The Subversive and Creative Consequences of Convictional Teaching

Theological education is not theologically neutral. A confessional College working within the framework of a secular University can either opt for a stance of critical distance and attempted intellectual objectivity, or it can self-consciously position itself within its own confessional tradition, while encouraging that tradition itself to be open to critique and review. Of course critical distance and attempted objectivity can never be neutral anyway; and there is something to be said for stating at the outset the position adopted by teachers, the assumptions and presuppositions that underlie any given course.

That's why our Scottish Baptist College is deliberately and intentionally open about our commitment to a Baptist way of doing theology, while also being open to that mutual enhancement of educational practice made possible by collaborative partnership with a publicly funded University. Theological education is no different from other subject-focused forms of learning. We pursue our peculiar agendas, exploring our particular subject field, develop distinctive discourse, and seek enriched understanding through that cross fertilisation of ideas we call multi-disciplinary study. But all this is done as a theological College which is self-consciously Baptist and Scottish.

It's against that kind of background that Wallace Alston Jr. makes a passionate plea for convictional teaching, a real and acknowledged  relationship between a teacher's personal beliefs and their public instruction. Theological education as a process of Christian formation is at its most formatively effective when teachers are vocational mentors who demonstrate an attractive and persuasive discipleship of the intellect.

"What I am talking about is classroom teaching that leaves no doubt in the student's mind concerning where the teacher stands in relation to the subject under consideration, whether it is of life and death importance or simply an object of dispassionate reflection and evaluation. Convictional teaching is teaching done from the inside of an issue or idea as a sympathetic participant  rather than from the outside  as a disinterested spectator. It is teaching with such obvious passion for the subject matter that the student is caught up, drawn into it, and brought to the point pf personal decision about its meaning and merit. Convictional teaching in theological education  is a form of intellectual mentoring whereby the teacher approaches  questions of truth in scripture and tradition with a hermeneutics of trust and gratitude that bears witness to the sheer delight of serving God with the life of the mind."

Wallace Aston, 'The Education of a Pastor-Theologian', The Power to Comprehend with All the Saints. The Formation and Practice of a Pastor-Theologian, Wallace M Alston & Cynthia A Jarvis (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2009), 71-2.

The painting is called 'Shadow in the Middle' and is by Daniel Bonnell. The play of light and shadow, the protective stance of Jesus, the tooth shaped shadows around Jesus and the woman, the stones lying on the ground – whatever else, Jesus is no dispassionate observer. A crash course in theological education might start with an exegesis of this painting, some convictional teaching on holiness as moral courage on behalf of others. And the competence based learning outcome might be "a demonstrated capacity to stand in the middle beside the vulnerable, daring the stone throwers"!