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Evan Rosa: For the Life of the World is a production of the Yale Center for Faith and Culture. Visit us online at faith. yale. edu. Hello, friends. Quick note here before the show. We're currently running a listener survey about the podcast. The bottom line is we want to keep on improving the show. Find out your preferences, give you a chance to share about what you enjoy and what you do not enjoy, and everything's fair game.

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Mark Jordan: I still am enthralled and mystified by Jesus's teaching in the Gospels, because these are all scenes of instruction that form the kernel of the Gospel narratives. And in those scenes of instruction, Jesus often appears as, you Very hard to understand, enigmatic, provoking, uh, sometimes deliberately elusive.

And rather than regard that as character failings in Jesus, I would rather think those are important elements of the pedagogy of what he's trying to teach. So there's something about the use of parables. riddling ways of talking. That seems to me important to what he's trying to say. The forms of teaching that Jesus uses are meant to, in some way, cut through the racket, the chatter of all the surrounding forms of speech.

What he does is speak very often in these enigmatic aphorisms, these kind of paradoxes. And again, I take that as a deliberate way of putting something in front of the hearer. That will stop the hearer in her tracks.

Evan Rosa: This is For the Life of the World, a podcast about seeking and living a life worthy of our humanity. Evan Rosa with the Yale Center for Faith and Culture. Trust me, I know, you know, that conversations about education are really important and also really fraught, but nothing is really new there. It was just as fraught in ancient Greece, when a short, bearded, bow legged, beggarly man spent his days walking around interrogating the public square with a very simple question about the meaning of wisdom.

The unexamined life, he said. was not worth living. And eventually he was tried and convicted for his philosophizing, being accused of idolatry, and that would lead us off topic, but also for corrupting the youth. Now that's Socrates, of course. And you can read all about his fateful trial in Plato's dialogue.

Apology, but that phrase, corrupting the youth, it's pretty good. And I've been on a Zoom call, for instance, with a philosophy professor who has that phrase emblazoned on a flag in her office. It's even cooler. But that's what we worry about when we worry about education. Isn't it? Corrupting the youth. Are we shaping younger minds toward beneficial ends?

Are we, as the Chinese philosopher Meng Tse taught, straightening out the crooked branch? Exactly what needs straightening out? How best to do that? And how can we educate in such a way that frees the student to envision and pursue a life worth living? Well, before you throw me in an Athenian jail and pass the hemlock, I better just introduce the conversation.

In this episode, Theologian Mark Jordan joins Matt Crosman for a conversation on the meaning of theological education today. Mark is the R. R. Niebuhr Research Professor at Harvard Divinity School and is the author of 10 books, including Telling Truths in Church, Scandal, Flesh, and Christian Speech. He came on the show to discuss his 2021 book, Transforming Fire, Imagining Christian Teaching.

Along the way, he reflects on Christian pedagogical principles, the question of the teacher's power and the potential to enact unabusive pedagogy. He talks about the enigmatic, provoking, and sometimes deliberately elusive teaching strategy of Jesus through his parables. the role of desire in learning, and the shared love for the divine between teacher and student.

He acknowledges the expansiveness of theological education that occurs outside a classroom setting and he wonders deeply at the very purpose of Christian teaching. Thanks for listening today, and perhaps just to be enigmatic and provoking, I'm just going to drop you right into a parable Mark tells about a teacher, a student, and a fish.

Mark Jordan: There once was a famous professor and a student comes to him and says, I want to learn about insects. And the professor says, fine, I'm happy to help you with that. Here, sit down at this table, here's your fish. And the student says, no, but I wanted to learn about insects. And the professor says, no, look at the fish and tell me what you see.

And then the professor walks out and appears irregularly, unpredictably to ask, what are you seeing? What are you seeing? And the student is befuddled, spends a lot of time in the room along with the fish. And after a certain amount of time, the professor comes in and presents a second fish and puts it down and the same routine follows.

So gradually, the student begins to make notes about what the student is seeing. The student records, draws, uh, asks questions about what he's seeing, and this goes on for a year and a half. And finally, the professor says, all right, you're ready to move on to insects. And the student feels inwardly, but I really like fish.

I really want to stay with the fish. This story about teaching is, um, it's strong in the sense that it would be easy, I think, to decry that pedagogy as abusive. The professor ignores what the student professes to want to learn. The professor is not directive and yet interruptive and coercive. And the student ends up learning how to look at fish.

which is, after all, what the professor is trying to teach, that is, until you can learn to see, it doesn't matter whether you're studying fish or studying insects, you've got to be able to see. 

