Category — Pedagogy

And the second commandment of the Teaching; You shall not commit murder, you shall not commit adultery, Exodus 20:13-14 you shall not commit pederasty, you shall not commit fornication, you shall not steal, Exodus 20:15 you shall not practice magic, you shall not practice witchcraft, you shall not murder a child by abortion nor kill that which is begotten. You shall not covet the things of your neighbour, Exodus 20:17 you shall not forswear yourself, Matthew 5:34 you shall not bear false witness, Exodus 20:16 you shall not speak evil, you shall bear no grudge. You shall not be double-minded nor double-tongued; for to be double-tongued is a snare of death. Your speech shall not be false, nor empty, but fulfilled by deed. You shall not be covetous, nor rapacious, nor a hypocrite, nor evil disposed, nor haughty. You shall not take evil counsel against your neighbour. You shall not hate any man; but some you shall reprove, and concerning some you shall pray, and some you shall love more than your own life.
— Didache, Chapter 2

I love how direct and unqualified this is. Lord, make me more naive, as a child. Make me shrewd and innocent, make me tremble and rejoice. I hate this body of death. Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord!

Maranatha…

“To me, there nothing more important in a preacher than that he should have a systematic theology, that he should know it and be well grounded in it. This systematic theology, this body of truth which is derived from the Scripture, should always be present as a background and as a controlling influence in his preaching”. — Martyn Lloyd-Jones*

“But when proper words make Scripture ambiguous, we must see in the first place that there is nothing wrong in our punctuation or pronunciation. Accordingly, if, when attention is given to the passage, it shall appear to be uncertain in what way it ought to be punctuated or pronounced, let the reader consult the rule of faith which he has gathered from the plainer passages of Scripture, and from the authority of the Church, and of which I treated at sufficient length when I was speaking in the first book about things. But if both readings, or all of them (if there are more than two), give a meaning in harmony with the faith, it remains to consult the context, both what goes before and what comes after, to see which interpretation, out of many that offer themselves, it pronounces for and permits to be dovetailed into itself”. — Augustine, On Christian Doctrine, Book III, 2:2

Lloyd-Jones is silent in regards to conciliar systematics, but Augustine was not. The silence is not a denial necessarily, just an assertion of the individuality that Lloyd-Jones prized so much. I think Lloyd-Jones would admit that he was dependent on church councils, despite himself.

*Thanks to Mr. Wilson for the quote from Lloyd-Jones. All italics mine.

Came across a book entitled “The 100 Most Influential Books Ever Written” by Martin Seymour-Smith. Like Mortimer Adler, he has created a list. Unlike Adler, he bases it on the general cultural influence of a book. Adler aimed at creating a prophylactic against illiteracy in the West. “Greatness” was an a priori assumption on Adler’s part, an “ought” built into his worldview. Seymour-Smith takes the after-the-fact route. There is over-lap between the two lists, but Seymour-Smith includes books that were actually read by people, not just what should be read.

He includes a number of mediaeval and 20th century books that Adler does not, such as Maimonides, Kuhn’s “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions”, Chomsky’s “Syntactic Structures” and Von Hayek’s “The Road to Serfdom”. Arguably, these books have had a deep influence on the West.

As a student of Western History and Worldview, I am thinking that Seymour-Smith may be on the right track. Dismissing the empirical reality of what shaped the West for an ideal of what should have can lead to all sorts of distortions and misunderstanding. Tone-deafness is a hallmark of some parts of Christendom.

I appreciate Adler’s work, agree with his pedagogical ideal, and have benefited greatly from following his plan — back in ‘96 I began to work through his list, and finished the better part of it. But, Seymour-Smith’s approach could help to fill in the blanks of the reality of the West and its trajectory.

“It begins with a criticism…” — Herman Dooyeweerd

“Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism, as I understand it”. — George Orwell

“We demolish arguments and every pretension that sets itself up against the knowledge of God, and we take captive every thought to make it obedient to Christ”. — The Apostle Paul

Every truly provocative and lasting piece of literature has this dual element in it. Contrarians make for the most interesting reading. The challenge is to do both well — critique and exposition. The temptation is to be dogmatic and generalize about the opponent, to forget that they are human too and there is something in what they are saying that possesses truth or beauty or goodness. No one is ever absolutely wrong in every aspect of their temporal perspective. I would be a contrarian to myself and to my Christian brothers in defense of a pagan who makes a good point. I hope I will always do this. 

Reading, seminary, discussion, writing, a PhD: all of these are for the purpose of nailing the meaning of the immediate text at any given moment of my life, for myself, and maybe, for others. My life is a hermeneutical spiral. 

Above all, Thomas was a teacher. His pedagogical method reflects a real understanding of the development of the student. This included a Socratic, question and answer approach too learning (not simply catechism, but actual discussion), which assumed the dignity and the recognized abilities of the student. 

Discussing Thomas’ method, Pieper writes: “Teaching…presupposes that the hearer is sought out where he is to be found. Thus teaching implies proceeding from the existing position and disposition of the hearer. Nor can that position be determined abstractly in advance, or fixed once and for all; it must be located in its own historical context, determined concretely for what it is. The hearer’s counter-arguments must be taken seriously and the elements of truth in them recognized…The teacher, then, must proceed from what is valid in the opinions of the hearer to the fuller and purer truth as he, the teacher, understands it”. 

This is reflective if the heuristic approach to knowledge used in the Lyceum: beginning with particulars, an abstracted, universal knowledge is attempted. The individual is assumed to possess knowledge of some kind, as we are all informed through our own experience of the world around us, and that from birth. We all “know” something, and this something is the basic starting point of continued learning. The teacher’s business is to discover the beginning spark and to nurture it to further understanding. Analogical learning, from one thing of the uni-verse, to another thing.

Thomas sought, as Aristotle before him, to get at the essence of a thing, to see as it “is” and not in relation to anything else, ie, a duck is a duck is a duck. This is the defining mark of all Hellenic philosophy: being precedes and determines meaning. Of course the question “What determines being?” has yet to be answered.