Teaching Theology

Successful or Useful?

Success is attractive. It is a “suitcase” word which is packed with different content by those who use it but its general use is with a reference to us – how others and society perceive us.

As the job of theological educator has become professionalised, so has the temptation to think about personal success. With the training colleges drawing closer to academia in society and often gaining accreditation, our colleges are increasingly looking like two storey houses, with the bottom floor the old Christian training college and the top floor, built on more recently, of secular higher education architecture. And it is the top floor which is increasingly setting the attitudes for those living and working in the house. Professionalism is fine as a commitment to skilful work, but when it holds out to us a “career” in which we can succeed or the status of a social class to which we can belong – success in the world – then it is a far cry from the apostles who were happy to be counted as the “scum of the earth” so long as they were useful.

Usefulness has a different focus, outside of ourselves, on others – not what they think of us but how they benefit from us.

I know the argument that the desire for usefulness is also selfish because it imparts significance to our lives. This is often present when we try to be useful but all our actions arise from a bundle of motives and our job is to keep the right ones on top. The fact remains that the desire for success has a focus primarily for ourselves and usefulness primarily for others.

For the theological teacher, usefulness is an ellipse, formed around two foci – usefulness to God and usefulness to our students. If this sounds too individual, we can add usefulness to the college but it is the duty of leadership to ensure that usefulness to God and the students coincides with usefulness to the college. If it manifestly does not, it is hard to keep a happy staff. To be useful to God is to ensure that our calling is exercised in such a way that it is of maximum impact for the kingdom. This involves a number of careful decisions as to how and where we exercise our ministry of teaching, which we may not yet have consciously taken.

To be useful to our students is also not a straightforward matter. It is certainly more than giving them good information about theologians and their views so they can pass exams. At its best, it is teaching them how to live as Christian human beings and as ministers of the gospel in a complicated world – by word, example and humble companionship.

I hope you found this useful.

Bad Students

Church history is full of bad theological students who went on to do good things for the kingdom. David Brainard, missionary to the North American Indians, was dismissed from Yale College in 1739. David Livingstone, the missionary explorer, was the subject of an unfavourable report from the informal academy of Rev. Richard Cecil of Ongar, where he was sent for residential training and the London Missionary Society sent him back for more work in 1839. Gratton Guiness, the great revivalist preacher and founder of the UK Bible College movement did not complete his course at New College, St. John’s Wood, London in the 1850s. And there are many more.

Why are bad students bad? Some are bad for bad reasons, some for good reasons and most for a combination of the two. Sometimes the fault is as much in the system as the student. Maybe a student is pushed into an academic level or mode he or she is not suited for, or which they consider will not prepare them for their future. They could then become fearful and lose heart – and even occasionally resort to forms of plagiarism to keep up. Or the rules structure of the college may be so all pervasive that the naturally rebellious find it hard to live within all its un-necessary elements. Where there are faults on both sides, as guardians of the college side, it is hard for us not to rest all the blame on the student.

Sometimes it is just a matter of timing in a person’s life. Maybe a student is not yet ready to make the sort of commitments needed, but these will come later. Some years ago, it was very moving for me to receive a past student into my principal’s office, who came back simply to apologise for the sort of student he had been while at college. He was right to apologise, he caused me grief, but now he is in a very useful work for God.

There are many other reasons why students are problems to us. So how should we behave towards them? Firstly, we cannot condone wrong doing, it must always be pointed out clearly – and often it must have consequences. Secondly, we need to create, as far as possible, a safe atmosphere in the college, where students can make their mistakes and mess up, even sin, in a forgiving environment. A place where humble people are on hand to pick them up when they fall and set them on the way again. Let them have their falls now at college. After all, there are plenty of situations in Christian service which are not as forgiving or caring. Thirdly, we need to believe in redemption as well as teaching it in the doctrine classes. This means we practice mercy and patience whenever possible. Of course, occasionally a bad apple has to be removed from the barrel, but students change, they are at the most changeable time in their lives, and they change when someone believes in them and gives them a second chance.

Mercy and patience are the marks of God’s dealings with us all. Patience is a fruit of the spirit and, as our Lord said, blessed are the merciful for they shall obtain mercy.

Beautiful Lectures

Our fathers (and theirs before them) generally had two criteria to judge theological lecturing -“is it true?” and “Is it useful?” But that this is not enough. Your lecturing may well be true and useful, but is it beautiful? (Happily, I ask the question about our lecturing not ourselves.)

Beauty, in fact, is a hard concept to get hold of. David Hume said that beauty is a power in things to afford us pleasure. So you sink into a hot bath and say “Ahhhh that’s beautiful!” Unfortunately our present evil world has taught us that people can, and often do, derive pleasure from some very unbeautiful ideas and acts. In any case, pleasure is often confined to our moods. For a student in love even the worst lecture is beautiful. For a student who has a bad cold, the best lecture is pretty ugly. Yet lectures should be so delivered that they are a pleasure to take.