Matt Croasmun: You, you say again early in the book that the authority of the teaching is not secured by certified expertise, voluminous publications, or status in a guild.

It's vindicated in the student's transformation. And I take it that that's part of what's happening in that fish story, is there's a deep transformation that's happening in the student's ability maybe to attend, to, to, to focus their attention in particular kinds of ways. That's a really bold ideal to hold up for teaching in a university.

Sometimes we talk about teaching for transformation and sometimes university colleagues are worried about that, that they're, that maybe it is abusive, or even if it's not abusive, it's sort of overstepping the bounds of what kind of permission students have given a teacher to do in their life. But it seems like you, you hold up this ideal.

Why is it worth taking on these sorts of risks? You could get a terrible course reviews or even, I don't know. Is there a moment where it can go too far? How do we find a strong pedagogy that is willing to take some risks to aim at student transformation? That still respects the student and their own agency or something like this.

Mark Jordan: That last, the last question, Matt, the question about agency is a tricky one, and I'd like to come back to it, I guess, because I'm one of those people who believes that. What people think they want is very often not what they really want. And it may not, even if they really want it, it may not be what they need.

I think we're very ready to see pedagogical abuse in situations where teachers apparently ignore what the students are looking for. But I, I wonder what we have in the back of our minds, because there are many other forms of abuse in teaching. Wasting a student's time is an abuse. Imposing your own opinion is an abuse.

Teaching inferior material rather than better material is an abuse. Those all seem to me significant dereliction of duty as a teacher. And so, in some way, what I admire about the fish story, What I admire about it is, in some way, his straightforwardness, his not wasting time, his not trying to garner a favorable opinion from the student, his not trying to charm the student or make the student a friend.

The student is there to learn to see the natural world, and the teacher is taking the most direct route. And I carry that over to my own teaching. I don't think what I'm teaching, if I'm teaching Gregory of Nyssa or Therese of Avila. It's not my job to give the student my opinion, to be charming, to make jokes about Simone Weil, to try to relate Simone Weil immediately to some practical application, although I'm very intent upon no distinction in theology between theology and practical theology.

All theology is practical or it's not theology at all. But, my job is to teach Teresa or Gregory or Simone, and that means I have to get myself and my ego out of the way. In the space between the text and the student, I need to just step aside as far as possible and put the fish on the table. 

Matt Croasmun: So you offer, again, if I'm following rightly, it seems that you offer a thought that your picture of education is so, in a certain sense, so text centered, and yet you're also, you point out, you are troubled alongside, as you point out, many Christian teachers before you, troubled by the thought that Language that words that writing, especially writing, might get actually in, in the way you lead us instead to think not just about texts alone, but about the ways that those texts are themselves offering sort of, or they are scenes of Christian education in some kind of way.

And it seems like the goal in for the. teacher is to use different language at different times or reactivate these sorts of scenes of Christian education. Is that part of it? We can leave the fish metaphor behind at some point if it's no longer helpful, but is that part of just putting the fish on the table?

It requires more than just putting the fish because we have the writing and maybe through the writing, we need to get access to this site of transformative education that the writing is ideally supposed to make available to us. It seems like you're proposing something a little bit more than just putting the fish on the table.

It's not just read this text and then I'm done. There's some agency for the teacher to exercise as you're describing it, to help orient us towards the scenes of education. 

Mark Jordan: Yes. Although it would be interesting. I don't want to stand by the fish longer than is wise, but I do want to say that putting the fish down on the table.

First of all, it's a real fish. It's not a picture of a fish or a drawing of a fish. It's not scholarly reports about current views on fishness. It's a fish, which means it's a real thing, which means it's a complicated organic structure that was once alive. And in some way, the view of the fish is to notice all of that in it.

And I would say also with the text we put down, you're quite right. My view of texts is that they are not inert bodies of information. They're not like Wikipedia articles or something. They are scripts. They're scripts for learning. I always try to teach texts that have been beautifully written, magnificently written as acts of teaching in themselves.

So, what I'm doing is putting down on the table in front of the class, a, and, p. If I point in the right way to certain features of that text, if I say, oh, notice this, oh, look, oh, that word's come back, oh, there's that character again. What happens is the students, I hope, this is my confidence, my piety, the students can be caught up in that script.

