For a number of reasons that I don't need to get into here, I am still finishing up some work from the Fall semester, but I will be done that by the middle of this month. And that's good, because tomorrow is the first official day of the Spring semester (and my final semester) here at Reformed Theological Seminary. In May, I'll be graduating with a Master of Arts in Theological Studies. Normally a two-year degree, I have spread it out over three. But it really is hard to believe that almost three years have gone already.

I'm looking forward to this semester. I will have two classes on campus, and two virtual classes. They are listed below, the first two being the ones I am taking on campus.

• Educational Ministry of the Church
• Exposition of Hebrews
• Systematic Theology IV (Ecclesiology and Sacraments)
• History of Missions

It will be a relatively light semester, which is good, because these next few months also require me to try and figure out what we will be doing come May. I've made mention of our plans a number of times on the old blog, and I have started to get in touch with some different people and make some contacts to get things rolling. To reiterate, what I am looking for is a position in a church where I could be involved with the educational and teaching ministry. Needless to say, it's both exciting and a little stressful. We could be in for some big changes in the middle of this year. But God has continually shown His faithfulness to us and we trust His leading. We can't wait to see what He has in store for us next.

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I really like how John Frame, in his The Doctrine of the Christian Life, calls Deuteronomy 6:6-9 the "great charter of Christian education." The verses read:

And these words that I command to you today shall be on your heart. You shall teach them diligently to your children, and shall talk of them when you sit in your house, and when you walk by the way, and when you lie down, and when you rise. You shall bind them as a sign on your hand, an they shall be as frontlets between your eyes. You shall write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates.

The point here—and one that is pervasive throughout Scripture—is that the Word of God is to give shape to our whole lives and our whole being. That, too, is to be the focus of Christian education. And that is why education is something more than just the imparting of objective knowledge. Education is formation.

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As I have been reading Desiring the Kingdom, author Jamie Smith has continued to provoke me to thought with his insights. Earlier, I quoted a portion of the introduction, which had pointed to some of the questions he was setting out to answer in the book. On page 68, Smith speaks briefly about Charles Taylor's notion of the "social imaginary" (discussed in Taylor's book, A Secular Age), and then talks about how that notion can help the Christian worldview conversation. In many ways, I think this portion directly addresses some of his earlier questions.

The 'social imaginary' is an affective, noncognitive understanding of the world. It is described as an imaginary (rather than a theory) because it is fueled by the stuff of the imagination rather than the intellect: it is made up of, and embedded in, stories, narratives, myths, and icons. These visions capture our hearts and imaginations by 'lining' our imagination, as it were—providing us with frameworks of 'meaning' by which we make sense of our world and our calling in it. An irreducible understanding of the world resides in our intuitive, precognitive grasp of these stories.

Now, what does this have to do with a Christian worldview? I suggest that instead of thinking about worldview as a distinctly Christian 'knowledge,' we should talk about a Christian 'social imaginary' that constitutes a distinctly Christian understanding of the world that is implicit in the practices of Christian worship. Discipleship and formation are less about erecting an edifice of Christian knowledge than they are a matter of developing a Christian know-how that intuitively 'understands' the world in the light of the fullness of the gospel. And insofar as an understanding is implicit in practice, the practices of Christian worship are crucial—the sine qua non—for developing a distinctly Christian understanding of the world. The practices of Christian worship are the analogue of biking around the neighborhood, absorbing an understanding of our environment that is precognitive and becomes inscribed in our adaptive unconscious.

What Smith means with the analogy of biking around the neighborhood is that when we live somewhere, we become intimately familiar with it such that we can make our way around it and to specific destinations without even really thinking about where we are going. Another analogy could be the unconscious way we operate a car with a manual transmission after years of doing it.

Smith's caution against the concept of worldview becoming too intellectual is one I am familiar with, and I think is helpful. The aim of worldview education is the transformation of the whole person; however, there is a tendency for it to get bogged down in thought and conversation. Smith is entirely right to recognize that worship (not just our public worship on Sunday) plays an integral part—in fact, it may even be the crucial part—in forming an holistic understanding of the world.

We must look at the world through the lenses of the gospel, and that begins when our hearts are rightly ordered. What we worship shapes our hearts, dictates what we love, and fosters that intuitive know-how we operate from as we make our way through the world. That Smith should point out how important it is that education be aware of this is not surprising.

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On Monday, I walked into the bookstore and my eyes were immediately drawn to a new book on the shelf, Teaching the Faith, Forming the Faithful: A Biblical Vision for Education in the Church, by Gary A. Parrett and S. Steve Kang. I immediately grabbed it, scanned the back cover and the table of contents, and rather impulsively purchased it.

