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“Call No Man Rabbi”? A Theology of Education

It is my understanding that the Scriptures and orthodox theology teach us that we live in a bent world that is “charged with the grandeur of God…” over which the Holy Ghost “broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.”[1]

Christ has created and sustains “all things,” (Col 1:16–17) and is the New Adam in whom all creation finds life (John 1:4; 1 Cor 15:22–28). His Spirit is the Spirit of Truth (John 14:17) who has been poured out on “all flesh,” (Acts 2:17) to be received as the one in whom we see all things aright, the one in whom we know ourselves as no less than children of God (Rom 8:15–16).

The Spirit shows us that we are “in Christ,” that we are bound up in him just as we were in bondage in Adam (Rom 5:12–21)­­, and that all things must now be understood in light of the resurrection of Jesus: “the old has passed away; behold, the new has come.” (2 Cor 5:14­–17). Christ continues to work in our midst and on our behalf, as our mediator to the Father, as our older brother, as our Great High Priest whose ministry is without end (1 Tim 2:5; Heb 2:11,7:20–28). His Spirit guides us “into all truth,” (John 16:13–15) and draws us in to participate in the Son’s worship of the Father.

Therefore, the old order, the old way of being, “the patterns of this world,” (Rom 12:2) are bankrupt, and a lie. The Western idolatries of abstraction, dissection, and individualism have cut us adrift. But the Spirit convinces us that nothing is separate from Christ; in him we are forever pursued by the love of God (Rom 8:39).

Christ is the truth (John 14:6). There is no truth apart from him. St Paul has claimed that love, and its helpmates faith and hope, are the ways to know in this reconciled world, which still exhibits a façade of corruption and separation (1 Cor 13:13; 2 Cor 5:14–19). The Spirit must then lead us to account for all truthful and loving human behaviour, whether acknowledging Christ or not, in reference to him in faith, love, and hope.

Is this plausible? Can it be upheld? Where, for instance, can we see such a theology in the teaching of mathematics?

A teacher is introducing the concept of multiplication to her class. She understands herself to be called to this work and is seeking to honour Jesus in her teaching. But what does Jesus have to do with multiplication? Is this concept merely a cheap metaphor for evangelism? Where is Jesus in her classroom? Where is God in her passion to see her ākonga (students) indwell this mathematical concept?

In Christian education, there seems to be a perceived tension between being faithful to the subject matter and the art of teaching on the one hand and being faithful to Christ on the other. Erring on the latter tends to use “Christian” as a qualifying adjective, with the risk of failing to honour the dignity of both teaching and the subject on their own terms. Erring on the former leads to the irrelevance of Christianity and a dis-integration between personal faith, the Christian claim on reality, and the work of education.

How can we see Jesus in education? How can we live faithfully in this One reconciled world under God, even as teachers?

Cantus Firmus[2]

Truth is a person: Jesus. Humanity is still scrambling to understand this claim; this claim of truth Himself, and its implications for all manner of life, not least of which, education.

But this is not a foreign principle that must be somehow applied to life. It is a claim of reality: a claim of what already is. “The Kingdom of God is among you!” When we understand a mathematical principle, or we discern the beauty of a piece of music, we somehow participate in Christ.[3]

Learning is an unveiling, a dis-covery, of reality; reality being that which is created and sustained by, in and for, Christ. The Incarnation is the articulation of “the unspoken word, the Word unheard,”[4] which has been declared into all the earth and is now the immanent mystery revealed. The truth is before us, within us, around us, closer than our very breath. All speaking, all prayer, all learning, all theology, begins in silence, before the Word.

Selah

Advent: The Road Rising Up to Meet Us

Unlike Plato, on the one hand, who came to believe that we re-cognise the truth due to it being eternally innate within us, and Locke on the other, who believed that truth must be acquired through learning due to our being a tabula rasa (blank slate), Kierkegaard pointed out that the truth comes to us.[5] Learning is advent: “the true light, which gives light to everyone,” (John 1:9) has come. Incarnation! Immanuel!

