There are ways to teach New Testament Greek or the history of Christianity and Christian doctrine that resist integrating faith and learning. On the one hand, one could approach these subjects in a way that prioritizes certain dogmatic positions over others, avoiding critical thinking or different perspectives. On the other, one could use a purely secular approach to these disciplines and resist discussing how these things might affect faith claims or piety. Both approaches compartmentalize learning and faith, and I purposefully resist that kind of compartmentalization. The Graduate School of Theology faculty as a whole emphasizes the integration of academic study with ministerial formation, and the nexus between the academy and the church is precisely what excites me about working at ACU and with the GST.
It feels natural to me to integrate faith and learning in my course design, lesson planning, class discussion, and one-on-one mentoring. As I design my courses, I consider the student learning outcomes (SLOs) of our degrees, and I am proactive about connecting course material and assignments with both academic and ministerial SLOs. I think about what kinds of routine practices we can engage in every time we meet to reinforce these connections through embodied practice in addition to critical analysis. For example, right now I’m teaching a class on the development of Trinitarian theology, so we begin our time together with a form of midday prayer that contains several trinitarian elements. I pointed these features out to my students, giving them advance notice that we will reflect later about the experience of praying together this way as we learn about the development of this doctrine.
As I prepare for each in-person class, I try to balance academic rigor in assigned readings and lectures with thought-provoking classroom discussions about concrete ministry situations. In fact, both of these activities are rigorous, and they ought to inform each other; there’s nothing easy about wise ministerial practice! I ask my online students, who are often embedded in church ministries already, to offer their own examples and connections to concrete ministry situations. They frequently bring their own ministry experiences to bear in ways that I could not have anticipated, and it stretches me too. When I meet with students one-on-one to discuss their work or to provide academic advising, we frequently explore how their academic work and ministerial calling intersect.
Something I love about reading primary sources with my students in historical theology and church history is that going back to these sources allows us to read them on their own terms and see their ideas in context. The leaders of the church prior to the Enlightenment were far less inclined to erect a barrier between faith and learning. Their most profound teachings about God are rooted in reflection on scripture, the natural world, worship, and the experience of prayer. They are reflexively communal, which is a wonderful corrective to our individualistic instincts. They were often unafraid to engage thoughtfully with non-Christian philosophy, but they rarely do so uncritically; they usually keep their Christian convictions central and allow these to guide their integration of other sources of knowledge. (Though, like us, they aren’t always completely successful!) Today we might not do the same kind of integration in the same way, but there’s a lot to learn here about the value of integrating faith and learning rather than keeping them in separate boxes.