Branson Parler on: Reformed worldview and why it matters for DE?

Bio: Dr. Branson Parler is a Professor of Theology at Kuyper College in Grand Rapids Mi. His area of expertise is the theology of John Howard Yoder. He makes thoughtful social commentary on his website located here.

Disclosures: Dr Parler and I have known each other for years. This interview was held at a La Huasteca Mexican Restaurant. We highly recommend the wet burrito. the interview has been edited for length.

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LM How is an academic program different when taught from a Christian perspective as opposed to a pluralistic alternative?

BP At a place like Kuyper… the difference [is in] the student we are trying to shape, and form… they shape and form in a different context. It has to do with the whole person, not merely intellectual knowledge, and it’s not merely practical knowledge. Recognizing [that the] person as a whole should be shaped by the classes. It goes to the heart of what drives a person to do what they do…. It includes what they are going to do in their vocation, but it’s not limited to what they are going to do in their job.

LM So it is broader than vocational development?

BP Yes. My perception of DE right or wrong, is [that] it’s easier to deliver information at distance than it is to shape people. Maybe that’s a bad dichotomy to make; it’s not necessarily one or the other. I think from a Christian perspective, in all of my classes, I try to appeal to peoples’ hearts, to their sense of purpose, sense of drive… from a Christian perspective.

LM Now I know you teach Bible & theology, but speculate for arts & science courses. In a writing course, what is different when taught from a Christian perspective as opposed to a pluralistic perspective?

BP One key difference, is that you are trying to evaluate your subject matter in light of the truth of scripture and the truth of who God is. Take for example an advanced rhetoric course, in most courses you will get an emphasis on critical thinking, on engaging with an issue. In a Christian institution, it’s going to be done with a very specific perspective in mind. How do we think this through? How do we not just evaluate the logic of the argument itself, but how do we think an issue through from a Christian perspective?

LM What do you say to a person who says: “Ok you have ten class assignments. In a secular English class, all ten assignments will be on English. If you are integrating components from Bible and theology into the course, what gets removed to make space? Or do your students just have to work harder?”

BP Yeah, I’d say that

It’s not so much that the Bible & theology is something that’s added, but it’s something that is infused through those writing assignments. I don’t want to take [an assignment] away, so that my students will read the Bible more or something… I think of a cooking metaphor, you infuse something through a dish, so that flavor is present everywhere through the dish… I don’t want it to be that Bible & theology is laid on top…

I think in terms of education, having a particular model or example, is a big part of the shaping process. Part of what the instructor is doing, is modeling for the student the ways you should do things.

LM So you are teaching behaviors in addition to the course materials?

BP Yeah, I think it’s not just the skill of critical thinking, but the attitudes you bring into that, the beliefs you bring… that is part of how you find some of the difference.

LM What changes when you talk about DE? You mentioned it might be more difficult to help a person grow holistically. Is that something you’d identity as a note of concern for DE providers?

BP Yeah I think so. I think there are different challenges. If you are talking about shear information, shear information is everywhere. In one sense, the role of the instructor has to do with modeling. Part of modeling is, trying to be contagious in terms of your love for your particular topic.

LM The DE educator needs to be creative on how to preserve that.

BP Yeah I don’t think it’s impossible to do.  I wonder if it would be more difficult to communicate that passion for the topic, in part because one of the main ways we do that is through our speech, bodies, that kind of thing you are removing in a DE context.

LM These days people meet online, fall in love online, then they meet and end up having happy marriages. People who are employed work exclusively online, and never go on site. Do you think technology is changing that about people, that it is now a possibility to explain your passion for something through text?

BP Yeah, and it’s not just text, through use of videos, multimedia, I think there is a certain level where you can communicate that through text. I still wonder if you lose something, not necessarily something necessary, but still something key to the process.

In my class, when we talk about Jamie Smith’s book, desiring the kingdom, one of the ways he phrases it: “I love in order to know.”

Often times I’ll ask students, “What are the classes that you just thoroughly enjoy, and why is that?” … I’m always interested to hear how often they use the phrase “love.” “I love this class, I loved this instructor,” and usually one of the key points in that is the instructor’s love for the material.

LM So I guess professors should be using a lot of emoticons when they are typing.

BP I just read an article earlier… about teaching Plato’s dialogs through the use of emoticons. Where the instructors in an onsite class, in order to help the students think through the written text, they said “Ok: insert emoticons at the appropriate places here.”

