All Theology is Historical

All Christian theology is historical. It is rooted in history, influenced by language, culture, and story. We see this in how Plato and Greek philosophy greatly impacted the Church Fathers, Aristotle ("The Philosopher") was a key shaper of Aquinas, and Enlightenment thought made a tremendous shift in Western theology. We continue to try and grapple with what Jewish and Greek words meant in their original Biblical context, as we try to understand why that particular word was chosen and its linguistic significance for then and today. Language, concepts, and culture have a left a consistent imprint upon Christian thought.

For two of my recent classes, the textbooks have spent their first sections on this topic of Western history. They do this because history is so key for theology and the class needs a common footing. But the books also delve into Western civilization because they have to assume that the students know next to nothing of Western intellectual history. Sadly, it's true. Students seem taken aback about Modernity versus ancient times. Most of their historical notions are fairly populist: the Middle Ages were a time when the Church and the Pope were bad, and then the Protestants fixed things up, and now we can have freedom and shop when we want.

The frustrating result is instructors have to spend a third of the semester's class time on history that students should largely know. These are kids that presumably did well in high school and have gone on to college, but who live in a world of popular historical memes and notions. Rather than doing more advanced work with the material or even the history, we must cover the basics.

I know that instructors have complained about students' knowledge and preparation for centuries. What makes this generation different are the endless distractions they have available: cable television, internet, facebook, you name it. Students could always blow off their work in the past, but the threshold was higher; to go fishing you had to get your pole and worms, maybe pack a lunch. You had to walk all the way to your friend's house and then walk to town to see a movie. In today's world, many students have movies in their pockets (that is, on their iPhones) and numerous ways to contact and hang out with each other. These aren't bad things, but they are far easier and thus more seductive than they used to be. Who wants to read chapter three when you can watch Star Wars for the tenth time?

Interestingly, however, philosophy has a different relationship to history. Although a bit of history helps explain larger trends and interests among philosophers, their ideas to stand on their own more easily. One can read a dialogue by Plato and not have to know that it's from Greece, that it's 2,400 years old, or that it's pre-modern (although these things will help). Understanding that Kant is responding to Hume helps Kantian ideas make more sense, but it's not necessary; Kant can stand on his own. Philosophy's rational underpinnings really show here – the dependence on rationalism means that philosophy doesn't need history quite as intimately as theology does (that's not to say that philosophy can escape it, but that it is more independent of it). Theology is more rooted, as we've come to realize, in narrative and history, and so the Enlightenment project failed.

Lessing's ditch remains, which in the end is just fine. We ourselves are, after all, creatures of history.

Experience helps

We've moved numerous times in our lives, and it's always taken at least a year to become comfortable with a new location and environment. Where's the grocery store? What's the best way to get from A to B?

The reality is, experience helps with pretty much everything. This is a lesson that is perpetually forgotten, especially by me.

There is so much stress with something new: a new route to get somewhere, a new place to find, a new class to teach. I'm reminded of this as I teach one class that I've taught twice before, and a class that is brand new to me. It's a bit like reading a book for the first time; only by going through a class once does one get a feel for the course material as a whole, its shape, tempo, and emphases.

A new textbook, a new course, a new classroom--these are all sources of stress, as well as ambiguity. There's no way to tackle the problem except for gain the experience you need, which requires patience and a generous helping of forgiveness. After several semesters, the material becomes comfortable, clear, and develops its natural tempo, but until then you're in the wilderness. Reading the textbook through multiple times won't give you the same perspective as teaching the class, week in and week out, for 15 weeks, and doing it again and again for several semesters. Being an expert in a field doesn't mean you can effectively teach the class, especially if you've never taught it before. Experience helps.

