Educating People of Faith, ed

Educating People of Faith

Edited by John Van Engen

FOREWORD by Dorothy C. Bass

© 2004 Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company

“The church is always more than a school,” declares the historian Jaroslav
Pelikan at the beginning of his five-volume history of Christian doctrine. “But the church
cannot be less than a school.”1 As time passes and new generations arise, the continuity
and integrity of the Christian faith depend upon its transmission to newcomers. A
parallel claim can be made regarding Judaism, a tradition that for millennia has observed
God’s command through Moses to “take care and watch yourselves closely, so as neither
to forget the things that your eyes have seen nor to let them slip from your mind all the
days of your life; make them known to your children and your children’s children”
(Deuteronomy 4:9). Teaching and learning have been woven into the fabric of Jewish
and Christian communal life across the centuries and in countless social and cultural
contexts. In each of these “religions of the book,” adherents have educated and formed
one another in the tradition’s wisdom and way of life through numerous, diverse, and
historically changing practices.

In recent decades this perennial necessity has become a matter of acute concern
for those who care deeply about these traditions. Even though hunger for things spiritual
is strong and widespread, religious groups shaped by centuries of theology, liturgy, and
communal life often seem less attractive to contemporary Americans than do spiritual
movements that offer newer, more free-floating approaches. The challenges to religious
formation presented by an image-laden consumer culture with immense formative power
of its own have also become increasingly evident. Some denominations have
experienced decline in the number and commitment of their members, and few are
surprised when young people drift away from the religious communities of their birth.

The idea for this book emerged during a conversation among scholars and
religious leaders about this concern. One of the scholars was John Van Engen, who
calmly called to the attention of those gathered the fact that concern about faith formation
was hardly a new thing. Educating people of faith has been not only a necessary goal
within each tradition, he pointed out; it has also been a persistent problem. Without
diminishing the particular challenges inherent in late modernity, he noted that forming
persons and communities into life guided by Torah or into membership in the Body of
Christ has always faced resistance. Yet within the ancient and continuing endeavor of
forming people of faith, there have been some periods of remarkable creativity when
movements or structures have emerged that drew sizable numbers of believers into
deeper reflection and greater devotion.

With support from the Valparaiso Project on the Education and Formation of
People in Faith, a project of Lilly Endowment located at Valparaiso University, Professor
Van Engen gathered a group of outstanding scholars of ancient, medieval, and early
modern Christianity and Judaism and asked them to explore important episodes, settings,
or issues in faith formation in the areas of their expertise. The results are published here.

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In richly detailed essays, we see how Jewish and Christian orientations to life took shape
both through specialized practices such as catechesis, study of scripture, rituals, and
preaching and in the ordinary choices of daily life, such as what and when to eat or not to
eat. Together the essays portray religious formation across social levels, from the textual
attentiveness of highly literate rabbis and monks to the local experiences of illiterate
medieval Christians for whom the veneration of the shrines of saints, street performances
of religious dramas, and public sermons by wandering preachers were profoundly
formative.

Reading these essays, it is clear that educating people of faith did not in the past
(and cannot today) take place only or even primarily in places recognizable as “school.”
Rather this process takes place through and within practices—some of them deliberately
and intentionally educational, but most pursuing other goods, such as communion with
God or love of neighbor. Through worship and study, community governance and
catechesis, spiritual direction and household prayer, Jews and Christians over time have
been educated and formed within a web of practices transmitted and transformed by the
communities that live them out in daily life. Engaging in such practices—whether highly
ritualized or thoroughly quotidian—individuals and communities come to know
themselves, others, and God in specific ways. Through them, in multiple contexts of
inculturation, resistance, and negotiation, basic orientations within the world are both
expressed and absorbed.

This book demonstrates that attention to the practices of actual religious
communities can open fascinating new insights into specific periods in history and into
important themes in religious formation, even when distance in time limits access to
sources and necessarily leaves readers with unanswered questions. I am confident that a
wide range of readers interested in the practices of Christianity and Judaism will find
these essays informative and stimulating. However, I want especially to encourage
historians and religious educators to explore the excellent work assembled here.

