Built on the Word: The Bible and Christian Formation
Almost a generation ago the Chronicle of Higher Education (September 22, 1995, p. A68)published an article, “The Disparity Between Intellect and Character,” by Robert Cole. A student of his at Harvard, a young woman, had experienced what Cole labeled “moral insensitivities” by her classmates. To help pay for her education, she cleaned student rooms. Some of her peers confused her lower economic status with low or no morals, and often, she experienced a lack of respect from them. A male classmate who shared two moral reasoning classes with her propositioned her for sex; ironically, he received the highest grades in those courses.
The crude pattern she experienced led her to withdraw from the University. Cole asked why she was leaving. “I’ve been taking all these philosophy courses,” she explained, “and we talk about what’s true, what’s important, what’s good. Well, how do you teach people to be good? What’s the point of knowing good if you don’t keep trying to become a good person?”
One of the aims of Bible engagement must be the development and formation of Christian character. This entails many variables, including the coherence and alignment of cognitive, behavioral, and ontological aspects of character since the core of Bible engagement is a matter of the heart.
Bible engagement is an intentional, goal-directed activity. As language shapes an individual’s thought categories and empowers them to transcend those categories, engagement with biblical narratives involves social processes that can build and transform character. Individuals and communities have the capacity to be informed by the Word and the narratives of Judeo-Christian faith traditions—to become like Christ.
I begin by acknowledging some assumptions and values that guide development of this writing. Without an awareness of the traditions and values that frame and support one’s work, it is difficult to evaluate and critique the conclusions. Assumptions shape our work and direct us to what we believe is worthy of attention.
Four assumptions inform this presentation. They are grounded in social constructivist perspectives of epistemology (Gergen, 1994, 1999; Potter, 1996; Flick, 2002). They are:
1. Meanings of the words, signs and symbols we use to describe our views of reality are not inherent in the object(s) we seek to study;
2. The terms, concepts, signs, and symbols we use to communicate are socially constructed artifacts that have developed over time through interactions in particular cultures and contexts (Berger and Luckmann, 1966; Gergen, 1994);
3. Our claims and accounts of the world are legitimated and sustained not by objectivity, but through social processes (Berger and Luckmann, 1966);
4. The importance of language and other symbols of human affairs are derived from their utility in human relationships (Gergen, 1994; Potter, 1996).
These assumptions are based on the conviction that how we work is as important, if not more so, than the points we make or the knowledge we construct (Henson, 1999). With these assumptions exposed, here are the key terms that anchor my understanding of what is involved in and what is at stake as we use the Bible in Christian formation.
Bible engagement is an intentional, goal-directed activity. While some aims may be approximate and others eternal, the objective here is Christian formation. As language shapes an individual’s thought categories and empowers them to transcend those categories, engagement with biblical narratives involves social processes that can build and transform character. Individuals and communities have the capacity to be informed by the Bible, and the narratives of Judeo-Christian faith traditions to become like Christ.
Bible Engagement
Drawing upon symbolic interactionism and the works of Norman Denzin, I define Bible engagement as
1. Relational: Individuals are social beings and socially responsive. They able to be influenced and shaped by forces beyond themselves (Mead 1934; Blumer 1969; Kinch 1963). As George Herbert Mead (1934) asserted “it is impossible to conceive of a self arising outside of social experience” (pp. 138-140). Bible engagement is a means for discovering, understanding, nurturing, and sustaining God’s intended ways of being in the world, all of which take place through socially responsive interactions with others.
2. Practical: Bible engagement helps persons learn how to read, inhabit, and embody scripture in different cultural settings and contexts, while also attending to the ways the Bible has been interpreted in different historical and cultural contexts.
3. Participatory: Bible engagement recognizes and provides for the active involvement of individuals and communities in interpretation and meaning-making processes.
4. Culturally situated: Bible engagement helps people explore the world behind the Bible, the world within the Bible, and the world to which the Bible is addressed.
5. Inter-confessional: Bible engagement will addresses current biblical interpretations at work across the whole church.
6. Global: Bible engagement appreciates recent developments in globalization and embraces the pluralism of global biblical interpretation and translation studies.