LM We have been talking about generally Christian worldview. When it comes to a more Reformed perspective, have you been able to think through what would make a Reformed DE program different then a more generally Christian worldview? Why would someone want that?

BP Yeah, I think in terms of, content, Reformed worldview is going to be a little more narrow about how it talks about and interprets reality. It does focus specifically on concepts like “structure” and “direction” that you get in Al Wolters Book “Creation Regained”

LM Talk to me about “structure” and “direction?”

BP Wolters talks about “structure” in terms of the essence of something, of what it is.  There is a connection here as well with Kuyper’s idea of sphere sovereignty. That you can think about, and that God has created the world with these creational structures, that have possibilities and potential built in to it. And so articulating the creational structure is a way to think through the goodness of all these different areas of life and culture and society.

…Direction is a way to recognize that these can either function in line with God’s purposes, or out of line with God’s purposes. So it’s either creational, or it’s sinful, or in the process of being redeemed. And so for me at least, Reformed Worldview goes back to Abraham Kuyper and people extrapolating on that, that it does present a distinctive way to view life and society as a whole.

It’s not just a distinctive theology, or church order, or way of reading the Bible. It is a way of diagnosing what going wrong, and what’s going right in life and society. I think that it has the resources, because of the way it focuses on the goodness of creation, it has the resources… to say: “What’s good here? What is misdirected here?” And “How should Christians engage in this area of life or culture to bring it more into conformity with God’s purposes?” So I think of that compared to a more general Christian worldview, I think when people think of Christian worldview, they still kind of think Bible and Doctrine. That its key points of doctrine, key points of the bible.

LM But this is bigger than that.

BP This is bigger than that.

Interview with Bierma & Keeley: How has technology changed education?

Bio: Nathan Bierma, pictured left is an educational technologist for Calvin Theological Seminary (CTS). He was a consultant hired to help launch their DE programming and has stayed on in a leadership role.

Bio: Dr Robert Keeley (Bob), pictured right is the Director of DE for Calvin Theological Seminary (CTS) and has nearly 40 years of teaching experience at the secondary, post secondary, and graduate levels.

Disclosure: I interviewed both of these gentlemen at Calvin Theological Seminary’s beautiful campus. When transcribed, this interview was 20 pages long! It has been edited for length and divided into chunks.

This section focuses most strongly on the question: How has technology changed education?

Stay Tuned For Insights from Bierma & Keeley on how Reformed Institutions can provide leadership in DE as well as assessment of Spiritual Formation in DE.

LM From what you have been saying it sounds like you don’t think it’s just online learning that’s changing, it’s learning in general?

NB So do we focus on the education or the tech? Let me try a slightly different angle. Often the core objective of what prospective students are asking us [is]:

“What distance offerings do you have? … I can’t uproot or relocate myself, my career, my family, the church I’m serving at, so what education options do I have considering those things?”…

The biggest thing that’s changed in the last couple decades… has been the shift in that you no longer have to be implanted in a residential community in order to have this kind of education or get this kind of degree. You have access to it via technology from a different location. And so that’s the biggest change.

LM Talk about that Bob.

RK In some ways the change in education… is older than 20 years. That’s when the technology came in, and that changed some things about education… I first noticed … [that] technology was changing about education… when I was a middle school math teacher. I got a degree in mathematics from Calvin College in 1976. For Christmas 1974, I got a calculator. It was an inch-and-a-half, to two inches thick at its thickest part; it had glowing red numbers. It did adding, subtracting, multiplying, and square roots. And it cost $200….

By the time I finished teaching day school 18 years ago, all my students were required to have a graphing calculator… When I started, a big part of elementary math was: “How do you grind out algorithms to do these things?”… Over the course of a few years, all my students had access to $5 calculators that could do quite a bit of the work for them… And so that made us think: “What is really important?” Giving them the month long drilling on the long division algorithm made no sense anymore…. So that’s where education started to change.

…Now, when I write something and publish it online where people around the world can see it, where I can send it to a particular person anywhere in the world, or just put it out there and let others respond to it, that makes a difference. On my blog, when I reviewed a book on emerging Christianity and I complained that this guy seems to have no sense of Church history, that he thinks that emergent Christians are the first to use candles, David Kennerman found my blog and responded to me and said: “your misreading it!” And then I respond: “Here’s what you say!” That’s different then when I was a kid, there was no way I could have interacted with the authors themselves.

