Some news: Calvin, Comment, & sabbatical

Some professional news to share; three items to be exact:

1. Earlier this year I was awarded a Teacher-Scholar Grant by the Calvin Institute of Christian Worship. The grant is called “Vital Worship, Vital Preaching” and runs from May 1, 2024, to May 1, 2025. My project is the research for my next book, Technology: For the Care of Souls. Worship is the locus and gravitational center for practical Christian questions about technology, not least what is permissible or useful in the liturgy and why. I’m grateful to be supported by Calvin as I pursue these questions.

2. Recently Comment magazine announced a slate of twelve new Contributing Editors, of whom I am one. The others are Amber Lapp, Angel Adams Parham, Brandon Vaidyanathan, Christine Emba, Daniel Bezalel Richardsen, Elizabeth Oldfield, Jennifer Banks, John Witvliet, L. M. Sacasas, Louis Kim, and Luke Bretherton. I’m honored to be counted among them. Last month we gathered at the glorious Laity Lodge (just three hours south of Abilene) together with the entire Comment editorial team, along with regular contributors, stakeholders, and Cardus folks. It was wonderful. Check out the new Manifesto guiding the vision of the magazine under editor Anne Snyder. Subscribe today!

3. I am currently on research leave at ACU. The sabbatical covers both semesters in the academic year—really, from early May 2024 through August 2025, it amounts to sixteen months outside the classroom. This was made possible by the generosity of both ACU and dozens of donors, not to mention the support of my chair, dean, and provost. I was busy with family and vacation this summer, so it hasn’t felt like the sabbatical had truly begun until the last three weeks. It’s a relief, to say the least. Teaching a 4/4 is not a death sentence, as I’ve tirelessly repeated; but it’s still taxing. As I said above, this year I’m preparing a manuscript, due to Lexham next August, on the challenges of digital technology for church leadership, pastoral ministry, and public worship. Besides my normal writing for Christianity Today and other outlets, three-fourths of my working hours are currently devoted to reading and thinking about technology and related topics.

That, and doing publicity and podcasts for my two new books coming out next month (in 23 and 45 days, respectively!). It’s a busy time, but a very, very good one. I’m thankful.

Lecture recording: “The Word of the Lord”

A few weeks back I delivered a lecture here in Abilene for the Center for the Study of Ancient Religious Texts, at the cordial invitation of my colleague Jeff Childers, who is a world-class scholar of ancient and Syriac Christianity in the Graduate School of Theology. The lecture is an amalgamation of a few different sections of my book The Doctrine of Scripture, but it is also followed by 20-30 minutes of Q&A. Thanks to CSART for having me and to all the students, colleagues, and friends in town who attended. It was a pleasure.

The link above will take you to the CSART page hosting the video. Here is the link straight to Vimeo. If I can figure out how to embed it below, I’ll do so. Enjoy.

Christian ethics

This spring semester I’m piloting a course in theological ethics for upper-level students at ACU. Wednesday this week wrapped up our fourth week as well as part 1 of the course. To begin the work of synthesis I wrote up a series of ten theses on Christian ethics and distributed copies to the class. Here’s what I wrote:

1. Christian ethics pertains to followers of Christ.

2. The community of Christ-followers is the church.

3. The church is thus the context, audience, and agent of Christian ethics.

4. Christian ethics is for “the world” in the sense that those outside the church are invited to visit and to join the church; but the church does not expect the world to live according to Christian ethics.

5. The church is the teacher of Christian ethics; the Spirit’s pedagogy or “moral epistemology” is housed there.

6. The vehicle or living source of the church’s teaching is its sacred tradition, governed and normed by Holy Scripture, inspired and guided by the Holy Spirit.

7. Human beings develop good character, or virtue, through belonging to the common life of the church, which is centered on the corporate worship of God.

8. If ethics is about flourishing as a human being, then it follows that knowing and worshiping God is the height of human flourishing; our final end is friendship with God.

9. Virtuous character in community is ordered by and to imitation of an ideal or exemplar; in the case of the Christian community, the one truly human being worthy of imitation is Jesus Christ: he is the pattern or paradigm of “the good man.”

10. In sum, therefore, Christian ethics is about:

    1. journeying in and with the life of the worshiping community of the church toward the eternal life of the triune God;

    2. learning the moral life in humble obedience to the church’s teaching;

    3. developing good character over time and through practice by the sanctifying work of the Holy Spirit;

    4. and, ultimately, being conformed to the image of Christ.

A taxonomy of academic vocations

A couple weeks back I wrote more than 12,000 words on the experience of teaching a 4/4 load as a professor while also trying to publish (and, if possible, live an ordinary life). Consider this post a coda to that four-part series.

