Teaching as Believing: Faith in the University

1: Teaching Genesis as Story

21 In the beginning of The Idea of the University, Cardinal Newman considers the possibility that even when the university is sponsored by the church, a “line” exists between the way of the university and the way of faith. For a moment he identifies a clear boundary: It will be said, that there are different kinds or spheres of Knowledge, human, divine, sensible, intellectual, and the like; and that a University certainly takes in all varieties of Knowledge in its own line, but still that it has a line of its own. It contemplates, it occupies a certain order, a certain platform of Knowledge. (29; 1.2.3) It will be said. Newman raises this point only to deny it in the next sentence, insisting that to separate faith and knowledge is finally too easy. In the end, at the Catholic university that he is charged with creating, in nineteenth-century Ireland, a university grounded in faith, the distinction won’t hold. But in the beginning of my own discussion, at a state university in twenty-first century America, the distinction between faith and reason does hold. Though the university “certainly takes in all varieties of Knowledge,” though the distinctions will start to dissolve before long, in an obvious way, in this time and place, Oregon State University can be said to occupy a “platform” or “sphere” of analysis distinct from that of St. Mary’s Parish. It can be said to have “a line of its own,” and intuitively we know what it is: the line of inquiry rather than of advocacy, of analysis rather than of dogma. c h a p t e r 1 Teaching Genesis as Story Anderson.Teaching 9/30/04 4:20 PM Page 21 Teaching as Believing 22 This is where to begin, with the broad, horizontal beam of the cross, the beam that describes the work of critical thinking that is the work of a public university or any university. In this chapter, I explain how the teaching of the book of Genesis as literature can simply be seen as another way of doing that work, how the Bible can serve as a particularly rich text for the kind of analysis that defines higher education. In Ricouer’s terms, the aim of the university is to keep demonstrating the many possible “thoughts” that can be inferred from the “story” of our lives, our culture, our literature, our science. The paradox is that my identity as a preacher becomes a very useful way for me to demonstrate exactly this point. This chapter and the next argue that we need to leave out our stories (in a sense), setting them aside and focusing instead on the texts themselves . But I want to begin by returning to my time at the seminary, reflecting on the differences between my experience there and at the university because these differences prepared me to return. They gave me tools for doing exactly what the university is supposed to do, what I feel called to do, as both deacon and professor. Fall Often in the fall when I was teaching and studying at the seminary I’d walk out on the bluff beyond the monastery buildings. There is a rutted road and then a path through the blackberry hummocks and dry grasses to an oak grove where I would read and watch the birds. Sometimes a downy woodpecker was going about its work in the branches. Chickadees bickered and fluted lower down. From beneath the trees I looked over the brow of the hill to the wide fields of the valley floor, sprinklers arcing in the distance. One afternoon I brought a book by the Anglican theologian and patristic scholar Andrew Louth, Discerning the Mystery, and reading it there in the oak grove I had one of those profound moments that we all have now and then when our intellect and our life and our faith come together. It happened when I read this passage: The central truth, or mystery, of the Christian faith is primarily not a matter of words, and therefore ultimately of ideas and concepts, but a matter of fact, of reality. To be a Christian is not simply to believe something, to learn something, but to be something, to experience something. The role of the Church, then, is not simply as the contingent vehicle—in history—of the Christian message, but as the community through belonging to which we come into touch with the Christian mystery...