Community of the Risen

You should read Wes’ Paper here:

You Were Aliens

There are many theological systems.  Some are built on grace, others on hope, others on atonement, and many terms are interconnected to form a coherent whole.  Perhaps it would be helpful to think of theology in the contemporary framework of the world wide web.  On a website, there is an interconnected set of sub-sites that all find their root on a home page.  From the home page, if one can navigate through the maze of sub-sites, a person will find a locus of knowledge that centers around whatever the creator wishes.   The problem is, however, that a web-site is, by nature, limited in its scope of any subject.  The nice thing about them is that information can be deleted and added rather seamlessly (thus the rise of wikipedia and other open source software).  In the same way, any system of theology centers around a series of ideas and cannot, in and of itself, be an end.  Theology is only the study of God, not God himself.

When we read about the “peace of Christ,” the Pauline text also reminds us that it “transcends understanding.”  In other words, the peace of Christ cannot be understood in the way we understand facts and conceptions of reality. The peace of Christ ultimately transcends and eclipses all reality.  There can be ways in which we begin to understand this peace, but it is primarily experienced rather than understood.

Recently I taught my first lesson on the crusades in my intro to teaching class.  This is not a student teaching position.  I just show up once a week to help out with the classroom.  It is a social studies junior high world history class, and I have to teach two lessons.  I did the first one last week.  I was very surprised by the results.

I went through a brief history of Israel with the students, then we read one document from Pope Urban II and one document from the Arab perspective.  After this, we talked about bias in documents.  After the lesson my host teacher told me that the information had gone totally over the students heads.  I was stunned.  I had gone through the documents slowly because I wanted to make sure they understood the documents.  I had explained all the difficult vocabulary words.  What was the problem?

She suggested that I had made the crusades too religious.

“They don’t all have a religious background, you know,” she said.

I really didn’t know what to say.  I am living in a generation where it is a stretch for students to understand the religious aspects of the crusades.  The study flabbergasted me so much that I went to Barnes and Noble today to look at information on religion and education.  I picked up a book by Stephen Prothero called Religious Literacy: What Every American Needs to know.  He believes along with others that these problems of religious illiteracy can be traced to “John Dewey and other progressive-era education reformers, who gave up in the early twentieth century on content-based learning in favor of a skills-based strategy that scorned the piling up of information” (4).  Prothero began to find that he could have “challenging conversations” at the college level without “common knowledge” (4-5).

We have to find ways to bring this “common knowledge” at the junior high level.  If we don’t inculcate students with proper vocabulary at the junior high level, I don’t think we will ever be able to reach students.

Reading this week in my California history book has been disheartening.  Once again, there was a time in US History when a minority race was set against the majority because of people’s fear.  Japanese were interned simply for the fact that they were Japanese.  The most interesting person, however, was Earl Warren who originally allowed for the injustices to go on as a governor of California, but later said it was the greatest mistake of his life.  He went on to become chief justice of the United States and fought for civil rights for all people.  It is interesting the way that people can change and grow to become better people.  In some sense we are all Saul on our own road to Damascus.  We have to be careful how quickly we write people off.  I think it is also important to remember, however, that the reason Warren gave into the internment was societal pressure.  We also have to remember that we are going to be motivated often by a “the will of the people” which can also be the “democratic tyranny.”  As Christians, we need to be able to stand for our rights.

When I asked a student in class the other day not to say “shut up” to another student, I was given a blank stare.

“That’s just the way we talk,” she said.

I was floored.  I didn’t really know how to respond.  I am thinking today about the difficulty of language and what place it has in the classroom.  After having thought about it, I have decided that when I become a full time teacher, I will spend an entire class period early in the semester analyzing with the students the relationship between language and social division throughout history.  Since the middle ages, language has been used as a weapon to divide society.  If we dislike someone, we have words with which to express that anger.  If we want to show that we’re smarter than someone else, we will use words they cannot understand.  We have created classes based on the way we talk.  For instance, historically certain words have been considered “taboo” in Christian circles as a seperation marker.  If you say certain words, you receive less respect within your particular Christian faith community.  It is not about what you mean when you say it, but merely the fact that you say it.

Thus we have quite a difficult mess on our hands.  How do we begin to bring students together in the classroom through language when it is precisely language that has seperated sub-cultures for so long?