And all of a sudden, it's not an inert body of words in front of them. It's a scene of instruction that they're being invited into. This, for me, is the great loss of so much of our teaching, that we think that the nature of a classical work doesn't matter. We think we can reach in and pull out paragraphs or lines.

or illustrations of a thesis that we're trying to promote. But in every time we do that, we're putting ourselves in place of the author as the teacher, as the leader of the scene. The scenes 

Matt Croasmun: that you, that you return to quite often are scenes of the pedagogy of Jesus, the teaching of Jesus, or scenes that you help us understand are themselves echoes or re enactments, re performances, re activations of Moments of Jesus's teaching, scenes of Jesus's teaching.

What in particular, I want to ask you both about, what about Jesus's teaching do you think is for our emulation? And then I, uh, you spend a lot of time in the book talking about this, uh, and I'd love for you to share with our audience some of those reflections. I'll warn you in advance. I also want to ask you, what of Jesus's pedagogy oughtn't we imitate?

But we can certainly start with the first. 

Mark Jordan: Yeah, I'm going to ask you about that second question. 

Matt Croasmun: Sure enough. 

Mark Jordan: Yeah. So I just, I'm very taken by the fact that most of what we, most of the ways we write theology now and for centuries bear little resemblance to the form of the canonical gospels. So early on, Christian theologians decided that they were going to abandon the genre of the gospel for other genres of writing.

That seems to me a consequential decision. And there's plenty of reasons for doing it. There are apologetic reasons. You want to sound the people you're trying to persuade, their church governance reasons. You want something that looks like a code of law or a code of conduct. You want summaries that you can hand out that aren't as long as the gospel.

So yes to all of that. But I still am enthralled and mystified by the gospels, by Jesus's teaching in the gospels, because These are each, these are all scenes of instruction that are, that form the kernel of the gospel narratives. And in those scenes of instruction, Jesus often appears as very hard to understand, enigmatic, provoking, but sometimes deliberately elusive.

And rather than regard that as character failings in Jesus, I would rather think those are important elements. of the pedagogy of what he's trying to teach. So there's something about the use of parables. There's something about his riddling ways of talking that seems to me important to what he's trying to say.

And there again, I take him as someone who's trying to teach in the middle of a noisy marketplace of other forms of speech, right? He's got all the speeches of the Roman Empire. He's got all the speeches of the structures of Jewish religion. He's got philosophers trying to recruit people in the marketplace.

He's got people selling fish in the marketplace. So it's all there, the whole cacophony of human speech. And that's the other thing that matters to me in the gospel, is to notice that the forms of teaching that Jesus uses are meant to, in some way, cut through the racket, the chatter. of all the surrounding forms of speech.

So instead of giving us perfectly polished speeches the way any third rate teacher of philosophy could at that time in the Mediterranean world, we're giving us elaborate disquisitions in the way any student of the emerging Talmudic tradition could, right? What he does is speak very often in these enigmatic aphorisms, these kind of paradoxes.

And again, I take that as a deliberate way of putting something in front of the hearer that will stop the hearer in her 

Matt Croasmun: tracks. Yeah, it makes me reflect on a couple of summers ago and during the pandemic as a church, we were Meeting outdoors because that was the way that it seemed safe to to gather and we were preaching the parables of Jesus out on the New Haven Green with all of city life going on around us and it felt like the parables had found their natural environment again.

It felt so right and I remember preaching the, it was either the parable of the mustard seed or I think actually probably of the And I felt like I have to, I hardly have to say anything because we're experiencing. The parable of the leaven right here, right? We're experiencing the parable in its right context, but we're also experiencing the marginality of the kingdom.

We go inside our church and we can have a sense that the only thing that's happening in the world during our worship service is our worship service. We control everything we hear, everything we see, everything we smell and taste and touch. It was so transformative to experience the Parables week after week, where I remember remarking several times, most of the people who could hear my voice couldn't care less about what I was saying.

And that felt like somewhat, yeah, it felt like I said, like the parables had found their, their place again. Like we'd put them back in their sort of proper place. And there's something right about experiencing our own marginality or at least the sort of that directness speaking into a sort of cacophony.

How do you reproduce that in inside your classroom? You sort of playfully joke a couple of times, should we be aiming at like puzzlement and confusion as like one of our learning objectives? You know, by the end of the term, the student will be befuddled. But it sounds like you, I think if I'm reading you right, you do think that at least at some point along the way, the student probably ought to have been befuddled.

