I read a little piece by Mark Galli on Christian Education on Christianity Today. The primary point, as I read it, is that a major problem within Christian education programs in the church today is the wide influence of classroom practices in the secular educational system that are imbued with an objectivist, mechanistic understanding of things that is at odds with the subjective, experiential nature of Christianity. There are two points to be made here. One, the notion of an objectivist education - which is another expression of “value-free” - is a false notion in and of itself. The problem therefore, is a lack of philosophical grounding in the educational system for policy makers to understand the values that are mediated through an educational system. Second, that it is perhaps the failing of Christian education stemming from its roots in the evangelical tradition that relies too much on the experience of faith at the expense of reasoning through it. Hence, Christian education lacks theological depth to pursue an understanding of faith.

It is true that the public school system teaches “facts” and does so with the notion of “objectivity” or even may use the term “value-free”. Such is the case with No Child Left Behind which increases the need for schools to teach our children those objective facts in order for them to succeed standardized competencies in “facts”. But the very notion of doing so “objectively” is not without value and so, contains an element of subjective authority over what this objectivity is. That is to say, the philosophical premise of public school is quite weak even though it is clear that no knowledge - even the most rigorous of scientific findings - is without value and judgment of the observer having sway at some point in the investigation. Knowledge without value is blind at best and perhaps to state it more forcefully, cannot exist.

But with that stated, I do not want one to think that I am positing that there is no objectivity in science. Any scientist worth his or her salt would and should take great offense to such a conclusion! Rather, I am positing that the nature of objectivity as understood through such a mechanistic lens that imagines knowledge without a personal dimension that mediates it and by doing so makes it subjective is both misleading and quite absurd. One of Wittgenstein’s great contributions to philosophy and epistemology was that language in itself forms a limit and therefore conditions our thinking. Knowledge that is outside of the bounds of language is nonsensical or is unknown. If we can therefore only know something within those bounds and our “objective” knowledge is conditioned by all of the values and conditions mediated through our language, there must be a social, cultural and yes, subjective element to all knowledge. Perhaps more directly, Michael Polanyi calls this the “personal coefficient” wherein all knowledge must come from a person who articulates it. So to answer the question, if a tree falls in a forest and no one is there to hear it, does it make a noise? The proper answer is who really cares? If it remains a secret for eternity it simply does not matter if it happened (as the existentialist in me cries out).

The foil against secrets and secret knowledge is disclosure and revelation. The completion of the cycle of knowledge is then in articulation. All the while personal values and cultural values and norms are thrown about as visible as the billions of energy particles that course through our bodies every day from the very source of the universe. This is the nature of theory which works with observation in complementary relationship where each refines the other in a dance of precision. So science deals primarily with probabilities - many of which are so minute that a Vegas odds maker would have a field day. This can range in areas as unrelated as predicting the location of an atom to the toxicity of that prescription drug you just popped in your mouth this morning! So let that be a lesson for the postmodernist who is on Prozac…!

But on the other side, Christian education has had a bad history of Bible memorization and analogical application, without any real critical understanding of tradition or all of those forces that play a shaping role in how and why our children believe. The Christian faith in popular circles and on your local Barnes & Noble Christian Spirituality bookshelves usually boils down to a few basic and unreflective principles that are palatable, easy to market, and radically simplistic. While they may be true in essence, the education that ought to unpack them with depth of theological sophistication is quite typically dressed in the clothing of apologetics rather than critical theological engagement. (More on apologetics at a later date!) This is where the Campus Crusade comes in as a billboard example of this evangelistic philosophy that backs plenty of educational materials if not in actual content, in the kind of content that it mediates (WWJD? anyone?). Here the Christian faith boils down to Four Spiritual Laws:

1. God loves you and offers a wonderful plan for your life. (John 3:16, John 10:10)
2. Man is sinful and separated from God. Therefore, he cannot know and experience God’s love and plan for his life. (Romans 3:23, Romans 6:23)
3. Jesus Christ is God’s only provision for man’s sin. Through Him you can know and experience God’s love and plan for your life. (Romans 5:8, I Corinthians 15:3-6, John 14:6)
4. We must individually receive Jesus Christ as Savior and Lord; then we can know and experience God’s love and plan for our lives. (John 1:12, Ephesians 2:8,9, John 3:18, Revelation 3:20)

