Susan E. Ramsey, Ph.D.

CTS - Creighton University 1 June 2013 Page 1

So Students Might Flourish: Classical Theology and Virtue Formation

**Start with blue sheet Basic Presmise At this point, I find it important to discuss the context of my teaching. The courses I have taught this year were for adult education students. At Carthage College, these courses last for seven weeks and the sessions are from 6 to 9pm, once a week. Imagine teaching Church History or Judaism in seven sessions of three hours each. Ive learned to focus on essential matters, although I am still learning to discern the priorities of each course. In teaching Church History specifically, I have found it quite a challenge to take students on a whirlwind tour of twenty-one centuries of people, events, concepts, and movements. This spring I taught eight sessions of History of Christian Thought II: Reformation to Modernity which were four hours in length and took place every other week over the course of a semester. The chair directed me to use Alister McGraths Theology: The Basics for the historical theology aspect of the course. To me, this book seemed too simple for a college course, but the chair was wise and the students found McGrath accessible. They told me that they were learning that there was so much more depth to the Christian faith than they had imagined. Even so, the students struggled to understand the nuances. For example, in the chapter on Jesus Christ, McGrath presents the Ransom view. For most of the students, this was a new concept, but for some reason, they took that as the only correct view of the Cross. In addition, they struggled to understand how Augustine managed to have a major influence on the Protestant Reformation without being the contemporary of Luther.

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These teaching experiences have led me to question how I introduce these topics to students with very little background. I have wondered what the purpose and goals are for teaching this material to students beyond the expected usual suspects As Ive struggled to integrate course content with my pastoral approach in the real world of adult students who begin the course with very little foundational knowledge and who often lack in key academic skills, I have searched for possible approaches that might correlate with these intentions and needs. When I first read the theme of the conference, I immediately thought of the phrase the pastoral function of Christian doctrine. I couldnt remember precisely where I had heard this phrase, but I knew that it reflected my pastoral approach in the classroom and my desire to communicate the essentials of the Christian faith when possible. Eventually, I realized that this phrase was the subtitle of Ellen T. Charrys book, By the Renewing of your Minds: The Pastoral Function of Christian Doctrine. In the book, Charry contrasts the preEnlightenment approach to theology with the post-Enlightenment approach. She argues that: Primary Christian doctrines have been under fierce pressure since the Enlightenment. Modernity pressed theology to account for any claim to theological knowledge. As the conditions for knowledge narrowed, religious claims began to be read symbolically. On the symbolic interpretation, religious assertions about humanity, God and the world, even if they are historically grounded, are significant only as expressions of the collective experience of the community or inner states of consciousnessAs the scientific understanding of truth came to dominate modernity, theologians came to assign religious claims to the realm of myth and meaning. The loss of theological realism and the retreat of sapiential theology, while not mutually entailed, happened at about the same time. The modern notions of truth, reason, knowledge, developed by empiricist and rationalist philosophy and the natural sciences, squeezed out both revelation and sapience as genuine truth and knowledgeI will argue that theology has been overly diffident in this regard and that the conditions of modern knowledge

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themselves are broad enough to include or at least not to exclude the possibility that religious claims actually refer to God.1 In this paper, I will discuss the application of Charrys approach to classical pastoral theology to teaching church history and historical theology in a contemporary context. I will also explore the need for virtue formation in higher education and present a proposal of how premodern theological texts might be employed in the context of introductory level courses to assist in handing on the Christian faith. Besides Charrys work, I will also draw upon Douglas and Rhonda Hustedt Jacobsens No Longer Invisible: Religion in University Education and Sharon Parks Big Questions, Worthy Dreams: Mentoring Young Adults in their Search for Meaning, Purpose, and Faith. To begin with, I will explore the approach presented by Charry to historical theology. Charry examines the relationship of pre-modern Christian thought to the good life and virtue. She writes that: Scholarly attention to the debates and circumstances surrounding the formation of Christian doctrine has crowded out implications of texts for Christian living.2 She draws on the philosophical hermeneutics of Gadamer: in order to [join] the normative question to the historicalGadamerchallenged the assumption of historical criticism that scientific objectivity in the humanities mandates an unbridgeable distance between original author and contemporary interpreter. Gadamer pointed out that classical texts are those that reveal truth that transcends their moment in history. The texts constitute a tradition that subsequent interpreters must engage within the horizon of their own historical location in order not only to further understanding of the tradition but also to understand themselves as members of that tradition.3 Charry presents the constructive thesis of her work:

Charry, Ellen. By the Renewing of Your Minds: The Pastoral Function of Christian Doctrine. New York/Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997 (6). 2 Charry, 16. 3 Charry, 16.