In brutally broad brushstrokes, the social sciences seem to follow Plato, and the so-called “hard” sciences, along with much of modern theology, seem to follow Locke. Education and counselling can often use the language of the “truth within” the individual, and modern theology can still act as if acquiring knowledge about Christ in history and doctrine is truth.

But the truth is no commodity or subjectivity to master or grasp but is the Person in whom all things are sustained (Col 1:17). He is the logos who unifies counselling, education, and theology (John 1:1). It is under the King of this ever-present Kingdom that we under-stand. And this is righteousness, too: rightly aligning ourselves to reality in heart, soul, mind, to the love in whom, by whom, and for whom all things exist. We abide in the truth who is within us, and who comes to us.[6]

A Christian epistemology, therefore, has no room for rationalism, which treats context, physicality, relationality, and the human body with contempt.[7] And neither do we have room for relativism, which cuts each person off from true understanding and relationship through patronising tolerance. Instead, we “love to know.”[8] This love of the Word is how we learn.

Righteous Wrestling: Education as Faith, Hope, Love

The Holy Spirit, who unveils our hearts and eyes to the truth that we are “in Christ,” is “poured out on all flesh,” and into every classroom. Knowing is relational, and this love is not without conflict, so the Spirit comes to prepare us for the Word of God, who is always our adversary.[9] The Word is for us, and so is always for our growth, and always against “every hair and feather” of the devil we may seek to retain.[10] So although the Word is for us, he is not on our side. The Spirit is then in the midst of the teacher and learner, in the dynamic of the ako (the reciprocal teaching and learning relationship), forming both in the likeness of the truth, as we wrestle with the Spirit, against the assumed “patterns of this world” (Rom 12:2).

When we wrestle with a mathematical puzzle, we are seeking after the reality found in Christ. And there the Spirit is, in our midst, as we grope around in the darkness, leading us to the Light who is eternally coming into our world, always making His way toward us. And in Him, we find reality, where we see all things in glorious clarity, where all human endeavour comes home. This is because, remember, Christ is the truth. Therefore, even an apparently innocuous, a-theological mathematical problem is the creation of God, an echo of God, through which we may see His glory with the eyes of the spirit, the revealer of the true depth of reality. The Spirit of the same Christ who sustains all things and has created all things leads us into all truth, even the truth of mathematics to those who are oblivious to God’s glory in, around, and through them, in the apparently mundane ako event.

Education is an ongoing honing and shaping of righteousness; of an alignment to reality (Acts 26:14). Education is an apocalyptic event, being confronted by the Word of God in our midst, with the Spirit removing the scales from our eyes so we might discover who, and where, we are. This means that discipleship, formation, ethics, the pursuit of righteousness, the pursuit of knowing God and thereby ourselves and the other, along with NCEA mathematics, can all be understood to be education. It is faith, hope, and love: it is a faithful commitment to the other, to the world around and beyond us, to history; it is a hopeful creative endeavour that brings possibility, transformation, growth; and it is being lovingly present, attentive, and on-behalf-of the world.[11]

Learning requires the induction of the learner into a conversation that is greater than herself. The discipline of mathematics utilises the discoveries, constructions, and developments resulting from diverse conversation partners and communities, over thousands of years. It is not simply a collection of stand-alone formulae, principles, symbols, but rather a social process to which one must simultaneously conform (speak the language; play the game) and challenge (use the language to speak newness, to expand it). And these conversations create vocabulary, dispositions, tones, instincts, and common-sense peculiar to them. The learner is inducted by the teacher into a way of being—a “form of life,” as Wittgenstein says.[12] This, in part, is faith.

Uncovering the joy of God in education, seeking it out, and paying attention, is love; to seek understanding of a particular problem or aspect or law is to love. The deepest understanding of any mundane thing is that it is finally a gift of the Triune God of Grace.

