Covenant and pedagogy

Abstract

This article argues that “covenant” ought to serve universally as a framework for education, beyond the exclusive sense of covenant in use in Reformed Christian education. The article begins with covenant as creation’s answerable relationship with the Creator, then offers a brief account of language as a form of covenantal exchange, and concludes with pedagogy as a function of the covenantal structures of being and of speaking.

Keywords

answerability covenant theology philosophy of education Speech Act Theory

Every word is directed toward an answer and cannot escape the profound influence of the answering word that it anticipates.

Understanding comes to fruition only in the response. (Mikhail Bakhtin, 1981: 280, 282)

The doctrine of the covenant is one of the primary drivers of Christian schooling in the Reformed tradition. To cite just one instance, the Christian Reformed Church of North America (CRCNA) includes in its Church Order an explicit reference to the covenant when mandating the local church, through its leadership, to promote Christian schooling:

The Council shall diligently encourage the members of the congregation to establish and maintain good Christian schools in which the biblical, Reformed vision of Christ’s lordship over all creation is clearly taught. The council shall also urge parents to have their children educated in harmony with this vision according to the demands of the covenant. (CRCNA, Article 71)

The clause “according to the demands of the covenant” invokes an earlier rendition of the “Form for the Baptism of Infants and Young Children,” which identified three covenant relationships that are enacted by infant baptism. First, baptism is understood as a special sign from God whereby he sets apart the infant as his own in a manner that extends into the New Testament church the Old Testament sign of the covenant, circumcision. Second, baptism invites the child’s parents to rededicate themselves to God, to accept the promises of the new covenant on the child’s behalf, and to undertake to nurture their child in the reality of those promises. Third, baptism effectually reconstitutes the church into which the child is baptized as a covenant community. The parental responsibility for nurturing the covenant child in the Christian faith is thereby shared by the congregation and delegated to teachers on behalf of the community. When people in Reformed and Presbyterian churches associate “covenant” with “education,” they are usually referring to some or all of these aspects of infant baptism.

In this article, however, I will suggest that “covenant” ought to serve as the basis for a Christian view of education in a far more comprehensive way than in the more particular doctrine of infant baptism. To do so, I will be asserting that all reality bears the nature, structure, and function of a biblical covenant, and not only the exclusive relationship between God and his elect. I will begin with covenant as characterizing creation’s answerable relationship with the Creator, then offer a brief account of language as a form of covenantal exchange, and conclude with pedagogy as a function of the covenantal structures of being and of speaking. The article will become increasingly sharper in its focus as it moves from covenantal creation through covenantal language to covenantal pedagogy. Central to the connection that I will be making between covenant and pedagogy is language, the means by which covenant is effected, enacted, and experienced. In particular, I believe that the concept of answerability in the language theory of Mikhail Bakhtin (1895–1975) aligns with many of the facets of divine and human covenants within and without Scripture, not least of which is the role of language in the performance of a covenant relationship. I hope to have demonstrated by the end that the covenantal structure of being and knowing is applicable, not only to Christian education generally or Reformed schooling specifically, but to pedagogy universally. Just as Michael Horton (2006: 23) considers covenant theology as more than simply one big doctrinal idea among many, so I will argue that covenant should be seen as the structural framework within which we practice pedagogy. In effect, this article seeks to provide within a comprehensive, rather than a specifically Reformed, theology of covenant a biblical rationale for collaborative practices in classrooms of any kind whatsoever.

