Living Wittily

Leaving University In Debt or Indebted? The Long Term Cost of Student Debt.

 

I posted these thoughts of Chomsky the other day on my FB page. At the time they seemed to be saying something important about education. Reflecting further they are also saying something about human formation and the processes that shape our values and our way of looking at the world. Then as I've gone on thinking about it I have the uncomfortable feeling that his words are a warning that we are well on our way to losing any conception of education as humanising gift, social capital, cultural treasury, creative possibility for the future, imaginative empowerment of the minds, affections and commitments of the recent and coming generations of pupils and students.

Trying to pinpoint the precise nature of unease isn't easy. Education does have to be paid for by somebody. Schools and Universities are expensive places where learning is impossible to measure in the pounds it costs, saves or will ultimately make. Chomsky's warnings ring with the alarm notes of a social prophet - trapped in debt, no time to think, thus unlikely, unable to think about chnaging society because of the burden of debt and the urge to earn. These two phrases "unable to afford the time to think" and "unlikely to think about changing society" are chilling outcomes of an educational process which requires the student to mortgage much more than large amounts of money. A burden of debt, and a sense of having been burdened, is deeply corrosive of social capital, and ultimately fatal to that altruism that springs from gratitude and instils a commitment to the common good.

An education bought at the price of long term debt, knowledge and know how purchased on a mortgage, a relentless focus on employability and the market as key drivers in educational aspiration, reduces education to commodity, pupil and student to customer, and having paid for my own education I am entitled to exploit it in the market place. When that happens what are the chances of intellectual energy focused on making life better, imaginative thinking towards new possibilities, creative and critical reflection on change and opportunities for others, and fundamental to each of these is, ironically, the feeling of indebtedness. A person's fundamental attitude to the culture in which they have grown and been nourished, allowing for all the social inequalities and diversities of life chances, is defined largely by how that word is used.

If indebtedness means I have been supported through my education, and if I have been enabled and empowered by the processes of learning and formation and growing, then I am likely to be a net contributor to my community. If I live in a culture that takes for granted the right to education towards fulfilling and living into my potential, and if that gift implies sacrifice for others on my behalf, and part of the educational process is a deepening awareness of such gift, then a sense of indebtedness will solidify into gratitude. The giving and receiving of co-operative and communal resources in the education of each person is one of the essential pillars of social security and the common good.

Indebtedness for a gift is very different from being in debt for £50,000 and seeing my education as something I bought and out of which no one has any further claim. Employability, career trajectory, personal development, earning potential, plus the debt I now have to pay off, have become the values that will drive my thinking and acting and sense of social responsibility. I have become through being in debt, someone who has no sense of indebtedness. My education is my possession, and my product with which to play in the market. I have become "an efficient component in the consumer market."

In debt or indebted. Resentful or grateful. Owing my community nothing, or owing it my life and my living. Education as product or as gift. University as knowledge supermarket or as school for life and living. I know. I'm fully aware of the issues of funding, grants, loans, part time work, sacrifice and sheer toil for very many of our students; and equally aware of Government spending priorities and the need for viable economic strategies of affordability in the economic realities in which we are enmeshed on a global scale. But training generations of our students to think of their education as purchased employability, rather than enabled humanity, is short-sighted and will have its own economic, social and ultimately political consequences. And they will be different from what might have been, had these same generations of students come out of University, not in debt, but nevertheless indebted, grateful, still employable and ambitious, but with an undertow of indebtedness, gratitude and acknowledged responsibility. Or so it seems to this erstwhile theological educator, who came late to University, and whose own personal story is of education as grant aided, as gift, and as otherwise impossible.  

Shalom - a Tapestry of Psalms - Psalm 1

Since Christmas I have been working on a large six panel tapestry which brings together the word Shalom, and the Book of Psalms. During Advent I completed a small tapestry featuring the Hebrew word 'shalom ', and it was based around some passages from Isaiah. I wrote about it while it was still in progress, which you can read here and get some idea of what I'm playing at. I don't mind the phrase 'playing at', it combines fun, recreation and experiment.