There is a lot to say about educational ministry in the local church. Most important, perhaps, is its declining influence. Quite a lot of churches have done away with extensive educational programs for any number of reasons, and these programs have been replaced by others aimed at things like "spiritual formation." Perhaps it is unconscious, but this fosters a sharp dichotomy between the two when, in fact, they go hand in hand. I do plan on returning to this topic more extensively here in the coming months, because it is one that I am especially passionate about. Also, as I'm considering seeking out a position in which I can be involved in that sort of ministry on a vocational level, I am frequently reflecting on it.

But for now, I just wanted to share this small portion from the first few pages of the book. Parrett and Kang begin their discussion by narrowing in on what they think should be the guiding motif or central part of a church's educational ministry. They use this brief story to illustrate:

Some years back, New Testament scholar Gordon Fee was sitting with other attendees at a workshop about the power of story. The speaker was Eugene Peterson, his faculty colleague. Peterson mentioned an episode in which his four-year-old grandson jumped onto his lap and demanded, "Grandpa, tell me a story, and put me in it." Upon hearing this account, Fee began to weep, overwhelmed by the fact that this is precisely what God has done for all of us. God is unfolding the great Story, and he has invited us to take our places in that story.

This great story into which God has invited us...is the grand drama of redemption and reconciliation. Growing in our understanding of the Story, and of our places in it, is critical for teaching and formation in the Church.

This echoes very closely something I quoted from Robert Webber a few months ago. The point of education in the context of the local church is not simply that members would download the necessary information they need to be saved, or to be able to explain various points of theology, or to answer the arguments of atheists (recall Jamie Smith's discussion on what education is all about). Instead, the goal of the church's education is one of formation, teaching those who belong to the church what it means to inhabit God's story and what it looks like to think and live rooted in that story. God has told us a story, and we are in it.

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As I was browsing some recent books the other day, I noticed one called Education for Human Flourishing, a recent book by Paul D. Spears and Steven R. Loomis. It attempts to lay out a thoroughly Christian philosophy of education in response to the pervasive pragmatism of modern education. In the preface, they discuss the urgent need for us to rethink how we do education. We are thrown into the educational system at a very early age, the authors write, and because of the structure of that system,

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As someone who plans to be involved in education, this bit from Jamie Smith's latest book, Desiring the Kindgom, is music to my ears.

What is education for? And more specifically, what is at stake in a distinctively Christian education? What does the qualifier Christian mean when appended to education? It is usually understood that education is about ideas and information (though it is also too often routinely reduced to credentialing for a career and viewed as a ticket to a job). And so distinctively Christian education is understood to be about Christian ideas—which usually requires a defense of the importance of "the life of the mind." On this account, the goal of a Christian education is the development of a Christian perspective, or more commonly now, a Christian worldview, which is taken to be a system of Christian beliefs, ideas, and doctrines.

But what if this line of thinking gets off on the wrong foot? What if education, including higher education, is not primarily about the absorption of ideas and information, but about the formation of hearts and desires? What if we began by appreciating how education not only gets into our head but also (and more fundamentally) grabs us by the gut—what the New Testament refers to as kardia, "the heart"? What if education was primarily concerned with shaping our hopes and passions—our visions of the "the good life"—and not merely about the dissemination of data and information as inputs to our thinking? What if the primary work of education was the transforming of our imagination rather than the saturation of our intellect? And what if this had as much to do with our bodies as with our minds?

What if education wasn't first and foremost about what we know, but about what we love? (17-18)

The copy of the book I have right now is from the library, but having read the introduction and a bit of the first chapter, I am convinced that it needs to be on my shelf.

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You might recall a post a few months ago with some tips and advice on reading from Gideon Strauss. I'm revisiting the reading tips again today, and these present tips concern those sorts of books which you may choose to mark up, those which you may have to read for school or just think are worth the time and effort to really delve into. Today's advice comes from the late Mortimer J. Adler (via Steve Bishop).

There are all kinds of devices for marking a book intelligently and fruitfully. Here’s the way I do it:

• Underlining (or highlighting): of major points, of important or forceful statements.
• Vertical lines at the margin: to emphasize a statement already underlined.
• Star, asterisk, or other doo-dad at the margin: to be used sparingly, to emphasize the ten or twenty most important statements in the book. (You may want to fold the bottom comer of each page on which you use such marks. It won’t hurt the sturdy paper on which most modern books are printed, and you will be able take the book off the shelf at any time and, by opening it at the folded-corner page, refresh your recollection of the book.)
• Numbers in the margin: to indicate the sequence of points the author makes in developing a single argument.
• Numbers of other pages in the margin: to indicate where else in the book the author made points relevant to the point marked; to tie up the ideas in a book, which, though they may be separated by many pages, belong together.
• Circling or highlighting of key words or phrases.
• Writing in the margin, or at the top or bottom of the page, for the sake of: recording questions (and perhaps answers) which a passage raised in your mind; reducing a complicated discussion to a simple statement; recording the sequence of major points right through the books. I use the end-papers at the back of the book to make a personal index of the author’s points in the order of their appearance.