Covenant and creation

The first premise of my argument is neither controversial nor new: the creation of Adam and Eve places them in a covenant relationship with the Creator. The Christian church has long recognized the primary place of the Edenic covenant across an array of theological topics—from anthropology and Christology to soteriology and eschatology. What is called in the Presbyterian theological tradition a covenant of works is effectively enacted in the second creation account, in Gen 2:15–17. There, God bestows on Adam and Eve the office of regent over creation with both a promise (“You are free to eat from any tree in the garden”) and an obligation (“you must not eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil”). Though the Hebrew word for “covenant” is not used in Scripture until Gen 6:18, WJ Dumbrell (2013) demonstrates that the structure of the covenantal speech act is already present in God’s establishing the covenant relationship with Adam and Eve in Genesis 2. Theologians may differ in their construal of this earlier covenant—whether it is a covenant of works or a covenant of grace—but they agree that the relationship between God and human beings is rightly described as “covenantal” from the beginning. John Frame (2002: 101) describes this relationship simply as “God’s covenant presence.” Because we are made in God’s image, human beings have the capacity to meet the conditions to enter into a binding relationship, even though the fall into sin has rendered them incapable of keeping our obligations under the covenant.

The second premise of my argument is perhaps a little more controversial. What if we were to see the relationship between God and all creation as a covenant, and not just his relationship with humanity? Seen in this perspective, the first creation account of Genesis 1 can also be read in terms of a covenantal structure from the beginning. God’s act of speaking creation into being establishes a relationship between the Creator and the creation that mirrors the call-and-response nature of covenants. In other words, even though the explicit covenantal formula with regards to creation does not appear in Scripture until after the flood (Gen 9:9–11), one can discern an implicit covenantal relationship between Creator and creation already in Genesis 1–2. The Dutch theologian Herman Bavinck (1854–1921) argued that God’s attributes are communicable not only inward with the three persons of the Godhead (ad intra) but also outward to that which he makes (ad extra). Bavinck alludes to Augustine in locating the originating moment of creation in the conversation among the three persons of the trinity: “the self-communication that takes place within the divine being is archetypal for God’s work in creation” (Bavinck, 2004: 333). The counsel of the triune God, Bavinck writes, “is to be understood as his eternal plan for all that exists or will happen in time” (Bavinck, 2004: 372). The word “counsel” here involves more than the result, decision, resolution, or decree: “counsel” has in its orbit of meanings, too, the process of consulting together (verb: to counsel) and the persons of the consultation or assembly (collective noun: the Counsel). These latter two aspects convey “counsel”—anthropomorphically, at least—as a communication event in time. God’s counsel is not only the contents of the eternal decree, it is the dialogue itself among the three persons by which the will of the Godhead is resolved. One can see that the structural relationship between decree (eternal, secret, ad intra) and covenant (historical, revealed, ad extra) is realized in creation. Just as the eternal decree of election entered time and space in the historical event of the covenant with Abram, so the eternal decree of creation entered time and space in the historical event of the creative speech acts described in Genesis 1. Each of the covenantal speech acts recorded in Scripture—with Adam and Eve (Gen 2), Noah (Gen 6), Noah and all creatures (Gen 9), Abraham (Gen 11, 15), Moses and Israel (Exod 34; Deut 5), Aaron (Num 25), and David (2 Sam 7)—can be read as a progression (as well as a diversification) in the historical actualization of the single eternal decree of God that begins in time with the creation of all things: “Creation is the initial act and foundation of all divine revelation and therefore the foundation of all religious and ethical life as well” (Bavinck, 2004: 407).

The world and all that is in it, therefore, is not merely a thing that has been made but a creation that corresponds with and is answerable to its Creator. The relationship between the Creator and created reality, in its original form as well as in its organic or natural and cultural or social formations over time, is one of call-and-answer. Herman Bavinck is helpful in showing how the biblical doctrine of creation differs from both dynamic Pantheism and mechanical Deism:

… all peoples either pantheistically pull God down into what is creaturely, or deistically elevate him endlessly above it. In neither case does one arrive at true fellowship, at covenant, at genuine religion. But Scripture insists on both: God is infinitely great and condescendingly good; he is Sovereign but also Father; he is Creator but also Prototype. In a word, he is the God of the covenant. (Bavinck, 2004: 570–571)

The unity-in-diversity that characterizes the three persons of the Godhead in his eternal decree also characterizes the singular, unified purpose of the multiple, complex forms of a coherent creation that stand in a dialogic relationship with each other and with God. In his Church Dogmatics: The Doctrine of Creation, Karl Barth (2004: 48) puts it this way: “The decisive anchorage of the recognition that creation and covenant belong to each other is the recognition that God the Creator is the triune God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit.”

