So a robust account of Christian education and formation requires an adequate philosophy of action—something little thought about in contemporary discussions that are fixated on “the Christian mind.” We have spent a generation thinking about thinking. But despite our “folk” accounts and (deluded) self-perception, we don’t think our way through to action; much of our action is not the outcome of rational deliberation and conscious choice. 13 Much of our action is not “pushed” by ideas or conclusions; rather, it grows out of our character and is in a sense “pulled” out of us by our attraction to a telos. If we—and if the alumni of Christian universities are going to be “prime citizens of the kingdom of God”¹4 who act in the world as agents of renewal and redemptive culturemaking, then it is not enough to equip our intellects to merely think rightly about the world. We also need to recruit our imaginations. Our hearts need to be captured by a vision of a telos that “pulls” out of us action that is directed toward the kingdom of God.
This intuition is captured in a saying attributed to Antoine de SaintExupéry, the author of The Little Prince: “If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up people to collect wood and don’t assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea.”
It’s not a matter of thinking trumping dispositions; it’s a matter of acquiring new habits.
we simply are not the sorts of animals who can be deliberatively “on” all the time. So the proper response to unhealthy mindless eating is not mindful eating but rather healthy mindless eating, changing environments and practices in order to form different (unconscious) habits.
Christian education will only be fully an education to the extent that it is also a formation of our habits. And such formation happens not only, or even primarily, by equipping the intellect but through the repetitive formation of embodied, communal practices. And the “core” of those formative practices is centered in the practices of Christian worship.
Hence most Christian accounts of education and pedagogy end up being covert epistemologies focused on what and how we know.
