On the final day of class last week, I had students read Arthur Holmes’s classic statement on Christian education: “All truth is God’s truth.”
It forced me to try and articulate for my students the truth I felt we had discovered together in our literature and writing courses. I realized that if I began and ended the course with Holmes’s statement, I probably would have had a good litmus test for what to emphasize and omit over the course of the semester. I tend to be so fixated on tactics that I forget to reiterate the deeper reason for the tactics. In other words, I err on the side of teaching students efficiency rather than effectiveness.
If the goal is to discover and learn the truth about the world, we’ll have a different orientation to reading and writing.
The basic premises of a Christian orientation to literature and writing are that:
- When we reading and interpret books, we exercise an aspect of God’s image in our lives and find a concrete place to see the gap between ourselves and our maker (i.e. our interpretations are limited and prone to error).
- Thus, reading provides us a place to discover truth (facts) and meaning (interpretation) about God’s world. Literature allows us to access those facts and interpretations in a different, and potentially more powerful, way then descriptive prose.
- When we write, we engage in a special form of communication that God used to reveal Himself to humanity.
- Thus, writing provides a means to more truthfully and faithfully think God’s thoughts after Him.
If I kept coming back to these points and used literature to illustrate them, I would give students a more affective relationship to the idea that all truth is God’s truth. It’s not enough to know or repeat this. This idea should be formative. As I consider that statement’s effect on my life, I will be more able to convey its important to my students so that their own wisdom begins with a proper relationship to God and truth.