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"On the Matter of Faith and Learning"by W. Dale Brown" This first appeared in Christian Educator's Journal, February 1996.I teach literature and composition courses at a college that uses the word Christian to describe its mission. When I introduce myself as a professor at such a place, I can expect knowing looks. Everyone, after all, knows about those sort of places. Schools with religious affiliations and Christian intentions feature rules and curfews, chapels and Bible classes, sermonizing and piety. This is the sort of place you send your child for protection from the worldliness of the secular institution. It is education with a Christian coating. Those of us who have spent our careers swimming against that stereotype are rightly frustrated by the persistence of the noxious notion that Christian education is akin to summer church camp extended into an academic calendar. Nonetheless, we would do well to be ready with an answer to at least one of the good questions that sometimes drifts into this conversation: "Well, how is an English class in your Christian school different from the English class at Down Home University? Shakespeare is Shakespeare, and an adverb is an adverb, after all." I like the question, because far too many so-called Christian institutions have fallen into the cultural stereotype. We provide chapel services and dormitory Bible studies, we offer Christian counseling and a code of Christian conduct, we pray before ball games and have an invocation and a benediction at all public events. But English is English and math is math. We haven't done the job until we have given serious attention to the relevance of faith to the various disciplines taught; even the most pedestrian of our courses must be about the business of blending our faith and our learning. Trained for the most part in secular higher education, our professors are often the victims of their own graduate school notes and professional journals. Except for the devotional prayer at the beginning of class, our classes are often mirror images of the classes down the road at the state university. It is not the chapel service that makes a school Christian. It is instead the consistent infusion of a Christian worldview into the courses we teach. Without propagandizing or indoctrinating, we must bring the faith to bear on the subjects we present to students. Easy to say. But what does the faith have to do with the nouns and verbs? How does faith find its way into a conversation about Twain's Huckleberry Finn or Fitzgerald's Great Gatsby? In my literature classes I try to coerce students toward a serious encounter with important artists that will lead on toward a serious encounter with culture and self. To plunge into the poetry of Emily Dickinson or the fiction of Mark Twain is, I believe, to plunge into oneself. I build my approach to literature around what Robert Frost calls "ulteriority"-what we more often call metaphor. In literature, as in life, it is important to know our way around in metaphor. To learn to read for metaphor is to learn, finally, how to read one's life, and such reading leads to the theological notion of providence. In American Literature courses, for example, I encourage students through their reading to confront the value systems informing the American experiment. The risk of such an aim is, of course, that the class can become a shipwreck experience for some students. Nonetheless, we do our students no favor if we do not help them see that a commitment to Christ will sometimes put them in an antithetical position with regard to the prevailing culture. I do not subscribe to any artificial grafting of religion on literature; rather, I submit that literature and religion share the same territory in their mutual attention to the central questions of life-alienation, fear, dehumanization, lostness, salvation, and the like. Thus I aim for a seamless interweaving of the issues of faith and the issues of my subject matter. Our artists are calling us to wakefulness. So does our faith. My courses are built on this principle of developing sight and insight. I do believe that a study of literature leads finally to a doing of justice as a reformed vision suggests, but I think the first step is as the sacramentalists have it-a moment of inspiration and insight. Rhetoric and composition courses pose other problems. The challenge in such courses is to provide content that stimulates students to good writing while providing specific attention to a wide variety of writing glitches. I try to perform the latter service tutorially, and I address the content issue by treating the course as a general introduction to college. I do not try to separate the writing act from the speaking act or the reading act; rather, I offer the course as an invitation to thinking. Lately, I have been using an autobiographical approach, asking students to treat their own lives and historical settings as texts for explication. I finally do move in the writing courses from the autobiographical focus to a social analysis that sets up a research project. I want them to see that a sharper apprehension of the territory of our own lives leads us toward a clearer analysis of the worlds in which we move. I do try to help these first year students toward a deeper appreciation for words. I want them to see that language is an aspect of human desire for knowing, a part of our reaching for God. Grammar, then, is simply our attempt to order the communication act. Essentially, however, language partakes of the divine business of naming and bringing order to our worlds. All of this leads, of course, to a discussion of the Word-the generative principle behind all that we do. A recent change in my teaching derives from my increasing conviction that we must be about the business of helping students fill in the vowels and consonants between the academic material of the classroom and their daily lives. We continue to register surprise when we