The further familiarising of reality (that is, the gift of the world in Christ), the greater capacity we have to uncover the mundane glory (the glory of everyday life), with the language and tools accruing exponentially. Thus, the more responsibility we have to respond to this growing joy. “To whom much is given, much will be required.” (Luke 12:48). A growing faithfulness to reality, for instance, a growing skill to use mathematics, according to its own internal logic and its application, is therefore characteristic of good teaching. This is faith and hope.

Hope sustains our attention, giving us the conviction of meaning in the present that will lead to some yet unknown reality. Hope is crucial as it drives our action. It anticipates meaning; it leaps out towards the unknown. In mathematics, this can be hope of discovery of a solution, or hope of understanding or teaching a particular characteristic of the discipline.

St Paul’s relational knowing categories of Love, Faith, and Hope, must be utterly practical and grounded for everyday practice. This is because we must take seriously the claims of the gospel which unveil a relational reality: there is no alienation of God from creation; we are the good work of the Triune God who is at work here in our midst. “All things,” are created in and through Christ by and for the Father, and that humanity is a new creation in Christ through his death and resurrection. God, though relationally distinct from all else, is intimately involved in all creation, and is actively unveiling its true depth of being, its glory, by the Spirit. In short, we must take seriously that Jesus Christ truly is Lord, and that we cannot understand anyone, and therefore anything, without Him.

Being our New Adam, our new covenant Head, our lives and activity are caught up in Him. This is the logic of the Hebrew Scriptures. So in all things, we are participating in the Son’s worship of the Father by the Spirit, and we are true (faithful) to this relational reality when we know in love (and then in faith and hope).

The Glory of The Subject

Again, what does teaching mathematics have to do with theology? What is the nature of what is taught?

What is at stake is the dignity of mathematics on the one hand, and the universally comprehensive claims of the Christian gospel on the other. We tend to answer this question with the errors of deism and dualism.

We may say something like, “God made the world in a rational way, open to discovery by the human mind.” If this is all that is said of God, this way of thinking leads to deism, where the Creator has since stood back from His creation, for us to pick up the pieces. This does not work for so-called “soft” or social sciences, which are caught up in the ever-changing world affected by humanity and does not utilise the “raw materials” left to us by this Creator. Neither does this account for the gloriously, necessary, and unavoidable way in which all understanding is developed socially in community for even the “hard” sciences.[13]

When we have a deistic view of God and education, we are more disposed to think of the teacher-student relationship along the lines of what Paulo Freire calls the “banking or transmission theory of school knowledge”: the teacher possesses information which she deposits in the head of the student.[14] Facts and figures. Learning by rote. The facts of God. This complements the pagan idea of a pure natural order which can be mastered through objectivity, where the knower is separate from what is known.

However, confronted with the claim that students are subjects, that all information requires interpretation, that facts look very different depending on where one stands and how one is moving, such neo-platonic theology and pedagogy gets shaky. Even more so when we take seriously the relational heart of knowing.

Theologically, deism neglects the ongoing work of the Son and the Spirit in Creation and on its behalf. This then leads on to the next error of dualism, which sees God as active and interested in the spiritual realm, but humanity stuck in the temporal realm. The human task, in this view, is to connect to the spiritual exclusively through religious practices.

Here, Christ rules in Heaven but not Earth. The Holy Spirit equips the saints for every good religious or “spiritual” (understood in the problematic narrow sense) work, not teaching. In deism, God is not involved in the teaching of mathematics for its own sake.

In this light there is no real dignity or glory imparted to the subject itself, which is our focus here. Mathematics is treated here as a means to an end; at best it is an appreciation of God’s world which leads the mathematician to God, but does not account for the glory of mathematics, or the glory of the work of the mathematician per se. Mathematics is reduced to the glory of God. This is perhaps the problem of a reductive reading of Augustine, or perhaps even another fruit of Augustine’s neo-platonic dualism.[15]

“Reduced to the glory of God?” How is this a reduction?

