Monday, December 19, 2011

Education as Worship

The secular artist does not intend to provide an occasion for an encounter with the divine, but that is what he does. I don't see in him the natural terminus of his creative genius; it goes much deeper than him. He intended for me to worship him or his art, but of course I can't stop looking behind him to the true source of all creative genius. Perhaps there will be others that will exalt him, but I cannot be counted among them.

Imagine what it would mean if his innovative contributions were sourced in him alone and not in a source greater either than him or any congress of the best and brightest. It would mean that should some of our finest artists die, there would be no hope of ever seeing the beauty and glory of their work. But of course since it is true that the sum of human creativity is ultimately nothing more than a thimble full of the ocean of God's creativity, any instance of human ingenuity impels us to celebrate it, and yet to see it as epilogue to the great creation event and prologue to the best expressions of both divine and human creativity; it is no climax! Whatever we may think of Steve Jobs or Mozart, they are only midstream; indeed greater things have been done and will be done.

In the same way, the secular educator does not intend to provide an occasion for worship, but for the Christian he does so all the same. The Christian receives his secular education as another opportunity to search out the mind of God in all things. In that sense, for the Christian, either a secular or a Christian education are sacred journeys into theological truth, but a Christian education is self-consciously theological in its work while a secular education often is inherently hostile to the theological truths that alone can make sense of doing education in the first place. Everyone in the Christian institution is asking the question, "what is this telling me about God, His truth, His world, and my place in it?" In the secular institution, only the Christians within it are asking those questions; the others are far too cosmopolitan for all that.

In that sense, the Christian school is more liberal than the secular school. The secular school would tell us to make art--say, a landscape--but tells us not to question whether the scenes in nature that inspire art could themselves be the handiwork of a supremely powerful artist. In point of fact, the secular school tells us to create, but not to think that the universe is an artifact of creativity. The Christian school tells us to create because that is what we were created for (at least partially). Which is the more liberal idea? That nature observed is nothing more than nature observed? Or that nature observed indicates an entire supernatural realm that may be explored through nature? Is it more liberal to believe that Yosemite is just an accident of geometry and physics or that Yosemite tells us about geometry, physics and much much more?