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the classic theologians based their understanding of human excellence on knowing and loving God, the imitation of or assimiliation to whom brings proper human dignity and flourishing. Seeking the various divine pedagogies articulated by classic theologians should provide grounds for reclaiming a genuine pastoral Christian psychology that grounds human excellence in knowing and loving GodIn various ways all the thinkers to be examined here held that knowing and loving God is the mechanism of choice for forming excellent character and promoting genuine happiness.4 Now we turn to the application of Charrys approach to the contemporary intro to church history classroom. At some institutions, one could immediately apply Charrys approach as it would be normative if there is in place an orthodox creed or orientation to the college. However, at institutions that have historically been church-affiliated, but currently reflect few traces of that heritage, the application of Charrys approach is more problematic. At a public institution or a private secular establishment, this might be out of the question at first glance. The common ground between Charrys methodology and institutional mission is found in the ever expanding concern for the development of character and integrity. In the past, administrators and professors considered these matters outside of the purview of the classroom. Sharon Parks explains: Since the nineteenth century, and particularly with the development of the research university, higher education has been increasingly dominated by a particular interpretation of academic objectivity that over time has appeared to preclude a self-conscious search for value and meaning. As a result, commitment to the true has been divorced from the question of the good.5 Douglas and Rhonda Hustedt Jacobsen affirm this tendency: As with everything else that was perceived as spiritual or religious and character and vocation are inherently religious because they concern things that really matter for individuals, however historically religious or irreligious these individuals may be such issues were sidelined by much of higher education during the latter 20th century as matters that ought to be handled privately, rather than in the public context of a college or universitys formal educational program.

4 5

Charry, 18. Parks, Sharon. Big Questions, Worthy Dreams: Mentoring Young Adults in their Search for Meaning, Purpose, and Faith. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass, Inc., 2000 (159).

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Instead, the goal of higher learning was to expose students to the full spectrum of human life without morally or religiously stacking the deck one way or another.6 In 2010, however, the president of Agnes Scott College and a professor of political science at Duke wrote the book Debating Moral Education: Rethinking the Role of the Modern University. In their book, Elizabeth Kiss and J. Peter Euben articulate a critique of the false dichotomy between higher education and the spiritual and religious dimensions of character and vocation: Every association has a moral end, a hierarchy of values, which is cultivated through its everyday norms and practices and this includes colleges and universities whose moral ends and purposes [are] expressed not only through institutional statements and curriculua, but also, and often more powerfully through the hidden curriculum of everyday campus life.7 Beginning in 2005, the Association of American Colleges and Universities stated that educating students for personal and social responsibility was one of the core commitments that any reasonable definition of liberal learning should include.8 The Jacobsens who teach at Messiah College, located less than an hour from a large Amish community, discuss the mistaken notion of equating the years of undergraduate education with an extended Rumschpringa. Some people including many involved in higher education think of the college years as a kind of massive rumspringa for young adults in American mainstream culture, a time when there are no rules and when anything goes prior to settling into adult responsibilities. It is assumed that students can decide later on what kinds of people they will be as adults. However, this analogy ultimately fails because there is no decision point at the end of college that equates with the choice facing Amish youth. For students in mainstream American culture, there is no settled community with proscribed roles and discipline to which they can and will return. They are morally free in college, and they will be morally free after college. There is no break between life in college and life after college, and

Jacobsen, Douglas and Rhonda Hustedt Jacobsen. No Longer Invisible: Religion in University Education. Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press, 2012. (Kindle edition 3119 of 4505) 7 Kiss, Elizabeth and J. Peter Euben. Debating Moral Education: Rethinking the Role of the Modern University (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010) 17, as quoted in Jacobsens No Longer Invisible (Kindle 3126 of 4505). 8 Jacobsen. No Longer Invisible. (3135 of 4505)