Spending five years at Yale for my PhD was, in numberless ways, a blessing. But one of the few ways in which it was not was in its formation of my (and presumably others’) sense of what it means to inhabit the academy. To be an academic, I learned, was to be a top-flight scholar whose publications are not only numerous but significant: the sort of work that changes the field, that sets the terms of debate going forward. To be anything other than this is to fail at the academic calling, to fall short of the high ideals of serious scholarship.

It goes without saying that this vision of the intellectual life is a lovely and admirable one for a few. It is reserved for only a few for at least three reasons: because almost all academics are not at Ivy League schools; because for certain articles and books to be conversation-shapers and game-changers most publications cannot be; because most of us are simply not possessed of that rare combination of intelligence, upbringing, education, talent, discipline, health, and ambition necessary to produce polymathic scholarship. Hence, for the rest of us mere mortals—which means very nearly every working professor today, minus a fortunate handful—some other vision of the intellectual life must suffice.

Happily, one of the many gifts of teaching at my current institution has been an education in the diversity of academic vocations. It turns out there are more ways than one to inhabit the university. Here’s my own personal taxonomy.

NB: These are in no particular order; none are mutually exclusive; plenty of academics encompass more than one, though I doubt many, if any, do all eight well.

1. Scholar

The ideal and stereotype: the professor in her study, surrounded by stacks upon stacks of thousands of books, master of a dozen languages, slowly producing multi-volume works of guild-defining scholarship. Less ideal-typically, an academic in this mold lives for the work of the library; she considers it her number-one job, and organizes her life around it. Her principal academic aim is to make a contribution to her discipline.

2. Researcher

It seems simultaneously defensible and worthwhile to distinguish the scholarly labors of the humanities from those of the sciences. The way I’ve realized I do that mentally is by the word “research.” Obviously research can describe anything, including literary and textual research. But for lack of a more targeted term, I’ll reserve “scholar” for an academic-publisher in the humanities mold and “researcher” for an academic-publisher in the sciences mold. For the truth is that both the work and the product of each are almost entirely distinct, a disciplinary extension of C. P. Snow’s “two cultures.” When colleagues in the sciences describe their work in the lab, or on Amazon Mechanical Turk, or what they read, or what they write, or how they present at conferences, or the role of numbers and spreadsheets and studies in their day-to-day work—it sounds like we have different jobs. That’s because we do. “Research,” for me, names what the folks in STEM do with their time, alien though it may be to this theologian.

3. Writer

Academics are not usually writers, whether or not they write on the regular. In fact, most academics are poor writers, and many, if not most, academics hate writing. I speak from experience, which being anecdotal may be a small sample size, but I’m confident that it is representative. All you have to do is open a book published by an academic press, and you’ll see as quickly as you can read how boring, plodding, ugly, and jargon-laden the prose is. I’ve known very few academics, moreover, who like to write. But occasionally one likes to write; even more occasionally that writing isn’t bad. Since you can produce scholarship and engage in research without either of those things being true of you, and since you can be a good writer without being an especially good scholar or researcher, I think setting aside “writer” as a separate vocation is more than warranted.

4. Teacher

This one’s a given. Most academics teach, though far too many neither enjoy it nor are especially good at it. Check that: more are good at it than you might suppose. That’s part of the problem with imagining that Yale and Harvard, Chicago and Notre Dame are the norm, and the rest are the exception to the rule. (And those institutions contain lots of wonderful teachers, too!) So strike through that cynical reflex of mine. Most academics teach, and many, many of them both excel at it and find great fulfillment in it. What they don’t enjoy is the 70-hour work weeks, the professional precarity, the high teaching loads, the huge class sizes, the unreasonable expectations, the consumer mentality applied to students, the gutting of non-job-related course subjects, the collective societal presumption against the meaningfulness of their work, the condescension toward their work by uber-scholars—and so on. Nevertheless, it is true that some professors are not teachers by vocation but only by necessity.

5. Mentor

This is one I had some sense of during doctoral studies, given the role of advisors in dissertations, but I’ve had a front-row seat observing quality mentorship at my current institution—and let me tell you, it is a calling unto itself. Where I teach mentoring might be personal and spiritual in addition to being professional or academic, but that’s only a reminder that “academic” is not a distinct compartment in a fragmented life but seamlessly integrated into the whole of a young person’s maturing sense of identity, beliefs about the world, and hopes for the future. For many students, mentorship makes all the difference. It’s what makes this or that college, this or that professor special. If I were a department chair, and I could choose between a quality scholar who was a super mentor, on one hand, and a super scholar who was a “fine” mentor, on the other, I would opt for the former without a second thought. Good mentors trail behind them all manner of secondary virtues that invariably benefit their academics neighbors, both within the classroom and without.