encounter instances of inhumanity on our own campus, almost as if we expected our students to become more humane as a result of reading in the human disciplines. We cannot expect such learning to occur as a matter of course. The suffering and turmoil they read about needs a human face. I am increasingly convinced of the need for relevance-making in the classroom. Consequently, I have developed a service dimension in each of my classes. My American Literature students, for example, are required to do one tutoring session each week in a local school that is largely Hispanic. The Calvin students tutor children both during and after school, helping with specific assignments and aiming to encourage young children in the educational process. The work in the elementary school then becomes a matter of conversation in the course that deals often with issues of race and poverty. The experience of many of my students is being greatly expanded through the service project. Their work on the outside project becomes the subject of a report at the end of the semester, but my deepest goal is to help them toward the realization that becoming more thoughtful people involves a doing as well as a being. I think of these service projects as internships that help students understand the why behind the what of my courses. Such experiences as the service project provide opportunities for relationship with students. I hope that students who have studied with me will have a sense that I care about them; I am increasingly convinced that effective teaching has some sort of elusive but striking relational component. Furthermore, I hope they leave with a sense that something important, even transforming, can happen in an encounter with words. I am not particularly concerned that my students pick up some prescribed body of information or some theory of literary criticism. I target appreciation and discernment as my fundamental goals and have those occasional moments of elation when reason, faith, and imagination do indeed merge in marvelous ways. Much of what I have said above relates to the issue of how my faith finds its way into the classroom. I have spoken of the natural affinities between religion and literature of my approach to the issue via a blending of a reformed and a sacramentalist view. The subject gives me considerable pause, because I try to keep in mind both sides of the phrase "Christian College." That is, I believe in the truth of the Christian creeds and try to bring my students to stand under that truth. Nonetheless, a college is an arena for searching, questioning, stretching, and we must, I believe, resist the urge merely to indoctrinate our students with our pet orthodoxies and notions of the Christian system. If we do not avoid the temptation to reduce our classrooms to propaganda centers, we are no better than those politically motivated professors of this or that whose work in secular institutions we rightly decry. The notion of Christianity as a closed system simply will not sustain a viable college. Truth is real, yes, but the search for it is never complete. Believing, we journey toward understanding. Furthermore, the metaphor of integrating faith with learning is probably misleading, suggesting wrongly that the two exist in distinct categories and further suggesting that the process is something we do rather than something we are. My faith inescapably influences my teaching just as it inevitably directs the rest of my life. Whether I am making biblical allusions in the classroom, or talking about a Christian response to literature for some local church, or commenting in a committee meeting upon the public relations of our college with reference to our representation of Christ, I am naturally speaking out of my faith conviction. I want my students to have an appreciation for their own religious traditions, and I hope they develop an appreciation for a multiplicity of Christian voices, but the central business, it seems to me, is getting them to care about the call to righteousness in their own lives. I want my students to grasp the insights of a Christian worldview-that we are creatures of God's design moving in a universe that reflects both His moral vision and our own failure to apprehend that vision. I pray for them an understanding of God's action to free us from the death of our own sinfulness, a hold on the tragedy and the hope. (This is, I think, what we mean when we borrow C. S. Lewis' phrase "mere Christianity.") Such an ideal is not achieved through opening a class with prayer, although that might certainly help. But the Christian worldview must explicitly infuse the class conversation. "Now what is a Christian response to all this?" is a question I find myself asking frequently. I am grateful for a college that encourages me to teach out of my faith convictions with the aim of moving students toward a richer understanding of their own lives and toward a closer examination of their own faith commitments. Avoiding dogmatism and without propagandizing, the teacher must help students toward a perception of the Word of God, a sensitivity to how that Word is registered in many and diverse places, and a desire to make the vision of the Word their own. With fear and trembling, the teacher boldly points the direction to truth, beauty, reality, and goodness, suggesting along the way that not all worlds are equally good and true. We teach that none of us can escape the implications of sin, thus we must, as Harold Macmillan says, "know when a man is talking rot." That is, genuine education is about sightedness and discernment. Sometimes Buechner's definition of the English teacher as "a professional corrupter of the young" sounds right to me. We try to loosen mental restraints, open doors, push toward enlightenment and truth. All that is so much more than offering professional and technical training, of course. I want my students to be a blessing to the world, and I believe that involves more than literacy and a command of the facts. Together