Mathematics is not merely a “thing” to be used on the way to know God. It is far more than a useful tool to understand numbers in Scripture, as Augustine suggests.[16] To the utilitarian, God’s extravagant gifts are embarrassingly inefficient.

Perhaps the problem is a linear, or even Gnostic view of glory. We are absolutely right to see the glory of God as the end (“object,” in Augustine’s terms) of all things, but we are absolutely wrong to disregard the gifts of God as anything less than “good” in-and-of themselves (Jas 1:17). “Glory” is not a Gnostic substance, as if shards of the Divine, but rather the integrity and inherent beauty of the thing or person itself.

Jesus is not only the mediator between us and God, as if anything can be known apart from God, but is the mediator between persons.[17] In virtue of this fact, He is the mediator of all things (Col 1:17). Nothing stands outside Christ, but in Him all things stand truly.[18] He is the light through whom we see things as they are in the mind of God (John 1:9–10).

To see something, or someone, as God sees it, is to see its glory. To come to mathematics by the light of Christ (e.g., in the openness of hope, lovingly attentive, giving oneself) is to approach its glory. The gifted mathematician sees the glory of mathematics, but he may not know the Light by which he sees it. The glory of mathematics is the particular mathematical expression of the passion of the Father, brought into being in, through, and by Christ, and is revealed to the individual human person by the Spirit, in a similar way to how a painting is an expression of the artist. We can understand mathematics well in its own terms without reference to God, as perhaps most mathematicians do, but to know it as a gift of the artist is itself a gift, and is its deepest truth.

When we rest “suspended in the grace of God”[19] that is, in reality, we see things as they truly are. What a thing or person truly is in themselves, is their glory: the weight of its created brilliance and dignity. Therefore, curiously, the glory of mathematics is itself.

Mathematics is a good, extravagant gift of God. We honour God in mathematics by doing mathematics and being absorbed in it, even being forgetful about God (as a child may forget her parent in the wonder of their gift), though we also honour Him by allowing mathematics to lead us to acknowledge or contemplate Him as its author and sustainer. Both ultimately glorify God, though only the latter is worship. Both are to know the joy of God.

Christ the Rabbi: Teaching as Participation

What then is the role of the teacher?

[The scribes and Pharisees] love the place of honor at banquets, and the seats of honor in the synagogues, and personal greetings in the marketplaces, and being called Rabbi by the people.But as for you, do not be called Rabbi; for only One is your Teacher, and you are all brothers and sisters. And do not call anyone on earth your father; for only One is your Father, He who is in heaven. And do not be called leaders; for only One is your Leader, that is, Christ. But the greatest of you shall be your servant. Whoever exalts himself shall be humbled, and whoever humbles himself shall be exalted. Matthew 23:6-12 NASB

Who is our Rabbi? He is truth Himself. His Spirit, the Spirit of truth, guides us into all truth.

Therefore, when I teach mathematics, and I lead a student to an answer, I lead in the love of Him who is truth. I participate in the Knower, as one who is known, holding forth the joy of knowing to the student. And I am not alone. The Spirit leads both student and teacher to the Mediator, who is the gap between the unknown and the known, through whom all things are made, by whom all things are ours, and in whom all things cohere.

Whether I am focally aware of this or not,[20] when I teach, I participate in the teaching of Christ by the Spirit. As a teacher of mathematics, I am not the source of knowledge for the student (as in Locke), and neither is the student the source (as in Plato). Rather, it is the mystery of Christ the Rabbi disclosing His world to us, and being a Christian teacher is having our eyes opened by the Spirit to Christ in us: to become a bewildered participant and witness to this mundane, pervasive, ubiquitous glory. This is the joy of God in teaching.

When I teach a student how to multiply numbers, I am participating in God’s joy. I honour Jesus by honouring the subject, by involving the learner in a reality that is beyond each of us, and leading her further up, and further in, ushering her into the wonder of the subject, itself a shadow of God.