Just as dialogue can metaphorically describe the internal counsel of God before creation, so the metaphor of speech and communication captures the participation of created things in covenant response to the Creator. When Scripture describes creation’s response to the Creator, it typically uses metaphors of speech:

The heavens declare the glory of God; the skies proclaim the work of his hands. Day after day they pour forth speech; night after night they display knowledge. There is no speech or language where their voice is not heard. Their voice goes out into all the earth, their words to the ends of the world. (Ps 19:1–4)

Another locus of this biblical theme is Job 12: “But ask the animals, and they will teach you, or the birds of the air, and they will tell you; or speak to the earth, and it will teach you, or let the fish of the sea inform you. Which of all these does not know that the hand of the LORD has done this?” (Job 12:7–9). Each created thing responds, according to its kind and function, to the call of its having been made—which is also a theme of God’s words “out of the whirlwind” to Job (Job 38–41). This accounts, too, for the Apostle Paul’s expression for the eschatological longing of creation as the wordless speech act of the groans of childbirth:

The creation waits in eager expectation for the sons of God to be revealed. For the creation was subjected to frustration, not by its own choice, but by the will of the one who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself will be liberated from its bondage to decay and brought into the glorious freedom of the children of God. We know that the whole creation has been groaning as in the pains of childbirth right up to the present time. (Rom 8:19–22)

Scripture frequently uses anthropomorphic figures in describing the rapport between creation and Creator as a responsiveness to the purpose for which all things have been made, often with speech as primary figure. In sum, the phrase the covenant of creation includes three phases: first, the divine decree before creation; second, the calling into being of that which was not during the six days of creation; and, third, the continuous providence over creation. The first articulation of the covenant of creation is among equals within the triune Godhead; the second is between the Creator and that which he created; and the third is the ongoing call-and-answer between Creator and created, as well as among all created things, until the eschaton.

It is worth noting that the covenantal ontology derived from the biblical doctrine of creation that I have described finds parallels in the continental philosophical tradition, particularly in that of the phenomenological school. In Being and Time, Martin Heidegger describes “being” not just as Dasein (being-in-the-world) but as awareness of the “thrown-ness” (Die Geworfenheit) of one’s being in a world that is a complex web of interrelated entities: “as something thrown, Dasein has been thrown into existence” (Heidegger, 1962: 57, 321). Put in existentialist terms, to be authentically human is to be openly responsive to the condition of being thrown into existence and to answer the call of obligation toward the Other: “Conscience manifests itself as the call of care” (Heidegger, 1962: 57, 322). In The Gift of Death, Jacques Derrida (1995) argues that the concept of responsibility in European history derives logically from Heidegger’s idea of “the call” (der Ruf). By Derrida’s account, Heidegger’s notion of der Ruf always already summons the individual into a “being-toward-death.” The ultimate invitation for a being—“ultimate” both in the sense of time (final, last) and of telos (essential, defining)—is that of death, a call that mortals alone must answer and answer alone. The sense of our ending, for Derrida, constitutes the existential ground of the experience of responsibility: because we all await the ultimate summons of death, we have a responsibility for living. Unlike the covenantal ontology described above, the grounding of Derrida’s notion of human “response-ability” lies not in the origin of the species but in the consciousness of one’s necessary death. Interestingly, but in diametrically opposed ways—in the beginning of creation and in the death of existence—the biblical and the phenomenological accounts of the human condition are both predicated on a relationship of call-and-answer.

