Knowing God: Revelation and theological education

Religious Education, Summer 2001 by Seymour, Jack

Practices shape the ways that we experience the everyday realities of our lives. For example, a friend is a birdwatcher. When we look at the horizon and the flight of birds, she sees differences where I see none. She knows for what to watch. She is excited when an unexpected bird comes into view. I do not even know what is expected. The practices of bird watching, reading about birds, and the activities of watching, discerning, and discussing findings with other birdwatchers have honed her vision. They have empowered her vision while mine remains cloudy, confused, and even blind to the real vitality and diversity of the horizon.

Another friend has converted from evangelical Protestantism to Islam. In many ways, she is the same person. Her smile and many of her convictions are the same. Nevertheless, her dress, her practices of eating and worshipping, her prayers, her community of friends, and her central commitments have changed as she seeks to live as a faithful Muslim in a world that is suspicious of her people. Her conversion was based on a conviction that Islam offers pride, hope, and community to urban Black men that have been tossed off by society. Her practices empower her as she faces the future and engages in her vocation. She acts and preaches with conviction and with power.

My daughter married this summer. She and her husband are committed to Jewish faith. Their home is kosher. The Jewish calendar punctuates theirs lives-Friday is Shabbat. Their wedding was a wonderful celebration of family and faith. (They even wrote a guide so the uninitiated could follow the practices.) The betrothal was proclaimed before the Torah in a Shabbat service. The signing of the ketubah connected the covenant of the tradition with their covenant before families, friends, and God. Dancing, eating, and storytelling filled an evening that ended by praying again the wedding blessings first recited in the wedding service itself. The wedding practiced religious education in story and action. Their wedding was an experience of family, community, faith, and traditioning.

KNOWING GOD

God is known through a tradition, through a narrative. Practices remind us who we are. Faith meanings are intimately connected to the realities of daily living. Ethnography demonstrates (or better, reveals) how people deeply breathe meanings into the practices of daily life. These practices are forms of education, even religious education. When we engage in ethnographic research and interviews with people, we see and hear them doing theology, being faithful, and hoping in the midst of brokenness, evil, and death.

Yet, the world is a polyglot of languages, meanings, and practices. I do not simply practice the realities of my religious community. My identity is no longer the Christ-against-culture community of my childhood. In fact, it was not even fully this identity when I was a child, because I had to negotiate home and church with school and community. Each of us risks meanings of faith everyday as we engage the practices of the U.S. economy, as we traverse the world of diverse cultures in our communities, as we read and converse with others whose faith practices are not our own.