By way of contrast, the wrong-headed teacher will, among other things, draw irrelevant attention to himself which detracts from the subject. He will either leave the subject in objective abstraction, or he will prostitute it wholly to utility, perhaps the most common utility being standardised assessment. But by being attentive to the glory of the subject in love, the law of standardised assessment will be met, for love is the fulfilment of the law (Rom 8:13). In this way, a good teacher is like a good writer, who brings attention to the subject in a particular personal way without drawing attention to herself or her language. And Christ the Rabbi is the Word through which all these things are heard.

I teach, having been initiated into the mystery revealed, that is, knowing I am participating in the work of the Holy Spirit, who is drawing all people to Jesus, the truth, the only teacher. And in Christ we receive the world as a gift from the Father of lights.

Incarnation: Social Reality Made Holy

Finally, then, what is education?

Human enterprises, as part of the earth, are filled with the glory of God (Isa 6:3). Mathematics, teaching, and education are social constructs which are part of our glorious commissioning as humanity. Taxonomy, the naming of the animals (Gen 2:19), can be considered a shorthand for the culture-building work we were created by God to undertake. So if, as St. Irenaeus claims “The glory of God is man fully alive,”[21] social constructs are tied up in our own inherent human gloriousness.

This is, of course, most fully the case with Christ, our true humanity. We might see this directly in his genius of literary engagement with Jewish Scriptures and cultural critique, but the particular universality of the incarnation is far broader than this. Our God learnt obedience through what he suffered (Heb 5:8); in his learning to speak, in his learning the law, in his learning the craft of carpentry. He submitted not just to the Jewish and Roman authorities in his death, but to his parents and teachers who had gone before him. Our God humbled himself to become a neophyte who was ushered into a conversation which he had to become familiar with, and faithful to.

In Christ, we have God stepping into humanity, and thereby, into human culture.[22] In Christ, therefore, we see the making holy of social constructs, since God is a refiner’s fire (Mal 3:2), and our work is an inextricable part of our life in him.[23]

“The world reconciled to God,” is not only the world created before us. It is also the world created and discovered by us.[24] God commissioned Adam to name the animals, for humanity to “fill the earth and subdue it,” and God will welcome this diverse glory into the New Jerusalem as God’s prize (Rev 21:26). Reality therefore includes the social constructions, culture, language and so on created by humanity: God is as much involved here in the so-called “soft” sciences as God is in the so-called “hard” ones. Both culture with its messy social constructions and the “natural” order are under the Lordship of Christ.

Our heresies are more comfortable with humanity being some kind of pollutant of a pure natural order, and we likewise tend to be more comfortable with a distant deity who has set things ticking, but the doctrine of the Trinity violently disturbs this. Humanity, as God’s counterpart and stewards of creation, is entrusted with the ongoing development, ratification, and even reinterpretation or reappropriation of reality. God is involved in this development by his Spirit. Most incredibly, the coming of God as a man “establishes the work of our hands,” and even makes them holy.[25]

God stepped into a particular body, a particular culture, both bursting it and resurrecting it so that it may hold glory.[26] Jesus, the Jew, that particular man in space-time, is God hidden and revealed (even before and after crucifixion).[27] This is the utter scandal of our faith. And by him, humanity’s social constructions are made holy ground upon which we can meet God. But only in Jesus!

This is not to say that all of what is created or spoken is true. There is the “unclean, detestable, false” that is left outside the gates of the New Jerusalem (Rev 21:27). If these are not weeded out in the ongoing conversation of the discipline, or the personal formation of the knower, they will be weeded out in the reckoning of the Lion. Even our deliberate participation in evil will not stand against the coming of the truth, but woe to that man by whom he is betrayed! (Mat 26:24). The new wine is always bursting our old wineskins, and we scramble to make sense of truth, who is always ahead of us, always evading us, always leading us, always confronting us.[28]

And this scrambling is education.

Conclusion: What Does Theology have to do with Teaching Mathematics?