The covenantal ontology rooted in creation finds an even stronger parallel in the philosophy of Martin Buber and Emmanuel Levinas. Buber’s I and Thou (Ich und Du, 1958) describes human experience as inescapably reciprocal between the self and the other in a way that eludes the subject/object dichotomy. Buber describes this primary characteristic of being human as existing in the meeting of the self and the other, a relationship expressed in the two “primary” words, I/Thou and I/It. Although Buber does not directly invoke biblical covenantal language, his description of intersubjectivity makes space for a transcendent “eternal Thou” that can be glimpsed through each specific, temporal meeting of the “I” with the “Thou”: “Every particular Thou is a glimpse through to the eternal Thou; by means of every particular Thou the primary word addresses the eternal Thou” (Buber, 1958: 75). In an early article, “Is Ontology Fundamental?” Levinas argued that an ethical relationship with the other (autrui) exists prior to the recognition of the other in Heidegger’s ontology:

The person with whom I am in relation I call being, but in so calling him, I call to him. I do not only think that he is, I speak to him. He is my partner in the heart of a relation which ought only have made him present to me. I have spoken to him, that is to say, I have neglected the universal being that he incarnates in order to remain with the particular being he is … The relation with the other (autrui) is not therefore ontology. (Levinas, 1996: 7)

Heidegger may have moved from an idealist ontology of the Enlightenment to something more involved, responsive, and intersubjective, but clearly not far enough for Levinas. The reciprocal structure of intersubjectivity in Levinas’ concept of alterity begins to resemble the covenantal ontology grounded in creation when one considers that the central metaphors in Levinas of summoning, invocation, and call suggest that reciprocity of persons is dialogic, linguistic, and communicated. Rowan Williams (2000: 72) adopts precisely this language to describe the creature’s relationship with the creator: “God alone (as supremely free of the world) can bring a hearer into being by speaking, by uttering (making external, ‘outering’) what the life of God is, in a creative summons.” In other words, existence as call-and-answer is experienced through verbal and non-verbal utterance. In biblical covenants, the relationship of the caller and the called, of the invocation and the answer, of the act of summoning and the act of responding, is necessarily asymmetrical and diachronous. The self and the other are not merely echoes nor do they speak simultaneously: the one creates the conditions for the other in a dynamic reciprocity. Pulling phenomenology in a theological direction, Jean-Louis Chrétien (2004) develops the potential of intersubjectivity by unpacking further the literally evocative nature of being in The Call and the Response. The capacity for response (chrono)logically precedes the call: “Speak, LORD, for thy servant heareth” (1 Sam 3:10). Because the call-and-answer structure necessarily makes a covenant bilateral in practice (or dipleuric, as it is sometimes called), the parts and parties of the covenant are necessarily “other” to each other.

Covenant and language

All covenants in Scripture, whether those on the vertical axis (Creator-to-creature, God-to-Adam, God-to-Noah, etc.) or those on the horizontal axis (Joshua-to-the-Gibeonites, David-to-Jonathan, David-to-Mephibosheth, etc.), are performative speech acts. The relationship with the other in a covenant relationship is always enacted in the form of discursive, linguistic, and verbal exchange. Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679), the Enlightenment master of contracts and covenants, defines a covenant as a spoken interaction between parties that is conveyed in written form; even when the covenant is unspoken, it is predicated on an implicit verbal construction that is tacitly understood as having been exchanged prior to the written instantiation of the agreement (Hobbs, 1998: 1.14). A number of biblical scholars have fruitfully co-opted Speech Act Theory for biblical hermeneutics, but it is Kevin Vanhoozer (2001, 2002, 2010) in particular who draws Speech Act Theory into dialogue with covenant theology for a performative theory of the reading of Scripture. Whereas creation is a general covenantal speech act by which God calls everything into existence in dependence upon Him, inscripturation is a special covenantal speech act, through the agency of human authors and language, with perlocutionary force. The basic structure of all divine covenants is the gracious extension of a promise with an invitation to acceptance, with consequences, and Scripture functions in a similar manner. By its very nature, Scripture effects God’s electing work of inviting the person to believe in him and of forming a covenant community; Scripture does not return empty but separates humanity into those who accept in faithful obedience and those who reject in unbelieving disobedience. Gerda Aister-Elata and Rachel Salmon (1993: 42) conclude their analysis of covenant in the Torah with the observation that “the reader who intends to repeat [the Torah], performs, in reading it, the declarative speech act of becoming a partner to the covenantal relationship with God.” The relationship between the Author and the reader of Scripture certainly is asymmetrical, but it nevertheless places a reciprocal responsibility on both parties of the covenant: God condescends through the accommodation of human language with promises of salvation to the reader who accepts the responsibilities that accompany the reception of those promises.

