Lutheran Education: From Wittenberg to the Future

Can you actually be what you think you are without history? In the what-do-you-have-that-you-did-not-also-receive world of Lutheran thinking, the answer to the question is an emphatic No. Our now is our past; our weal in our now is our faithfulness to our past; our way to future is mapped out on the chart of our past.

Of course, this leads to some Rip Van Winkle moments in the life of the Church of the Augsburg Confession. An uncomfortable illustration, one so close to home many who are now reading will stop: our dads tell us that the general confession of sins at the start of the Common Order is our heritage from the Reformation. Somehow they were able to map the practice over Article 11 of the Augsburg Confession. But the Fathers tell us a different story: Lutherans during and after the Reformation retained private Confession and Absolution. 

So it goes with Lutheran school and higher education, as well. Without the perspective of history, when asked, "How do you know it's Lutheran?" a well-meaning parent's or teacher's response amounts to something like, "Because it is..." "Because that's what our sign says." "Because we have synodically certified teachers." "Because we have chapel every Wednesday."

Tom Korcok devotes an entire volume to answering the question, "How do you know it's Lutheran?" by examining the historical record, tracing a line from Luther and the Reformation through Walther and the North American renaissance of confessional Lutheranism up to today. Lutheran Education: From Wittenberg to the Future is full of Rip Van Winkle moments. But no parent with children in a Lutheran school, no Lutheran school teacher, no parish pastor with a Christian day school should pass up the opportunity to imagine the future of Lutheran education by reading the map of its past in Korcok's perceptive little book. Intensely and intentionally rooted in Christian vocation, Korcok argues, Lutheran education uses the tools of the good arts (of the trivium and quadrivium) and catechesis (yes, Luther's Small Catechism--not as a book of doctrine, but as a devotional text) to shape the baptized into thoughtful, deliberate Christians living simultaneously in God's two realms, of the Law and of the Gospel. Korcok develops his thesis especially in contrast to modernist and progressivist educational thinking. If you're not sure what that means, you'll have to read Lutheran Education to find discover the ideological, philosophical and, yes, theological gulf that separates the two approaches to the education of children.

Our present present may bear little resemblance to our past; but Tom Korcok hopes his book can help us to use our past to move with confidence into our future. 

Wittenberg and the Sciences

Perhaps no more vexatious question, no question passed over in more silence, no question more [unpersuasively] pontificated upon, is that of the relationship between science and theology. The two don’t make easy bed-fellows. In fact, so the caricature goes, they’re more likely found sleeping in separate rooms, unwed. When the two do meet (Daniel Dennett, say, and Oral Roberts), it’s usually for an unsatisfying one-nighter in the alley behind the bar that both would rather forget, and it requires an ice-cold shower back in the safety of their own disciplinary apartment to wash off the filth. (Excuse the colorful image.) So it goes in the 20th and 21st centuries.

It has not always been this way. In Wittenberg, in fact, the sciences lived comfortably in what was at the time known as the Philosophical Faculty or the Arts Faculty, taken up by the master’s (M.A.) candidates and their teachers as the Quadrivium after they had successfully demonstrated mastery at the bachelor’s level (B.A.) of the other three arts. Indeed, there was no road to the higher faculties—to Law, Medicine, and Theology—but that that led through both the Trivium (B.A.) and the Quadrivium (M.A.). And in Wittenberg it is the case that by the mid 16th century, the humanistically-reformed curriculum that emerged was pointedly weighted toward the two elements that arose as central in the B.A. and M.A. curriculum: philology in the Trivium; science in the Quadrivium.

This historical fact and element of our intellectual heritage as Lutherans beckons us, it seems to me, to take the sciences seriously in the curriculum. But that raises hackles and comes with a set of questions that needs to be addressed before the sciences can find their home—not a place, but their home—in the curriculum of a Lutheran college radically dedicated to the Wittenberg way both intellectually and theologically.

Following are some of the questions that, at first blush, seem to be basic and preliminary to any further consideration:

Has so much scientific water flowed under the bridge since the 16th century that it is impossible today to make the sciences at home in a Lutheran curriculum?

Is there such a thing as a Lutheran approach to science? And if so, how does it differ from, how does it complement other views? How might it be regarded as better or deficient?

What need does the Church have of the sciences, if any? Put the other way around, what would be missing for the Church without the sciences? And are all sciences equal? Which are necessary, which are not?

What sort of philosophical or theological Weltanschauung is necessary to work under in order to have a healthy scientific community on a Lutheran campus?

Will 16th-century guide-posts be helpful or harmful in this discussion? If helpful, how can they be enlisted?

Can a science-less curriculum offer a responsible Wittenberg education?

Do the big quarrels, such as that between evolution and intelligent design, materialism and non-materialist views, matter? Do they drown out the healthy discussions, or do they create a context in which a healthy discussion may occur? Are they the only “going paradigms” that may be adopted?

In the coming weeks, I hope we can address this. I’ve enlisted the help of my friend, Stevin Gehrke, Professor in the School of Engineering at KU, pious Lutheran committed to classical, orthodox, confessional Lutheranism, and thoughtful interlocutor. Actually, this discussion finds its impetus in his proddings. Some things will get posted here on the blog. We can also use the Renascentes Musae Facebook page for less formal exchanges. If you have not yet joined us there, look us up, and welcome aboard.

But what’s your reaction, now, to this matter? Do you have any helpful things to say in addressing the questions above? Do you have other matters that you think can help the discussion along? Do you think that something like an intellectually and theologically rigorous and responsible science can be articulated from the Wittenberg perspective? Please weigh in!

[Image: Aritmetica; mosaic]