6. Practitioner

Here think of all those majors in the contemporary university that are taught by what those students majoring in that field want to become: nurses, teachers, PTs, OTs, social workers, ministers, journalists, even businessmen. Often (though not always) these professors and instructors worked for years, maybe decades, as a professional before returning to college in order to train the next generation. It can’t be emphasized enough that these fields and their faculty are the reason academia is still afloat today. In my experience, most (but, again, not all) faculty in these areas do not understand themselves as “academics” in the way that many “scholars” (see above) are trained or socialized to do. To the extent that the ideal-type of the tweed-jacketed philosophiae doctor with his dusty library volumes and German-language poetry and career-spanning articles on erudite topics still exists, often as not practitioners neither desire it nor exemplify it nor feel intimidated by it. Practitioners are doers who train still more doers, and in general they are making the world a better place, and are constitutionally unimpressed by your transparent attempts at prestige. And rightly so.

7. Administrator

There is nothing less sexy in academia than administration, at least to purists of the scholar or teacher type, but like practitioners, administrators make the world go round. Working for a good chair or dean means your life, all things being equal, is a dream; working for a bad chair or dean, accordingly, is bound to become nothing short of a nightmare. Furthermore, many academics both enjoy the work of administration and are gifted at it. I have friends and colleagues around the country who are clearly meant for administration, and unless it would make them miserable, their going that route makes life possible as well as happier for the rest of us. Sometimes administration is a burden suffered for a time, out of duty or need. But the calling exists, it is an academic calling, and we should all be grateful for those who accept it.

8. Intellectual

Not every academic is an intellectual, and vice versa. What do I mean by that? By “intellectual” here I mean to refer to someone for whom the life of the mind is her central preoccupation, a preoccupation that takes the form of mental curiosity, wide learning, voracious reading, affection for big ideas, desire for debate, love of history, and the pleasures of disciplinary promiscuity. To be an intellectual means making time for the mind, which means making time for texts (print or digital). Not every intellectual produces, but every intellectual consumes: which is to say, takes in what she can, when she can, as often as she can. An intellectual may or may not be a hedgehog, but she is always a fox; she knows many things, or seeks to do so, and for their own sake. Intellectuals make up a higher percentage of academics than the ordinary populace—that’s a matter of self-selection—but if you are not yourself an academic you might be surprised by how many academics are not intellectuals in the sense here stipulated. You might then be inclined to interpret that observation as an indictment. It need not be, however. The point of laying out this taxonomy is precisely to call into question our widely shared assumptions of who or what the ideal-typical academic is or ought to be. There are many ways of inhabiting the academy; we need all of them; there is no prima facie reason to suppose any one of them is essentially superior to any of the others. The sooner some of us learn that lesson (and it took me some time, as I said at the outset), the better our common work is liable to be.

Dame, ACU, sports, glory (TLC, 1)

Two years ago I wrote the following in a short tweet thread, in response to Damian Lillard's walk-off buzzer-beater to win Portland's playoff series against Oklahoma City:

What's revealed by Dame's buzzer-beater walk-off series-winner, and the hoopla surrounding it since, is something simple but often forgotten in today's analytics-driven journalism: People do not watch or play sports for the sake of technical proficiency. They do so for glory.

What Damian Lillard did was all-caps GLORIOUS. The stakes, the moment, the narrative, the beef with Russ, the degree of difficulty: People watch what is often sheer monotony in sports for a single, once-in-a-lifetime moment just like that.

Paul George's comments after the game that "it was a bad shot, though nobody's going to say it," was true but seriously beside the point. Of course it was a bad shot! If by "bad" we mean "having a low probability of going in," it was definitionally bad. And yet it went in!

Watch the video, and look at the reactions: OKC's, the crowd's, Dame's teammates, and Dame's own. Sheer, stupefying, lightning-struck glory. Athletes devote the entirety of their lives, soul and body, to be ready for a moment like that—and not, say, to finish 4th in MVP voting.

Sports journalism's in a weird place, drawn in a few directions: hyper-analytics; First Take stupidity; Twitter cleverness; athletes-as-celebrities gossip. What I'd love more than anything is a recognition of what makes sports great, and matching prose to the glory of the thing.

I stand by all of that. Every day that analytics makes further inroads not just on backroom GM decision-making but on the whole public culture of professional (and amateur!) sports is a step in the wrong direction. Sports do not exist for "wins," Ringz, or championships. They certainly do not exist for statistical supremacy. They do not even exist first of all for the display of physical excellence and bodily self-mastery and the combat of competition. They exist for people to behold unpredictable epiphanies of human glory. All the other goods of sports are contained therein.