The front end-papers are to me the most important. Some people reserve them for a fancy bookplate. I reserve them for fancy thinking. After I have finished reading the book and making my personal index on the back end-papers, I turn to the front and try to outline the book, not page by page or point by point (I’ve already done that at the back), but as an integrated structure, with a basic unity and an order of parts. This outline is, to me, the measure of my understanding of the work.

Given that I'm a seminary student and have to work my way through a lot of different books, I found these tips especially helpful. It is always good to have your own system for marking up a book, something that works for you. I employ a lot of the same techniques Adler does, my weapons of choice being a 0.7mm mechanical pencil and a small ruler for underlining. I know some people are averse to marking up books, but I'm not. When I open the book and right away see certain things underlined or the various notes in the margins, I begin to quickly recollect the information I thought important on the pages.

Also, earlier today James K. A. Smith was asked some questions about reading which he posted on his blog. Be sure to check those out as well because he offers some good advice derived from his own reading habits.

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Just a couple weeks remain before I begin my final year of study at Reformed Theological Seminary. It’s hard to believe it’s gone by so quickly. Among other things, this means I have had to start giving some serious thought to what will happen in May of 2010 after I graduate.

Initially, my plans were to immediately transition into a doctoral program in historical theology, looking at ecclesiological developments in the Reformation or post-Reformation period. However, over these last few months as I have been doing some reading and research to try and figure out more specifically what I would like to study within that broad field, I have found myself overwhelmed by the amount of material out there. This, along with a number of other factors, has led me to realize that at this point I am rather unprepared to go on to this level of study. I need some more time to do some focused reading and research in preparation, and so am postponing going this route for a few years.

What does that mean for now, then? I will be looking for work in the interim. More specifically, I’m looking to do some sort of vocational ministry work for the next few years. There are a couple of reasons for this. First, before I decided to go the academic route, I had planned on going into pastoral ministry. In the past while, however, based on the advice of others and plenty of thought on my part, I have come to think that perhaps I should spend some time doing ministry in a church context before I make a definitive decision not to pursue that long-term. Additionally, many students of theology will tell you that the best teachers they had were pastors at one point.

Second, I have been involved in the educational ministry at our local church and have thoroughly enjoyed serving in that role. So much so, in fact, that if I could find a position with a title like “Pastor of Educational Ministries,” I would probably jump at the chance. Except for the fact that I am not from a Missouri Synod Lutheran Church, this position sounds like it would be absolutely ideal for me. I might tweak one or two things, but I could see myself fitting very comfortably into a role like that.

And so that’s where we stand right now. While Robin and I like the idea of having things planned out and everything set in place, we are a bit adventurous at the same time and seem to thrive when things are uncertain. Although we don’t have any idea right now where we’ll be headed next year, we are confident that God will again show us the path He would have us go down, and we’re excited to see where it will lead. We are not committed to any city or country, and want to make ourselves available to wherever He would use us. To that end, we are open to going almost anywhere.

That being said, I’ve begun to keep my eyes and ears open for any possibilities and opportunities that are out there, although I am really venturing into uncharted territory here. Nonetheless, it will be exciting to see what unfolds this year. Over the next few months I’ll begin compiling a resume/CV, which I will post here along with some more information about me. Also (and perhaps this is more for those of you who know me), if you happen to hear of anything you think might interest me, please don’t hesitate to contact me.

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One section of James K. A. Smith's book, The Devil Reads Derrida, is a collection of essays on the university, entitled "Schools of Faith." The title underscores Smith's recognition of the fact that any educational institution communicates a worldview and is shaped by a certain religious orientation.

The modern American university, Smith says, is every bit as religious as those institutions which intentionally declare themselves as such. These other institutions operate on the false principle that they are educating objectively, with the assumption that the secular is neutral and non-religious. This, of course, is impossible; "indeed, one could suggest that much that goes under the banner of 'secular' education is, in fact, a kind of religious formation where students are initiated into a particular worldview" (56). In the case of the secular institution, this means education reflects the secular commitments of the market and political liberalism, among others.

What this fosters is the mindset that students are consumers. As a defining characteristic of Western culture, Smith argues, this consumerist mentality filters its way into every part of our life such that even our educational institutions become agents in the process of consuming "goods" and "skills," which are intended solely for the benefit of the individual and his or her happiness.

There is another way, however, that does not focus on consuming goods and skills, but acquiring them, a distinction Smith employs to emphasize that acquisition of these things is ultimately for the sake of others—to be used in service to God and for the good of our neighbors. Here is where a liberal arts education is so important.