http://www.crusade.org/downloads/article/resources/4SpiritualLaws.pdf

What’s great about this is all I have to do is pray that and think that I really believe it, then ask for a pamphlet online to explain it and I am saved! Great! Of course, I still have no clue what I am saved from or why I need it. “Jesus loves me this I know, for the Bible tells me so”. As long as you believe it and experience it, it’s good enough. The irony is that the Crusade situates itself within academic environments all over the world with an almost antidotal function to the intellectual environment that this simplistic version of shrink-wrapped and sanitized, individual portioned Christianity offers students who would be corrupted by the liberalizing influences of higher education! It is as if thinking too much about the faith leads to idolatry or missing the point. Granted in some cases that may be true. But this idea works in contrasting opposition rather than cooperation to the environment in which it is situated. So much for Anselm’s aphorism “Faith seeking understanding”. When Karl Barth wrote his Church Dogmatics - undoubtedly the 20th Century’s most comprehensive systematic theology - he commented that it was essentially his reflection on what “Jesus loves me this I know, for the Bible tells me so” means. So while we don’t have to go as far as Barth, we should go further than Four (simple) Laws right?

What this understanding of Christianity does is pit the simple individual experience of belief against the intellectual pursuit of unpacking what the experience means not only for the individual, but for the world. While faith like a child is good for a time, we need to grow up too. Paul, the first missionary of the Gospel and the impetus for the expansion of Christianity surely did not stop with four simple laws, but unpacked the faith and his experience of it in thoughtful and heartfelt messages to various audiences in very different soil in which the early church found its germination. It is therefore quite strange that those messages are so often wrapped into individual bite sized samples for the apologetical mission of would-be thinkers of the church in the popular evangelical circuit. I wonder what Christ would have done with the metaphor of the Costco sample-sized version of faith that is distributed as an individual exploration that has absolutely nothing to say about love of neighbor?

The truth is that this easy to swallow morsel of experiential and radically individualized faith has firm and deep roots in the fields of American evangelicalism dating back to the First Great Awakening through the Second, through the Scopes trial, and right up through the Christian Coalition, televangelism, and mega-church collusion of the Gospel and capitalism (where else can you get a Starbucks latte with a scoop of Cherry Garcia after you finish hearing about how we need to love our neighbor and serve the world for Christ?). The failing of this project for the communication of the “narrow gate” about which Christ so vividly spoke is apparent in the news flash that Rick warren has begun a conversation about the plight of the orphan. The unborn agenda has largely been a political agenda cloaked in the garb of religion on one side and a religious goal cloaked in unbiased political conservativism on the other, that the status of the born child without a parent, again about which Jesus spoke so vividly, had been ignored by the same “pro-life” movement. This reveals the ultimate problem of theological vacuity in many evangelical circles. Schools like Wheaton and Calvin are poised to make more changes in this arena as they already have, but changing the system will be a very tough haul against such a massive corporate entity as the mega-church mentality of so many thousands of evangelicals and fundamentalists.

Ironically, if there is any hope of an education that looks at both facts and connects them intimately with value to allow the learner to critically engage both in theoretical rigor - it is in religious education. But this must be a reflection on experience, and the experience of reflection on the change that such religious principles institute when integrated into the world in all of its vast riches of cultural and social diversity and inequalities. It must observe the realities of the world in the expanse of knowledge that other disciplines produce in their quest for objectivity as I have described it, and it must also examine its own mission objectively. This must be done with a far more solid theological foundation for it to survive with any integrity over the long haul.

But with that integrity must be a continual critical examination of itself. Thinking about God is not the same as God and so, our thinking about God must undergo the same scrutiny and rigor that blueprints for a bridge, the molecular structure of a drug, or a simple mathematical formula on a junior high school test. It is in this constant critical pressure that revelation occurs and the nature of God is incrementally disclosed to us through eternity. We will only get glimpses of it, but only as our minds wrestle with a being whose nature cannot be contained nor conform to the structures in the Bible, in science, and in theology that we construct and reconstruct through history.

The possibility of redemption that continually exists makes Christian education all the more sweeter. To say that we are living in a culture that has no values is as misleading as saying that we can know anything without values. Rather, we simply ignore the foundations and values upon which our values are formed and are lead into myth of blissful ignorance by even our religious structures that shape our knowledge. So we move about unaware like fish are to water or birds are to air. Faith seeking understanding and science in search of objective reality are up against the same thing - the limited nature of the human mind to comprehend all of reality at the same time. But if we keep our eyes on the gradual disclosure of truth as it occurs through eternity in our midst, and in the pressures of critical reflection, we can at least catch a glimpse of whose image in which we were created.