In due course I will do a second small one with the Hebrew word 'hesed'. I have chosen these two words because they open theological horizons, no one definition or statement of meaning comes close to expressing the 'thick textual textures'  they create. That's why they are fertile theological ground, rich in possibility for exploring through the texture of textile colour and image. I have chosen six psalms which separately and together celebrate the God of shalom and hesed. And the two smaller panels will celebrate the equally rich poetry of Isaiah. When they are finished, the long Shalom column and the two small Hebrew tablets will hang in a cruciform pattern.

The panel above is on Psalm 1. The imagery is mostly self-evident, once you're told what the psalm text is. The stability of the life founded on study of Torah, meditation on the word of God, contemplative attentiveness to the gracious command and commanding grace of God. In the foreground the sylised orderliness of the landscape contrasts with the flowing rapids of life-giving water. The fecund trees with evergreen foliage and sound abundant fruit make blessing both visble and extravagant. Shalom is continual fruitfulness and roots irrigated from constant living water. Shalom is stability and constancy that comes from deep roots, plunged like anchors into the ground, the tree in its ideal environment. Torah is the ideal environment for the human heart, will, conscience and mind - no wonder the wise delight in such reflective obedience and reverent enquiry.

Big words, large ideas and a vast Gospel

My Gran was a self taught daughter of a miner and the mother of miners in Allanton near Shotts. She taught me to say “A slight inclination of the cranium is as adequate as a spasmodic movement of the left optic to an equine quadruped devoid of its visual capacity”

Once I had learned it by heart and recited it she said, “James, you are expostulating far beyond the exuberance of your own verbosity and your aristocratic language is too superior to my diminutive sarcastications – so please, be quiet!”

Gran didn’t say that with a twinkle in her eye. She didn’t do twinkles – she said it with a glint, a kind of steely “I dare you to answer back” look.

At the end of last Session our leaving students bought a hoodie with their personal motto on the back. Mine had the claim “I’m a sesquipedalian”. A lover of big words

Theological education is about learning big words – obvious ones like hermeneutics, eschatology, epistemology, these are the secondary ones; others like Gospel, Jesus, grace, sin, faith are of primary and defining importance. Words are big not because of their length or syllable count. It’s the content that makes words large, expansive and vast.George Herbert's poem "Agonie" begins with this verse:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Philosophers have measured mountains,
Fathom'd the depths of seas, of states, and kings,
Walk'd with a staff to heaven, and traced fountains
        But there are two vast, spacious things,
The which to measure it doth more behove:
Yet few there are that sound them; Sin and Love.

An entire theological and philosophical syllabus is contained in those two words, sin and love. But all the other big words we learn to use in theological thinking and discourse, are the tools we use to understand, to analyse, to apply and with the aim of living the Christ life as Christians who can give good reasons for the hope that is within. Though often our vocabulary is over-strecthed by the vast realities of the Christian Gospel, the words we use help to give clarity to ideas which in turn shape and form vision, and train the mind to think precisely, critically  and creatively about Gospel, culture and church – about witness, mission and discipleship, and how those double threefold strands weave into a whole and holy Christian life.

Two books I have lived with for a year or two couldn’t be more different yet they exist between the same covers of the Bible, Ecclesiastes and Colossians. As Christians we exist between the two poles of “all is vanity”  and “He has made all things one, reconciling to Himself all things, making peace by the blood of the cross.”

So a theological education which aims at formation for ministry holds the place of tension between culture, church and Gospel. The goal and the focus of spiritual and intellectual energy is on equipping and enabling students, working with them and for them, deepening understanding, sharpening thinking, helping explore gifts and experiences in their lives. And then to support them in enabling and appropriating these, to integrate them, to take hold of all they are and make it a living sacrifice as they are transformed by the renewing of their minds and conformed not to our culture but to Christ. So they become powerful conduits and efficient conductors of the Gospel, bridge people who understand the connections and disconnections between Gospel  culture, and church and who speak and think always and everywhere, with Christ on the Horizon,  the Colossian Christ in whom all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell.

Diminishment, Dumbing Down and Doxology

The theological virtue of intellectual humility is a very different spiritual disposition from that intellectual form of immodesty which goes by names such as certainty, assurance, and even, often misused word, conviction. There is in faith a durability and endurability, a knowing that is more, and less, than full understanding: "the light shines in the darkness and the darkness comprehendeth it not" - I love the King James Version of John 1.