How do you do that in your classroom? 

Mark Jordan: It does seem to me, so at a certain point, Christian teaching decided to make peace with the existing forms of teaching, with the existing educational establishment. That happened differently in different places and times. It happened most crucially, perhaps, for people in our situation.

when theology was moved from monastic schools into universities. And that was a decision. That was not fate. That was not divine command. That was a decision about where to place theological teaching. And that movement inside the universities, which has had so many different forms as universities have mutated in the last eight centuries.

It seems to me what we've forgotten is the prior question. Should we be indoors? Yeah. Should we be in, should we be entrusting the main work of Christian theology to universities? That, that we would want to have an outpost or an outreach mission to universities, of course. But do we want to actually make the habitation of theology in universities?

Because I think that many, many things follow there. One of the things you've already pointed to is that we begin to think that the classroom is the locus of divine revelation, whereas, in fact, it's the world and not just suburban places or urban places. But here, where I live in the high New Mexico desert, one of the things I keep thinking every morning when I look at the sunrise is, what ever led us to believe that we should be doing theology in cities?

Again, that we should be preaching in cities, of course. We should be there, yes, but look at what Jesus does in terms, especially say in the Gospel of Mark, of seeking solitude, of going out into the wilderness. As you say, this whole notion of preaching in the world. Where you actually, mountains and soil and animals around you, that's a different theology.

The other, one of the other things that happens that I'm really concerned about in the book is that when we enter universities, we entered the university schedule. That means that we have to read at a certain pace and we have to evaluate certain fixed intervals and so on. We have to conform to a degree plan.

So many of the texts that I teach are text. Texts that move with a very different timescale than the timescale allowed in a university classroom. And about all I can do teaching in a university classroom is to keep saying, wow, do you notice that really we would need another six months to do this text properly instead of one week, which is what we've got.

And even then many people think my syllabi moved too slowly, right? So there's that. And to loop this back to the question of. Teaching for Transformation just does seem to me that we have fairly strict speech codes and behavior codes in university classroom. A lot of that is very important, very much to the good in terms of protecting students from faculty and protecting faculty from students and maintaining minimum civility, all that to the good.

But I also notice when I'm teaching that these texts are frank, are candid. And if the whole setup of the classroom is to protect students from any sort of demand that they risk their lives, that they transform their lives. in response to certain reading. Well, then we've sabotaged the texts from the very beginning.

And sometimes I say to myself, well, it's better to teach, you know, a little Gregory of Nyssa, or a little Teresa of Avila, or a little Thomas Aquinas, or a little Bonaventure, or a little Luther. It's better that they hear some of these words than not at all. But I also often ask the students, have you ever encountered a text that, just as in the story of so many Christian saints, makes you want to get up from the, from your seat and walk out the door and go in pursuit of God.

And if you have never felt that, then I'm not teaching very well. I 

Matt Croasmun: will confess that reading your chapter on Lewis, Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, which I read 35 years ago, I was in tears reading his, his line. I'm not sure that line I'd ever read before from the dedication. to Lucy this book by the time I started writing this book for you, but now that it's done, you're too old for it.

And by the time it's published, you'll be older still, but perhaps there will come a time, forgive me, I'm trying to, I'm just trying to summarize here rather than quote, but, but there does come a time in one's life when one returns to fairy tales. And perhaps you'll find this useful when you get there.

And just that thought of the time when we'll return to fairy tales. I, yeah, I will choose to be unashamed to say I was sobbing at that moment. I just felt that tug of what would it be like to return? Or I don't know if that's a sort of second naivete, that sort of vulnerability and openness to transformation, right?

You say it's important that he invokes fairy tales in particular, because those are pedagogical texts. They offer Symbolic worlds in which we might choose to live differently or come to understand the world differently such that we might live differently. As a teacher, you can't make that happen. And I sometimes have reflected or many times I think about this, my, one of my roles in my church community is.

My evangelical church community is as a song leader, and there are moments, especially in a sort of evangelical space of worship, where we don't have exactly a plan. We have, we have some songs we're going to sing. We're not exactly sure where this is going to go, but there's a hope that there's a pretty visceral encounter with the presence of God.

You can rehearse the band well, you can put together a thoughtful set list and prayerful preparation and whatnot, but that sort of encounter with God. Well, if you could make it happen, then you'd know what you were making happen. Wasn't an encounter with God, right? And you're forcing some sort of emotional moment, right?

