Some time last century Nietzsche killed God, or reported on our murder of the divine, anyway.
As the trends and forces which made him declare that God was dead accelerated we have systematically done the same to each authority figure we encountered, in diminishing scales of authority like repeatedly smashing Russian dolls, until they are all gone.
To have autonomy we have to not only kill God, but we must murder each authority figure that we find. After we subsume Nietzsche’s will to power it’s an inevitable climb up a hill of skulls. We become intellectual Oedipus’ who have to overturn the wisdom of the masters. We’ve stopped doing so actively long ago, instead we passively kill the wise daily.
This has allowed us to each enthrone ourselves as god of our demesne, and no god brooks rivals. So we separate one from another, each man an island, unmoored and solipsistically floating, lonely as a cloud.
Ok, so that’s overstated and overwrought—not least because reports of the Lord’s demise were greatly exaggerated, go and have a peek in the tomb—but what has happened in the last couple of centuries is a successive dethroning of God from every arena of public and private life. This is then followed, inevitably because vacuums must be filled, with a slow but inexorable enthroning of the self in each throne we find.
This is the backdrop, or part of it, that created the phenomenon we name (and inhabit) ‘expressive individualism.’ The problems with community that persist in our societies, well documented at this point, exist for all manner of structural reasons—and it can be difficult to tell cart from horse. However we arrived, we find ourselves in a place where we place community after our selves. I decry it and yet I do it, a product of the social imaginary in which I live and breath and have my being, it is difficult to not view the world through the prism of my ‘identity’ and sense of self.
Yet if we can break back into reality we might just discover a richer, wider, surprising world that wants to teach us stories of its and our maker. We might discover the world is much stranger and more delightful than we give it credit for, having explained away the mysteriousness and tied everything up in neat boxes. We’re wrong of course, but we need to begin to see the world again, to see the reality that everything we encounter participates in and points towards.
To see reality we will need teachers, and we’ve killed them all. Thank the Lord he’s the God of resurrection.
Not so long ago I worked at a different University where I was responsible for helping academics develop their pedagogy. This included evidence-based evaluations of whether new teaching methods ‘worked,’ coaching academics on their practice, and reading a lot of academic studies in pedagogic journals.
Once at a conference we were extolled the virtues of Jacques Rancière, a philosopher who was interested in ‘emancipatory pedagogy’ among other ideas. I never encountered his work directly after that but began to see echoes—whether of his work or of the work of others in similar philosophical veins I am ill-equipped to suggest—running throughout much of what that University did. When I later read his book The Ignorant Schoolmaster it was hard to avoid them.
Rancière speaks to the nature of being positioned as a learner under a knower. He is deeply concerned that this is structurally unequal. He argues in The Ignorant Schoolmaster for a postmodern theory of learning where our interpretation of ‘texts’ is most important.
This is a denial of learning at its most basic: there is no longer anything to learn, and there is no virtue to be formed in the direction of. Every institution that might mould us into its shape is beaten into a platform for us to be displayed as unique individuals.
For Rancière education is emancipation, and gospel. The point is to free ourselves. I understand a Christian theory of education to involve us being shaped towards virtue. The point is to be formed by others. Virtue, and institutional thinking, necessarily implies being moulded, formed, and limited. Of course, I think that’s good for us. Rancière thinks that we are only stupid when we encounter the knowledgeable (7-9).
To explain something to someone is first of all to show him he cannot understand it by himself.
The Ignorant Schoolmaster, 6
Well, yes, because he can’t. In case it’s unclear, he thought this was a terrible thing because we should be able to understand everything ourselves. On the contrary, we are blinded by sin, understanding is not in our reach without guides. He hated the Socratic method (29) because it hardened the line between master and student/slave. Rancière argued for education by the ignorant master. This master doesn’t know or force you to learn, and so emancipates you from the master. Which is true enough, I’m just unconvinced it emancipates you from ignorance.
Perhaps this sounds mad, and yet it emerges in the modern University more often than you might think. I’ve never heard anyone argue directly for his principles outside of that conference, but it is common to say that lecturers are ‘guides on the side’ rather than ‘sages on the stage.’
Rancière wants to remove our ability to stand on the shoulders of others. I recall Anthony Thiselton drilling into me in his hermeneutics classes that we were pygmies on the shoulders of giants. Rancière would have us cut the giants off at the knees and then merrily dance into the sunset. As Christians we must instead confess that the tradition matters, the past matters, those who have gone before us show us the way.
Even though few reading this will have heard of Rancière and fewer will be interested in reading more of his philosophy, these sort of ideas are ten-a-penny in our discourse. Few people in our cultures think that tradition (or The Tradition) can speak to us today. This is as true in the church as it is in government.
It is difficult to suggest to evangelicals that we should pay more notice to the church’s tradition. We naturally bristle and say we have the Bible as though I suddenly want us all to swim the Tiber. I don’t, I want to be a Protestant, which includes being in dialogue with the last two thousand years of reflection on what the Bible means.
Our Biblicist credentials often lead us down Rancière’s path, albeit for very different reasons, we want to understand the text and he wants us to say what it means to us. Sadly, our rejection of masters who might teach us the way leads us to a surprisingly late modern mode for reading the Bible, even when we think we’re being deliciously premodern.
I’m a fan of guide on the side teaching, but my complete difference to Rancière is that I don’t want to be the master but I want us to have one: the ancients, the masters, the texts we explore together are our masters. We submit ourselves to them to learn virtue.
I’ve recently been taking a small group through some of the apostolic fathers. Some of the texts are occasionally very strange—this week we had doves emerging from Polycarp’s wounds. I’m not an expert on the texts, I can’t be a sage on the stage, but I do know how to facilitate interaction with a text. I’m a guide on the side, except at every stage I’m committed to ensuring that we have a master: the text in front of us. We are there to learn from the breeze of the centuries.
And there’s a scent of spices on the wind.
Photo by Miguel Henriques on Unsplash
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