Which brings me to ACU, where I teach. My colleague Richard Beck wrote up a nice appreciation of our "little ol'" basketball team's dethroning—decapitating? horns-sawing?—of the University of Texas in the NCAA tournament. Watching our team upset UT in the opening round, by icing two free throws to go up by one point before stealing the inbound pass as time expired, put me in mind of Dame's walk-off buzzer-beater. Sheer pandemonium, wild release, pure glory: the reason why we do this in the first place. That glory spread like wildfire across sports media and social media alike, and rightly so. How often in your life will you see something like that?

It would have been wonderful for our guys to have won the next game (and the next, and the next...). But that loss doesn't remotely diminish the glory of the initial upset. It happened, it always will have happened, and those players will be the toast of west Texas for a long time to come. Good for them.

An update

I've not written much on the blog these last few months, but I've been busy in the meantime. I'm hoping, though, to get back into my self-imposed charter of "mezzo-blogging," some happy midpoint between tweet-length commentary and full-blown (intimating to find the time for) essays. So here's what I've been up to during my absence, together with what's on my plate for the present and near future.

1. Covid, obviously. Everything hit during our spring break, and students never returned to campus. I've written a few things Covid-related, though I've wanted to find the time to write more. We'll see if I get anything out before school returns.

2. I revised an article for publication in the Journal of Theological Interpretation. It'll come out in the first issue of 2021. It's called "What Are the Standards of Excellence for Theological Interpretation of Scripture?" It's 15,000 words, double the usual limit for the journal. I'm grateful to them for making the exception, and excited to see it appear.

3. I wrote a long review essay of N. T. Wright's Gifford lectures for the Los Angeles Review of Books, where I've written similar pieces before on David Bentley Hart, Patrick Deneen and James K. A. Smith, and Paula Fredriksen. I'm hopeful it will come out this fall. (My editor there, who is supremely gracious, has also extended me some slack on the word count. He's a mensch.)

4. Once the semester was complete—a real endurance test, since both my wife and I teach at ACU, and we had four children 7 years old and under at home with us as we transitioned and taught online—I had 15 weeks ahead of me in which to complete two major book-length projects. The sixth week we took off for a family vacation, and the fifteenth week is full of pre-sessions, meetings, and other "welcome back" activities. So effectively that meant 13 weeks, usually working four days each week, about 6-7 hours per day.

5. The first five weeks were devoted to revising my manuscript (drafted last fall) for The Doctrine of Scripture in the Cascade Companions series. I finished a full penultimate draft, and am very happy with it. I over-shot the word count, though, so this fall I'm going to be working on trimming it down to size. Which, I trust, will only increase its clarity, substance, and readability. I am a fan of small books, but they're harder to write than the larger sort! In any case, it'll be a semester of killing my darlings, all those darn adverbs and dependent clauses cluttering the page.

6. Following vacation, I've given the remaining eight weeks to a revision of my dissertation for Eerdmans, titled The Church's Book: Theology of Scripture in Ecclesial Context. This one's been a bear, for a few reasons. First, it turns out sentences written by 2015 me are unsatisfactory to 2020 me. So a lot of re-writing. Second, the dissertation-ness of it all. Gotta tear out that academese root and branch. Third, dropping the word count from ~175,000 words to ~140,000. Again, that can only improve the project, but it's been more drudgery than I was anticipating. Writing and even editing has always been a pleasure to me, but this one's been a pain. So be it. I'm grateful for the contracts and the opportunity. Lord willing, both manuscripts will be emailed off by Christmas, and I'll be a free man come January.

7. The next manuscript isn't due till end of year 2022, and that one's the 25,000-word entry in Lexham's "Christian Essentials" series called The Church: A Guide to the People of God. So while I might draft some chapters next summer, most of 2021 will be reading, reading, reading.

8. Having said that, two other short-term projects worth mentioning. One is that I have the privilege of curating a symposium in the journal Political Theology on Karen Kilby's new book, God, Evil, and the Limits of Theology. That should come out late this year, perhaps early next year, depending on the ability of contributors to receive books and get responses out. I won't share the lineup just yet, but just know that when you see it your eyes are going to bug out of your head.

9. The second project is part of a Templeton grant, which I was generously rewarded through Biola University's Gratitude to God project (GTG). I'll be researching and writing on the difference that the doctrine of God makes for a Christian grammar of gratitude. That'll occupy most of my time in 2021. I'm honored to be a part of the project as a junior scholar. I can't wait to meet and learn from those involved in it, especially from other disciplines.

