ACCS conference notes, part 2 (of 5)
Theological inquiry as delighting in what you already believe, the modern crisis of meaning is a crisis of glory
Post number two! This photo just before the honor choir this evening.
Did you know that when you try to slip out of a talk early, but one of your legs is asleep, it doesn’t work as well? It’s true.
Here we go.
Joe Rigney, "Anselm the Teacher: The Pursuit of Joy in Education"
Great talk, about joy-driven theological disputation.
Anselm's approach to theological reasoning:
Involved friendly disputation. Discussions and friendship with students is where many of the ideas were worked out.
Involved internal disputation - meditation. You are arguing with yourself, you anticipate objections and respond.
"In all his writings he appears on the field already the victor." He has already won the battle, now he wants to help you see it.
Involved divine disputation - prayer. Some of his books are presented as a prayer, probably because that's how the ideas actually came about.
God, teach me where and how to seek you, where and how to find you, he says. This is instructive for teachers. "Apart from me, you can do nothing."
Anselm views thinking over what God has said as essential. God will give you insight. But you don't just sit there waiting to be zapped. God reveals what is hidden through disputation.
If what I said was helpful, you should thank God, not me.
Anselm was bounded by a Biblical and confessional tradition.
He tried to reason, intentionally at times, just based on observations of the world. That can make Christians a little queasy, why are you ignoring the Bible? But he emphasized that he did not find anything from those observations contradictory to the fathers.
God created grain on the Earth, and that first grain gave seeds. In the same way, God gave revelations to his prophets, and that revelation is the "seeds" we work out to their full fruit.
There are three ways scripture can guide your thinking.
Scripture can just tell you something.
Scripture can authorize a conclusion because it does not deny or contradict it.
Scripture can contradict a conclusion, which makes it out of bounds no matter how much your logical reasoning seems to affirm it.
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But, within the tradition, Anselm is going to say more than has been said before. He isn't just a parrot. And he is permitted to expand with good reason:
The fathers were not able to say all they could have said.
The truth is so copious and profound that the fullness of it is inaccessible by mortals.
God keeps raising up new teachers and giving them gifts, clearly he intends something for them to do.
Scripture invites us to explore the reasons for our faith.
This is an encouragement for teachers as well, even those who think they aren't that good. You can say your thing. You can be faithful with what God has given. Say it another way, say it in other words.
Joy in the discovery that God is both the origin and the goal of theological inquiry.
Anselm wanted to explore the logical coherence of Christian doctrine.
The early fathers wanted to nourish those who already took delight in their faith.
If you have already accepted the truth, you want more of it.
We are not trying to arrive at faith through reason, but rather delight in what we already believe.
Anselm’s joy in theological discovery induced him to try to recreate that experience in readers but putting himself in their place. This Eureka moment already happened for me, how do I recreate it in others?
Louis Markos: “A teacher is just someone who loves to tell other people about what fascinates him.”
Anselm desired to recreate eucatastrophic moments for his students
This is why Anselm often writes in a disputational manner. Paul does the same in Romans, anticipating objections, putting them in the text, and replying to them.
Q&A is especially helpful, Anselm says, for slower intellects.
The only situation in which Anselm does not employ dialogue is when answering heretics. Then you drop the hammer. You don’t treat understanding as a happy journey you’re going on with others with heretics, that’s for friends.
All the above means three things for teachers.
One, the teacher is an artist. Anselm expresses fear to remark upon certain subject matters because they are so beautiful. We hate bad painters. He wants to do justice to a beautiful thing by how he talks about it.
Two, the teacher is a storyteller. Anselm emphasized that his writings needed to be read in a certain order. There was a sequence to the understanding. He was a storyteller.
Rigney mentioned that when he teaches a class, strangely, he doesn’t want to assign the books he has written. He wants to assign the books he read. He wants to create the narrative movement for his students. It’s better to take them on the long winding path than just give them the answers.
And three, Anselm loved faith seeking understanding. Faith is both the objective content of scripture, and our allegiance to it. Understanding is what we gain in life, the midway point between faith and sight (the beatific vision).
Teachers know they have mastered a subject when they can explain it to someone like they are five.
Andrew Kern, “Temple-Centered Teaching”
Do you remember Hamlet?
I have of late, (but wherefore I know not) lost all my mirth, forgone all custom of exercises; and indeed, it goes so heavily with my disposition; that this goodly frame the earth, seems to me a sterile promontory; this most excellent canopy the air, look you, this brave o'er hanging firmament, this majestical roof, fretted with golden fire: why, it appeareth no other thing to me, than a foul and pestilent congregation of vapours. What a piece of work is a man, How noble in reason, how infinite in faculty, In form and moving how express and admirable, In action how like an Angel, In apprehension how like a god, The beauty of the world, The paragon of animals. And yet to me, what is this quintessence of dust? Man delights not me…
This was written at a time when it was hard to be a thinking person. If you were born in 1500, you knew where you stood. Catholicism was everywhere. There was an agreed upon moral code. The world knew where it stood. The planets moved around the Earth. A man looking at the night sky could hear the music of the cosmos.
