Theology as a Way of Life

On Teaching and Learning the Christian Faith

Adam Neder

• Publisher: Baker Academic
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9780801098789
• eBook ISBN: 9781493419784
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Theology

What difference does Jesus Christ make for the way we teach the Christian faith?  If he is truly God and truly human, if he reveals God to us and us to ourselves, how might that shape our approach to teaching Christianity? Drawing on the work of Søren Kierkegaard, Karl Barth, and Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Adam Neder offers a clear and creative theological and spiritual reflection on the art of teaching the Christian faith. This engaging book provides a wealth of fresh theological insights and practical suggestions for anyone involved in teaching and learning Christianity.

1
Identity

Anthropology is the soul of pedagogy. Who we think our students are animates how we teach them. However conscious or unconscious, clear or ambiguous, coherent or incoherent, our working anthropology shapes our pedagogical goals and practices. As we seek to understand particular students, we draw on an understanding of human beings in general. This is no less true for teachers who reject the idea of human nature as such, since that too is rooted in a view of what human beings are. And yet at first glance, the question of what makes human beings human appears unanswerable. No two people are exactly alike. Each of us is distinguished by our differences, those collective differences are boundless, and it’s impossible to account for them all. The question of what unites us amid our differences runs the risk of generating answers too narrow to include everyone—an error with a long history of calamitous consequences. Furthermore, our rapidly expanding knowledge resists summary. From neuroscience to literature, psychology to economics, genetics to political science, we are awash with illuminating lenses through which to understand people. No single discipline—much less a single individual—is capable of synthesizing all the insights relevant to the construction of a comprehensive theory of the human person. There is always more to learn. And given our numerous limitations and biases, developing a broadly compelling theory seems impossible anyway. Thus teachers face an apparent dilemma: either we conclude that an adequate view of human nature cannot be constructed, or we prioritize a particular disciplinary perspective, even when that perspective cannot accommodate important or competing evidence. Neither option looks promising.

Karl Barth offers a revolutionary Christian response to this dilemma, one that informs more or less everything I say about teaching in this book. His basic thesis is that Jesus Christ is “the one Archimedean point given to us beyond humanity, and therefore the one possibility of discovering” what it means to be truly human.1 In other words, Jesus Christ is the key that unlocks the mystery of human nature. He is the true human being. In him we discover not only who God is but also who we are. As God “discloses himself to us, he also discloses us to ourselves.”2 This insight does not replace or compete with what we learn about humanity from other disciplines; Barth counsels us to welcome the contributions made by the various disciplines to our understanding of human life. Instead, his christological anthropology contextualizes that knowledge within a fundamental relationship. Whatever else turns out to be true about us, the relationship secured between God and humanity in Christ is the basic presupposition of human life. Human nature has no “independent signification” apart from this relationship.3

The church has always struggled to fully grasp this point. For all its strengths, the long history of Christian reflection on human nature is marked by a speculative tendency to look away from its center in Christ. While the concept of the image of God has dominated Christian reflection about what it means to be human, the numerous interpretations given to that phrase have rarely been consistently governed by the New Testament’s identification of Jesus Christ as himself the image of God, and they have often gone far beyond anything suggested in the Old Testament passages that use the phrase.4 Against this tendency, an anthropology rooted in Christ’s person and work offers resources for conceiving of the image of God—and the essential truth of humanity in general—not as a particular faculty, attribute, or set of attributes intrinsic to each individual person, but rather as a living relationship established by God in Christ, which includes everyone and into which everyone is called. Since that is a compressed and rather cryptic way of expressing this crucial point, I will now explain what I mean.

The Reality of Reconciliation

The New Testament describes the relationship God establishes with the world in Christ using a wealth of images and metaphors, among the most important of which is reconciliation (Greek katallage). While the word and related terms appear infrequently in the New Testament, their significance is nevertheless unmistakable. For example, Paul uses reconciliation language five times in 2 Corinthians 5:18–21—a passage that includes his magisterial assertion that “in Christ God was reconciling the world to himself” (v. 19). The word indicates the setting right of a relationship. God’s reconciliation of the world to himself in Christ is his decisive intervention against everything that impedes this relationship. Commenting on this verse, Barth writes that in Christ “the weakness and godlessness and sin and enmity of the world are shown to be a lie and objectively removed once and for all. And there, too, in Christ, the peace of the world with God, the turning of humanity to him, its friendship with God, is shown to be the truth and objectively confirmed once and for all.”5

But as one reflects on claims such as this, an important question begins to emerge. Is it true to say that the reconciliation Jesus Christ accomplished in his life, death, and resurrection is an “objective” reality? Did he really establish peace between God and humanity? Is that a fact that includes everyone—something that is true about each and every one of our students? Or did Jesus Christ make it only possible for people to be reconciled to God? Did he open a way to reconciliation that becomes real only when people respond to it appropriately? In other words, does our response make reconciliation a reality, or does the reality of reconciliation call forth our response? Our answers to these questions have far-reaching consequences, both for how we understand what it means to be human and for how we teach Christian theology.

Consider the three most important New Testament passages that bear upon this issue. As you read them, pay attention to whether they move from the possibility of right response to the reality of reconciliation, or from the reality of reconciliation to the possibility of right response.

Romans 5:6–11

For while we were still weak, at the right time Christ died for the ungodly. Indeed, rarely will anyone die for a righteous person—though perhaps for a good person someone might actually dare to die. But God proves his love for us in that while we still were sinners Christ died for us. Much more surely then, now that we have been justified by his blood, will we be saved through him from the wrath of God. For if while we were enemies, we were reconciled to God through the death of his Son, much more surely, having been reconciled, will we be saved by his life. But more than that, we even boast in God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have now received reconciliation.

Colossians 1:15–23

[Jesus Christ] is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation; for in him all things in heaven and on earth were created, things visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or powers—all things have been created through him and for him. He himself is before all things, and in him all things hold together. He is the head of the body, the church; he is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead, so that he might come to have first place in everything. For in him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell, and through him God was pleased to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, by making peace through the blood of his cross.

And you who were once estranged and hostile in mind, doing evil deeds, he has now reconciled in his fleshly body through death, so as to present you holy and blameless and irreproachable before him—provided that you continue securely established and steadfast in the faith, without shifting from the hope promised by the gospel that you heard, which has been proclaimed to every creature under heaven. I, Paul, became a servant of this gospel.

2 Corinthians 5:14–21

For the love of Christ urges us on, because we are convinced that one has died for all; therefore all have died. And he died for all, so that those who live might live no longer for themselves, but for him who died and was raised for them.

From now on, therefore, we regard no one from a human point of view; even though we once knew Christ from a human point of view, we know him no longer in that way. So if anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation: everything old has passed away; see, everything has become new! All this is from God, who reconciled us to himself through Chris...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Endorsements
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1. Identity
• 2. Knowledge
• 3. Ethos
• 4. Danger
• 5. Conversation
• Bibliography
• Index
• Back Cover