Emmanuel Kant tried to take beauty out of the subjective sphere. He said that beauty is a recognition of form and design which is in some way universal, and dis-interested – not linked to your special interest in, or possession of, a beautiful thing. If that is true, there is something wrong with you as a student if you do not find my lecture beautiful. It all sounds a little presumptuous for the lecturer to take such an attitude but the form and structure of our lectures should be right and good.

But beauty is not just subjective and objective, it is also local or cultural. Fattening houses used to be popular in Nigeria, where I worked for some years. Before they married, young women would go there to eat and lie around so that they would become beautifully fat for their wedding. Slimming clinics perform the opposite function for women preparing for marriage in England. So what would be a beautiful lecture in Africa may be an ugly one in New York and visa versa. And a lecture that fits our generation’s culture may well be un-necessarily ugly to today’s youth culture which our students inhabit.

Can lectures be beautiful? I think they must be but mostly in the deepest meaning of beauty. There is a strong Franciscan tradition of seeing beauty and encountering God at the same time. God is the source of all beauty because beauty is a part of his image stamped on what he has made. Beauty that God has made in nature or beauty that man has made because God has made man that way – such as in art or music – is an encounter with God and His beauty.

So what is a beautiful lecture? At its lowest level there could be a pleasing of the student, a beauty in its architecture can also be attractive. It can be culturally appropriate. A deeper beauty can be seen in the coherence of ideas. A lecture can be beautifully Christian when it expresses the concerns of God and brings pleasure to his heart and any Christian heart. The deepest beauty, however, like all beauty, is when it brings us into the presence of God. We lecture about God, not just with him listening in (a difficult enough thought in itself) but also with attention to God and with focussing the attention of the students on God’s presence. That will always be a beautiful lecture.

David Livingstone made three missionary journeys in Africa. On his first and happiest he wrote in his diary, “missionaries ought to cultivate a taste for the beautiful”. So should lecturers.

Teaching is Ministry

Jesus is not the best model for theological educators today. Of course, he is the peerless example of holiness, prayer, humility and many other vital issues for theological educators. He also called the disciples whom he taught, his “friends” and that close, involved, yet hierarchical, relationship needs to be explored for our role with students. But he asked them to become his disciples and we need to ask our students to become disciples not of ourselves but another. He adopted, with modifications, the current model of education, that of the rabbi, so he may well be a good example of critical contextualisation into our contemporary educational system but we do not need to wander the land in sandals with twelve students. Above all, although he was a human being, he was not a sinful fallible human being like us and it is this very factor which is vital for the way we do theological education, think of ourselves and relate to our students.

So where do we get a biblical model? I suggest it is the gift of “teacher” to the church. Paul lists this gift as third after apostles and prophets. James advises that not many should enter this role since those who do will be judged with greater strictness. Above all, we see in the life of Paul, a good example of how the teaching ministry of Jesus can be interpreted into the situation of a fallible sinful human seeking to bless the church by the exercise of his ministry.

Once we see that theological education is fundamentally a form of ministry to God’s church and Paul is a good example of that ministry, whole new vistas open up to us. Immediately we see that Paul was deeply emotionally involved with those he ministered to. He speaks of tears and groans and joy – and occasional anger. He used his experiences of the Christian life, both positive and negative, in his teaching. He followed his Lord in giving not just truths but his “very self” to those he taught. He had a strong pastoral care for them and felt responsible for presenting them to Christ as formed believers. He warned against falsehood as damaging to their souls. If then, like Jesus, we choose to work within the contextual model of education of our day where we can, it must be on the understanding that the concept of Christian ministry has to remain at the heart of our work and challenge that secular model where necessary.

In case all this sounds too heavy, let us remember that Paul does not supply the only model. There is also the biblical picture of the “teacher” in Ecclesiastes who reminds us that we should not get too carried away with the meaningfulness of our work, but relax and enjoy it – and all the humanness of our life which the Lord has given us to live under the sun.

Reading the Wrong Books

Theological educators are great readers. Books are the tools of our trade. We collect them, read them and often write them. They are status symbols, they impress students by filling our shelves and our lectures. We may not be better Christians but we have read so much more than our students. Yet perhaps we read the wrong books or, more precisely, we don’t read enough of the “wrong” books.

For us, the “wrong” books are often those which are outside our subject area. Who can keep up with the books coming out on Old Testament or Missiology today? And so we feel a pang of guilt if we read from elsewhere. Then there are the “wrong” books which come from a different ecclesiological tradition, outside our comfort zone and which, if we read them, would cause un-wanted stimulation to tangential thinking.