The scandal of the liberal arts education is that it's not about giving people what they want. It's about challenging the wants themselves, and ultimately to form and direct those wants and desires otherwise. My task is to invite students to radically reconsider their wants. The professor's task is not to politely and meekly ask, 'Can I help you find what you're looking for?' Rather, I want to challenge students by asking: 'Why would you be looking for that?' A liberal arts education—and especially a Christian liberal arts education—should come as a shock to those whose habits have been shaped by a culture of consumerism. This is because the liberal arts are about the formation of students, and the central task of formation runs deeply counter to the egocentric stance fostered by consumerism. The very notion of 'formation' calls into question the autonomy at the heart of consumerism (42).

Referencing the modal theory of Dutch philosopher Herman Dooyeweerd, Smith goes on to make the point that the university needs to operate according to its leading function or aspect, and raises the question of whether or not "the paradigm of student-as-consumer indicate[s] that the college is unwittingly letting a secondary, economic aspect trump our leading aspect of education, formation, and research" (44). The answer, of course, is quite clear. And so, Smith concludes,

while students are here to acquire habits, skills, and wisdom, this does not make them 'consumers' or customers. As an institution focused on the task of education, we are not providing a 'commodity.' And having a unique identity does not just translate into being a 'brand.' In fact, the task of a distinctively Christian liberal arts education is to create a community of people formed to resist and challenge the reductionism of a market-driven culture. To the extent that we do that, we will be faithful to our calling (45).

Any thoughts on this?

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James K. A. Smith's new book, The Devil Reads Derrida, grabs you immediately—not only is it shod in a can't-turn-your-eyes-away red, but it bears a provocative title that compels you to drop whatever you're doing, pick it up, and scan the table of contents.

That is just how I reacted when I walked into the RTS Bookstore some time ago and saw it on the shelf of new featured items. At this point, I've only read the introduction and the first chapter, but it looks as if there will be lots of great material in this little volume; certainly some good material on which to blog.

Smith makes his overarching theme known within the first few pages of the introduction. Christian scholarship, he contends, is something done in public—that is, it is ultimately done in service to the Church, for the purposes of discipleship. When academics withdraw into the scholarly world, and the roads they travel never intersect with the laity, the latter will begin to look for wisdom and guidance wherever they can find it.

His intention, following the lead of Richard Mouw, is to work out of a hermeneutic of charity. He admittedly finds himself frustrated from time to time with "his people," the evangelical world, yet realizes that this is precisely the reason he can't withdraw from those circles even when he wants to. In his own words:

No matter how much I might disagree and be frustrated by their positions and interpretations, I know that above all my brothers and sisters want to be faithful disciples of Jesus. Even if I think they've bought into all sorts of questionable assumptions and causes; even if I think they've been co-opted by cynical political machines; even though I might think they've assimilated the worst sorts of cultural prejudices; even if I think God wants to invite them to 'higher' cultural passions—there is a sense in which I think they're just trying to make their way in the world the best they can. And if they've bought the paradigms sold to them by the voices on Christian radio that I think are problematic, then the burden is on me to show them otherwise. My responsibility is not to condescendingly look down upon them from my cushy ivory tower, but to take time to get out of the tower and speak to them—and, please note, learn from them. Christian scholars would do well to be slow to speak and quick to listen.

This hermeneutic of charity is not just romantic or utopian; in my experience, the wisdom of this stance has been confirmed. When I take the time to teach an adult Sunday School class, I find Christians who are hungry for wisdom. And though ultimately I might be trying to induce a paradigm shift in their thinking, hoping to basically de-program the way Christian radio has got them thinking about gender or justice, I find that so long as I begin from the assumption that we want to bring all of our thinking and doing under the Lordship of Christ and the light of the biblical narrative, my brothers and sisters are quite happy to hear a different take on their settled convictions—as long as it is offered in charity and humility, not with scolding and condescension (xv-xvi).

Reading this last night was refreshing; it was as if Smith was taking my own thoughts and neatly putting them in paragraph form. Next to glorifying God, the deepest desire I have is to take my abilities as an academic (well, that's rather audacious—perhaps an aspiring academic, or maybe a pseudo-academic) and use them in service to His people in order that they might come to know and serve Him better, and to love Him more. That is one of the reasons I love teaching the adult Sunday School at our local church, and why I see myself being involved in the educational ministry of the church for years to come.

Smith rightly points out that in the family of faith, there is no "us" and "them." It's only "us," bound together by the name of Jesus Christ. If those whom God has gifted with intellectual and academic abilities make primary use of their gifts outside of the Church, we can only expect churches full of people who lack wisdom and discernment.

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