Outlines for Class Lectures

After reading Advice for New Faculty Members by Robert Boice, I've tried to shift to an outline for class lectures. Outlines have several advantages over a traditional, discursive manuscript. They:

• Are easier to scan the page as you are speaking
• Are easier to skip and rearrange material as you go
• Reduce the tendency to simply read the lecture
• Allow an easier interaction with the students, as points can be fleshed out and transitioned in response to student responses

An outline is not as useful if it is a new class or new material. Outlines really presume a mastery of the material, where you can simply write a topic such as "Anselm's ontological argument" and then launch right into it for 15 minutes. If you need more details as to what the ontological argument is, or are concerned you will get it right in your description, the outline tends to become more discursive  and written out, which defeats its purpose.

I've been using OmniOutliner, which is a Mac application that has a unique niche among the applications out there. It is sort of a cross between Word and Excel. It's not a high-powered fancy spreadsheet application like Excel, but it can do many of the basic functions of Excel (add, sort, and so on), and it gives terrific fine controls in terms of layout, if you want to use them. It is also super easy to use and outline with, so that it almost becomes a word processor/outliner as well.

You could use Microsoft Word for this as well, but Word is slower and more prone to crash, and you would need a separate iPad application to open the files. OmniOutliner NEVER CRASHES. Neither does Scrivener or Pages. One of my main rules of thumb is, is this software gloriously stable? Or must I save constantly and carefully close files when away, so that there isn't a crash and loss of data? This is the problem with Word – I don't and can't trust it completely. I have to lock the doors often, so to speak, to insure my changes don't disappear. Other applications such as OmniOutliner and Scrivener are rock solid, and this is what I prefer.

There is an iPad version of OmniOutliner that I will probably get at some point; right now, I simply export the outlines as plain text into my dropbox, and then I use the PlainText iPad app to read the outline on the iPad in class. This works just fine.

I formerly used Scrivener to lay out an entire class using folders and such, but OmniOutliner provides a simpler, cleaner outlining ability than Scrivener (Scrivener is terrific, but not optimized for outlining as OmniOutliner is). As a tech nerd, I had to try something different, and so I did.

Textbooks

Ordering books for college classes is its own little world. Calculating the difficulty of the readings, the length of the readings, and the cost of the books is a challenge. (I refuse to select at textbook that is more than $90. This is getting harder to do.) You strive for balance in readability versus challenging the students, enjoyability and applicability versus authenticity and depth.

Textbooks make this all easier and harder. With a course textbook, the course cost for the student goes up significantly (at least most of the time), while the textbook is free for the instructor (a nice incentive to go with a textbook). Most textbooks give great overviews of the material, and there is a simplicity in having one book to rule them all--there is no confusion about which book to read or bring.

Textbooks are also great for showing how ideas play off of one another, as a free-will reading can be directly paired with a determinism reading. This gives the issue a sharpness that exceeds that of reading one particular thinker, who would most likely take stand and move on, rather than revealing the debate at hand. Especially in a field like philosophy, where there is so much variability, this can be quite illuminating. Textbooks also reveal the scope of a field. A theology textbook must cover 2 millennia of history, ideas, disputes, and changes, and it would be difficult to achieve that kind of scope with only a clutch of monographs.

Yet many humanities textbooks are, by their very nature, extracts from other books, so that the students never get a real in-depth plunge into a single writer or point of view. They are given samples of various authors, but don't really get into the mind of Plato or St. Augustine. Everything stays fairly mild, in some ways. Yet, for an introductory course, is this not a benefit? This is where I stand now, at least, so that instead of getting creative and ordering primary texts, we are using some textbooks.

Textbooks ain't so bad

Having used a textbook for a class this term in philosophy, I have to admit it has its advantages. One book to rule them all, so only one text to worry about bringing. This particular textbook was made up of selections of various writers, so the end result is different writers and selections put in stark contrast to one another. This gives a real sense of conversation going on that is harder to get with multiple monographs in one semester.

Much of my own education was not with textbooks, and for this I am most grateful. But I can see where, with an introductory class, a textbook can be useful. Sort of like a foodcourt--not real food, but useful at times, and at least you don't leave hungry. You might even try something different …