Here is a small list of books that meet both these criteria of “wrongness”. They are not in your subject area (but in the area of your calling to teach) and they are from a variety of traditions. Enjoy! If you put these authors together in a room they would probably have a mighty argument and I am certainly not suggesting agreement with what they say, only stimulation and enrichment for you and your students. Isn’t that enough?

Simone Weil, Waiting on God. Weil (1909-1943) was a French philosopher, mystic and activist. Her essay on education in this book talks about how both study and prayer partake of the idea of attention. “It is the part played by Joy in our studies that makes them a preparation for spiritual life”[1]

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Life Together. Bonhoeffer (1906-1945) was a German Lutheran innovative theologian, killed by the Nazis. His little book is about the community of a theological college and explains how it is built not on immediate relationships (I like you, you like me) but on mediate relationships (I am in Christ, you are in Christ).[2]

Parker Palmer, To Know as We are Known. Palmer (1939-) is a North American Quaker educationalist. He says that his little book is on the “spirituality of education” and “the community of truth”.[3] It is very moving.

Martin Buber, I and Thou. Buber (1878-1965) was an Austrian Jewish philosopher . His book is almost a poem – to relationships as the basis of reality. Teaching then is a relationship between you and people (and ultimately God) not you and things.[4] Most other assertions we want to make about teaching follow from that.

Jean LeClercq, The Love of Learning and the Desire for God. LeClerq (1911-1993) was a Benedictine mediaevalist. His careful scholarship draws the comparison between mediaeval scholastic theology and monastic theology. The second is related to spiritual formation, is a different kind of reading of the text and involves contemplation.[5] The relevance for today’s theological educator is startling.

Why not use the comment facility below this post to add one or two books (right or wrong!) which have stimulated your thinking?

Many lecturers today powerpoint their subjects to an early grave. They then shovel in a few podcasts, You Tube video clips, websites, an interactive CD or two and press the earth down with the module’s Facebook page.

What is wrong with the use of modern technology in teaching? Nothing at all, of course but, if we imagine that the use of the technology is good teaching itself and that, if we use it, we are good teachers, it is a disaster. Technology can add 10 to 20% to the teaching experience, It can subtract 80% if relied on to do the job. After all, good teaching had been around for a few thousand years before Bill Gates founded Microsoft.

This is now beginning to be widely understood. As the enthusiasm for the new tools dies down, articles are appearing distinguishing them from good teaching. We are now clearer that they will not make bad teaching good, that they will make good teaching a little better and that they are in danger of drowning good teaching in our classrooms.

What is a lecture? I am sure we can agree that it is not primarily information transfer. That can be done more effectively in other ways. And we are all happily beyond the “schooling” approach to theology, or any other subject, where the students collect the information in lectures and return it to us in the exams. We must also agree that it is not a performance. There is drama. We are, in a way, actors in front of an audience, but this is very much a sub-plot in the process. Yet some lecturers so load the lecture with dramatic graphics and sounds that the students are mostly entertained.

A good lecture is a giving of yourself – and your relationship with the subject – to your students. Then, as they trust your reality, they form a bond with the ideas – and hopefully, a deeper bond with your God. I remember a lecture we received once from a university teaching unit on how to give a good lecture. The lecturer used all the tools – sound clips, videos, flashing powerpoint slides rushing in from the right and the left. She had come to help us be better technicians but she did not sit on the edge of the desk, talk face to face, eye to eye, about what was in her heart.

Our job in the classroom is to build relationships – between us and the students, the students and the subject and the students and God himself. It is to inspire, provoke, argue, share yourself, lead them up the garden path and then show them the safe way back, get them to love as you love. My best classes have generally been sitting round a table and a subject with students. My best moments have been when a student says “Yes, but..” or when a smile appears on a student’s face because he or she has suddenly connected with me and the issue before us.

That is teaching, with or without the toys. It happened quite a lot in Galilee.

Laughter is a funny thing.

It is a good communication tool; it relieves pressure and relaxes the listener. C.H. Spurgeon once explained to his students how he used humour in the pulpit to get his point across. He said that if you try to force open a live oyster or clam you may well not succeed. What you need to do is tickle the edge of the shell and when it opens, you stick the knife in. Humour relaxes the mind to accept the truth

But someone might say that humour is inappropriate to theology. Theology is a serious matter and so it excludes laughter. But there is nothing more serious than humour. Theology needs laughter because laughter is a sign of theology’s humanity. Only humans laugh. Dictators and fanatics have no sense of humour because they have lost much of their humanity and regard themselves to be God-like. Laughter was banned from medieval monasticism, quite logically, because many monks drew a dichotomy between being human and being spiritual.

