Pastors and Teachers: First Pray for God’s Presence

By amazon Tuesday, November 19, 2019 Comment Edit

The effectiveness of our theological instruction depends ultimately on the presence and activity of the Holy Spirit.

I have been a professor in the theology department at Whitworth University for the past sixteen years. Most of my students think I am a good teacher. I know that because they tell me so and because they write sweet things in their course evaluations. But with every year that passes, I become more acutely aware of my weaknesses, more in touch with the ways I fail them.

Anyone who claims to have mastered the art of teaching the Christian faith is a fool. No one possesses the necessary knowledge, wisdom, eloquence, or imagination. Anyone who doesn’t find it strange that he or she should be the one to stand in front of a group of people and talk about God is either deluded or hasn’t thought very deeply about what is happening. My guess is that many teachers recognize this. We know we’re not up to the challenge, and so we wonder, “Okay, well now what?”

We’ve been given an impossible task. We want students to know God—not merely to know about God, but to know God personally. We want them to engage with Scripture, doctrine, art, history, philosophy, and plenty of other things, but knowledge of those things is not our ultimate goal—or at least it shouldn’t be. In the midst of all this, we hope our classrooms become places where students encounter the living God—places where they become contemporaneous with Christ, to use Søren Kierkegaard’s way of speaking.

According to Kierkegaard, the goal of theological study is not merely to understand but “to exist in what one understands,” and that kind of knowledge is not something teachers can engineer in their students, nor can students realize it on their own. It depends ultimately on God himself.

But if teachers ...