Similar to the earlier extension of the structure of particular covenants to the divine act of creation in general, one may view not only Scripture but all linguistic exchange as functioning within a covenantal structure. This is the argument that Vanhoozer (2001: 10) makes when he proposes that “Language has a ‘design plan’ that is inherently covenantal.” Bavinck was quoted earlier as having suggested that the conversation among the three persons of the Trinity is the originating moment of the creation of the world. Vanhoozer brings that insight to bear specifically on language as the primary means of actualizing the relationships between God and humanity and among all human beings: “The doctrine of the Trinity … stands not as an analogy but as a paradigm to human communication” (Vanhoozer, 2001: 10). Language is an essential aspect of being made in the image of God: we could call this a Trinitarian covenantal linguistic anthropology. God’s speech acts ad intra in his eternal counsel (“Let us make … ”) and his speech acts ad extra in his making the universe (“Let there be … ”) enact his covenantal relationships, both among the persons of the Trinity and with his creation, most significantly in the Word-made-flesh. James KA Smith has argued that the Incarnation solves the problem of the incommensurability between transcendent God and immanent language in a way that does not diminish God’s transcendence and infinity. Smith concludes “that language is incarnational through and through, that it never escapes incarnation as its paradigm and condition of possibility” (Smith, 2003: 164). Vanhoozer’s covenantal-Trinitarian approach to language includes the incarnational, logically precedes it and, like it, precludes the problem of incommensurability, transcendence, and infinity precisely because it accommodates the asymmetry that is constitutive of a biblical covenant exchange.

In the same way that we briefly noted parallels between covenantal ontology in Heidegger (1962), Derrida (1995), Buber (1958), and Levinas (1996), so we can see similarities between covenantal linguistics and contemporary theorists of language. For instance, Umberto Eco in Kant and the Platypus (2000) offers a contractual realist theory of language. Eco is especially interested in the problem of identifying where and when cognition meets language: at what point in time and where in space do the concept or conception of a thing and the naming of that thing meet? Eco addresses the problem by describing cognition and language as a series of negotiated interactions between the universal (or categorical) and the individual, between the perceiver and the perceived, between the representation and the reference, between the sense and the significance, and between the speaker and the audience. In this regard, Eco builds on the idea of dynamic interrelationships already found in Ferdinand de Saussure, who describes the sign as holding in tension within itself both the signifier and signified. Eco also borrows de Saussure’s idea of the simultaneity in discourse of langue (the system and structure of language) and parole (the local utterance of language). More than Saussure, Eco’s view of linguistic referentiality as a contract foregrounds mutual responsibility as the key to its social and intersubjective nature. When a speaker refers to something, in Eco’s account, he or she performs something of “a contractual nature—or at least a strong contractual component” (Eco, 2000: 280). Not only is there a contractual negotiation between the idea or essence of the thing (quidditas) and the particularity of this thing (haecceitas), each utterance is also a contractual give-and-take between the participants in the exchange: “Deciding whether a sentence designates individuals or classes depends not on its grammatical form … but on the intention of the senders and on the assumptions of the receivers” (Eco, 2000: 284). A relationship of trust exists between the sender and the receiver prior to the grammatical form that the sentence takes, both in its syntactical and semantic aspects. It would not be a stretch to consider as a social contract both the lexicon of meanings and the grammatical system of a language itself—what Saussure calls langue. Nor would it be a stretch to consider as a covenant the mutual but asymmetrical responsibility of the speaker and the hearer in the particular utterance in time and place—what Saussure calls parole. The call-and-answer structure of language—the idea and its expression, the object and its naming, the speaker and her or his respondent—is itself an echo of the essentially covenantal nature of created reality.