LM So as far the learning goes, you are saying that the form of learning is changing, but that also the content is changing. They don’t need to learn the same things they did before. [Also] the power structure is changing. How is a program with Christian worldview different than a pluralistic alternative?

RK Let me reframe the question. Nick Wolterstorff said that the question should not be “How are we distinctive?” it should be “How are we faithful?” … I don’t want to lay the common grace card here, but maybe I’ll lay it down:

Common grace says that sometimes the unregenerate get it right. So let’s ask the question: “What does it mean to be faithful to your call as a Christian educator as you create distance learning opportunities?” Rather than: “How is it different, how is it distinct?”

LM What do you have to say about that Nathan?

NB The most striking difference from the outside of a Christian education program and a pluralistic [one], presumably you’re teaching students to have fealty to a church or Christian organization, teaching them to preach and teach the gospel… More deeply you could get at what’s different about the Christian religion than others, which is an incarnate God who humbles and sacrifices himself… leading to a servanthood ethos among followers. As well as an evangelistic imperative to go out and preach and teach. Now those things would be true of any Christian institution. Since our DE is simply a different method to implement the same curriculum, it’s hard for me to think about a Christian DE program as opposed to a more generic DE program.

RK Instead of me challenging the question, let me answer the question. I think being faithful… is [in] three areas. Who are we teaching? What are we teaching? And how are we teaching? So with “Who are we teaching?” We are teaching people who are made in God’s image… that idea of what it means to teach people who are image bearers has an impact on the how and what we teach also.

Interview with Richard Mouw Pt 1 of 3 on Reformed Worldview in Distance Education

Richard Mouw  is Professor of Faith and Public Life at Fuller Theological Seminary, after 20 years as FTS’ president.

Disclosures: My interview with Dr. Mouw was carried out over Skype. The interview, when transcribed was ten pages long. As he has a lot of important things to say, I have broken the interview into three parts, the latter two of which will be published later.

• Reformed worldview’s role in higher education
• Spiritual formation in distance education
• DE history and the future of DE in collaboration

Reformed Worldview’s Role in Higher Education

LM How is an academic program from a Christian perspective different than a pluralistic alternative?

RM The obvious thing is that we do take our presuppositions seriously, we do take the faith commitments seriously. Secondly, we also take seriously that our faith commitments apply to all areas of life. Our Kuyperian commitment to every square inch of creation, which means, every academic discipline, is under the lordship of Jesus Christ. And so it’s important to be thinking, whether you’re teaching a history course, or a math course, or 19^th Century English Literature, that we are sure we are looking at things through a lens…

I think, that the kingdom perspective as we understand it in our Kuyperian, reformed tradition, we tend to look at everything through the pattern of creation, fall, redemption, and ultimate consummation. So when we are studying something like poverty, or something like sexuality, we think in terms of “how does this phenomena relate to God’s creation?” And “what ways has it been impacted by our fallenness?” And “what ways can we be working on the redemption of it, or the transforming of it, and what does this have to tell us about the coming kingdom when all things will be made new?” I think especially those of us from the Kuyperian tradition, the creation, fall, redemption eschaton is a very important worldview perspective or framework for us to be thinking about.

LM How can Reformed institutions provide leadership for other Christian institutions in regards to DE programs?

RM First thing we need to do is see the ways that we are providing leadership. When I first started out in Christian liberal arts education in my earliest years were teaching at Calvin college… Back in the 70’s there were a lot of schools for whom… a Christian perspective really meant chapel services, bible studies, and spiritual formation kind of stuff. And, a lot of that had no connection to what was happening in the classroom. It was basically the same thing you could get at a state university, plus devotions or prayer before class.

There were other schools who saw it as service projects. You see a lot of that in the Mennonite community for example. You would take courses that maybe weren’t always looked at from a Christian perspective, but you were expected to do an international service project, or work with the poor or something like that. So it was more supplementing the material with doing something Christian.

Those of us in the reformed community always insisted that [it had] to do with the way that we teach. When I was interviewed at Calvin College, President Spoelhoef, one of the great leaders there, he wasn’t too sure of me because I came from a Reformed Church background, and I was coming into a Christian Reformed institution, and he wanted to be sure I understood the worldview portion, and he said: “Let me put it bluntly, if in one single night, the whole religion and theology department dropped dead, and the chapel burned down, the next day, this would be as Christian a college as it was the day before. Because what makes it Christian is what gets taught in the chemistry class.”

