynical, and shrewd (Abolition 32). I have heard Christian educators use the metaphors of demolition and the wrecking ball-and not in Paul's sense of pulling down strongholds of opposition to Christ but as a pedagogy of doubt, smugly tearing down authority as if the measure of the mature Christian mind is how little it believes and how much it doubts. Rather than the discipline of conformity to a pattern-requiring rigorous self-examination, deference to experience, and submission to criticism-students are taught to value spontaneity, unlimited free choice, and sovereign individualism.

How the Church obtained what David Martin calls "the ideology of the spontaneous and masterless self" is a question for a more capable scholar, but the implications of this ideology for Christian higher education are all around us. Primarily, it feeds into consumer sovereignty. Martin writes:

[The market model] assumes that the satisfaction of personal wants and desires is the only given: the customer is always right. In this model custom does not mean an accepted and understood mode of doing things but a regular demand. Customers habitually make demands and teachers supply them. After all, a salesman must never frustrate a customer. "Goods" are passed from one person to another rather than a "good" transmitted from one generation to another. (151)

[The market model] assumes that the satisfaction of personal wants and desires is the only given: the customer is always right. In this model custom does not mean an accepted and understood mode of doing things but a regular demand. Customers habitually make demands and teachers supply them. After all, a salesman must never frustrate a customer. "Goods" are passed from one person to another rather than a "good" transmitted from one generation to another. Such goods are not subjected to "quality control" by the salesman; his business is to minister humbly to assorted likes and dislikes. It is not for him even to enquire whether the assorted items go together or will cumulate into a coherent ensemble over time. (151)

Notice here once again the emphasis on passing on, on giving and receiving. A closer fit than the consumer model for the university, Martin argues, is the family or church:

Like a family it transmits a good by a prior act of qualitative judgment; like a church it takes a novice, tests his calling and socializes him into a rule of life. As in a the family there is a clear hierarchy of knowledge and experience which does not respond to demands but makes demands on those who desire to attain the good which is offered. (152)

We cannot escape the question of authority, and yet we have been shy about the inescapably prescriptive nature of education. Once again, Martin puts it well:

Only when most decisions have been made for students can most decisions be made by them. Thus authority precedes spontaneity. People who have exercised total freedom of choice from the beginning neither know the range of choice which has been open to them nor realize the range of things they have not become. Total openness leads to absolute closure. Moreover, they can easily suppose that the collection of bits and pieces which seemed initially to be relevant to their spontaneous desires provide an "education." Not to know what you are not is as bad as not knowing what you are. (152)

Without a guide and a destination, a pilgrimage becomes mere wandering. Without an architect and a blueprint, a building project becomes a folly for weekend warriors. Without a master craftsman, amateur dabblers never become artists. The Apostle Paul dares to speak of the captivity of our minds. We passionately defend academic freedom, and rightly so if it is defined properly and in the right context. But how many of us ever consider the greater demands of academic captivity? The New Testament requires humility and submission to the mind to Christ, our model, our pattern. We are called to be imitators.

Formation (More than Training)

Discipline is not an end in itself, however. To be disciplined in evil is evil. We are helping to shape students into something definite-although we have much trouble explaining to ourselves and others just what that something looks like and why we value it above other options. The culture, including most educational rhetoric and practice, favors the instrumental over the formative, insisting on what a student will do with an education rather than what a student will be. Many parents and students seem to insist on this justification. They are shocked to discover that anyone is antiquated or alien enough to think otherwise. Before our utilitarian age, however, the oratorical and philosophical traditions, as much as they disagreed with each other, agreed that education formed the soul and character. From Isocrates right down to a curmudgeon like Albert J. Nock, the advocates of education as formation have emphasized wisdom, judgment, sight and vision, patience, reflective habits of mind, and, as Mr. Chips says, proportion. The choice is not a false one between the active life and the contemplative life. In fact, the active always understood the need for the contemplative, and the contemplative for the active. Cicero, Seneca, Augustine, and Aquinas all desired the "mixed life" of the contemplatively active and the actively contemplative. The booming, busy life of mere doing denies both of these. Ruled by necessity, it values materialism, efficiency, practicality, skills, utility, and productivity. It values cleverness more than wisdom. But is there any way to integrate Christianity and cleverness?