Covenant and pedagogy

In the discourse around education, particularly among those in the Reformed and Presbyterian theological traditions, the doctrine of the covenant is typically invoked in three related ways: it identifies the status of the student as marked by God as his child, holy, and set apart (1 Cor 7:14); it places an obligation on the child to respond in faith to the promises given at his or her baptism, also as those are developed into a vision of the kingdom; and it mandates the Christian community to establish and maintain schools that have a covenantal perspective on the child and his or her education. When it comes to the practice of teaching and learning, however, covenant theology has had limited application. In the area of curriculum, perhaps, covenant theology can be helpful in shaping the learning outcomes in the affective domain, particularly those that pertain to spiritual formation and character development. A sense of the child’s obligation as a covenant-keeper could potentially undergird a school’s approach to discipline. Covenant theology will certainly shape the curriculum content in the teaching of Bible, doctrine, and church history in a school that alludes to the covenant in its founding statements. But covenant theology generally lacks operational force in the classroom. In the final section of this article, I would like to apply to pedagogy the conclusions of the previous sections on the covenantal nature, structure, and function of creation and language to three areas: posture, collaboration, and assessment. Essentially, the comprehensive view of the biblical covenant that I have outlined above allows us to articulate in theological terms the practices that are already common in education in religious and non-religious settings alike.

Posture

Clarence Joldersma, deftly invoking the ethical philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas, has made the persuasive argument that the asymmetrical relationship of “self” and “other” effectively characterizes the posture of the teacher toward the student:

Pedagogy involves centrally heeding that call, succumbing to that elected obligation. I am irrecusably chosen to be responsible to that student. The otherness of the student, his or her vulnerability—neighborliness—creates this in me. (Joldersma, 2001: 187)

This way of construing the teacher and the student retains a binary structure in which the student is always already the neighbor. Yet one could equally flip the statement in that the student is also irrecusably chosen to be responsible to the teacher. Is not the teacher vulnerable in his or her “otherness” to the student? From a covenantal perspective, I would argue, the dyad of teacher-and-student stands together in relation to the Creator: as fellow creatures, the teacher-and-student are joined in a prior elected obligation to the totally Other, the Creator. Thus the covenantal dynamic adds a vertical relationality with the “Other” without erasing the Levinasian formulation of the dialogue of “self” and “other” on the horizontal plane. If all creation answers the call of being, the teacher and the student are equals, coming side by side to respond to the call. Without negating the importance for pedagogy of the face-to-face Levinasian ethic as Joldersma describes it, the conviction that creation is itself always already in a responsive orientation toward the Creator joins everyone in the school into association with each other and with all created things. While distinctions in roles and divisions of labor remain between administrators and teachers, heads of departments and staff, teachers and their educational assistants, teachers and parent volunteers, and middle-school students and their Junior Kindergarten buddies, the school as social microcosm reflects the unity-in-diversity that is creation. As God “has given to every creature its being, shape, and form, and to each its specific task and functions to serve its Creator” (Belgic Confession, Article 12), so the community that is the school stands together in a posture of covenant responsiveness toward the Creator.

In the classroom, this covenantal posture expresses itself in the bearing that teachers and students collectively have toward creation. Whatever the subject, the matter of learning, as well as its manner, already shares an ontological responsiveness to the Creator. In the natural sciences, for instance, the teacher and student study the biological, chemical, and physical properties that allow each aspect of created matter—both animate and inanimate—to play its part in uniting the complexity of creation into an organic whole. A covenantal view of creation not only gives the teacher and student an answer to the scientific determinism that reduces nature to mechanical processes, it also provides an antidote to an instrumentalist approach to the sciences that sees nature as something to be used. Seeing oneself as a subject dependent upon the Creator in ontological parity with the very objects of study helps resist the temptation to epistemological hubris. The stewardship model of creation care that should be central in the Christian school builds on a biblical covenantal theology of creation: not only were Adam and Eve enjoined to keep a covenant of works in paradise, all humanity has the responsibility to fulfill the obligation of guiding the rest of creation to serve its Creator. With a broad creational covenant perspective, teachers and students in the science classroom can identify differentiation, including the differentiation of roles and functions of creatures, as the Creator’s way of directing the diverse structures of creation toward a faithful response to the summons into being. The duty of dominion over creation (Ps 8) does not place human beings in a binary opposition to created things, but endows humanity with a special place within the collaboration that is all creation responding to the divine fiat of existence.