And, of course, Jesus laughed. Can you imagine how the crowd in Judea fell about laughing when Jesus described the Pharisees carefully removing gnats from their wine and swallowing whole camels without noticing? And do you imagine that there was not a smile on the face of our Lord when he said it? As Sherwood Elliot Wirt says, to deny laughter to Jesus is to be theologically unsound because you cannot have a person who is fully human without laughter.[1]

Bernard Ramm writing of Karl Barth, entitles one of his chapters “The Laughing Barth”. He writes, “Humour in theology serves the function of reminding every theologian that he or she is a human being performing a very human task”.[2] There is a fundamental distinction between theology and the Word of God. I will not laugh at the Word of God. It is divine and perfect. But my definition of the infallibility of Scripture will not be infallible. The way in which I talk about the divinity of Christ will not be divine. For all the help of the Holy Spirit and the blessing of knowing what others have done before me, I create theology as a human being and so open it up to that characteristic human response, laughter.

To be frank, some of our divisions and furious theological contests are laughable. One of the best things you can say to some theological lecturers these days is “loosen up”, “be real”, “smile a little more”, “you’re only human.” You students will thank you for it.

Nothing could be more fundamental for theological education but I know of no writings on the subject.

Excitement is somewhere between awe and fun, sharing characteristics of both but transcending each. It is a joyous agitation of spirit caused by God and truth on the one hand and possibilities on the other. It is at the root of theological education because good theological education only occurs when a student and a teacher form a relationship which acts as a bridge between them. Excitement – about God, ideas and truth, and about what can be done for God in this world – is the primary “goods and services” which passes across the bridge (in both directions).

Just as in missiology, the “Three Selfs” formula became a tired way of describing missiology because everyone claimed it whether they were doing good or bad mission, so the “three objectives” formula of theological education – that our aim is for the students to grow spiritually, academically and in practical service – has become tired and meaningless because of its current fog-inducing universality.  A key, perhaps the key, marker of excellence is not any of these things, it is excitement. Without this, theological education is inadequate. It passes on a distorted view of God, truth and the world, and is not worthy of its great themes. Accrediting agencies need to go beyond paper pushing and look above all for excitement.

So what implants the deep excitement and what triggers the surface enthusiasm? Here I must become more personal. For me there have been two things, ideas and people. We need to get excited about God and ideas related to Him and mission for Him – theology. If not, we should look for another job. And we need to get excited as teachers by the possibility of forming a bond with our students that becomes a vehicle for blessing them and influencing their lives and future ministry. To throw the stone in the pond that ripples out across God’s church as those they minister to, minister to others.

Surely we can be excited about that.

When you come to think of it, the coffee break in a theological college or seminary is a strange thing. We call a halt to lecturing and training the future leaders of the churches in order for us all to imbibe a drug together, and then resume our activities.

Coffee breaks seem to have begun in the USA early in the 20th century as part of the improvement in working conditions in factories and first had the name “coffee break” attached to them around 1952 when a coffee company used the phrase “give yourself a Coffee Break” in advertising. At some stage, the practice must have transferred across to theological schools, possibly via the universities, so now it is an almost universal practice.

In the minds of the teaching staff, a coffee break generally performs a refreshing function for the students – increased blood sugar levels, caffeine acting as a neuro-transmitter and a short rest for tired brains, all make for more attention in the next few lectures. But the student see the social function of the coffee break as paramount. The formal structure of interaction in the lecture room gives way to the more attractive informal chat and bonding over coffee, which is at least as important to them as academics.

But is there a more intimate connection between beverages and theology? (please take what follows with a small pinch of salt).

In the Reformation era, it was common for theologians to drink wine or beer. Luther was famous for his beer froth on the table at Marburg, Calvin was partly paid by the city of Geneva in wine for his cellar and many of the first batch of English reformers used to meet at the White Horse Inn in Cambridge. They wrote a type of theology which was deeply concerned with the fundamental issues, the big ideas of theology.

In the last few hundred years, the total abstinence movement in North America, UK and a few places on the continent has meant that the usual beverage for theologians, when they are on their own and when they meet in theological seminaries, conferences, etc. is no longer alcohol, but coffee.

Has this affected the nature of the theology done? Does the mind of someone who has drunk an alcoholic drink tend to concentrate on the big ideas and a mind affected by caffeine tends to make fine distinctions – preferring the trees to the wood?

Actually, Christian theologians were comparatively late in discovering the blessings of coffee in their calling. Below is a poem from the Arabic dated around 1511 in Mecca. I found it while browsing a book on the history of coffee houses (The Penny Universities) in the British Library a few years ago. It says all that needs to be said…….

“O coffee, thou dost dispel all cares,
Thou art the object of desire to the scholar.
This is the beverage of the friends of God;
It gives health to those in its service,
Who strive after wisdom.”

Maybe there is a case for coffee times interspersed by lecture breaks.