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a students style of life will not magically metamorphose into something else upon graduation. College is part and parcel of ongoing life.9 Because concerns about values and morality have for some time been classified as personal and therefore far outside the purview of higher education, college counseling services and campus ministry are left to deal with the fallout from the moral freedom inherent in the American college years. Chaplains from Brown, Cornell, the University of Chicago, Emory, Furman, and Princeton gathered at Stanford in the fall of 2008. Many of these chaplains, according to the Jacobsens, would describe themselves as socially and religiously progressive, and they are by no means a prudish bunch. But when we listened in on a session devoted to stories from the field, their list of concerns was topped by alcohol, sex, and depression, with the three often interrelated.10 The chaplains desired to move realities on their campuses in the direction of their schools articulated goals, but instead they were spending their time in therapeutic roles: keeping a lid on problems and helping students deal with issues defined as personal by their institutions.11 According to one chaplain: Living a meaningful and coherent life is way down the list. Prestige and money are the real priorities of the university and students know it. All the warm rhetoric about meaning and purpose and quality of life seems inauthentic like a parent saying do what I say, not what I do. But students know the operative values.12 As institutions of higher education have begun returning to an emphasis, even if it is rather rhetorical, on living lives of meaning and purpose and the concomitant areas of morality and character, it is incumbent on professors of theology, religious studies, and other disciplines in the humanities as well to address these topics in their classrooms. Professors connected with communities of faith are particularly in a position to warmly represent a life of character, moral
9

Jacobsen. No Longer Invisible. (3063-3064 of 4504) Jacobsen. NLI 3068-69 of 4505. 1111 Jacobsen. 3072 of 4505. 12 Jacobsen. NLI 3072 of 4505.
10

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integrity, meaning and purpose. We should resist the expected mode of academic discourse that assumes a sharp dichotomy between objectivity and subjectivity, between factual knowledge and wisdom. As Ellen Charry writes: Sapiential truth is unintelligible to the modern secularized construal of truth. Modern epistemology not only fragmented truth itself, privileging correct information over beauty and goodness, it relocated truth in facts and ideas. The search for truth in the modern scientific sense is a cognitive enterprise that seeks correct information useful to the improvement of human comfort and efficiency rather than an intellectual activity employed for spiritual growth. Knowing the truth no longer implies loving it, wanting it, and being transformed by it, because the truth no longer brings the knower to God but to use information to subdue nature. Knowing became limited to being informed about things, not as these are things of God but as they stand (or totter) on their own feet. The classical notion that truth leads us to God simply ceased to be intelligible and came to be viewed with suspicion.13 This leads us to examine Charrys pre-modern theologians and how we might apply her idea that studying Christian doctrine can lead to the formation of virtue so that students might flourish, discovering what is meant by the good life, or as Pseudo-Macarius calls it, the true life. Due to time constraints, I will explore only the chapter on Athanasius of Alexandria Charry discusses other premodern theologians including the Apostle Paul, Basil of Caesarea, Augustine, Anselm, Bernard de Clairvaux, Thomas Aquinas, Julian of Norwich, and John Calvin. One of the intriguing beliefs espoused by my dissertation director was that there were still saints roaming the earth. Father Alexander Golitzin, now a Bishop in the OCA, spent several years in residence on Mount Athos. He told us stories about some of the holy men he encountered there. Presbyterians, such as myself, do not often make such statements, although I am certain that part of my attraction to Pseudo-Macarius was his confidence that transformation

13

Charry, By the Renewing of your Minds, 236.

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of the human being is indeed possible beginning in this life. What helped to sustain my interest was the juxtaposition of this possibility of transformation alongside very explicit statements about the state of humanity after the Fall. Macarius opens the first homily of Collection II with an exploration of Ezekiels vision of the chariot: For the mystery which he saw, was that of the human soul as she is hereafter to receive her Lord, and become herself the very throne of his glory. For the soul that is thought worthy to partake of the spirit of his light, and is irradiated by the beauty of his ineffable glory, (he having by that spirit prepared her for his own seat and habitation) becomes all light, all face, and all eyeby reason of the inexpressible beauty of the glory of the light of Christ, that rides and sits upon her. In the fifteenth homily of Collection II, Macarius has quite a different view of the human heart: Take the example of a great palace that is deserted and all kinds of stench and odors from many cadavers come out of it. So also the heart is the palace of Christ and it abounds with every kind of impurity and with great crowds of evil spirits.14 In a culture where we have drastically lowered our expectations of human virtue, I find these two vastly different presentations of theological anthropology very helpful. On the one hand, Macarius encourages us not to settle for being passably moral, and on the other hand, it is correct to perceive serious deficits in human goodness. This is in stark contrast with the modern conviction that humans are basically good and, if they are behaving badly, we can teach them to behave well. The theological anthropology of Athanasius carries some of the same concepts as that of Macarius. Ellen Charry writes: The human problem for Athanasius is a loss of dignity and self-respect caused by wandering away from God. Dignity, which is required to direct human life rightly, was buried, lost and forgotten through generations of fumbling around in the dark. By forgetting who God is, we lost touch with who we really are: creatures destined for eternity in light of who created us. This forgetting led to

14

II.15.33. M 120. KDD 146, ll 460-463.

