Teaching for Spiritual Formation: A Patristic Approach to Christian Education in a Convulsed Age
Many valuable resources exist for Christian professors eager to integrate faith and learning in the classroom; however, I have found some of the best theological insight and practical guidance in a recent book directed toward classical Christian high school teachers. The book bears the intriguing title Teaching for Spiritual Formation: A Patristic Approach to Christian Education in a Convulsed Age and was written by Kyle Hughes, history department chair and faith-learning integration coordinator at Whitfield Academy in Atlanta.
In his brief but rich book, Hughes combines pedagogical methods, including assessment, with the insights of such spiritual formation gurus as Richard Foster and Dallas Willard. He then runs that marriage through the lens of five key church fathers who lived and wrote in the fourth, fifth, and sixth centuries. The result is a challenging but accessible guide for understanding the role teachers and students play in spiritual formation and assessing the what, how, and why of training those students to lead disciplined, actively contemplative lives of faith, prayer, and service. Though Hughes writes primarily for secondary school teachers, administrators, and students, all the points he makes apply with equal force to the world of undergraduate education.
To help assess the kinds of teachers we must become if we are to properly guide students, Hughes seeks wisdom from Gregory the Great, who served as Pope Gregory I from 590–604, after spending many years first as prefect of the city of Rome and then as a monk. In his Book of Pastoral Rule, Gregory laid out carefully the qualifications for spiritual leaders responsible for the care of souls. Those who bear such a responsibility must be as pure in their behaviors as they are in their motives. They must be role models in the highest sense of that often-misused term.
“Gregory,” writes Hughes, “suggests that we must examine, align, and balance our interior (spiritual) and exterior (physical) lives. This process can proceed only from the messy and uncomfortable process of self-examination. … By tending to our own spiritual and emotional health, we will be better able to deal with inevitable things like conflict and tension both inside and outside the classroom, gradually becoming transformed into the kinds of people that we would want our students to emulate” (21). Self-examination takes patience, courage, and humility, but it is a prerequisite if we wish to present ourselves as people students can confide in.
How can we ask students to have their minds renewed and transformed (see Romans 12:2) if we have not at least begun that process ourselves? Unless we model in our own lives discipline, prudence, and discernment in matters of authority, speech, and compassion, we cannot expect students to follow us on the difficult road of sanctification. In a world of conflict and anxiety, students should be able to look to us as calm ports in the storm, as Christ followers who balance in our own lives the boldness to take actions to further God’s kingdom with the contemplative commitment to meditate regularly on the Lord and his Word.
Such is Hughes’s Gregorian vision “of the teacher as a spiritual director seeking to form disciples of Christ” (41). But how are we to view our students? We must not trust solely to the secular social sciences to define our students for us but must remember that they, like ourselves, are embodied creatures who were made good in the image of God and yet are fallen and depraved. To fill out this portrait, Hughes enlists the aid of a pedagogical homily by the most eloquent preacher of the early church, John Chrysostom (c. 349–407): “On Vainglory and the Right Way for Parents to Bring Up Their Children.”
Vainglory, Hughes explains, “refers to what we might today call empty pride, narcissism, or conceit.” It presents all people as “driven by materialism, conspicuous consumption, and concern with prestige and the opinion of others” (42). This does not mean that students should be treated as irredeemable wretches! “[S]tudents’ predispositions,” Chrysostom assures us, “need not define their destiny. Rather, students are able to be shaped or molded by their education, trained to become people whose ways of thinking and living ultimately produce virtue” (45).
Our job is like that of Michelangelo: to remove obstacles and impurities from the raw marble and so release an image of goodness, truth, and beauty. That process includes guarding the senses of our students from sights or sounds or smells that might corrupt, confuse, or lead them astray. It also includes steering them away from worldliness, not as an end-in-itself, but as a means of encouraging them to develop a positive orientation toward God’s creation.
Although the advice in the last two paragraphs may seem relevant only to grade-school teachers, college professors would do well to pay heed to Hughes and Chrysostom. The onslaught of social media has left undergraduates prey to sights and sounds, images and ideas that are as heretical and blasphemous as they are self-destructive and anti-humanistic. They may be over eighteen, but they are still in need of guidance, correction, and good counsel. If we do not strive to form them in accordance with godly standards, the world will conform them to its own. College may be their last chance to assess properly what the world offers before they become so attached to it that they can no longer see it clearly enough to question it.
To help flesh out the kind of curriculum that can best assist in the spiritual formation of students, Hughes turns next to Basil of Caesarea’s “Address to Young Men, on How They Might Derive Benefit from Greek Literature” (c. 375). Whereas some Christians harbor suspicions about the value of pre-Christian literature and philosophy, Basil argues that “pagan literature not only serves to prepare the soul to receive the mysteries of Scripture, but it also has value and meaning in its own right; even secular writings, therefore, can contain what is beautiful, good, and true (Phil 4:8)” (71). Christian educators of all grade levels would do well to be reminded that all truth is God’s truth, and that pagan literature can provide both glimpses of truth that square with the teachings of Jesus and models of virtuous behavior.
Such is the nature of the raw material available for the classical Christian teacher or professor, but in what context should it be taught? Hughes holds up the Rule that Benedict of Nursia “wrote for his monks at Monte Cassino … around 540” (93) as a helpful guide to promote the kind of community life conducive to spiritual formation. The inculcation of humility and obedience, the nurturing of active listening and high expectations, the balancing of work and prayer, and the creative use of time and space to foster liturgical rhythms all serve to bind together a community in the single-minded pursuit of wisdom and holiness.
Finally, as a way of drawing together teacher and student with curriculum and methods, Hughes turns to “the catechetical lectures of Cyril of Jerusalem (ca. 313–86), delivered sometime around the middle of the fourth century” (118). Cyril issues a serious call to discipleship that is not to be taken lightly by the one directing or the one directed. Words like preparation, immersion, memorization, purgation, illumination, and contemplation play a heavy role in such catechesis; there are no shortcuts. The goal is to promote and instill new habits, to reorient teacher, student, and classroom around a new paradigm that makes “space for reflection, silence, and stillness” (147) and shifts the focus from temporal to eternal concerns and realities.
Hughes’ thesis is a sound one, and he balances well theoretical and practical advice, but the Christian professor who would make spiritual formation a centerpiece of his vocation will need to think long and deeply about what education is. Hughes admits that the educator who tries to implement his suggestions will have to overcome institutional, societal, and theological roadblocks (5-6). He surveys those roadblocks well, but all of them, I would argue, comes down to the low view that Christians, especially evangelicals, hold of contemplation.
In a world that values action, speed, and efficiency, contemplation makes for a hard sell—especially on the college level. The trimming down of the liberal arts core, the growth of STEM at the expense of humanities, and the channeling of funds away from faculty and toward administration are all symptomatic of a Christian university system that is more interested in external tangible results than internal spiritual transformation. We all need to slow down and meditate again on the rich theological and ecclesiastical traditions out of which the university was born. We need to ask tough questions of ourselves, our students, our classes, our majors, and our institutions that will remind us of what our true mission is: making disciples.
Teaching for Spiritual Formation can help Christian professors, students, and administrators to focus again on what is most vital and perennial in the work of Christian higher education. By drawing our attention back to the fathers who helped guide the church through a difficult period of transition between the fall of pagan Rome and the rise of Christian Europe, Hughes shines a needed light on the role that discipline, holiness, and community must ever play in breaking the chains of conformity that bind us to the world, the flesh, and the devil.