10. Speaking of grants, my home institution, ACU, awards internal grants for faculty research, and I was also fortunate to receive one of those this spring, primarily for my work this summer on turning the dissertation into a book. The grant meant my wife and I could rely on childcare for our youngest two kids this summer, and I could afford to decline teaching a summer course. Lord willing and the creek don't rise, by Christmas 2021 I will have not one but two books published, an article in JTI, an essay in LARB, a symposium in PT, an article in the works from my research on GTG, and maybe some scattershot essays online or in magazines. In the midst of a global pandemic, I'll take it.

11. Otherwise, we've been taking quarantine very seriously. Our kids (as of this coming September, 2, 4, 6, and 8 years old, respectively) have borne the lockdown as well as could be hoped. We've reopened modestly, seeing other families outdoors while social distancing. Besides that, we're mostly just hunkered down and are doing our best to stay sane.

12. I've yet to mention the way in which Covid has rocked and is continuing to rock higher education. That's largely because (a) I still have a job and (b) worrying about it is bad for my mental health. Once I knew I would have a job for AY 2020–2021, I did my best to let go of all the anxieties besetting friends and colleagues around the country, put my head down, and got to work. I've waited to prepare for the fall, for the most part, because it hasn't been clear what exactly the semester would look like. But as of now, the plan is that we will be teaching in person, with students returning one month from now. We're taking all the necessary precautions—mandatory masks, social distancing, hybrid pedagogy, larger classrooms for smaller class sizes, no large gatherings indoors, office hours outdoors or on Zoom, etc., etc.—but the truth is nobody knows what the lay of the land will look like come Labor Day, much less Halloween. We'll be done with residential learning by Thanksgiving, anyway. I don't envy those making these decisions, not least when making alternative choices would mean firing scores of people. Everyone in my orbit here is extending one another a lot of grace. My bosses are the best in the business, and understand what it means to have two children in elementary school and two others in preschool while teaching undergraduates with a 4/4 load in the midst of a pandemic. Few are as fortunate as we are, and I am profoundly grateful to be here, now, even amid so much uncertainty. (Did I mention there's an election in November? And perhaps another mutation of the virus awaiting us in the winter? Oh, and a summer-long nation-wide reckoning with a centuries-old legacy of systemic racism? And protests and riots and institutional upheaval? And an as-yet-unreckoned-with crisis of childcare and education facing us down in the public school system this fall? And, and, and, and ... )

It's been a year, in other words. And we're only halfway through. Lord have mercy on all of us. Blessings on each of y'all in these bewildering and trying times.

Principles of Luddite pedagogy

My classes begin in this way: With phone in hand, I say, "Please put your phones and devices away," and thereupon put my own in my bag out of sight. I then say, "The Lord be with you." (And also with you.) "Let us pray." I then offer a prayer, usually the Collect for the day from the Book of Common Prayer. After the prayer, we get started. And for the next 80 minutes (or longer, if it is a grad seminar or intensive course), there is not a laptop, tablet, or smart phone in sight. If I catch a student on her phone, and Lord knows college students are not subtle, she is counted tardy for the day and docked points on her participation grade. Only after I dismiss class do the addicts—sorry, my students—satiate their gnawing hunger for a screen, and get their fix.

For larger lecture courses (40-60 students) with lots of information to communicate, I use PowerPoint slides. But for smaller numbers and especially for seminars, neither a computer nor the internet nor a screen of any kind is employed during class time. I further require my students to submit their papers (however short or long, however rarely or commonly due) in the form of a printed copy brought to class or dropped off at my office. And for weekly (or random) reading quizzes, students must come prepared with pencil and Scantron; we begin the quiz promptly at the beginning of class, with the questions coming sequentially in large print on the PowerPoint slides. I give them plenty of time for each question, but I do not go back to previous questions. If you arrive late and miss questions or the whole thing, so be it.

I rarely reply immediately to emails, and may not reply at all if the question's answer is specified in the syllabus. I will reply within 24 hours, but I will not reply (unless it is an emergency) after hours, while at home; some days I may not even check my work email between 5:00pm and 6:00am the following morning.

I have a strict attendance policy: I count both tardies and absences; three of the former count as one of the latter; and beginning with three unexcused absences (for a twice-weekly course), I deduct four percentage points from a student's final grade. So, e.g., a student with four unexcused absences and three tardies would go from a 91 to a 79. More than six unexcused absences means an automatic failing grade.

Students behave exactly as you suppose they would. They come to class, they show up on time, they do the reading, and they take hand-written notes. The only distraction they fight is drowsiness (I will not say whether I contribute to that perennial pedagogical opponent). And for two 80-minute blocks of time per week, these students who were in second grade when the first iPhone came out have neither a device in their hands nor a screen before their eyes nor buds in their ears.