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idolatry, which led to the destruction of human dignity, and has culminated in human intercourse becoming a jungle of violence, corruption and deceit.15 This view can be empirically verified day after day at all levels of human interaction: internationally, domestically, in community organizations, in religious institutions, in the work place, in the family, between neighbors, and within our own person. Another statement of Charrys about Athanasius sounded equally contemporary as she references the desire for instant gratification. The point of the Incarnation is in order that through it men might be able once more to know him. The Fathers goal is to reclaim us by renewing our misshapen minds, which cling to instant gratification. The reclamation effort is not simply to regain our loyalty, it is also to reorient us to who we really are16 Charry makes the point that, for Athanasius, Christs story is not simply the gift of hope. It is an effective means of severing us from the idols, demons, animal sacrifices, magic, and astrology that we think makes us happy in order that, understanding through such grace the Image, I mean the Word of the Father, and recognizing the Maker, [men] might live a happy and truly blessed life.17 While Athanasius may not be able to make our students blush at paganisms disrespect for Gods creation, I think they might be surprised to hear Athanasius contention that God is not angry, disappointed, or vengeful, but simply eager to return us to ourselvesBy reordering our minds in harmony with the intelligent beauty of Gods creation, we can return to our true selves. Rhetorically, Athanasius appeals only to our self-respect.18 Many of my students have a rather thin and one-dimensional view of the Christian faith, and some of them would be surprised to hear that God acts out of compassion and that God holds a high view of human dignity.
15 16

Charry, 88. Charry, 93. 17 Charry, 93. 18 Charry, 91.

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In an age where we are bombarded with advertisements that prey upon the desire to stand out from the crowd through fancy possessions, outward trappings of success, and external beauty, Athanasius and other early church theologians challenge the cult of uniqueness and the pursuit of individual superiority. Instead, the psychology of the patristic age [declares] that human dignity comes from our relatedness to GodUnlike the modern view, our dignity is grounded not in what individuates us from others or demonstrates our self-sufficiency, but in that which links us to God by virtue of his grace. Human dignity is seen in our connectedness to God, not in our autonomy.19 Finally, Athanasius discusses the transformative power of returning to God and the potential effect on human relationships. Once God has our attention, we are confronted with his way of dealing with us, which becomes the standard for our behaviorThe teaching that is pressed home is Gods exclusive concern for our welfare and happiness and the recognition that we are not able to devote ourselves to the welfare and happiness of those in our charge simply by being told to do so; we must be led to do so by having our own needs met first. Once our immediate anxieties are quelled, we are secure enough to lift up our eyes and perhaps begin to deal with one another as God has dealt with us.20 To conclude, I would like to share a very modest proposal and to request feedback from more seasoned colleagues. I have observed that many church history textbooks at the introductory level tend to focus on events, movements, wars, leaders, and key doctrinal developments. Obviously, these matters cannot be completely neglected for seminarians or future graduate students. For students taking introduction to church history as a Humanities elective or as a second required Religion course, however, I wonder if it might be more helpful to teach a broad overview while focusing in on writings such as those discussed by Charry.
19 20

Charry, 90. Charry, 94.

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These theologians raise meaningful questions of human dignity, examine what has gone wrong with humanity, and what constitutes the good life. These writings deal with basic human struggles that have not changed greatly over time. I wonder also whether the question What is useful? is appropriate in the context of teaching church history at the introductory level to the students described above. By this I do not mean useful in the pragmatic sense, but useful in the quest for meaning and purpose in life. While it has been challenging to gauge the appropriate amount of detail to include in teaching various periods of church history or historical theology, it is encouraging for me to see the potential for addressing questions of character and meaning in introductory church history courses. I would welcome the opportunity to hear about your experiences in teaching introductory church history courses, to know if you have used primary text readings to draw out questions of character and integrity, and whether you believe there is potential for using such texts to pass on the faith while also meeting a deep concern of higher education and society.