The best theology

I attended a conference this past week at Parish Presbyterian Church on Christian Classical education. You might be relieved to know I wasn't going only to gratify my appetite for all things nerdy. I know I don't have to justify myself, but just in case, I'll tell you that there were practical reasons :) -- For one, I'll be helping to put together a teacher training manual for the Classical School of the Medes. Also, I'll likely be traveling to Iraq this January to teach at CSM, so a refreshment world-view training course was helpful.

One of the sessions I chose was on art in the classroom -- teaching towards beauty, goodness and truth. The speaker commented on how classical schools (in particular) tend to get the goodness and truth thing down well, but that beauty is a struggle. Beauty is often thought of as a subcategory of truth. But actually, it is essential to tying the other two (goodness and truth) together. Beauty is the visible manifestation of the other things. It is the first and sometimes last thing we notice about someone or something.

Because we often think of beauty as a subcategory, we tend to philosophize about it and theorize it more than we practice it. In other words, we talk our heads off about good art and bad art, but we never give a kid a paintbrush. At least, that was my experience. I'm glad I took aesthetics in high school, but I also wish I had been given a pencil and told to draw it. Today, I can write you a thesis paper about the biblical standards of beauty, but I'm sure I still don't have enough wisdom -- literally "skillful fingers" -- to actually believe it, practice it, taste it for myself.

There's the other side, too, of course. Some people, I've noticed, practice beauty (or think they are practicing it), but never think about what it is that they are glorifying through their production of art, music, writing, etc. Is it glorifying nature? Chaos? Is it celebrating our depravity? Or is it pointing us to that which is truly worthy of our honor? And is it even any good?

The best theology and philosophy, as I was taught in this session, is immensely practical.

So thennn....I was reading James 1, which talks about being both a hearer and a doer of the word. The last verse states: "Religion that is pure and undefiled before God and the Father is this: to visit orphans and widows in their affliction, and to keep oneself unstained from the world."

Wait a minute...hang on...are you saying that even my best attempts at religion, theology and philosophy don't even make it on the radar? All that reading I did in high school and college, all the conversations I've had with friends and colleagues about methodology, all those trips I took to the museum -- those aren't enough to make me a pretty well rounded individual?

But, but....wait. I'm a fantastic note-taker, an intent listener, and I'm great at regurgitating flowery nonsense. I've also read some books on subjects like poverty, tyranny, the just war theory, and sanctification. Doesn't that count for anything?

I guess what James is saying is: um, that's a negative. "For if anyone is a hearer of the word and not a doer, he is like a man who looks intently at his natural face in a mirror. For he looks at himself and goes away and at once forgets what he was like."

So if I've learned anything, I guess I've learned that I have some work to do. Easier said than done, right?