Orthodox Trinitarian-incarnational theology gives us the language and the ability to recognise the glory and dignity of teaching mathematics. The Triune God is intimately involved at every point of our teaching maths, as it is a participation in him. Recognising this helps to steer us away from the temptations of dualism and deism. It undercuts the power-plays of authoritarian teaching on the one hand, and the impotence of relativism or an exclusively maieutic approach on the other.

Teaching mathematics is teaching a hue of the glory of God, with the ultimate end being joy and not utility. Joyful obedience is the calling of the teacher, knowing herself to be a joyful participant in the work of the only Teacher, truth himself, and she draws her students into this work through her joyful witness to the peculiarities of this art.

Teachers and mathematicians cannot all become skilled in academic theology, but it is the role of theology to encourage these professions and disciplines with the wonder, dignity, joy and glory of their God-given work. The practice of theology is a witness to God in the passion and work of all people, in part so that these might recognise God’s joy and the supreme dignity to which they are called.

Jacob H. Sawyer, MTh (Laidlaw) was formerly a “theological consultant” for Laidlaw’s School of Social Practice (Education), and is a stay-at-home Dad to Noah (2) and Archie (4). He is author of The Hidden Authorship of Søren Kierkegaard (Wipf & Stock), and a coffee snob.


[1] Gerard Manley Hopkins, “God’s Grandeur,” in Poems and Prose (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1995), 14.

[2] “Fixed melody.”

[3] 1 John 4:7; Col 1:17; John 15:5.

[4] T. S. Eliot, “Ash Wednesday,” in Selected Poems (London: Faber and Faber, 2009), 80.

[5] Søren Kierkegaard, “Philosophical Crumbs,” in Repetition And Philosophical Crumbs, trans. M. G. Piety (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 91–93 especially. Written under the pseudonym of the rationalistic Johannes Climacus.

[6] Von Balthasar explains that prayer is “always two things at once: an entering-in to the innermost ‘I’, and the turning-outward of this I to the highest ‘Thou’.” It is the meeting of the Word within us and the alien Word that comes to us from without, seeing Mary as “hearer par excellence.” Hans Urs von Balthasar, Prayer (San Francisco, CA: Ignatius, 1986), 20–31. This understanding of prayer could serve to open up possibilities to understand a Christian epistemology.

[7] Aronowitz talks of Paulo Freire naming “the banking or transmission theory of school knowledge,” as a shorthandfor this kind of thinking in the education realm. See Stanely Aronowitz, Introduction to Pedagogy of Freedom: Ethics, Democracy, and Civic Courage, by Paulo Friere, trans. Patrick Clarke (Maryland, MD: Roman & Littlefield, 1998), 4.

[8] The mission statement of Laidlaw College.

[9] “According to Luther, the word of God always comes as adversarius noster, our adversary. It does not simply confirm and strengthen us in what we think we are and as what we wish to be taken for.” G. Ebeling, Introduction to a Theological Theory of Language (London: Collins, 1973), 17; quoted in Anthony C. Thiselton, The Two Horizons: New Testament Hermeneutics and Philosophical Description (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1980), xx. (emphasis original).

[10] “No, there is no escape. There is no heaven with a little of hell in it-no plan to retain this or that of the devil in our hearts or our pockets. Out Satan must go, every hair and feather!” George Macdonald, “The Last Farthing,” in Unspoken Sermons Series I, II, and III (New York, NY: Start Publishing LLC, 2012), Kindle Edition, p.138.

[11] In disagreeing with Scheler and James K. A. Smith I do not believe it is enough to say that a human being is “a being that loves,” but that we are rather lovers in space and time; we are beings who love in faith and hope. We are storied beings, thus our love must be coupled with faith and hope. Smith’s project would benefit from this explicit naming, though his work is obviously inclusive of these convictions, e.g., “Our ultimate love moves and motivates us because we are lured by this picture of human flourishing. Rather than being pushed by beliefs, we are pulled by a telos that we desire.” James K.A. Smith, Desiring the Kingdom: Worship, Worldview, and Cultural Formation: Cultural Liturgies, Volume 1 (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker, 2009), 54. Here, faith, hope and love together as a whole can serve as a better description of what moves us. Faith provides the historical trajectory and relational context for a future hope. For an excellent treatment of faith, love and hope, see Oliver O’Donovan, Self, World, and Time: Ethics as Theology, Volume 1 (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2013), 98.

