The Iconic Turn

The Case for Christian Schools: Part 8

Dear Readers

First, please accept my humblest apologies for recent inactivity. Sorry especially to readers who have written to me directly. I will reply, and normal service will now resume, continuing with the series of short essays I have been sending you on Christian education. In case you missed earlier essays or want to remind yourself of what I’ve been saying, I’ve grouped them all here for your perusal. But don’t worry about catching up if you want to keep your screen time down: I think the essays work as standalones, too.

Thank you as ever for your support and subscriptions.

Yours in Christ

Fr Thomas

What can we do to counter the relativism of the post-truth age in schools?

Take my suggestions from last time about religious literacy and fluency in different conceptual “languages.” Let’s say we manage to achieve this, and that our children aspire to a native-level understanding of Christian and, say, Muslim or Buddhist understandings of the world. Let’s imagine that we have successfully warned them about the perils and intellectual inconsistency of relativism and shown them how it is at least as arbitrary a worldview as any other. Are we still not left, in the end, with a supermarket selection of arbitrary worldviews? Doesn’t relativism always win in the end? Can there be any escape from the invisible hand of Mammon, the ideological free market which reduces everything to consumer choice - picking your preferred “brand” of ideology from the shelves?

A common way for schools to respond to this quandary seems to be that since no one way is better or truer than another, we will just take the one we’ve been lumbered with and stick with it. An historically Christian school might say that since we are a Christian foundation, we will simply adopt the viewpoint of Christianity and impose it. Pupils, parents and staff are expected to commit to living according to Christian tenets as long as they are part of the institution, whatever they may think of the faith. That’s who we are. It’s what we’ve inherited. Ask no questions. The faith is there: it is your private to take it or to leave it, as long as you fit in.

Next, in order to appeal to the unbelievers who may well comprise the majority of families in such a church school, they tend to present their ethos under the guise of “Christian values.” Whatever parents and pupils may think of the possibility of God and his self-revelation in Christ, it is supposed that there is a purely natural moral core that can be extracted from the supernatural claims of religion and which requires no faith to assent to it.

Need I say, this is highly problematic.

First, the values supposedly extracted from Christianity can end up being generic to the point of having no Christian distinctiveness at all. There is nothing exclusively Christian about love or forgiveness, for example. Just ask a Buddhist. One can readily be a non-Christian and exhibit these qualities far better than many churchgoers. The danger here is that these values become just another shopping list from which to elect or discard on a whim; or worse, that they become a prop for general humanistic values and the perpetuation of the status quo. So Christianity becomes little more than a cipher for a rather stale and boring moralism: the spiritual equivalent of cold showers, mortar boards and the cane. And once again, relativism wins, because that brand of moralism is something you can take or leave as a matter of personal preference. Consent is the only requirement.

Second, and more importantly, the very notion of “values” is arguably antithetical to Christian revelation. Jesus did not come to deliver a set of moral rules, but to embody the Law, the Torah, in himself. It is precisely because God cannot be contained in a list of “values” that He reveals himself in the living, breathing, giving, dying, rising person of Christ. Christianity is about relationship with God the Father, through His Son Jesus Christ, by the Spirit at work in the community of the Church. The self-sacrificial action of Christ Incarnate and Crucified and the mystical participation of the Church in that sacrifice through Word and Sacrament cannot be reduced to a list of “values.” The attempt to turn back the clock and reduce this mystery of the faith, this loving relationship with God as Father, to a code of conduct is the opposite of what Jesus was about: it’s washing the outside of the pots, rather than washing the inner vessel and the feet of your neighbour. Jesus was not a moralist come to broadcast the rules of some transcendent headmaster in the sky. Through reception of Christ’s grace Christians are supposed to grow in virtue and become more like him, the stamp of his character ever more clearly delineated, so that the Torah is written on the human heart. From the perspective of both Catholic and Reformed Christianity, it is a betrayal of the Gospel to suggest that we can ourselves attain to “Christian values” without God’s grace first imbuing in us the virtuous character of Christ, restoring the sullied image in us to His full and true likeness.

Third, the idea of values rests on a conception of God primarily in terms of his will. I’ve written elsewhere about the problems of voluntarism, the idea that what is good is defined purely by God’s will rather than being consonant with His divine nature. Nor is such a voluntaristic approach evangelistically effective in our present milieu. To make goodness simply what God wills, as though God’s will is somehow separate from his self-revelation in the created order, makes goodness seem arbitrary: just the imposition upon the weak of one greater, stronger but basically comparable will to our own. An unqualified appeal to God’s sovereign will is not going to convince a religiously pluralistic society which already sees all expression of will as nothing more than arbitrary extensions of personal taste.

Further on in this series, I will suggest resources within Christian tradition by which relativism can be overcome without insisting on complete conformity of the whole school community to all the truth-claims of the Christian gospel. The natural theology of S. Thomas Aquinas, in particular, shows how one can establish the necessity of a transcendent Good by the use of (God-given) human reason. His use of Jewish and Muslim Platonic texts shows the possibilities of such a consensus, while properly insisting as a Christian that this consensus is crowned and given its full value only by God’s self-revelation in Christ. Shifting the focus away from rather tired arguments about God’s existence, we will then be able to explore the existence of goodness, beauty and truth. This leads us to questions of what we mean by “existence” and “being” in the first place. We can ask whether beauty is really just in the eye of the beholder, and if so, what this means for our natural environment and the human use of the world: whether the utilitarian paving of paradise, qua Big Yellow Taxi, is really just an expression of one arbitrary rival “good” over another. We can take the child’s inherent predisposition towards fairness and demonstrate that, without any transcendent underpinning of a real goodness behind it, that predisposition really makes no sense at all. Where does that predisposition come from, and is it real?

I realise that this might sound like an entry point to the God of the philosophers rather than the God of the Bible, to readers who wish to make that distinction. Yet I would insist that all I have said is what we in the trade call a preparatio evangelica, for once the Good is be established as real and therefore true, rather than a convenient collective fiction, then we are in a position to open minds to the possibility that this Good is in fact the God whom we can know and see in Christ. Ultimately, we need to make Christ Himself, not Christian values, the model for goodness in our schools. And what parent could possibly object to their child becoming more like Christ?

Ancient Christian thought offers the intellectual resources for a richer understanding of our relationship to God and to one another from that of bare contracts and consent: a relationship which rests not on obedience to an arbitrary divine authority, not to some indemonstrable set of values, but on participation in the demonstrable reality of goodness, truth and beauty. In contrast to the idols we have been busy unmasking and knocking down, we might call this worldview “iconic.” More on it anon.