An education that embraces a Baconian worldview of knowledge as power over nature-of busy doing-cannot integrate faith and learning. Preoccupied with control of externals, it neglects soul-formation. In The Abolition of Man, Lewis regrets this fascination with technique: "For the wise men of old the cardinal problem had been how to conform the soul to reality, and the solution had been knowledge, self-discipline, and virtue. For magic and applied science alike the problem is how to subdue reality to the wishes of men; the solution is a technique." (88).

Of more immediate concern is the careerist view of busyness, of getting and spending, that distracts students from contemplation of higher ends. No matter how often we read Bible verses at the start of class or include them on our syllabus, or pray, or talk about the application of Christian principles, to the degree that we promote busyness, we prevent the formation of reflection and judgment and the examined life. Instead, we generate the spiritual noise and distraction that blocks knowledge of self and knowledge of God, the ultimate purpose of education, the inescapable telos of authentic Christian higher education.

Conclusion

To the degree that Christian higher education adopts an open-ended search for truth, practices the pedagogy of doubt, embraces the cult of originality, pursues curricular and technological innovation for its own sake, treats students as customers, and tirelessly pursues the distracted life, it abandons a higher and harder calling, one more in harmony with Scripture. The more the culture values these things, the more the Christian professor is called to be countercultural. The integration of faith and learning requires the reintegration of Christian higher education with the vocabulary, values, and priorities of the New Testament. We need to recover the lost language of learning.

Too often, Christians worry more about being of out of tune or step with the world than with the New Testament. Christian education worries more about incongruity, dissonance, and incompatibility between itself and the world than between itself and the mind of Christ. Rather than "wiping the slate clean" in pursuit of an ever-receding future, or discovering the next hot trend, Christian administrators and faculty ought to be delivering unto others that which they themselves have received. Students at Christian universities are the inheritors of a tradition, ought to be initiated into a body of truth and practice, and ought to be taught to value conformity to Christ more than originality. The Christian educator ought to embody the attribute of Lewis's ideal Christian writer: "of every idea and of every method he will ask not 'Is it mine?', but 'Is it good?'" ("Christianity" 9).

Notes

1 An earlier version of this paper was delivered at the Baylor University Conference on "Christianity & the Soul of the University," Waco, Texas, March 24-27, 2004.

2 All Bible quotations in this article are from the NIV translation.

Works Cited

Augustine. On Christian Doctrine. Trans. D. W. Robertson, Jr. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1997.

The Bible. New International Version.

Chesterton, G. K. Saint Thomas Aquinas. New York: Image Books/Doubleday, 2001.

Lewis, C. S. The Abolition of Man, or Reflections on Education with Special Reference to the Teaching of English in the Upper Forms of Schools. New York: Macmillan, 1955.

_______. "Christianity and Literature." Christian Reflections. By C. S. Lewis. Ed. Walter Hooper. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1967. 1-11.

Martin, David. Tracts against the Times. Guildford, UK: Lutterworth Press, 1973.

Newman, John Henry. The Idea of a University. Ed. Martin J. Svaglic. Notre Dame, IN: U of Notre Dame P, 1982.

Williams, D. H. Retrieving the Tradition and Renewing Evangelicalism: A Primer for Suspicious Protestants. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1999.

RICHARD M. GAMBLE <Richard_Gamble@pba.edu> is Associate Professor of History at Palm Beach Atlantic University, where he also teaches in the Honors Program. He is the author of The War for Righteousness: Progressive Christianity, the Great War, and the Rise of the Messianic Nation (ISI Books, 2003). He has been a Visiting Scholar at St. Edmund's College, Cambridge University. His essays and reviews have appeared in The Journal of Southern History, Humanitas, and The Independent Review.