So the same thing is true as a teacher. And it took me almost, it took me by surprise several years ago when I realized, Oh, this is actually a familiar, there's a familiar structure to this new vocation in my life. I've been teaching that for about 10 years. And as that has become more and more central of my vocation, like, Oh, actually, this is a little bit like worship leading, which I've been doing for much longer.

Especially in this feature that the thing that the success of what I'm aiming at is impossible for me to guarantee. And so there's something really risky. And you refer to this risk at several points in the book that if we aim at those sorts of transformative moments of encounter, as you said, if the students have never had that moment, we've failed.

At the same time, we cannot as teachers guarantee that this thing will happen. I wonder if you just might speak a bit about that, that feeling of risk. And I have a follow up question. That's, 

Mark Jordan: I think what you've said is very beautiful and something that ought to be engraved over the entrance to every seminary or indeed every Christian classroom or every classroom teaching Christian materials.

Because it seems to me we have the hardest trouble remembering faith is a gift, period. Faith is a divine gift. If it's something you do for yourself, if it's something your community does for you. Even if it's something that you've, that you attribute to the music, and I'm someone very susceptible to music, I regularly swept off my feet, even by hymns with terrible late Victorian lyrics, I just get moved.

I tear up. Yeah. But if I'm doing it, or if the community's doing it, or some argument is doing it, it's not faith. All of those can be preparations for faith, but faith is a divine gift, period. And it seems to me we forget that, and then we forget even more the consequences of that for teaching Christian theology, which is that our hope is that we put enough helps or invitations in front of learners or motivate them.

the draw that they're already feeling within themselves, and then leave space for divine action, which we cannot compel, right? Which does not show up according to our schedules, right? Yes, class notes, class plan, 1017, the Holy Spirit will appear, two minutes allowed for the Holy Spirit, and then we will go on to the material that will be on the midterm examination.

No, so I think that's really crucial. I think it's risky in various ways to actually open space. It feels risky. It's risky to our vanity. It's risky to our expertise, to our sense of control in the classroom, and nothing is more terrifying to a teacher, or at least to me, than the sense of losing control in the classroom.

Terrifying. Yeah. 

Matt Croasmun: How do you manage the, those feelings of fear, vulnerability, fear of insufficiency? And I guess, especially like someone, I spent a lot of time these days working with new teachers that are daring to aim for more than information transfer, daring to aim for, to teach for transformation.

Teaching is already risky and vulnerable and frightening. But then saying your major goal is something you cannot guarantee, that can turn it up to 11. Do you have advice for new teachers that are daring to aim in this 

Mark Jordan: direction? It's, look, it's hard enough, in my experience, it's hard enough for middle aged and old teachers like myself.

And I think one of the things that, that makes it easier as you go on is that you have been embarrassed often enough in class. You have failed often enough in class. Sometimes I think. I'm willing to play the fool because I've been the fool often enough in class without wanting to be. I also realized that there's this notion of teaching into the breaks in the performance.

Let me give you an example of teaching into the breaks. That was in a large, picture this, a large lecture room, amphitheater, about 150 people in there. And it was a lecture on churches in response to AIDS. And this is for the students, most of the students, this is a historical topic. It's, for me, a living memory.

And I finished the lecture all right. I got through, made the points, and then we were doing questions. And someone asked a question about what it felt like, and, and I started crying. That's what it felt like. It was horrible. It was horrible. And I tried to go on, I tried to talk, got to the end of the hour, people filed out, and the student who had asked the question came up and said, I'm, I'm sorry for asking that.

And I said, no, no. No apologies. That was a good question. And then the student said, I think of all the things that have happened in this classroom, that is the one I will remember. And I didn't feel like, why did I waste my time on the lectures? What I felt was that's exactly right. It's those moments in which the sort of facade of expertise breaks through in which we are.

All of a sudden, vulnerable in our creaturely humanity. Those are the moments of the most powerful teaching, it seems to me, which again doesn't mean you want to cultivate histrionic performances of crying at the lectern. What it does mean is that when it happens beyond your control, something else can be present in the teaching.

Matt Croasmun: I was encouraged that in one of the exercises that you invite the reader to do as they're reading this book, which we should talk about that maybe in principle in a second, but in one of those exercises, you invite the reader to reflect the reader who may be a teacher to reflect on their own bodily and affective sort of practices in, in, in their teaching.

