Kenosis and Teaching

As part of my graduate program, I am taking a colloquium on teaching as I teach my freshman survey on the Christian Scriptures.  One of the assignments was to write a philosophy of teaching.  My philosophy did not go over well because it was deemed too theological to be easily communicated to non-theologians. I personally reject the notion that anything a Christian says should strive to be anything less than theological, especially a statement on why one teaches.  Those of us in Christian higher education often speak of our desire to create a uniquely Christian approach to collegiate education yet such criticisms of being "too theological" betray a fundamental misunderstanding that anything other than theology can lay at the heart of every academic discipline, not to mention every pedagogical approach, for a Christian university.  I'll be developing these ideas and convictions much more in my dissertation on Hans Urs von Balthasar but I thought I might, in this post, say something briefly about how I theologically understand the role of the teacher in the Christian university.

Teaching is an act of service and, as such, should understand itself in light of the greatest biblical depiction of servitude: the beautiful kenosis passage in Philippians 2:5-11:

Your attitude should be the same as that of Christ Jesus:
 ⁶Who, being in very nature God,
      did not consider equality with God something to be grasped,
 ⁷but made himself nothing,
      taking the very nature of a servant,
      being made in human likeness.
 ⁸And being found in appearance as a man,
      he humbled himself
      and became obedient to death—
         even death on a cross!
 ⁹Therefore God exalted him to the highest place
      and gave him the name that is above every name,
 ¹⁰that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow,
      in heaven and on earth and under the earth,
 ¹¹and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord,
      to the glory of God the Father.

This passage depicts the journey of the Logos into the far country of humanity, emptying himself of the form of God and taking on as his own the form of the servant, descending from the heights of heaven to the depths of earth, even the depths of Hades.  The Son of God became what he was not, that is human, in his kenosis.  And he did so, at least according to the almost universal confession of the early Church, to raise humanity up to where it does not by (postlapsarian) nature belong, that is to say as united to God: He became man so that man may become God.

The kenotic descent of Christ is the model for the Christian professor.  As professors, yes, we have an important role beyond the classroom: we are called to be good citizens of our guild by publishing, going to conferences, reviewing books, having sophisticated and lofty conversations over coffee.  But the temptation for the Christian professor, I think, is to see his or her scholarly work as of primary importance and their teaching as a distraction from their "real work".  Over at First Things, R.R. Reno wrote a very good article on higher education that I recommend reading.  In it, he quotes Jacques Barzun's incisive insight into the temptation among scholars to become isolated in their research and to avoid teaching: "The highest prize of the teaching profession is: no teaching. For the first time in history, apparently, scholars want no disciples.”

Such an isolationist attitude is fundamentally opposed to a kenotic understanding of the service of teaching.  To teach is to descend, to descend from the heights of sophisticated abstraction precisely for the sake of meeting your students where they are in order to raise them to a higher level.  Christ met humanity on humanity's terms, becoming one of them while remaining God in order to draw humanity into their higher vocation of deification.  Christ did not effect salvation by remaining on high and transforming human nature from without.  Rather, he entered fully into the experience and existential reality of the human and transformed humanity from within.

That, I believe, is the calling of the teacher: To always remain the scholar (so that you actually have something to teach!) but to descend, to enter into the reality of the student, to speak and to teach in a way that they can begin to understand, to teach in a way that they can grasp but transforms them, pushing them into higher realms of thought.  

The true teacher descends and lifts the student up.  This will certainly involve a degree of suffering on behalf of the professor: the laboriousness of grading carefully, the frustration of taking seriously unsophisticated and perhaps even inane thoughts, the discouragement of showing patience with incomplete thought, the exhaustion from the unending attempt to teach students how to think and how to write well.  All of these things constitute the frustratingly obnoxious side of teaching, yes, but I think a good teacher takes these things on willingly, perhaps even delighting in them,  for the sake of the transformation of their students.  This transformation, further, is a translation: a translation of the student from a shallowly understood and unclearly articulated world to a world of thoughtfulness, of wisdom, of clear thinking, of word-care, of understanding and, perhaps most fundamentally, of worship.  This transformation, this translation, can only be accomplished when professors understand themselves as true pedagogues, those who come alongside the student in a kenotic act of descent for the sake of raising the student up.  This genuine pedagogy, as Clement of Alexandria saw so clearly, is Christological in shape because Christ is the true Pedagogue, the true Tutor.  Christ's tutorship began in kenosis and so should ours if we are to be imitators of Christ as professors of the Church for, as Paul insists: "your attitude should be the same as Christ Jesus".