7. Interdisciplinary: Bible engagement focuses on our present contexts, and equally on the way people in our present contexts access the Scriptures. Participants listen to and are informed by many disciplines of study.
Agency
The term, Agency, is used to convey volitional human acts that have capacity to go beyond routine practices and patterns. Pierre Bourdieu describes agency as “the capacity of individuals and groups to act and to make choices which seem to transcend constraints and limitations of present situations”(Bourdieu, 1977; Giddens, 1979).
Distinct from the concept of free will, agency expresses individuals potential and practices of acting in spite of the influences, constraints, and confinements of powers and controls that function to structure human activity. Resistance, the ability to remain unchanged or undeterred against other forces, and creativity, the ability to draw on imagination to develop original ideas or new practices both of which may be signs of agency. Pierre Bourdieu (1977) and others (Marshall Sahlins, Raymond Williams, 1961) describe the dialectical relation between routine patterns of behavior, relationships, and agency as a dance that operates in mutually reinforcing and contrasting ways. In the processes of creating and implementing reoccurring social patterns and practices, individuals are also shaping themselves.
Understandings and implications about agency
First, as Laura A. Ahearn and others have found, “language shapes individuals thought categories even as it enables them at the same time to transcend those categories . . .” (Ahearn, Key Terms in Language and Culture, 2001).
Second, as mentioned earlier, individuals are social beings and socially responsive, and able to be influenced and shaped by forces beyond themselves (Mead 1934; Blumer 1969; Kinch 1963). George Herbert Mead (1934) asserted “it is impossible to conceive of a self arising outside of social experience” (pp. 138-140).
Third, while the term culture is problematic for it represents just about anything–ideas, worldviews, behaviors, rituals, material objects, and more, there is general consensus that culture is produced by actors and groups, and is embedded in social structures. Culture operates as a mechanism for multiple functions including: to support and maintain collective values, to denote positions and relationships, and to transmit, maintain, and reproduce particular practices (Berger, Douglas, Foucault, and Habermas (1984); Turner (1988), Wuthnow (1988), Bourdieu, 1977).
Such insights about agency account for individuals’ ability to use biblical narrative and language to participate in dialectical relationships that are mutually constitutive of an individual’s character formation while also empowering those individuals to imagine, create, and transcend the culture and structures produced by such social processes.
From these views about agency and how it functions, there is a puzzle still to be solved: How do we pass on—transmit and reproduce—the beliefs and practices of our religious heritage and simultaneously work to renew beliefs and transform inherited practices that limit and constrain God’s creative enterprise? As educators and religious practitioners pass on inherited wisdom and traditions, when, where, and how may we create conditions, make supportive space, and establish affirming environments for the emergence of individuals’ unintended trajectories of development?
Christian formation
Simply stated, Christian formation refers to embodying Christ; personifying the life and character of Christ. Richard R. Osmer, (1990, 248), provides a possible point of departure for a shared understanding of the term. Christian formation: “is related to the idea of holiness or sanctification,” that is, continuous activities by which persons cooperate with God by taking responsibility, as recipients of grace, to live in ways that represent the actual and the not-yet realized hope of God to come (Osmer, 1990. 248). Thus, Christian formation is a human-divine enterprise, and this is its uniqueness in contrast to non-religious or non-spiritual development. Development through self-emptying—kenosis (Phil 2: 5-8) sets Christian formation apart from other forms of religious growth and suggests a temporal developmental end.
Let this mind be in you which was also in Christ Jesus, who, being in the form of God, did not consider it robbery to be equal with God, but made Himself of no reputation, taking the form of a bondservant, and coming in the likeness of men. And being found in appearance as a man, He humbled Himself and became obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross.
While the antecedents to this passage are debatable, the theme of unity among the community is carried over from Phil 1:27. Paul declares, in this Christian hymn, that the ground of the Philippians’ solidarity with one another is by imitating the self-sacrificial life of Christ—the generosity of God.