Because there's this sort of extraordinary moment, which you also relate in the book, you tell that story, but it does feel like it attending to these sorts of more human components of our teaching persona, if that's a little center for teaching and learning talk there, but the, I don't know, the, the parts of ourselves that we choose to share with our students, it just, it gave me, I'll tell you until I got to that exercise, my experience of reading the book had been.

I am a terrible teacher. I do not teach like Jesus. But I got to that moment, I actually thought, Oh, you know what? I actually, that was one of the rare exercises where I actually gave myself a moment. There, there are another couple inviting us to reflect on the children's literature that did the most to shape our moral outlook.

Velveteen rabbit. Anyway, that really authorized me as like a reader of this book of being like, okay, no, I'm in this conversation because I don't know. I think maybe my students have an experience of me as a, I think I express a lot of uncertainty. I express a lot of curiosity. I think there are things that I think I do have, uh, at times I, I will pause and allow for a lot of silence, especially when I, when a question is really like hitting all of us at any way.

At least for me, that was really helpful. So it's not just those extraordinary moments where you get that crazy question that, or that, that really intense question that sort of brings the classroom to a screeching halt. There can be those moments, but there are also ways that we can bring our humanity and that sort of affective emotional part of our whole persons into the classroom, even in the sort of.

in a more routine kind of way, in the ways that we choose. And it made me think about the way that John Hare, um, would always wrap his arm around his head because he was, he was communicating, I think, to this bodily practice of his, that the questions that we were taking up were difficult ones, and he was really wrestling with them.

And this wasn't simply a matter of him just dispensing expertise, though he has plenty of it to dispense, but that he, yeah, and it, that was a really helpful exercise to think about more than just those. Crazy lightning flash moments, but these more day by day quotidian practices, ways of showing up as a teacher, that can be ways of communicating 

Mark Jordan: this.

In fact, I would say every minute, right? That is, we're teaching with our bodies every minute, right? Not just when we're doing planned gestures or unplanned gestures, but we're teaching with our bodies and And that's entirely appropriate to Christian teaching, which is based on the premise of bodies teaching bodies.

That's why God became incarnate, right? Because bodies learn best from bodies. And it seems to me entirely appropriate to admit that to ourselves, right? Even though it makes me very uncomfortable. I do not like to be looked at in large numbers of people, right? And I'm also very parsimonious, very guarded.

About personal disclosures in class. And then I realized it's not the words that are doing the disclosing. It's my bodily presence. That's doing the disclosing. 

Matt Croasmun: Yeah, I had the thought reading, you draw this connection several times in the book. It seems like it's one of the central themes of the book is incarnational pedagogy.

If God went through the trouble of taking on human flesh because of the powerful way that bodies teach bodies, the way that only bodies can teach bodies in the ways that bodies can teach bodies, Why on earth would we, as faculty, work so hard to, to disembody ourselves, right? God went through all this trouble to take on a body.

Why do we work so hard to leave ours aside? How much of what we've just been saying about teaching, that the final sort of goal of teaching lies outside of our control, how much of that is true, not just of theological education, but of education, period. Andrew Delbanco, um, in his book on college invokes some language that he draws out from early Puritan reflection as he's going through sort of his history of the American idea of college.

He talks about a sort of third presence and he says, yeah, they might, that has obviously particular meaning. He recognizes for his Puritan sources, but he thinks there's, there's something there that maybe applies to all of teaching. How much of what you say in this book, do you think is? particular just to christian theological education and how much do you think is yeah just just true of of teaching Generally, and maybe, maybe those categories aren't, aren't distinct.

Mark Jordan: No, I agree with you. I guess I would say that, I mean, I've never taught accounting or nuclear physics, but I've taught a wide range of courses and what are called the humanities. So in that, I would say that what we've been talking about is especially or particularly true of theology. And. It's important to remember it because we seem particularly prone to forget it in theology with violent consequences.

So it's important to keep saying it in theology, but it's been my experience in teaching philosophy or teaching literature or teaching Latin where you would think it would be all rule bound except that there's that moment when all of a sudden The class moves beyond the paradigms and takes off, and they're all of a sudden in Latin in a way that The rules helped, couldn't produce.

And I'm remembering a passage in Thomas Aquinas Summa Theology, where he raises the question whether any human being can teach another human being. And he's thinking of Augustine's fascinating dialogue on the teacher. Thomas, in his usual way, Thomas is not interested in going through all the steps of Augustine's dialectic, but Thomas gives a kind of middle answer, which is, yes, a human being can teach another human being in the sense of, of helping the other human being to come to the point of seeing, but a teacher cannot help, a human teacher cannot help a human student do the seeing.

