What is the Purpose of Christian Education?

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What is the Purpose of Christian
Education? Preparing Students for the Embrace of
Unbearable Tension
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Who gets to narrate the world?
Today, as in the ancient era, the Church is
confronted by a host of master narratives that
contradict and compete with the gospel. The
pressing question is who gets to narrate the
world? Robert Webber
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Auckland University of Technology
the University for the changing world
Massey University
forever discovering
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Three stances

• Celebrate What is good? To be thankful for? To
  celebrate? To rejoice in?
• Critique What is twisted? Distorted?
  Perverted? Deceitful?
• Confront with grace What can we do about it?
  How can we represent the gospel?

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AUT and Massey Advertisements

• Humans Objects of rapid change
• Humans Agents of rapid change
• Humans Thriving competitors
• Humans Discoverers of the world
• Humans Imaginers of the world

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Worldviews are networks of implicit beliefs
embedded in widely held stories that answer
fundamental questions of life and serve to give
meaning to the whole of life.
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What is your worldview?

• What are your loyalties? The faithfulness and
  devotion in your life.
• What are your longings? The hopes and dreams in
  your life.
• What are your loves? The intimacies and
  encounters in your life.
• What are your liturgies? The practices and
  habits in your life.

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We must always, it seems to me, in every
situation, be wrestling with both sides of this
reality that the Church is for the world against
the world. The Church is against the world for
the world. The Church is for the human community
in that place, that village, that city, that
nation, in the sense that Christ is for the
world. And that must be the determining criterion
at every point. Lesslie Newbigin
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A society which accepts the crucifixion and
resurrection of Jesus as its ultimate standards
of reference will have to be a society whose
whole style of life, and not only its words,
conveys something of that radical dissent from
the world which is manifested in the Cross, and
at the same time something of that affirmation of
the world which is made possible by the
resurrection. Lesslie Newbigin
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These two competing stories will shape the
academic enterprise in different ways at every
point purpose of education, institutional
forms, leadership structures, curriculum,
pedagogy, theory formation, and so on. How can we
be faithful to the Bible without withdrawing from
or being absorbed into the story that shapes our
culture? These are always the two dangers for a
minority community living in a different story
than the dominant story withdrawal or
compromise, isolation or absorption, irrelevance
or syncretism, ghettoization or domestication.
Mike Goheen
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Equipping students for the embrace of unbearable
tension

• Develop a deep appreciation of and begin to
  wrestle with the profound tensions at the heart
  of the biblical account of the good life
• Citizens in a pluralistic, secular culture have
  trouble knowing what to make of the Bible. If
  they pay any attention to it at all, they treat
  it as a consumer product, one more therapeutic
  option for rootless selves engaged in an endless
  quest for self-invention and self-improvement.
  Not surprisingly, this approach does not yield a
  very satisfactory reading of the Bible, for the
  Bible is not, in fact, about "self-help" it is
  about Gods action to rescue a lost and broken
  world.

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Equipping students for the embrace of unbearable
tension

• Develop a deep appreciation of and begin to
  wrestle with the profound tensions at the heart
  of the biblical account of the good life
• Begin to develop the capacity to evaluate the
  grounds of cultural knowledge and practices

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Evaluating cultural knowledge and practices

• What do you mean by that?
• How did you come to that conclusion?
• How do you know that is true?
• Where do you get your information?
• What happens if youre wrong?
• Have you ever considered this?

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Equipping students for the embrace of unbearable
tension

• Develop a deep appreciation of and begin to
  wrestle with the profound tensions at the heart
  of the biblical account of the good life
• Begin to develop the capacity to evaluate the
  grounds of cultural knowledge and practices
• Be deeply influenced by educators (as well as,
  we trust, parents and others) who live faithfully
  in the tension, developing and teaching
  curriculum that explores reality in the light of
  the gospel

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I believe that any Christian who is qualified to
write a good popular book on any science may do
much more by that than by any directly apologetic
work. What we want is not more little books
about Christianity, but more little books by
Christians on other subjects with their
Christianity latent.
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You can see this most easily if you look at it
the other way around. ... It is not the books
written in direct defence of Materialism that
make the modern man a materialist it is the
materialistic assumptions in all the other books.
In the same way, it is not books on Christianity
that will really trouble him. But he would be
troubled if, whenever he wanted a cheap popular
introduction to some science, the best work on
the market was always by a Christian. C. S.
Lewis, God in the Dock