In addition to the two earlier posts - Simone Weil on Christ and truth, and Douglas Hall on the God who is not have-able, I was reading Marilynne Robinson's When I was a Child I Read Books, and was immediately and immodestly pleased with myself when I began to read words that articulate why it is that God who is Love reveals our blindness and blinds us with the revelation of a Love incomprehensible because eternal:

"God is of a kind to love the world extravagantly, wondrously, and the world is of a kind to be worth, which is not to say worthy of, this pained and rapturous love. This is the essence of the story that forever elludes telling. It lives in the world not as myth or history but as a saturating light, a light so brilliant that it hides its source,..."

In an earlier essay she says with the gentle poignancy laced with realism that our culture (and the church) have a tendency to "marginalise the sense of the sacred, the beautiful, everything in any way lofty...religion in many ways abetted these tendencies, and does still, not least by retreating from the cultivation and celebration of learning and of beauty, by dumbing down, as if people were less than God made them and in need of nothing so much as condescension. Who among us wishes the songs we sing, the sermons we hear, were just a little dumber?"  (pages 128, and 5)

Oh yes! It takes a novelist to remind theologians, and pastors, and worship leaders, that what happens up the front in a worship service is not the true, deep, soul-changing and soul-charging worship of the people of God. That is something deeper, far less in our control, the wild untamed beauty of a Love utterly beyond our words, radiant with life and light, made accessible only by the condescension of the Triune God who in love became incarnate, enfolding and embracing humanity and createdness. Makes no sense all of that - which is reassuring, and as it should be. Theology is done best not as logic, but as doxology - the God who is not have-able, is nevertheless the God who gives, without limit or calculation, a Love self-giving and eternal from One whose Being is inexhaustible and inexplicable, but in whom is life, and the life is the light of all humanity..."the Word became flesh and dwelt amongst us, and we beheld his glory.." To behold the glory of God is the true task of the theologian - and that beholding includes understanding, articulating, and then worshipping because we stand under Niagara with a thimble, yet drink our fill.

 

PT Forsyth, a Japanese Translation and an Unforgettable memory of Professor Donald Mackinnon

I  opened a parcel yesterday and found in it the recently published collection of essays on P T Forsyth, published in Japan, and in Japanese. I have a chapter in it which is a reprint of the piece on Forsyth from Evangelical Spirituality - never thought I'd be published in Japanese though!

The volume is a translation of Justice the True and Only Mercy, the collection of essays edited by Trevor Hart after the Forsyth Colloquium held in Aberdeen in 1995. That they wanted to add my chapter as a concluding essay is humbling and at the same time makes me feel a wee bit chuffed!

One memory of that colloquium stamped deeply in my affections was the paper delivered with Shakespearean power by Donald Mackinnon. It was a characteristic combination of lucid perplexity and integrated disjointedness! You have to envisage Professor Mackinnon's large presence, big arms waving and hands grasping and ungrasping as he threw out  grappling hooks, seeking anchor points on which to hang a virtuoso account of Forsyth, tragedy, German philosophy and high culture, atonement theology, kenotic christology and much else delivered with passion and in a voice modulating between gruff assertion and poignant questioning. It was as memorable a performance of theology as I've ever seen.

The essay in the book, revised and tidied up for publication, is a pale reflection of that encounter between Forsyth, Mackinnon and a bemused audience. Those of us who were there were both puzzled and moved, taught from deep wells and frustrated by an intellect ablaze, witnessing one of the great minds in 20th Century philosophical theology, like Samson wrestling with huge pillars of thought and threatening to bring it all crashing down on our heads. I exaggerate - a little! But it is the exaggeration of an affectionate admirer who gladly witnessed one of the genuine polymaths, performing an intellectual mini-concert, and displaying genius that eschewed pedagogic techniques that might make his thought more accessible to his audience. We weren't there to hear, but to overhear the theological soliloquy of a mind independent, fierce and passionately religious.