Right? The seeing. has to be done by the student. Thomas is not talking about teaching theology. He's just talking about humans in relation to each other. And I think there's much more to that than we allow. And there again, it seems to me that the internal logic of educational institutions always tends to overestimate the extent to which teaching and learning can be controlled.

After all, if you're selling degrees, you've got a product. You've got to be able to Do what you say. And maybe you can do what you say, but you're not doing the essential thing in education. 

Matt Croasmun: Earlier in our conversation, I was thinking of the ways that you, you invoke the end of the semester course evaluation in you.

Of course you begin the five point Likert scale, which I think I take it is actually I think in our day, probably in the last five or 10 years has taken on a new sort of resonance because it starts to look like the Yelp review or the Uber driver rating or whatever, right? We are, I'm sure there's been a consumer frame around education for a long time, but that's the five point scale just really, I don't know, crystallizes that sort of consumer relationship that as the teacher, we are a service provider, the student is the customer, and.

And yeah, and we better be delivering the service that the student has paid for meeting their expectations. And we should recognize for many, and as you do recognize in the book, especially for untenured faculty, there's job security that has, that ends up having to do with, are they service providers who are meeting the needs of the consumer as the consumer, uh, assesses the quality of the service that they've been offered.

How much of it do you think just comes down to that sort of consumer frame of the sort of consumer service provider? 

Mark Jordan: Yeah, it's consumer service provider. And it's never quite clear what the service is other than issuing the degree, but it does seem to me that the service, that service model is closely linked to the view that most of teaching is the transmission of information.

Which is the opposite, I think, of what teaching is. That is, if people want information, they can get it much more efficiently online. Something's happened here, and I, yeah, this would be another four hour conversation. It seems to me that what's striking to me is that so many of the ancient and early Christian models of education are fairly frank about the fact that education depends on desire.

And the desire is in the student, but also in the teacher. And as soon as I say that, people are blushing or scowling 

Matt Croasmun: because the human resources people are losing their minds. Yeah, exactly. 

Mark Jordan: So I make immediately clear that I'm not talking about erotic relationships between teachers and students. What I am talking about is that what many Ancient philosophers and early Christians and medieval Christians regarded as that deeper love, which is the love that drives human living, that makes human living worthwhile, which is the love for the divine, which is not separate from the love for each other or from the love of the created world.

But it seems to me the presumption of so many of the texts we teach is that the point of teaching is to activate and correctly align. The students love because only when that powerful motive is activated and correctly aligned will the student be able to see, put the pieces together to see the reality in front of the student.

Very risky, very risky because many things can go wrong in attempting to help someone align their love correctly. There are many false objects that can come into play at that point, many deviations. But I still hold to the view that as I hold to the view, not just teaching is beyond my control when it comes to the most important things, but the view also that teaching has to be motivated by the deepest love that the human being is capable of.

That seems to me the opposite of a consumer model. 

Matt Croasmun: Yeah. And you, of course, are in good company here, bell hooks. It seems like it's actually like feature of many pedagogy books in recent times that they all have this slightly, like you say, blush inducing chapter, right? There's one in bell hooks book.

There's one in Willie Jennings book in this same series. But this, I guess maybe this brings me to the disanalogy that I see potentially between us and Jesus is teaching. Namely that it seems to me that lots of Jesus is teaching, including some of the deliberate. Aims at befuddlement, which if anybody's Upset by your and my both using the word deliberate, they're intentional.

Go read Mark 4 again and hear Jesus explanation of why He teaches in parables so that they won't understand. It seems to me that a lot of that teaching is a reframing of desire. But in the teacher, you talk about ways that the teacher and the student, and again this is something that Bill Hooks talks about, something that Willie Jennings talks about, in that encounter between teacher and student, as desire is awakened and brought into the process, there can be this way that suddenly the desire becomes for the teacher to be the teacher.

And it seems to me that Jesus in large part is, that just works to his benefit because his person is in many ways the substance of his teaching. And that sort of training of the student's desire on him is his end goal. And it strikes me that should not be my end goal as a teacher. And that, but that disanalogy is a, is a really important one, but one that.

It makes me wonder, how do we bring our students into befuddlement? Because it is really tempting, and again, not in the, in no sort of erotic or HR troubling ways, but in an intellectual way, it can be really tempting. It can be really satisfying to have Students return to, Oh, I, I need to go talk to my professor about this question.

