What is the relationship between content and transformation? Does context matter? What about one’s body? Is there teaching that is requisite for life change? And what is “life change?” As the Greek philosophers pondered thousands of years ago, can virtue be taught? How?
Is information transformational? Speaking very generally:
- Protestants have answered “Damn straight!”
- The Roman church has said, “Yeah but…”
- While the Orthodox Church appears to have replied, “Not really.”
I find myself siding more and more with our Eastern friends on this one. What is the purpose of catechesis? Certainly the purpose is greater than information retention.
What if the point of catechesis has very little to do with knowledge and much more to do with participation in a romantic tragedy that is a comedy.
God’s story – if I can be overly reductionistic for a moment and call it, “The Lamb and the Bride” – is a tragedy, a real tragedy which is a comedy. It is a story in which both the Lamb and the Bride die. And they die real death, with great pain and fear and with uncertainty, but it turns out that the very thing most feared is what is most needed.
Can we teach death?
Ought we create environments where death is more likely to happen?
Is church like a community theater producing a living drama?
Maybe the Eastern Church needs to serve as a drama coach for the West.
Peace, dwight