with our students, we discover resources that, through faith, reason, and imagination, might lead us to sort through the noise and distraction of our time with spiritual discernment. When I teach "Feature Writing and Investigative Journalism," for example, I find myself frequently addressing the ethical issues that circulate in the journalism profession. I want my students in that class to think richly about how faith makes a certain demand on the stories they write, the perspective they bring to an interview, the attitude they have toward the reader/listener, and the ways in which they use language to persuade, inform, and move. In my modernism courses, I make every attempt to take seriously the bleakness of the literature of this century. Such pessimism is not the last word, but is certainly a part of the reality serious Christians must confront. "In this world we will have trouble," we have been told, and the literature of these courses chronicles the trouble, the despair of the abyss of meaninglessness. We do get to "I have overcome the world." We don't merely say "yes" to Hemingway and Joyce and the others. We say "yes, but." I try to bring students to that insight by drawing out their resources of faith, by appealing to their knowledge of Scripture and their familiarity with Christian tradition. I also try to underscore the spiritual anxiety, the homesickness of modern literature as a way of registering the loss to which a Christian vision speaks. Surely that is something of what we mean by integrating faith and learning. This developing of the Christian sensibility occurs as we come to a mutual understanding of God's universal truth, as we see that, as Hopkins says, "the world is charged with the grandeur of God." We inform them, we shape them, we draw them out. We entertain, we preach, we pry into their prejudices and failings. And we try, with God's help, to move imaginations, stimulate minds, and awaken spirits. Colin Jager, one of my recent students, puts it this way: "Literature is important because it is fundamentally spiritual. Art is firmly bound to enchantment. We study literature because somewhere along the way we've been touched by a poem or a novel or a phrase that was somehow too exquisitely right to be ignored." The profession of literature is uniquely joyful in that it so often pours forth from and flows back toward those wells of spirituality at the core of our lives. When I talk about an Emily Dickinson or a Henry David Thoreau, I can do so with the assurance that their central preoccupations have finally to do with how one ought to live. That is, in fact, what important literature does; it takes us where we haven't been, becomes, as Ezra Pound says, "a ball of fire we hold in our hands." That is the enchantment and the challenge I try to bring to the front of student's minds, and that encounter occurs in the arena of faith and learning. Franz Kafka says that "A book should be an ice ax to break the sea frozen inside us." That's it. The classrooms into which I retreat with my students have to be seen for the dangerous and exhilarating places they are. Frightening stories will be told there, and those stories will open to us some of the potential for horror in our own stories. But faith must be there too. Faith that reminds us that here too is God. And I must say that it is not just poetry. It is piety as well. Colleges and universities in this country that have long connected themselves to a Bible college or fundamentalist tradition have often defined the professorial role in a way closely linked to a pastoral or ministerial role. That is, a professor should be a model of Christian living to inspire similar living in students. The professor, in this view, offers counsel well beyond the confines of the classroom and course material. This expectation has, in some places, led to controversial rules, credal documents to be signed, pledges to be made, and the like-no drinking, no shorts, no this, no that. The tradition at Calvin College has, in part I think, looked askance at such a notion of the professor. Maybe we have even looked with some disdain on our Bible college counterparts. We have tended to define the professorial role in terms more in consonance with the universities in which we were trained. Teach the material and be wary of the example/counselor business. It is, no doubt, a tenuous balance to strike. Nowadays at Calvin we hear more talk about community and the professorial role in fostering the spiritual enterprise of the place. In his warning to teachers, I think James has it right. In that short preachment, James underscores our need for those whose wisdom licenses them to teach. The source of the wisdom, says James, is an absolute fear of God. (Job and the preacher of Ecclesiastes both like the idea too.) The wise, James concludes, are those whose devotion to God leads on to acts of kindness, faith made complete by deeds. Virtue is the result of wisdom. And it is virtue that we are called to demonstrate in our classes. I believe finally that the integration of faith and learning is about living for our students a concrete example of the good life. I have learned most from those teachers who befriended me, from the ones who modeled distinctively Christian lives in front of me. I almost shudder as I say it, because the weight of such responsibility can be overwhelming. But I believe a pivotal part of the conversation about faith and learning must circle on the professor's faith commitment. I am humbled by the challenge to try to live the Christian life in front of my students, and that, I suspect, is the heart of the building of learning into faith and faith into learning. I too often fail at having the mind of Christ; I miss opportunities for compassion and service; I fall short of modeling Christ in all I do. Nonetheless, I get up everyday and try it again. Our students will find faith only if they see it in our lives and not simply in our words. |
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