Rowan Williams on Theological Education

This is Rowan Williams at his reflective, discursive and penetrating best. This lecture on theological education is a startling and refreshing apologia for wisdom, holiness and loving God with heart and mind

"...a person who is educated in reading the Bible is a person who, you can say theologically, by the Grace of the Holy Spirit, has been brought into that relationship with the God of the Bible which allows them to recognise in the language of the Bible their own faith and their own narrative. And that is something rather different from quarrying the Bible for little bits that happily remind you of how you feel. That is not biblical theology. It may be a useful form of apologetical psychology but it is not particularly theological. But to find in that language, that narrative, that register of exploration, something of the faith that transforms your own life; that I think is to see what biblical understanding is. And it is not a million miles away from what Martin Luther said when claiming that the Christian response to reading the Bible always had to be, if you heard the words, this is about you, datae loquitor, this is about you."

The whole lecture text is here

Intellectual work, breaking sweat, and theological reading!

Delivery

Customarily, I rise early and spend

a couple of hours in my study before

washing and shaving. One morning

last week, the postman catching me

in night attire, I explained I had been

 

up for ages, rhyming away. Today,

exercising, I was perspiring freely

when the bell rang: he eyed me

impassively, then went on his way

murmuring, "Heavy work, this poetry!"

Stewart Conn, The Breakfast Room, Bloodaxe, 2010,  p.33

Poetry, theology, philosophy - all three ways of writing, speaking and spending time. Not everyone would call such reflective thinking, intellectual exercise, and mental discipline, work. So I like the postman's ironic scepticism, or innocent wonderment at the thought that hard thought and careful writing breaks sweat! And I'm sympathetic to a poet who does a couple of hours before the working day starts - Some of my best hours are early morning too - that's when I slowly make my way through the big books, several pages at a time. It's an interesting thought that 5 pages a day can give access to 1,825 pages - which is a lot of poetry, theology, philosophy or whatever else takes our interest. Six three hundred page volumes - do that for a few years and you become dead erudite so you do!

My current reading is a book that needs that slow, attentive listening. Mark McIntosh is a theologian who understands the connection between the study of theology and the encounter the theologian is likely to have with the Subject of her study. Divine teaching. An Introduction to Christian Theology (Blackwell: 2008), takes the view that in studying theology, if the mind and spirit are open to it, the theologian is taught by the One who is the subject of study. It's a fine book, and one that offers an innovative and inviting approach to theological reflection.

Hauerwas on the importance of questions and the danger of explanatory answers

In his theological memoir, Hannah's Child, Hauerwas writes with astonishing honesty about himself, others, his faith and how he sees the world. Referring to his wife's mental ill health he reflects on those who have assumed a theologian would have answers about how such life can be so lonely and sad. Then he says this:

I have learned over the years as a Christian theologian that none of us should try to answer such questions. Our humanity demands that we ask them, but if we are wise we should then remain silent. ..When Christianity is assumed to be an "answer" that makes the world intelligible, it reflects an accommodated church committed to assuring Christians that the way things are is the way they have to be.

Such answers cannot help but turn Christianity into an explanation. For me, learning to be a Christian has meant learning to live without answers. Indeed, to learn to live in this way is what makes being a Christian so wonderful. Faith is but a name for learning how to go on without knowing the answers..... (pp. 207-8)

Academic Administration: necessary tedium and / or exciting experiement?

Amongst the many horizons that have opened up to me in recent years, few have been more personally enriching and theologically challenging than academic administration. Yes. You are quite correct. Not a miss-print, nor a mind flip, not even a joke. AA. Not the Automobile Association, so hard pressed in the recent and returning climate of traffic paralysis. Not Alcoholics Anonymous, that wonderful organisation that, despite its faults and drawbacks, has drawn back many a life from the brink and enabled human beings to discover again their dignity, humanity and purpose. Not stranded motorists then, nor people at the end of the line all but destroyed by alcohol addiction - but something altogether more prosaic - AA, the discipline, skill, and ever recurring demands of ensuring that learning and teaching are up to scratch, quality assured, demonstrably effective. Academic Administration.