Historians will note that John Van Engen’s introductory chapter places this book
in the context of contemporary academic approaches to history and religion. While there
is no need for me to reiterate his fine discussion, I do want to add my own commendation
for the essays gathered here as exemplary work with rich potential as a model for future
research. This volume resists the disciplinary structures that have tended to divide
scholars into, say, those who read the works of Calvin and those who study social
mobility in sixteenth-century Switzerland. Thus the essays seek to overcome a separation
between the “intellectual” and the “social” that has too often restricted historians’
understanding of those human communities that were oriented by and to an overarching
religious account of themselves and their world. The dynamic intertwining of theological
ideas and social forms characteristic of such communities is, it turns out, right at the heart
of efforts to form people in religious faith. As a result, the topics taken up in this volume
afford remarkable insight into historic Christian and Jewish communities that would not
be accessible from other angles of vision. For this reason, this book could serve to very
good effect as a classroom text for historical study on the part of ministerial and
rabbinical students, as well as for graduate students and advanced undergraduates in
history or religious studies.

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Those who bear special responsibility for educating others within specific
traditions—teachers in churches and synagogues, pastoral leaders in congregations and
parishes, scholars in divinity schools and seminaries—will also find much to value here.
This book will help these educators to make the resources of the past available to
practitioners in the present. This is not to say that premodern methods can or should be
lifted out of context and deployed in twenty-first century congregations. Rather, I would
urge contemporary practitioners to allow these essays to stimulate their imaginations and
to generate reflection on enduring issues. How have others thought about the relationship
between the yearnings of ordinary believers and the articulate faith of religious elites?
How do practices born in devotion also become exclusive and even harmful? Is the local
congregation necessarily the most important place of religious formation? How do
images—not texts, not propositions—form people in faith? Historians are not charged
with offering systematic answers to questions like these. However, they can (and here
they do) lead readers into the company of other human beings who have responded to
these questions, both in words and in the ways in which they lived their lives.

Educating People of Faith belongs to a growing body of literature that focuses on
practices as key elements in the education and formation of people in faith. The scholar
who has done most to encourage this perspective is the practical theologian Craig
Dykstra, who has written the most fully developed argument for a practice-based
understanding of Christian education and formation, Growing in the Life of Faith:
Education and Christian Practices.2 Dr. Dykstra and I have worked together on
scholarly teams that have produced two other books that also develop this approach.
Practicing Our Faith: A Way of Life for a Searching People explores twelve Christian
practices—honoring the body, hospitality, household economics, saying yes and saying
no, keeping sabbath, discernment, testimony, shaping communities, forgiveness, healing,
dying well, and singing our lives—as constituent elements within a way of life that is
lived in the light of and in response to God’s presence in Christ.3 Practicing Theology:
Beliefs and Practices in Christian Life, which explores the implications of this approach
for systematic theology, emphasizes attention to practices as a way of bringing theology
into closer touch with daily life in the world and enabling it to fulfill its primary purpose
of serving Christian living.4

Although these previous works have sought primarily to serve Christian readers, I
am delighted that the present historical volume includes the work of Jewish scholars and
gives attention to the history of Jewish education. This fact greatly enhances the account
of the past here set forth. Further, I hope that having portraits of Jewish and Christian
education side by side in this context will stimulate fresh reflection on the part of
historians, religious educators, and other readers from both traditions.5

1 Jaroslav Pelikan, The Christian Tradition, A History of the Development of Doctrine, Volume 1
(University of Chicago Press, 1971), 1.

2 Geneva Press, 1999. Dykstra is Vice President for Religion, Lilly Endowment Inc.

3 Edited by Dorothy C. Bass (Jossey-Bass Publishing Co., 1997). Practicing Our Faith is not so much
about faith formation as it is a contribution to it; the book has been studied in hundreds of congregations,
retreat centers, and institutions of higher learning. The website www.practicingourfaith.org serves as a hub

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of reflection on practices and faith formation and will be updated as subsequent publications on this theme
appear.

4 Edited by Miroslav Volf and Dorothy C. Bass, Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 2002. One section of
the book addresses the education and formation of ministers and academic theologians.

5 The Valparaiso Project on the Education and Formation of People in Faith has also sponsored the work of
the Catholic-Jewish Colloquium, in which Christian educator Mary C. Boys and Jewish educator Sara Lee
worked with scholars and educators from both traditions to develop an approach they call “interreligious
learning.” See “Religious Traditions in Conversation: The Work of the Catholic-Jewish Colloquium,” a
special issue of Religious Education 91/4 (Fall, 1996). The work of Boys and Lee continues in association
with the Boston College Center for Christian-Jewish Learning.