By 1600, that is gone. Your country (in England) is divided. Perhaps you have lost relatives to the plague (you have if you’re Shakespeare). The Copernican Revolution is underway. You don’t know where you’re located in the world.
Hamlet could be considered the first modern man. He has lost his place in the universe. His world is unstable, now where do I stand?
This is the situation our children are in now. We have a crisis of meaning. You’ll notice we don’t deliberate very well either, that’s sort of a derivative crisis. We don’t talk to each other well when we disagree.
The world doesn’t have meaning, so words don’t have meaning. Words are violence (so is silence). The only reason anybody ever speaks is to gain power over somebody else [hello governor Whitmer]. Grace gets you out of this, but they don’t believe in grace, so they’re stuck here.
It’s fascinating that some people are starting to realize that we need Christianity, even if it isn’t true (see Tom Holland’s book Dominion).
Other poets also conversed on this. John Donne:
And new philosophy calls all in doubt,
The element of fire is quite put out,
The sun is lost, and th'earth, and no man's wit
Can well direct him where to look for it.
And freely men confess that this world's spent
We are used now to this world being lost. “Freely men confess that this world’s spent.” Once upon a time we had faith, but all we hear now is the long withdrawing melancholy of faith.
Yeats, of course.
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world
A pop song in 1968 proclaimed that “this world has lost its glory”. That summarizes 400 years of Western thought. We actually have a glory crisis. Our Lord has been forgotten. Instead of building a temple, we’re trying to survive in a desert.
What do you do on D-Day, when bodies are exploding around you? How do you mentally survive that? For some people, D-Day is just a concentration of what they think reality really is. Life is Omaha Beach.
But we can see the sunrise in the morning, and it’s beautiful. Which world do we really live in? A world of meaningful bodies, or a world of meaninglessness where even the beautiful things will turn into monsters and destroy you.
The habits you develop are different in the two worlds. In the latter world, we’re just competing with each other and looking for ways to keep ourselves safe. That’s it.
Modern schooling is the application of the habits we’ve come to develop because we (think) we live in the latter world. Christian schooling is the habits from living in the other world.
Which of these worlds are you showing to your students? If the world is full of glory and they can see that glory, it will form a different set of habits in them.
You are the temple of the living God. Everything you look at is either a temple or patterned on the temple. We should be amazed by the humility of God. We live in a world where you can gain wisdom by watching an ant.
The temple is an archetypal form, it repeats itself everywhere. The pattern is established in heaven, as on Earth.
People owe you respect, because you are part of the divine image. But they won’t give it to you, so you should forgive them, also because you show the divine image.
We have forgotten that this world is a temple filled with temples, and that is why it has lost its glory.
In the Old Testament, you had the holy of holies. Around that was the holy place, with the bread of the presence, and candelabra. There were seven candlesticks, and God emphasizes to Moses, make sure the bulbs are on the front. God wants the light projecting forward, toward the twelve loaves.
The Lord commands Moses, tell Aaron when he blesses the people, to say “the Lord bless you and keep you, the Lord make his face to shin upon you and give you peace”. The candlesticks represent the light of his countenance. God says, I want my countenance to shine upon you.
The holy of holies was a place of participation (vicarious for most). The holy place was a place of engagement. The surrounding courtyard was a place of reasoning. You care about being forgiven because you’re conscious of sin.
The disciples of Jesus don’t say, “repent because you suck”. They say “repent because the kingdom of God is at hand”. A Jew hearing that might think, that’s awesome.
It’s fascinating that the people who tried really hard to think about the law rejected this repentance. Sinners wanted healing. They wanted to know, “there is hope for me”. Soldiers and prostitutes and tax collectors were asking for advice about how to live their lives.
What makes scientists scientists is that they see through all the classes and homework and testing and somehow see the glory of creation.
Everything that exists has within it a holy of holies, an inner mystery that we can never access. But from that shines forth a glory that we can see.
What happens when you see the glory in something? There is nothing like a mother looking into the eyes of her newborn child. It is a holy moment, one men have no access to. But we see the radiance of that glory.
If you see that glory, love follows. Your child already loves learning. They don’t love being told they’re learning something that they aren’t encountering.
Kern always wanted to teach a class that mixed biology and poetry. “I think that I shall never see, a poem as lovely as a tree.” Is that true? Well you have to see the glory in both and compare them.
You can’t really cultivate a love of “learning” because it isn’t really a thing. You need to talk about the target, the object.
Similarly, you won’t argue your children into the faith. But show your children the glory of the Lord, and love will follow.
I mistreat other people when I forget their glory.
Rational thought only follows love. Without love, we never think rationally. But once we start to think rationally, we begin to value it more than the love that gave birth to it.
Maybe (he hasn’t thought this through), maybe rational thought as we understand it is a consequence of the Fall. We sinned, and so now we have to think about it. Now we understand the difference between good and evil. Thanks.
Finally, out in the camp (outside the courtyard) is where all this gets super practical. Problems arise, there are serpents and scorpions, people step on you. But you cannot succeed out there if there is nobody on the throne in the holy of holies. There is no meaning out there if there is nobody on the throne.
THE END