Abstract
When Paul authors The Epistle, helping and uplifting Roman learners and teachers in their grasp about faith and spirituality (Rom 1:11–12) obviously is on his curricular agenda. The teaching of spirituality in The Epistle is twofold. One is that the mainstream beliefs of the Greco-Roman world, unlike those of the contemporary world, recognised the fact that humans are beings with souls. Paul’s learners needed to know how the spirit might be freed or purified (cf. Rom 1:21 and 14:22). In this sense, spirituality and morality are blended. They are two sides of the same coin. The second aspect of the education is the question of what exactly is it that should be freed. Morality is more on the performance side. Spirituality is more the inward condition of the “inner human”, a term Paul uses in Rom 7:22, τὸν ἔσω ἄνθρωπον. This chapter will, on the whole, concentrate on the first aspect. Thus this chapter will focus first on a pedagogic reading Rom 4 and Rom 5. The second aspect will be dealt with in the next chapter.
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Notes
- 1.
- 2.
While the following conceptualisation by Bongmba (2014, p. 33) about “spirituality” might sound postmodern to some, it does parallel some of the essential features of the ideational landscape of Paul when The Epistle seeks to offer education across cultic boundaries of his epoch. In Bongmba’s words: “I consider the term, spirituality, to refer to ideas, ideals, and practices which people employ to focus on and strengthen their relationship to others, divine beings and spirits, as well as the entire cosmic order…. While religious traditions have provided a context for spirituality, it has become customary to see spirituality as a disposition towards the cosmos which exceeds one particular religious tradition. In the main, spirituality remains the deployment of thought and action towards all forms of relations between the individual (or community) and the entire cosmos, even though those actions take place in a concrete, historical world. Spirituality (thought and action) is a way of life that is not determined by [coercive] rules, but is guided by a good sense of the self, others, and the universe”.
- 3.
The thinking behind “train the trainers”, or the ToT model is that more experienced “teachers train their colleagues in the use of specific content or program” (p. 19); and that there is the pedagogic awareness that such “Transfer [of learning] goes beyond ordinary learning in that the skill or knowledge in question has to travel to a new context [such as in another district]”; and that “Transfer of learning means that participants in staff development activities use the knowledge and skills gained in the appropriate settings. Transfer must be defined within the context of what is relevant to the type of educational intervention and the intended outcomes of a particular program. Schõn (1983) believes that learning transfer involves moving from the ‘technical rationality’ of the classroom [training room] to the ‘reflection in action’ demanded by real [pedagogic; this insertion, mine] work settings (schools and classrooms)” (Griffin 1997, pp. 23–24).
- 4.
See, for example, Luce (1994, pp. 120-129) elucidating Aristotle’s view on the universe, the nature of well-being (happiness), moral excellence (the golden mean), and intellectual excellence.
- 5.
Rom 4:13: τὸ κληρονόμον αὐτὸν εἶναι κόσμου; literally, “the one so involved is tenant of the cosmos”.
- 6.
In modern history, the term “a psychology of worldviews” was expressed by Karl Jaspers. It may help some readers to note Webb (2009, pp. 15-16) has remarked further: One of Jaspers’ ideas “is his emphasis on psychological development and the construction of worldviews as a continuous, lifelong process stimulated by the experience of disturbance. This happens as a result both of the way one’s action and thought can clash with reality and of involvement in what he called ‘boundary situations’ (Grenzsituationen), examples of which include struggle, death, accident, guilt, and encounter with mystery, experiences that give rise to ideas of possible transcendence. Fundamental to all boundary situations, he said, is the paradoxical character of human existence and the experience of tension (Spannung) it can entail. The fundamental paradox of human existence, or ‘antinomy,’ as Jaspers called it, is that to be human is to be neither simply an object in the world nor simply a subject contemplating worldly existence from some standing beyond it but rather something of both – as Ernest Becker would dramatically put it a half century later, to be ‘half animal and half symbolic… out of nature and hopelessly in it.. up in the stars and yet housed in a heart-pumping, breath-gasping body that once belonged to a fish and still carries the gill marks to prove it’”. I would say, in substantial way, the curriculum in The Epistle is responding to this irreducible dimension of being human. Moreover, there is clear intertextuality between the views cited above and The Epistle.
- 7.
For the spiritual relevance, necessity, and significance of the aesthetic reading, see Pike (2005).
- 8.
The Stoics also have a somewhat overlapping way to getting to know. Verbeke (1991, pp. 21-22) notices, “The Stoics maintained that all parts of the universe are linked to each other like the parts of a living organism. Although they did not question the precise nature of these connections, they emphasized the point that one factor may reveal the presence of another. A philosopher is thus comparable to a physician or a diviner: Starting from the observation of some particular aspect, he is able to draw conclusions about what is hidden. The human being is endowed with a discursive and synthesizing mind. Consequently he is capable of inferring what is hidden on the basis of what he perceives. In this way, each part of the world is what it is in itself, but in a sense it is also what it is not, since it refers to other parts of the cosmos. In dealing with the sensible world, man is able to comprehend its coherence. On the basis of this universal sympathy, he endeavors to know what is not given in perception and even that which is not perceptible. For example, from the movements of the body, man can understand the soul, which is its animating principle”.
- 9.
Translation, mine, considering PHILIPPS, WE, and VOICE
- 10.
For the role of metaphor in spiritual discourse, see Halstead (2005, pp. 139-147).
- 11.
This primacy of intuition has a Kantian sense; see Noddings and Shore (1984, p. 45). In page 60, they thus have observed: “Reason uses the objects provided in intuitive representation, combines them, transforms them according to its own rules; but the conclusions of reason must be looked upon by intuition in order to be seen and understood. Often we have a result right before us, a result we have ourselves produced, and we still do not understand it. Our cognitive schemata from a cloud between ‘us’ and the material we are thinking about. In such situations, we literally need to stop thinking and look at the objects of reason. Clearly, reason is not complete in itself so far as our understanding is concerned. Saying is not equivalent to understanding”.
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Ho, O.N.K. (2018). Understanding Faith and Spirituality: The Origin, the Epistemic, and the Conduct. In: Rethinking the Curriculum. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-8902-2_5
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