It turns out I am a Luddite, at least pedagogically speaking. On the questions raised by this set of issues, my sense is that my colleagues, not just at my university but in the academy generally, are divided into three campus. There are those like me. There are those who find us and our pedagogy desirable, but for reasons intrinsic or extrinsic to themselves they cannot or will not join us and fashion their classrooms accordingly. And then there are those who, on principle, oppose Luddite pedagogy.

This last group, broadly speaking, views screens, phones, tablets, laptops, the internet, etc., as positive supplements or complements to the traditional teaching setting, and want as far as possible to incorporate student use of them in the classroom. This view extends beyond the classroom to, e.g., learning management systems and e-books, videos and podcasts, etc., etc. The scope of the classroom expands to include the digital architecture of LMS: a "space" online where discussion, assignments, interaction, learning, video, editing, grading feedback, and so on are consolidated and intertwined.

What rationale underwrites this perspective? Perhaps it is simply "where we are today," or "what we have to do" in the 21st century, working with digital-native millennials; or perhaps it is neither superior nor inferior to traditional classroom learning, but simply a different mode of teaching altogether, with its own strengths and weaknesses; or perhaps it is not sufficient but certainly necessary alongside the classroom, given its many ostensible benefits; or perhaps it is both necessary and sufficient, superior to because an improvement upon the now defunct pedagogical elements of old: a room, some desks, a teacher and students, some books, a board, paper and pencil.

I'm not going to make an argument against these folks. I think they're wrong, but that's for another day. Rather, I want to think about the basic principles underlying my own not-always-theorized pedagogical Ludditism—a stance I did not plan to take but found myself taking with ever greater commitment, confidence, and articulateness. What might those principles be?

Here's a first stab.

1. I want, insofar as possible, to interrupt and de-normalize the omnipresence of screens in my students' lives.

2. I want, insofar as possible, to get my students off the internet.

3. I want, insofar as possible, for my students to hold physical books in their hands, to turn pages, to read words off a page, to annotate what they read with pen or pencil.

4. I want, insofar as possible, for my students to put pen or pencil to paper, to write out their thoughts, reflections, answers, and arguments in longhand.

5. I want, insofar as possible, for my students to develop habits of silent, contemplative thought: the passive activity of the mind, lacking external stimulation, lost in a world known only to themselves—though by definition intrinsically communicable to others—chasing down stray thoughts and memories down back alleys in the brain.

6. I want, insofar as possible, for my students to practice talking out loud to their neighbors, friends, and strangers about matters of great import, sustained for minutes or even hours at a time, without the interposition or upward-facing promise of the smart phone's rectangle of light; to learn and develop habits of sustained discourse, even and especially to the point of disagreement, offering and asking for reasons that support one or another position or perspective, without recourse to some less demanding activity, much less to the reflexive conversation-stopper of personal offense.

7. I want, insofar as possible, for my students to see that the world to which they have grown accustomed, whose habits and assumptions they have imbibed and intuited without critique, consent, or forethought, is contingent: it is neither necessary nor necessarily good; that even in this world, resistance is possible; indeed, that the very intellectual habits on display in the classroom are themselves a form of and a pathway to a lifetime of such resistance.

8. I want, insofar as possible, for my students to experience, in their gut, as a kind of assault on their unspoken assumptions, that the life of the mind is at once more interesting than they imagined, more demanding than a simple passing grade (not to mention a swipe to the left or the right), and more rewarding than the endless mindless numbing pursuits of their screens.

9. I want, insofar as possible, for my students to realize that they are not the center of the universe, and certainly not my universe; that I am not waiting on them hand and foot, their digital butler, ready to reply to the most inconsequential of emails at a moment's notice; that such a way of living, with the notifications on red alert at all times of the day, even through the night, is categorically unhealthy, even insane.

In sum, I want the pedagogy that informs my classroom to be a sustained embodiment of Philip's response to Nathaniel's challenge in the Gospel of John. Can anything good come from a classroom without devices, from teaching and learning freed from technology's imperious determination?

Come and see.

Teaching ecclesiology: topics and readings

This fall I am teaching a course on ecclesiology for upper-level undergraduate Bible and ministry majors. It's a long-standing course I took over from a recently retired professor of New Testament, who was kind enough to share his syllabus with me as a foundation on which to build my own. Here's the final breakdown of weeks, topics, and readings. It's basically set, so I won't be changing or adding anything at this point—and I'm already demanding a lot from my students—but since this is a course I'll be teaching repeatedly in the coming years (as the Lord wills), all manner of feedback, recommendations, and shared wisdom from similar courses is welcome.

