The Divine Act of Education
The coherence, discernibility, teachability of the entire universe flows from the Divine Logic at the center of all things.
By Fr. Jeff Locke
“Those who can, do; those who can’t, teach.”
It would be easy for someone like me to become defensive when confronted with George Bernard Shaw’s words from the 1905 play, Man and Superman. Not only do I teach at least once a week in the congregation where I serve as a pastor; prior to entering full-time ministry, I was a public-school teacher. Given all the teaching I do, I am a prime candidate to be offended by these famous words.
However, my aim is not personal vindication before the ghost of an Irish playwright. I appreciate a pithy saying as much as the next person. Nor am I hoping to convince you that this sentiment is the reason teachers in our culture are systemically underpaid—though I am sure that case could be made. My concern is not personal or professional. It’s theological.
The theological argument at the heart of this phrase has resonated across modern, Western, activist culture for over a century without its doctrinal nature being fully recognized. Shaw himself had no interest in theology and would likely scoff at the idea he was a theologian. But some of the earliest Christian thinkers would have recognized it right away. They would have recognized it, because they knew that God himself is the Teacher.
At the turn of the 3rd century, Egyptian theologian Clement of Alexandria wrote a treatise entitled Christ the Educator. God the Son is a teacher because, according to Clement, he works to change people, not by miraculous action to override the individual will, but through persuasion. In fact, when he calls people to salvation, Christ “takes to Himself the name of persuasion” (my emphasis). God does not simply act on his beloved human creatures, but leads us out of our brokenness into his healing love by teaching us his ways. “The education that God gives is the imparting of the truth that will guide us correctly to the contemplation of God, and a description of holy deeds that endure forever…. leading us to salvation.” In other words, according to early Christian thought, Jesus was not an Übermensch, imposing his will on feebler human beings. Rather, he is “the Word guiding all mankind,” who, “in His love for men, is our Educator.” Christians have always believed that education is divine work.
Theosis, the process of humans achieving their destiny in becoming one with God, is, at least in part, an educational activity.
Much Christian writing on the idea of God as Teacher grows from the prologue of St. John’s Gospel: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.… And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we have seen his glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth” (John 1:1, 14). The Greek for “Word” is logos, from which we derive our word “logic.” The coherence, discernibility, teachability of the entire universe flows from the Divine Logic at the center of all things. This is why Clement could write, “Ours is the great Teacher of all wisdom, and the whole world, including Athens and Greece, belongs to Him.” Christians have always confessed that that Logic which gives the cosmos its very intelligibility took on our humanity so that he could make us one with him in his divinity. Theologians refer to this process of humans growing up into godlikeness as theosis. As St. Athanasius wrote, Christ “became Man that we might be made God.”
Historically, Christian theology has not viewed theosis as an immediate divine act, as if God waved a divinizing wand over sinful humans to transform them into models of holy perfection all in one go (“poof!”). Of course, there is nothing preventing our all-powerful Creator from doing so. He can do it. But, as G.K. Chesterton wrote, “Moderate strength is shown in violence, supreme strength is shown in levity.” Put a different way, he can do, but, in his supreme power, he chooses not to. Rather than do to his beloved image bearers, he prefers to teach us. Theosis, the process of humans achieving their destiny in becoming one with God, is, at least in part, an educational activity.
Counterintuitively, St. Irenaeus of Lyons, writing in the late 2nd century, believed that God did not even “force” perfection on Adam and Eve when he had first created human beings. Rather, he pictured us in the Garden of Eden, not as the prototypes of human perfection, but as “infants” who were not yet ready for the solid food of union with the divine. In order to give us what we need, God feeds us “from the breast of his flesh” so we could “become accustomed to eat and drink the Word of God” and so “contain in ourselves the Bread of immortality.” The goal of humans’ education in divine things is to develop the ability to see God, for “the beholding of God is productive of immortality.” After all, “the glory of God is a human being fully alive, and human life consists in beholding God.” For Irenaeus, the vision of God is the source of our very life. In order to enable us to receive this vision of Ultimate Reality in the person of the Son, God teaches us, trains us, develops us into mature image bearers capable of beholding his glory.
This intuition about the way in which God grows human beings to become partakers of his divine nature (2 Peter 1:4) has led the church, from its earliest days, to focus significant effort on catechesis. The word “catechesis” comes from the Greek katēcheō, which simply means “to teach.” The word occurs eight times in the New Testament, and it was taken up by the early church as a way to school new believers in a life of following Christ. This makes sense. If even Adam and Eve in the Garden had to grow up into maturity in their life with God, then a person raised in a culture with values opposed to Christian faith needs a rigorous path to being de-formed from the ways of the world and re-formed unto Christ. This was the goal of catechesis in the first centuries of the church. It was the way the church participated in the divine act of education.
These things weigh heavily on my heart and mind every time I step into the pulpit or teach catechesis in my church.
As a Christian minister serving in post-Christian America, I feel keenly the church’s need for catechesis. When I survey the spiritual landscape around me, the words of religious researcher George Barna resonate deeply: “the spirituality of America is Christian in name only…. We desire experience more than knowledge. We prefer choices to absolutes. We embrace preferences rather than truths. We seek comfort rather than growth.” Many of the churches I’ve been involved with and observed over the years have had this tendency to be conformed, not to Christ, but to the surrounding culture. If ever there was a time to go back to our roots and the catechetical resources of the earliest church, this is it.
Of course, the first obstacle to overcome to achieve a truly Christian approach to teaching in our churches is the modern dualism inherent in Shaw’s phrase. An ancient, holistic approach to teaching can’t be divorced from doing. The idea that you even could teach something you can’t also do would be ludicrous to an early Christian. Worse, if we think of teaching as something primarily (exclusively?) aimed at the mind, rather than the whole person, the church may be able to shape Christian brains without shaping Christian hearts and bodies to look like their Lord. Many today claim to be Christians because of the way in which they think about themselves and the world, without letting those thoughts translate into the actions of obedience and love. We need the faith and humility to lament these realities.
These things weigh heavily on my heart and mind every time I step into the pulpit or teach catechesis in my church. It’s a weight far heavier than I can carry. Every time I look out at the faces of my parishioners, I am faced with a choice. I can seek to do something to them—manipulate, berate, cajole, guilt them into action. Or I can participate with Christ the Educator and take on the name of persuasion. I can invite them to taste and see that he is good; that he is life; that the way of love and submission is the way to freedom and joy.
The act of teaching in church is pointless, hopeless without the conviction that it is a divine activity. God is the first Teacher who has apprenticed his people to godlikeness by showing the Way in the person of his Son. Even now, he is schooling us by the power of the Holy Spirit, making us more and more like Jesus “from one degree of glory to the next” (2 Corinthians 3:18). In this sense, I suppose Shaw is right—I can’t make anyone a Christian. I can’t do; so I teach. But I teach in cooperation with the Divine Teacher who has shown his supreme power, not by doing, but by gently guiding us in his grace to become partakers of his glory.
Jeff Locke is a California native and lives with his wife and four children in the San Francisco Bay Area. He is an Anglican priest and serves as the Rector of Eucharist Church in San Francisco.