[12] Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. P. M. S. Hacker and Joachim Schulte, 4th ed.(Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), section 19.

[13] Michael Polanyi, Personal Knowledge: Towards a Post-Critical Philosophy (New York: Harper & Row, 1962).

[14] See note 6 above.

[15] Saint Augustine, On Chris1tian Teaching, trans. Edmund Augustine (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999).

[16] Marie Valance, Jaliene Hollabaugh, and Thu Truong, "St. Augustine's Learning for the Glory of

God: Adapting ‘Faith-Learning Integration’ Terminology for the Modern World," International Christian Community of Teacher Educators Journal 4. 2, Article 5 (2009): 7. https://digitalcommons.georgefox.edu/icctej/vol4/iss2/5.

[17] A key emphasis in the early part of Bonhoeffer’s Life Together. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, “Through and in Jesus Christ,” in Life Together: The Classic Exploration of Christian Community, (New York: HarperOne, 1954), 21–6.

[18] “The world has no reality of its own, independently of the revelation of God in Christ. One is denying the revelation of God in Jesus Christ if one tries to be ‘Christian’ without seeing and recognizing the world in Christ.” Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Ethics ed. Eberhard Bethge, trans. Neville Horton Smith (London: SCM, 1955), 64.

[19] Cathy Deddo and J. Michael Feazell, “Theology in the Everyday,” in Trinitarian Conversations, Volumes 1 & 2 Combined, (Charlotte, NC: Grace Communion International, 2019), 200.

[20] Polanyi, Personal Knowledge, 55–6.

[21] “For the glory of God is a living man; and the life of man consists in beholding God.” Irenaeus, “Against Heresies,” Book IV, ch XX, sect. 7, ANF 1:loc 28393.

[22] “In the theological conception of incarnation, social reality is alterable in Jesus Christ.” Yael Klangwisan and T. Mark McConnell, “Theology and Pedagogy of Hope: A Vision for Teaching and Learning,” Stimulus 23:3 (2016): 21.

[23] The closest theological statement coming to mind is Gregory of Nazianzen’s “For that which he has not assumed he has not healed, but that which is united to his God head is also saved.” “To Cledonius the Priest against Apollinaris,” Letters, No. 101, NPNF 2/7:440. Cf. 1 Cor 6:12–20. The body, and its work, are meant for the Lord, and He must only have what is holy. He sanctifies all things, so that He is all in all.

[24] “Sub-created” may seem more technically correct here, since no work of ours is independent from God’s prior creation. We do not create from nothing. But this is in danger of distracting us from the point that God, in the Spirit and the Son, enters into and inhabits the existential and social world that has evolved and come into being through human culture. As von Balthasar suggests, even in every act of true knowing, the human subject “posits existence,” and has the power to “establish being.” This is the phenomenal commissioning and calling of humanity in Christ. See Hans Urs von Balthasar, “Truth of The World,” vol. I in Theo-Logic: Theological Logical Theory, trans. Adrian J. Walker (San Francisco: Ignatius, 2000), 73–74. Even more than this, God enters our world as we know it: if this is not the case, if God has entered merely the “objective” world detached from human lived experience, such salvation is irrelevant to us, and is in fact no salvation at all.

[25] Ps 90:17.

[26] Mat 9:17, John 1:14; 2:6–10; 19:34, Rom 3:23; 8:18-23.

[27] To expand Luther with Kierkegaard. See my The Hidden Authorship of Søren Kierkegaard (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2015), 19.

[28] Semper reformanda (“Always reforming”) must also be at the heart of mathematics and other disciplines, not simply religion.