If Christ is to be the template for holiness, then the ways of self-emptying love are essential attributes in the ongoing activity of Christian formation. To achieve such patterns of conduct and action—self-emptying and self-giving—over time and settings requires transformational rather than developmental change, although different stages of psycho-social and moral development qualitatively influence the transformations that are possible (Fowler, 1984, 74). Hence, there is a high probability that spurts, stalls, stagnation and even stiff-necked rebellion will be part of the process.
But, any conversation about Christian formation requires explicit consideration about the nature of “change.” What types of change are we talking about? Is it human or divine, or some combination of both? Are we speaking about shifts and drifts, transformation or conversion, or something either more subtle or revolutionary? Who’s in control of the change? How is this shift or transformation initiated, facilitated, and regulated? What changes are desirable and what transformations are unwanted? How is the type of change we label “Christian formation” similar to and distinct from other kinds of change in human development? These questions are merely the tip of the proverbial iceberg.
Character is the object of change or formation. Character involves, but is not limited to, “patterns of action and conduct that persist over time” (Peck and Havighurst, 1960). Character also consists of cognitive activities – frame analysis, constructions of meaning, justifications for making decisions, and decision-making (Kohlberg, 1981, Sullivan, 1977, Gilligan, 1983, Goffman, 1986, and Mezirow, 1991).
Value and Role of the Bible in Christian Formation
Christian formation entails changes in the presentation of self (Goffman, 1959), that is, changes in patterns of action, conduct, and being–in response to historical events, situations, experiences, and perceptions of God’s activity in history. Continuous shifts in a person’s locus of authority, from socially constructed perceptions of self to text; and from text ultimately to God. Through encounters with the biblical narrative, religious traditions, other cultural scripts, and role enactments, individuals receive community-shaped texts to take up an historical-divine identity, commit to certain ways-of-being such as belonging and loyalty.
Narrative and Narrative Discourse Analysis
“Tell the Story,”is a common injunction by worshipers to the preacher in some religious traditions. Jane Elliott defines narrative as a “discourse with a clear sequential order that connects events in a meaningful way for a definite audience” (p. 36). James A. Holstein and Jaber F. Gubrium (2000) assert that identity in a postmodern world is a narrated identity; it is “The self we live by.” As a concept, narrative has a variety of features, but its basic meaning is that it is a way of communicating by connecting events in a sequenced manner; a story with a beginning, middle, and end (Aristotle, Poetics). Because narrative provides “endless possibilities for who we are and what we can be” (Holstein and Gubrium 2000, 3), the biblical narrative is an immeasurable resource for Christian formation. Examination of speech structures and patterns provide evidence for understanding how individuals think about their own and others’ actions.
Why Christian Formation?
The Bible–the printed and oral words of Christian sacred texts–provides frames of reference, meaning perspectives representing ancient communities’ message about the God who acts in history. Individuals draw on meaning perspectives and cognitive scripts to make sense of experience, to assess what is desirable, to determine what actions to take, to remember, recall, and reflect on experiences. These meaning perspectives and cultural scripts are the soil of social encounters and interactions are the substance of character formation (Mezirow, 1991, 10-15, Goffman, 1961, 80). The crossroads of formation are the interaction with one’s social environment. The setting is a catalyst for both “focused” and “unfocused encounters” (Goffman, 1961, 7), cognitive and behavioral assimilations and conflicts (Mezirow, 1991); social intersections with “the other” within one’s current schemes of knowing, meaning, and living.
While attending to a person’s engagement with Scripture for Christian formation, another important change is in play: the transfer of authority. Christian formation demands that individuals turn over personal authority and allow the biblical narrative to become authoritative. In processes of Christian formation such a reassignment of authority ultimately ends with the rendering of complete authority to God. This authority of Scripture is a frequently debated, often contested, but necessary feature of changes that contribute to Christian formation.