When pedagogy is conceived of as a covenantal speech act, then the teacher and the student are turned toward each other. In effect, to borrow Bakhtin’s evocative statement from Discourse in the Novel, “Understanding comes to fruition only in the response” (Bakhtin, 1981: 282). In Bakhtin’s picture of communication, speaking is only half of the equation: the act of listening completes the otherwise incomplete transaction of speech. Like a promissory note, the speech act is only actualized when it is cashed in. As with love and marriage, so with speaker and respondent: you cannot have one without the other. A covenantal theory of language places on the speaker the responsibility of trustworthiness (or truth-worthiness), even as it places on the listener the responsibility of good faith. By analogy with the promises and obligation of divine covenants in Scripture, the premise in a covenantal theory of speech acts is that the speaker’s words are reliable and the listener’s response is in good faith. The assumption of the reliability of a speaker’s words is twofold: the meaning of the utterance is assumed to correspond accurately to the reality referred to by the speaker and to express faithfully the intention of the speaker. The burden of response on the part of the listener is likewise analogous to the recipient of a divine covenant: the recipient is obliged to respond in a manner appropriate to the promissory note proffered in the speech act, depending on the situation and nature of the speech act. This translates in the classroom into reciprocal postures of promise and obligation on the part of the teacher and the student—equal in terms of their creaturely responsiveness to the Creator, but different in terms of their covenant relationship in the classroom, where the posture of the teacher is that of promise-giver and the student that of promise-receiver. An obligation of loving trustworthiness characterizes the posture of the teacher, and an obligation of trusting receptivity that of the student.

Collaboration

To encourage a student’s ownership of his or her education, both secondary and post-secondary schools may ask students to co-design their own learning plan. REY Wickett (1999, 2000) and Fred Glennon (2008) have explored the concept of the Learning Covenant for teaching religion in a general education curriculum. The Learning Covenant includes elements of the transformational, experiential, contract, and cooperative approaches to teaching and learning in adult and higher education. Wickett highlights similarities between theological covenants and education, such as the prerequisites of commitment, responsibility, respect, benefits, and sanctions. Especially in co-operative and experiential learning situations where the adult learner devises her or his own learning plan, a learning covenant formalizes the relationship between the student and a number of stakeholders in the community (i.e. the supervisor at the placement) and in the school (i.e. the professor of record or the experiential learning staff). In the context of religious studies that Wickett and Glennon describe, connecting the biblical covenant with learning makes good sense. Here I would simply extend the structure of covenants, biblical and otherwise, to strengthen the basis for collaborative practices in the classroom at all levels.

The rationale for group work in a school or college rests on the familiar triad of knowledge, skill, and attitude. Working collaboratively capitalizes on the collective knowledge of the group, when individuals contribute to each other’s understanding of the content that they are working on. Each individual develops the skills of team-work that are so highly valued in the job market: identifying others’ strengths, assigning (and accepting) various roles in the project, and producing parts to create a greater whole. The qualities of what used to be called “citizenship” are cultivated in the collaborative context, from exercising charity and humility toward others in the group to sharing the credit for the completed project. Within the broader covenantal perspective of pedagogy, the basis for collaborative work in the classroom is found to be prior to the knowledge, skills, and attitudes of group work. When students see themselves as co-respondents with each other to the givenness and givens of creation, the invitation to work together is grounded in their shared status as beings created to answer the call of the Creator. Whether it is in a traditional classroom or in a virtual environment, students become a body of learners united in the specific task of learning. The corporate identity of the class is structured in a form analogous to the covenant community of the church, with individual responsibilities that contribute to the communal telos. The very real pedagogical benefits that derive from group work in the classroom, then, are subsequent to the ontological aspect of the student’s individual and shared covenantal obligation to answer the call of being created in the image of God. A covenantal pedagogy will then also push against the tendency toward individualism in education at all levels.