The two required texts are Gerhard Lohfink's Jesus and Community and Alexander Schmemann's For the Life of the World; the two suggested texts are Rowan Williams's Why Study the Past? and Everett Ferguson's The Church of Christ.

Week 1: Introduction: Theology and Ecclesiology

Aug 29: Robert Jenson, “What Systematic Theology Is About”

Aug 31: Gary Badcock, “Theology & Ecclesiology”; Ellen Charry, “The Art of Christian Excellence”

            Recommended: Everett Ferguson, The Church of Christ, Introduction; Rowan Williams, Why

Study the Past?, ch. 1; Nicholas Healy, Church, World, and the Christian Life, chs. 1-

2; John Webster, “Evangelical Ecclesiology”; Kathryn Tanner, “The Nature and

Tasks of Theology”; Mary McClintock Fulkerson, Places of Redemption, ch. 1

Week 2: Election and Covenant

Sep 5: Bryan Stone, “Israel and the Calling Forth of a People”

Sep 7: Michael Wyschogrod, “Divine Election & Commandments,” “Israel, Church, & Election”

            Recommended: Gerhard Lohfink, “Why God Needs a Special People”; Leslie Newbigin, “The

Logic of Election”; Sang Hoon Lee, “God in the Jewish Flesh: Michael

Wyschogrod’s Theology of Israel”; Katherine Sonderegger, “Election”

Week 3: Israel and the Nations

Sep 12: Lohfink, “The Characteristic Signs of Israel” (selections)

Sep 14: Lohfink, Jesus and Community, ch. 1

 

            Recommended: Bruce Birch et al, A Theological Introduction to the Old Testament, chs. 9-10;

Wyschogrod, “A Theology of Jewish Unity,” “Judaism and the Land,” “Faith and the

Holocaust”; Karl Barth, Dogmatics in Outline, 72-81

Week 4: Jesus and the Twelve

Sep 19: NO CLASS

Sep 21: Lohfink, Jesus and Community, ch. 2

Recommended: Ferguson, Church of Christ, ch. 1; Stanley Hauerwas, “Jesus: The Presence of

the Peaceable Kingdom”

Week 5: Pentecost and Ekklesia

Sep 26: Lohfink, Jesus and Community, ch. 3; Francesca Aran Murphy et al, “Ecclesial Faith”

Sep 28: Amos Yong, “The Acts of the Apostles and of the Holy Spirit”; Willie Jennings, Acts, 27-40

Recommended: Ferguson, Church of Christ, ch. 2; John Howard Yoder, “The Original

Revolution”; Hauerwas, “The Church as God’s New Language”

Week 6: Paul and the Gentiles

Oct 3: N. T. Wright, What Saint Paul Really Said, ch. 3

Oct 5: Wright, What Saint Paul Really Said, ch. 5

            Recommended: Ferguson, Church of Christ, ch. 3; Lamin Sanneh, “The Birth of Mission: The

Jewish-Gentile Frontier”; Hauerwas, Resident Aliens, ch. 4

Week 7: Church Fathers and Councils

Oct 10: Williams, Why Study the Past?, ch. 2

Oct 12: Creeds; Robert Louis Wilken, The Spirit of Early Christian Thought, chs. 4-5

            Recommended: Jenson, Canon and Creed, chs. 1-5; Jeffrey Cary, Free Churches and the Body of

Christ, ch. 6; Khaled Anatolios, Retrieving Nicaea, ch. 1

Week 8: Middle Ages and Christendom

Oct 17: Oliver O’Donovan, “The Obedience of Rulers”

Oct 19: O’Donovan, “The Obedience of Rulers”; Thomas Aquinas, commentary on the creed

            Recommended: H. Richard Niebuhr, “Christ Above Culture”; Peter Leithart, “Rome

Baptized”; Tanner, “Christian Culture and Society”; Hauerwas, “A Christian

Critique of Christian America”

Week 9: Reformation and Scripture

Oct 24: John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, I.6; IV.1; Decrees of Trent

Oct 26: Kevin Vanhoozer, “Scripture Alone”; Jenson, “Sola Scriptura”

            Recommended: Williams, Why Study the Past?, ch. 3; Jenson, “The Norms of Theological

Judgment”; Webster, Holy Scripture, chs. 1-2; Fulkerson, Places of Redemption, ch. 6;

Christian Smith, The Bible Made Impossible, chs. 1-2

Week 10: Baptism and Sacraments

Oct 31: Schmemann, For the Life of the World, ch. 1; appendix 2; Calvin, Institutes, IV.14.1-6;

Charry, “Sacraments for the Christian Life”

Nov 2: Schmemann, Life of the World, ch. 4; Yoder, “Baptism and the New Humanity”