The Bible’s authority—ideal and actual—is often a cause of concern. For some, the Bible has authority based on the Reformation principle of “Scripture alone.” For others, the Bible is authoritative based on its inerrancy and infallibility. The Bible’s authority for these adherents is described as “literal truth.” For Christian communions like the Orthodox, Roman Catholic, and other historic expressions of Christian faith, “authority” of Scripture is conditioned by the community that receives and administers the Word. Roman Catholics advocate that Scripture and tradition (cultural scripts) belong together and thereby the Bible’s authority is grounded in the interpretive work of the teaching office, the magisterium (Harrelson, 1990, 73). Orthodox Christian communions place the authoritative character of the Bible in dialogue with the early church’s ecumenical councils. Still others endorse Bible authority in conversation with experience, reason, and tradition, like the Wesleyan Quadrilateral. For many, if not all readers of the Bible, the sacred texts can be authoritative, but the meanings made and the kinds of authority envisioned are often dramatically different.
As the psalmist turns to God to learn about God’s ways as recorded in the Judeo-Christian scriptures, that approach used echoes of a deep thirst for God, yet the text is not to be used as a recipe for a relationship with God:
• “Open my eyes so that I may behold the wondrous things out of your law, …” (119:18);
• “Make me understand the way of your precepts, and I will meditate on your wondrous works.” (v. 27);
• “Turn my heart to your decrees, and not to selfish gain.” (v. 36).
The psalmist’s plea illuminates a shift in authority. The request points to a dynamic, continuing relationship between God and the hymnist. The writer’s end goal is not a relationship with a book that serves to provide intellectual or moral insights. Rather, the psalmist presents a yearning for a transformative relationship with God by the law that was shaped by a very different social world – an ancient Hebraic community.
The Bible is a source of cultural scripts by which persons attend to ancient meaning perspectives and alternative visions for contemporary constructions of meaning. Christian formation is about cultural practices—texts, rituals, enactments of normative roles—that categorically engage the Judeo-Christian biblical narrative as an indispensible stock of knowledge for memory and imagination. Our sacred text, the Judeo-Christian narrative is a wellspring of meaning perspectives upon which individuals shape identity and character and communities are willing to enact.
Importance of Context
Individuals are primary agents and focus of Christian formation. But the social and ecological context in which Christian formation takes place requires significant attention as well. Some key contextual features pertaining to the Bible and Christian formation come from the work of the National Research Council on Youth Development (2002). They identified six environmental elements that contribute to adolescents’ positive development:
1. Promotion of physical and psychological safety;
2. Provision of appropriate structures with clear and consistent rules and expectations, and firm, but adaptable, controls;
3. Endorsement of supportive relationships;
4. Encouragement of opportunities for belonging;
5. Upholding norms of behavior and positive rules of conduct, such as inclusion, support for cultural, bicultural and multicultural competence;
6. Encouragement and support of personal agency and self-efficacy.
These features contribute to the positive development of youth. They may be salient for Christian formation. Whatever is meant by the concept of “Christian formation,” its meanings are informed by historical events, shaped by a variety of traditions, and nuanced by cultures that are all part of its ecology of meanings. In addressing the topic of Bible and Christian formation, we recognize that the social ecology in which interactions with Scripture occur have a lot to do with how texts are read and the nature of interpretations rendered and appropriated. It is the Christian community–the Church–that names and claims the Bible to be a sacred text–a word far different from the writings of Shakespeare, Hemingway, or J. K. Rowling. Underlying any adequate discussion of Christian formation we must examine the place, role, and tasks of the Church as a reality-constructing, meaning-conveying, formative reference role in the socio-political arena.
Conclusion
Christian formation, patterns of action, conduct, and being that personify the self-emptying generosity of God, must attend to at least three principle concerns:
1. Coherence between one’s understanding of the tradition’s cardinal affirmations and one’s conduct;
2. Solidarity and connectedness with the Christ and his self-emptying rationale and actions–that the world might be reconciled to God and to the welfare of others;
3. Purpose and meaning rooted in biblical narrative that also pushes beyond the text to give and live in self-sacrificing ways beyond one’s self-interests to concern for creation(Butkus, 1990, pp. 106-108).
For the work of Christian formation, all three of these concerns are influenced by the Church’s efficacy as a formative agent of social reality and individuals’ encounters with communities’ meaning perspectives, traditions, and cultural scripts of the Judeo-Christian narrative intersecting in everyday situations.