Now I admit I too have seen AA as an algae outbreak in the garden pond, until I realised it might instead be the aerator and filter that keeps the water healthy. Now yes - some academic admin is tedious but necessary, and some is tedious and repetitive and harder to justify. And there's too much of it. (Warning: two long sentences ahead!) But in thinking about theological education, and how to shape a curriculum for 21st Century  Graduates in Theology, whose vocational trajectory is ministry of one kind or another, and for some, definitely pastoral ministry in the uniquely varied context of Scottish Baptist faith communities, the necessary clarity, scrutiny and rigour has come from thought disciplined by educational theory, ideas shaped by academic experience, and our limited small-world agendas pushed outwards by the requirement to demonstrate we know what we are doing! If theological education is to be taken seriously within the academy (and I refuse to have the word academic used always negatively, dismissively, pejoratively, as if loving God with our minds were not at least a quarter of what it means to love God at all!); so if theological education is to gain respectful hearing and serious consideration as a way of knowing, living and acting faithfully in our world, then it should not only survive in the academy, but earn the right to speak, be heard and make a difference to how we understand what a University is about.

That is why I'm spending much of my time with documentation, Module Descriptors, Programme Specifications, Regulatory Frameworks, QAA Handbooks, SCQF Articulations, Subject Benchmarks, and Annual Monitoring processes heavy on evaluative reflection. If AA is required of the Sciences and the Social Sciences, of Computing and Business, of Health and Engineering, then why not of Divinity?  One particular area of increasing reflection in the wider HE sector is "Attributes of the 21st Century Graduate". Some of the work done here is very helpful in identifying the kinds of persons we ideally want to produce through an effective, distinctive and high quality course of personal and academic formation. So. What might be the attributes of the 21st Century Graduate in Theology and Pastoral Studies. Ideally, what kind of person should emerge from a Degree aimed at training people for ministry in the 21st Century?

From a  lengthy process of consultation, reflection, and distillation I have formulated eight, which will form the basis of a paper I hope to have published soon. Do any of you readers  want to have a go at suggesting attributes both essential and desirable, of the 21st Century Graduate in Theology and Pastoral Studies? You are allowed up to three.

By the way, to raise the issue during Advent might seem another AA - Advent Aberration brought on by seasonal over excitement; or AA - Altogether Annoying distraction from seasonal themes; or yet Another Argument not worth having before Christmas:)) Indulge me - make your suggestion a gesture of goodwill.....

Emerging Church, Rabbi Gamaliel and the Theological Curriculum

Just spent the last couple of days meeting with colleagues in Oxford, at Regent's Park College. We were looking at the issues for theological education arising from the flux and diversity of expression in church community that has come to be called emerging church, or fresh expressions, or whatever catch phrase we care to use in the vain attempt to catch in neat definition this phase of the church's life in contemporary Westernised Christian culture.

Stuart Murray Williams is one of the central figures trying to interpret, understand and evaluate what is of permanent value and what of transient interest in the plethora of alternatives on offer for those no longer satisfied with 'inherited church' or 'traditional church' or 'mainstream church'. See - even the non emergent status quo is now accruing nuanced definitions! And given the long list of options from cafe church to to Sci Fi church, Post-Alpha church to Cyber church, from menu church to common purse community, it was an important exercise to try somehow to grasp the significance of whatever is happening, in a culture that values the 'whatever' word.

Not rehearsing it all here, but several really important questions are at least worth posing:

What is necessary for any group to legitimately claim for itself the word church as a valid descriptor of what it is and how it expresses its life? What is the ecclesial minimum for a group to call itself church?

How important is sustainability in any of these new developments in Christian mission and community? If it is a transient phase is that necessarily a sign of failure? And if some of these survive and become self-sustaining is that validation, 'if it is of God it will prosper'?

If a group aim to accommodate a culturally specific group (Goth church for example), how does that relate to the catholicity of the Church? If Christian community is inclusive, how does that square with groups whose nature, aim and identity are so specific and culturally focused that by definition others would find them all but inaccessible?

If these new and imaginative and creative initiatives are part of a search for a more authentic and participatory way of being Christian community engaged with surrounding culture, what are the criteria for such authenticity?

Given that fresh expressions of emerging or emergent church are self-consciously developmental, uncontrolled and organic, what is it that nevertheless enables them to define themselves as Christian? Where are the theological and spiritual parameters, and who sets them?

And the specific question for theological education as formation and preparation for ministry in such a cultural flux - what impact should such developments, and the need to understand them, have on curriculum content, styles of teaching and a theological understanding of ecclesiology and Baptist Identity?

All good questions - much sharp discussion - several tentative conclusions - and most importantly, food for thought and reason for dialogue.