Abstract
Beginning with a confession that he, himself, has “suffered too many books, and not enough of them” (vii), Mark D. Jordan's most recent book, Transforming Fire: Imagining Christian Teaching, aims to be something more than yet another manual for Christian teaching. This book, through explanations and exercises, helps the reader recognize and reconnect with the ways in which the lessons and learnings of familiar literature are, themselves, instructive.
Transforming Fire is organized as a series of comparisons of texts from the Christian tradition, or, as Jordan categorizes them, “influential books that claim to hand on some Christian truth” (4). Recently retired from his appointment as a professor at Harvard Divinity School, Jordan has, over the course of his career, taught these texts in front of undergraduate lecture halls, around graduate seminar tables, and in seminary classrooms. In this book, he invites readers to consider the value of such texts, not in terms of the truth students often seek from them, but rather, from the way they “give their own accounts of how they can best be handed down … the root meaning of the word traditio” (6). Put another way, Jordan believes these texts give the reader new insight and knowledge in the practice of teaching.
Jordan sets the stage for this approach to teaching in section 1 by juxtaposing a seemingly oppositional understanding of gender and embodiment as articulated in Gregory of Nyssa's account of his sister Macrina's life, and the Indecent Theology of Marcella Althaus-Reid. Rather than focus on the contrasts between the authors and their texts for the purpose of classroom debate—or even a dreaded pop quiz essay—the juxtaposition of the texts themselves holds for Jordan an instructive tension, one that insists upon the body as what he will identify as a “scene of instruction” for Christian teaching.
The book moves through four additional sections that rely upon similar juxtapositions as Jordan explores the themes of science, moving pictures, children, and barriers. Section 2 summarizes Bonaventure's impassioned and embodied desire to ascend to the mind of God in contrast to Paul Tillich's “disincarnate” academic exercise to articulate a framework for courage, highlighting the limitations of theological knowledge as it is often constructed in academic spaces (73). Section 3 explores the role played by images, as opposed to the text, in the Christian tradition as they “reenact God's incarnate instruction” (104). While passed down as written text, Jordan makes a comparison of Teresa of Avila's imagination and John Bunyan's allegory as scenes of instruction that offer the reader “imagined forms for the promised fulfillments of grace” (106). Section 4 focuses on the identity and power of education and resistance by exploring the stark contrast of Octavia Butler's Parable of the Sower and C. S. Lewis's The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe. And finally, in section 5 Jordan makes the case for a site of instruction beyond the limiting walled, gated, policing structures and paradigms of the church in the Philosophical Scraps of Johannes Climacus (Kierkegaard) and the letters and essays of Simone Weil.
While these literary scenes of instruction have the potential to resonate with readers across a range of theological training, one would assume that the primary audience of Transforming Fire, offered within a larger series on “Theological Education between the Times,” is most clearly those who are leaders in theological education. These are leaders who, having undoubtedly read and taught these texts in their own training, now find themselves navigating the challenges of adapting institutional mission and meeting rapidly shifting ecclesial needs. Jordan's approach may offer an opportunity for those leaders to perhaps set down the leadership books, or other manuals on how to teach in the present moment, and instead rethink this work in the presence of familiar co-learners from the tradition.
This audience of leaders in theological education will likely not be surprised by Jordan's sharp judgment on just how far the limited and limiting structures of administration and assessment in our theological schools have driven us from embodied and engaged modes of Christian teaching. And yet, Transforming Fire seems to emerge from and return to Jordan's belief that seminaries and theological schools can still be “like underground cisterns of displaced but alluring forms of teaching,” especially those who are willing to consider alternative “scenes of instruction” that turn us back to models of theological education that will “serve as sites of resistance to the trivialization of teaching implied by so many professional models” (11).