Assessment

One of the more contentious areas in education, the matter of evaluation, has undergone radical alterations in the past fifty years or so. The shift from the evaluative to the formative purpose of measuring student outcomes is one such change. Traditional thinking about measurement tends to value common, objective standards and end products, whereas more recent theory and practice tends to measure individual, subjective growth and the learning process. The language of failure has been replaced with that which encourages and enables the learner to develop toward his or her own potential, rather than against a prescribed—sometimes arbitrary—standard of success. Perhaps nowhere in education does one’s worldview reveal itself more than the theory and practice of assessment. Those who decry these changes blame Postmodernism’s radical relativism, and those who embrace these developments celebrate the demise of Modernism’s elevation of objectivity. How might a covenantal pedagogy help negotiate the impasse between traditionalist and contemporary views on assessment?

A number of Christian educators have addressed this question, emphasizing three aspects of the covenantal responsibility of both teacher and learner. Elaine Brouwer (2007) shifts the power relationship of the teacher and the student by having the teacher come alongside the student in the act of assessing learning. In effect, assessment is a shared responsibility by which both teaching and learning come into view. The covenantal posture of the teacher and student remains the same, even though their respective roles are different and distinct. Phil Teeuwsen (2013) builds on Brouwer’s work by combining it with Ted Wachtel’s notion (2003) of restorative practices in education. Teeuwsen defines assessment as the process over time by which students become responsible for progress in their learning. From an authoritarian posture to an authoritative process of transparency and collaboration, the teacher engages the student in learning conversations so as to lead him or her to become a self-conscious learner. Ellen Ballock (2018) has recently suggested that empathy, charity, and shared responsibility are the keys to assessment. Ballock recounts how she came to recognize the need for spiritual self-reflection when viewing a student’s work: the act of assessing is an act of speaking the truth in love. These three accounts of assessment accentuate the sense of responding with the learner to the situation of being-in-the-world. More pointedly, when assessment is realized as a speech act between two parties with promise and grace, as well as obligation and receptiveness, it is an instance of covenantal pedagogy in action.

Each of these three instances of pedagogy in the classroom—posture, collaboration, and assessment—rests on an understanding of covenant as structurally foundational to creation, language, and learning. Covenant theology, whether it is articulated as “covenant of works” or “covenant of grace,” typically leans toward the divine covenant of election with Abraham and his descendants. One could say that this is the soteriological expression of divine covenantal interaction with creation, the exclusive covenant of grace with the elect. I have been suggesting throughout this article that covenant theology should begin already before creation in the dialogue within the Godhead and with the perlocutionary Speech Act of creation. One could say that this is the ontological aspect of covenant theology, universal and inclusive, which precedes in time the special covenant of election with Abraham. In fact, the universal, inclusive covenant of creation is the precondition of the special, exclusive covenant of election that redeems it. As with the special covenant of election, the general covenant of creation enacts an asymmetrical, dipleuric relationship of Creator and creation, a relationship of promises and obligations, that constitutes creation as a community formed to respond to the call of being. As I have suggested briefly in the third section of the article, the universality of covenant-as-structure provides a common framework for pedagogical theory and practice in all contexts. The Christian teacher in the public school can embody the gracious character of God through her or his posture in the classroom, as the enabler of collaborative student activities, and with encouragement through formative assessment. The non-denominational Christian school can articulate its mission in the covenantal language of creation’s response to the invitation from the Creator to be faithful. The Reformed Christian school can expand its theology of covenant to embrace its universal dimension in creation, as well as its special instantiation in the covenant of grace with Abraham. With covenant as the essential, even constitutive, nature of being, a pedagogy that is deliberately shaped by its contours can be truly inclusive and descriptive of teaching and learning in all educational contexts.

Footnotes

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD

Ben Faber

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