Recommended: Calvin, Institutes, IV.15; Keith Stanglin, “Concerning Rebaptism”; Jennings,

“Being Baptized: Race”; James McClendon Jr., Ethics: Systematic Theology: Volume 1,

265-269; Augustine, Confessions, Book IX (selections)

Week 11: Eucharist and Communion

Nov 7: Schmemann, Life of the World, ch. 2

Nov 9: Calvin, Institutes, IV.17 (selections)

            Recommended: Gustavo Gutiérrez, “The Church: Sacrament of History”; William

Cavanaugh, “The True Body of Christ”

Week 12: Ordination and Polity

Nov 14: Calvin, Institutes, IV.3; John Howard Yoder, “The Fullness of Christ”

Nov 16: Jenson, “The Office of Communion”; Frances Young, “From the Church to Mary: towards

a critical ecumenism,” 313-342

            Recommended: Ferguson, Church of Christ, ch. 5; Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Life Together, ch. 4;

R. Alan Culpepper, “The Biblical Basis for Ordination”

 

Week 13: Unity and Ecumenism

Nov 21: Yoder, “Imperative of Christian Unity”; Young, “From the Church to Mary,” 342-357

Nov 23: NO CLASS: THANKSGIVING

            Recommended: Gunther Gressman, “The Unity We Seek”; Robert Cardinal Sarah, “In Search

of the Church”; Unitatis redintegratio; Peter Leithart, “The End of Protestantism”;

Gerald Schlabach, Unlearning Protestantism, ch. 1

Week 14: Mission and Witness

Nov 28: Bryan Stone, “Evangelism and Ecclesia”; Emmanuel Katongole, “The Sacrifice of Africa:

Ecclesial Radiances of ‘A Different World Right Here’”

Nov 30: Schmemann, Life of the World, ch. 3; Marva Dawn, “Worship to Form a Missional

Community”

            Recommended: Ferguson, Church of Christ, ch. 6; Stone, “Martyrdom and Virtue”; Brad East,

“An Undefensive Presence: The Mission and Identity of the Church in Kathryn

Tanner and John Howard Yoder”; Katongale, The Sacrifice of Africa, ch. 7; Lumen

Gentium; Yong, “Christian Mission Theology: Toward a Pneumato-Missiological

Praxis for the Third Millennium”; Michael Goheen, “The Missional Church in the

Biblical Story—A Summary”

Week 15: Worship and Prayer

Dec 5: Dawn, “God as the Center of Worship: Who is Worship For?”

Dec 7: Schmemann, Life of the World, ch. 7, appendix 1; Jenson, “How the World Lost Its Story”

Recommended: Ferguson, Church of Christ, ch. 4; Williams, Why Study the Past?, ch. 4;

Bonhoeffer, Life Together, ch. 2; John Webster, “‘In the Society of God’: Some

Principles of Ecclesiology”; James K. A. Smith, “Practicing (for) the Kingdom”;

Tanner, “Commonalities in Christian Practices”; Ernst Troeltsch, “Conclusion,” The

Social Teaching of the Christian Churches; Karl Barth, Dogmatics in Outline, 141-148

Teaching the Gospels starting with John

This fall I am teaching a course on all four Gospels ("The Life and Teachings of Jesus") to freshmen. Precedent, biblical scholarship, and the textbook I'm using all suggest going the typical route: Synoptics then John, and within the Synoptics, Mark first, then Matthew and Luke in some order, then John. Basically in presumed chronological order of their writing, with John as the odd duck coming in at the end—either adding a dose of high-level theological questions or, as semesters tend to get away from professors, getting the requisite nod and discussion but not nearly as much attention as the earlier, ostensibly more reliable and relatable (because more historical) Synoptics.

That's how I'll teach it this fall, and maybe the one after that. But I'm already thinking how to re-shape the course once I get a handle on it.

And I'm thinking I'd like to start with John.

The class is neither for seminarians nor for historians. It isn't a historical introduction to the composition of the Gospels; it's not a prep course for future pastors who will need to know the background and hypothetical redactional relationships between the books.

It's a course for freshman at a Christian university on the life and teachings of Jesus. We'll be beginning with prayer and talking like Jesus not only matters but is alive, present, at work in the world and in us. And if you believe, as I do, that Matthew, Mark, and Luke are every bit as theologically motivated, resourced, and interesting as John, then framing the course with the theological claims and questions that John raises might—might—enable more productive, more spiritually engaged, more intellectually challenging, and ultimately more rewarding interaction with the Synoptics than the other way around.

It's a thought. I'd love to hear how others have taught similar courses. We'll see how this fall goes, and if my intuitions are confirmed. If and when I undertake the experiment, I'll report on the results.