Holiness as a Liberal Art

Castelo

• Publisher: Pickwick Publications
• Year: 2012
• eBook ISBN: 9781621893974
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

Holiness is a topic that is rarely discussed in Christian colleges and seminaries, yet the rationale for the existence of these institutions is that they provide environments where people can grow into the image of Christ. In other words, these places exist so that Christians can grow in holiness. The essays collected in this volume treat the theme of holiness from a variety of theological disciplines, all with the purpose of disabusing Christians from mischaracterizations of the theme as well as offering a vision for what the Christian life could look like. In both simple and profound ways, holiness is a liberal art; it is the Christian way and shape of life.

1

Cultivating a Sanctified Way of Life

Introducing Holiness as a Liberal Art

Daniel Castelo

What is the point of Christian higher education? It is no secret that attending a Christian college or university1 is an expensive ordeal, especially when compared to a community college or state university, and so the question persists: What is the benefit of the Christian college experience? One suspects that both parents and students have their varied reasons for opting for this possibility, but I would argue that the point of Christian higher education is to make us better disciples of Christ, or to put it in more controversial terms, to help us grow in holiness. Several claims have to be unpacked and elaborated for this thesis to be sustained, but ultimately, the reason such places as Christian colleges and universities exist is so that we can grow in the calling that Christ has extended to us: to be his disciples and witnesses in a corrupt, broken, and hurting world.

Education as a Moral Enterprise

First of all, it is important to realize that education is a moral enterprise. Many scholars and institutions fail to recognize this point because it is a serious and controversial claim; after all, if education is morally forming then its appeal, as it is negotiated in our context, will be limited since it is not properly “value-free” and so generalizable to a wider, diverse public; however, despite the claims otherwise, there is no such thing as a non-formative, and so value-free, education. All pedagogies assume something about human beings, including what they are and what they are meant to be.2 In this regard, then, pedagogies are moral, not only in the way they operate (the descriptive factor) but also in what they see as worth inculcating and producing (the prescriptive element). “All education, whether acknowledged or not, is moral formation.”3

In our society, we tend to emphasize results or the bottom-line, and this perspective promotes a certain moral framework, one that assumes that what is good is what is monetarily profitable. And so, educational institutions are often pressured (especially as costs rise) to make a utilitarian case for the “product” they offer. The reasoning goes, “You ought to have something to show for all that time and money, so what can you do, and how can you earn a living with it?” Although all institutions of higher learning should take inventory of their processes and activities, this “bottom-line” approach just described is more appropriate for professional or trade schools; these places emphasize the development and mastery of certain skills so that people can in turn profit from the tendering of specific services.

Liberal arts colleges and universities are not strictly trade or professional schools. Many people wish that they would be so, especially in hard economic times, and their failure to be these kinds of schools tends to place the liberal arts curriculum under fire. “After all,” people ask, “what is the point of the liberal arts curriculum? Why did people develop and promote this kind of educational model to begin with since it doesn’t ‘do’ anything?” A liberal arts education is a contested enterprise, one with a long history and a number of intellectual, political, and economic factors to consider. Space constraints do not allow for a sufficiently adequate survey, but some points will be raised.

“Liberal education” was conceived and promulgated in ancient, democratic Greece. The understanding was that an educated citizenry was required for the polis (the city-state) to flourish. Citizens needed to engage one another effectively, persuasively, and “freely,”4 so a set curriculum came to be established, one that focused on the “liberal arts.” In medieval times, these arts included both literary (the trivium: grammar, logic, rhetoric) and mathematical (the quadrivium: arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy) disciplines. Notice that these areas of study are called liberal arts; the assumption here is that these fields require a certain kind of apprenticeship and a sustained fostering of skill within the broader rubric of aesthetics. For the ancient world, these skills were a species of techne, a term that does not denote so much a “technique” as a skill that was cultivated and disciplined and had its register in one’s mind and spirit more so than one’s hands. For this reason, people often assume a liberal education coincides with the fostering of such skills as critical thinking, persuasive communication (both written and oral), analytical prowess, and imaginative energy. Take note that these skills are not trades or professions that are immediately “profitable,” but they are nevertheless vitally important for human flourishing.

Why? Trades and types of professional training often focus on mastering a certain tangible, commodifiable skill, but they rarely venture to ask such questions as, “What do we live for? How should we live? What is good, beautiful, and true?” In our society, perhaps we do not think these are important questions (given the relative infrequency with which we discuss them in the public realm), but if we are inclined to devalue these concerns, then the future of our polis is in dire straits. As some authors have remarked, our times are “the most technologically advanced in history, with more technically skilled people per square mile than could once have been imagined,” and yet within this context “genocide is a term with which every grade school child must become familiar.”5 People have harnessed the sheer skill and competency to annihilate millions of people in a very short period of time. Sadly, it takes such promethean proportions to press the question: “Wow, we can do this now. But should we?” The “should” here implies a moral framework; the liberal arts help raise the question of discerning and cultivating what is good and in turn resisting and opposing what is evil.