That was a rather stark contrasting way of putting it. What we have come to see in the reformed world, is that the content is so important, and the community, the spiritual formation is an important part as well. It isn’t enough just to have a worldview, but I like to think these days, I don’t know what Jesus or Abraham Kuyper or anyone else would say about genetic manipulation of tomatoes, but I do know it’s an important question. The bible is a lamp onto our feet and a pathway, we shine the light of God’s word on all things that come along. Just having a worldview doesn’t do it. Its viewing, seeing things through the lens of the kingdom, of scripture.

I think the formation part is very important. Worship, bible study, prayer, service, all of these things integrated with the classroom experience the content of a Christian perspective of sociology, all that has to go together. What we’ve seen in the last couple decades, largely under the influence of Nick Wolterstorff and others who have spoken at Wheaton College and Indiana Wesleyan and those kind of places, as well as Arthur Holmes, who wrote a nice book called All Truth is God’s Truth, is that more and more, schools that used to be purely pietistic, are now getting into a Christian worldview. But they are looking to the reformed community for guidance on that. We are getting a lot of stuff out the Wesleyan churches and the Nazarene community.

I was invited to speak, two months ago, at a free Methodist church, which every year, brings together 30 or 40 PHD students in all fields, in literature, science and the like, Wesleyan, Methodist… they asked me to speak as a Reformed Christian, how the Kuyperian thing translate into the categories of a holiness movement. Can we do holy learning, and holy scholarship, without necessarily having to buy in to the whole reformed theology thing? And I think there’s a lot of interest in that.

With the Acton institute, you are seeing Catholic types coming together with Calvinist types, thinking about markets and morality and all that good stuff, I think schools like Kuyper College and Dordt College… are thinking a lot about that. How do we be centers of not only reforming our own students, but develop the models that are available to other Christians in other confessional traditions? I think the work of the CCCU is a wonderful thing because they bring representatives of over 100 Christian colleges and universities from the evangelical community together.

LM One thing you said there sparked a question for me, you were saying some of the Wesleyan and Methodist groups are asking, can we adopt portions, can we adopt the reformed worldview, without necessarily having the reformed theology? Talk to me more about that, do you think schools can say: “we love this reformed worldview thing,” can you logically do that without the Reformed theology piece?

RM That’s a big discussion right now. I am mentoring doctoral students, I have six, only one of them, Jessica Driesenga who graduated from Calvin Seminary, and she is the only one who has any Reformed church involvement. Others are Lutherans, people from the Wesleyan tradition, people from the Brethren tradition, but they all really buy into Kuyper’s sphere sovereignty, and all those good things. And we talk a lot about, to what degree can you call yourself Kuyperian if you don’t believe in infant baptism for example?

Or if you don’t have a real rich doctrine on the covenant, or if you don’t believe in predestination or the canons of Dordt, and this is a big project for us. As a Kuyperian, I understand Kuyper and people like him, the connections went deep to the Canons of Dordt, the Belgic Confession, the Heidelberg catechism, and it’s what gave rise to and inspired serving the Lord in politics and the liberal arts education… When I taught my worldview course here at fuller, I’d get 120 students. The people who were most excited about it were black Pentecostals. Because Jesus Christ is Lord, and not only Lord over our souls, but Lord over race relations, and over social justice.

LM So it seems that people, who do not always espouse Reformed theology, are adopting Reformed worldview. Let me ask you this, up to know we have been describing it as Reformed worldview, and we use that label to differentiate it from other types of worldviews. At what point does it become main stream enough that we just call it Christian worldview?

RM Yeah, I think you’re right. I think that’s important. Kuyper himself would talk about it being Calvinistic, but he really wanted a Biblical world and life view. And I think that’s really the way. Here at Fuller, we have 120 denominations. 4000 students from all over the world. I don’t get very far telling them they’ve got to be Kuyperian Reformed Calvinists. So I do it more in terms of Christian worldview. As somebody who does see that as grounded in my own confessional traditions, I have to keep struggling to which degree (that works). But I am more inspired by the reality that it’s possible to be a Lutheran or Baptist or Pentecostal and begins to develop, and the more they develop that broad worldview, the more they see that needs to be grounded in good theology, it tends to gravitate towards Reformed theology, even though they may not infralapsarianism