To insert oneself into their intellectual life such that they, they need you. It's nice to feel needed, but it seems to me that is, that's not our goal that we don't want to insert ourselves in the midst of someone's sort of intellectual life. But it seems to me that maybe Jesus did want to insert himself and create a sort of a dependency on the person of Christ seemed to be A win for Jesus.

That's a big loss for you and for me. How far does that go to suggesting some ways that our teaching might need to be a little bit different from Jesus's? 

Mark Jordan: I think if you said it, Matt, that, yeah, I don't, you know, teachers who are trying to create disciples or fans, man, that's talk about abuse. Long before you get into any sexual matters or anything like that, that use of your students, that kind of vampiric use of your students to fulfill your own emotional needs, it seems to me that's something that we must be on guard against every time we go into the classroom within ourselves.

The temptations are so strong, especially if we're not feeling particularly loved on a given day, or we do need someone to say something nice to us. If then I think you have to be most Careful. Can we just go back to the example of Jesus, because it, in one sense, it seems to me Jesus does want to encourage, I would say, a loving trust in him, but he's also constantly correcting the misapprehensions of that trust.

He wants his students to love him, but not as the next king. He wants his students to love him, but not in order to bicker about who sits where once he takes the throne. He's encouraging it, but he's also correcting it. I take that as a kind of, not exactly the same as, but a kind of prompt for my own thinking about how to respond when a student is beginning to mistake me.

For the actual point of the course and how to respond gently to that misapprehension. The other disanalogy that I always think about is that Jesus was willing to die for his teaching, to die for his students, and whatever else is going on there in terms of your atonement theory or whatever, within the pedagogical situation.

Jesus is willing to sacrifice his life for the teaching as a lesson, as a teaching to his students. And I'm not, I wish I were, but in some sense, the disanalogy that always weighs on me is the disanalogy of my own selfishness. 

Matt Croasmun: Mark, you end the book thinking about, about contexts other than universities in which theological education happens, could happen.

It's a real note of hope for any who have lots of anxiety about the state of theological education inside institutions of higher education. I imagine it could be energizing for folks in our audience who maybe had their seminary days or have never had an opportunity to go to seminary, but are really theologically interested.

You have a lot of hope for theological education and other kinds of spaces. I'd love to just hear where your And even you even say, Oh, I've got this dream, but that's just my dream of the moment. So I'd love to check in today. Where are you excited about when it comes to other scenes of Christian education that might be unfolding in our world or places where we could reenact or revivify some of these scenes of Christian education that have been handed on to us?

Mark Jordan: I am hopeful, Matt, but I'm also aware that I'm a creature of a certain stage of university based theological education. I've spent my life in colleges and universities. So, I also, I also tell myself that I'm probably not the right one to see is being raised up in these moments. But look, even if you use history as your guide, what you can say for sure is that Christian theological education has taken so many different forms.

And to think that it can only happen in something like the modern university or the modern seminary. No, no, no. It's happened in all kinds of places. It's happened in catechetical schools and cathedral schools and monasteries. It's happened in the middle of nowhere, people teaching each other. It's happened in coffee shops.

It's happened as you were saying, on the green in New Haven. So it seems to me that what we ought to do is probably flip the question and not say it. Okay. Theoretically, where could it happen? Let's assume that theoretically, it can happen anywhere. There's some people who believe that as the institutions for teaching Christian theology contract and then collapse, whether it's in universities or seminaries, That Christian theology will go away, and what I keep saying is that can't happen, because the church, which I believe will last till the end of the world, needs Christian theology, and the human heart, which will last as long as human beings last, needs Christian theology.

So the question is not, will there be a future of theology? It's where? Will there be a future of theology? All 

Matt Croasmun: of which I think points in the direction of imagining theological education that is for more than just than more than only the professional preparation of church leaders, but in fact, part and parcel of the discipleship of every Christian.

Mark, thank you for the gift of your time today and for the gift of this book. 

Mark Jordan: Thank you, Matt. Thank you for the conversation

Evan Rosa: For The Life of the World is a production of the Yale Center for Faith and Culture at Yale Divinity School. This episode featured Mark Jordan and Matt Crosman. Production assistance by Alexa Rollo, Macy Bridge, and Tim Bergland. And Rosa and I edit and produce the show. For more information, visit us online@faith.yale.edu where you can find past episodes, articles, books, and other educational resources.

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