The Academy and the Church

John Wesley, in setting out the “General Rules” for his societies, offered the following three: 1) doing no harm/avoiding evil, 2) doing good, and 3) attending to all the ordinances of God.6 An education at a Christian liberal arts college can focus on and discern all three in a way that a secular university cannot; it also can do so in a way that a local church cannot.

The secular university as a public institution is deeply contested, largely due to the ambiguity and abstraction of its purposes and aims. With the oft-repeated denial of its moral qualities, the modern-day secular university has a difficult time accounting for its purpose and constituency.7 Given this self-imposed ambiguity and “placelessness,” the university within the public realm often resembles and promotes the wider aims of the culture in which it finds itself. This reality presents an irony: rather than being an institution of “free thinking” (which, presumably, would imply calling into question what currently takes place within the public realm), the university often simply reflects the aims and values of its broader orbit. This state of affairs is in tension with the ancient model of liberal education. In that model, the academy prepared an up-and-coming citizenry for service; in our current model, the society significantly determines what kind of citizenry it wants its universities to produce. Now, of course, the matter has always been a two-way street, but in our current situation, the traffic appears to lean significantly in one direction. Rather than being an agent of change, the modern university tends be an agent of conformity.8

As for the church, a number of pressures exist in modern society that works against its sheer survival. Suspicions both external and internal to the church make it a kind of fellowship that one is reluctant to identify with or sacrifice for.9 Pastors find themselves in need of appealing to the masses and quickly applying the scriptures to people’s everyday lives and struggles. Within this context of suspicion, contention, and pressure, the church oftentimes has curbed its teaching role in terms of allotted time, resources, or topics that are discussed. The lowest common denominator is often pursued, both biblically and theologically, so as to appeal to the most people.

Those institutions of higher learning that actively promote and negotiate a Christian identity can do a number of things that the above two locations cannot. On the one hand, Christian colleges have a clearer sense of purpose than the modern secular university. Whereas the latter seeks to promote its values and aims in “value-less” and “unbiased” ways, the Christian university transparently recognizes that its pedagogy is moral and that its mission is decisive for its existence.10 In relation to the church, the Christian college can talk about truth, beauty, goodness, justice, and other matters in a sustained way, one that draws from the vast disciplinary fields of human knowledge all the while acknowledging that the triune God is the source and end of all that is. The conversations that can happen at a Christian university are deeper and broader than those that can happen at a local church, yet the aims of both contexts significantly overlap.

Christian institutions of higher learning are more than church-related institutions; they are in a pivotal way ecclesially-based institutions:11 They serve the wider church (and by extension, the broader world) by facilitating contexts in which truth, beauty, and goodness are discussed and engaged in a sophisticated and extensive manner, all the while with the recognition that the service we ought to render is one in which we worship and love God with all our hearts, minds, souls, and strength.12 The church and the Christian college offer two communities of formation and discourse in which we can learn and grow as faithful followers of Christ.

The Cultivation of Convictions

When students start to plumb truth, beauty, and goodness, strange things often happen. They start to realize they had gifts that they didn’t know they had. More importantly, they start to develop passions for causes, peoples, and issues that they knew very little or nothing about prior to their college careers. Although it is always dangerous to generalize, I have seen this pattern occur many times during my tenure as a college professor.

A typical scenario may look like this: As a student engages topics in class, she comes to develop a curiosity to find out more about an issue that intrigued her in class discussion and lecture. She looks up the matter on the internet and maybe attends a brown-bag discussion on campus. Soon, her eyes are opened to how big of an issue this specific topic is, and she starts to feel compelled to do something. She may attend a screening of a recent movie on the subject and even inquire about a school-sponsored trip to a region of the world where this issue is prominent. She ends up going there over the summer in order to see first-hand how the issue plays out in that context. What occurs subsequently could be a change in major, a change in vocation, in short, a change that marks her entire life. The issue in question is not the important matter; it could take any number of forms (human trafficking, access to clean drinking water, and many, many others); what is most important is the sense of passion and commitment that is cultivated.

What is going on here? If these movements are taking place within an explicit context of worship, a place where one’s life and how one lives that life are expressions of faithfulness, obedience, and love to a God who is the source and end of all, then one cannot help but suggest that the work of God’s Spirit is at play at such moments in the formation of what can be termed “spiritual convictions.” Convictions are those commitments that fundamentally alter us, that make us who we are because they claim us in a very deep way.13 Without them, we would not be ourselves because we humans are what we love; we are what we are passionate about. And if we are passionate about God and God’s work of healing and repair in the world, then that passion is going to come through in any number of correspondences that can begin to take shape at a Christian college or university. Such places provide certain conditions so that the Spirit can work in the lives of God’s people for the purposes of ready...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Contributors
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: Cultivating a Sanctified Way of Life
• Chapter 2: Salvation on Display in a Holy Life
• Chapter 3: Holiness in the Old Testament
• Chapter 4: “And Ever Toward Each Other Move”
• Chapter 5: Participatory Holiness
• Chapter 6: Practicing Holiness
• Chapter 7: A Heritage of Holiness
• Chapter 8: Radical Holiness and Gender
• Chapter 9: Holiness and the Spiritual Disciplines
• Chapter 10: The Community of Holiness
• Chapter 11: Holiness and Mission
• Bibliography