137 Christian Anthropology and the (W)Holistic Approach 3 Yourself and restless is our heart until it comes to rest in You’ (quia fecisti nos ad te et inquitum est cor nostrum, donec requiescat in te). Therefore, God utilises the preaching of His Word, which not only contains cognitive information but is also closely tied to all kinds of practices or liturgies aimed at the heart and desires of man. For Smith (2017), this approach was holistic, and Dupont and Walraet (2015) supported this idea with more scientific proof. By holistic, Smith meant, in the first place, non-reductionistic: he distanced himself from the rationalistic, reductionistic approach that dominates Western anthropology and also Christian education. In reference to Augustine, Pascal and Heidegger, Smith promoted an alternative to cognitivist anthropology. In the church and in Christian education, there should be more attention paid to the whole person, attention in which worship (the active service of God, including the physical and creative side of man) should not only be the central goal but also formative practice. The following quotation shows how he imagined the role of the Christian university that provides this attention: The Christian university does not simply deposit ideas into mind-receptables, thereby providing just enough education to enable credentialing for a job. No, the Christian university offers an education that is formative—a holistic education that not only provides knowledge but also shapes our fundamental orientation to the world. It is what I’ll call, in a slight tweak of Flaubert, a “sentimental education”. The alumni of Christian universities are sent in God’s good (but broken) world equipped with new intellectual reservoirs and skills for thinking; but ideally they are also sent out from the Christian university with new habits and desires and virtues. They will have been habituated to love God and his kingdom—to love God and desire what he wants for creation—and thus engage the world. Indeed, if we are going to teach students rigorously and critically, we must also form them in what Augustine calls “the right order of love”. (Smith, 2013, pp. 4–5) Holistic Christian education arises in Smith’s (2013) opinion from an approach to man that he calls ‘liturgical anthropology’ (p. 29). Central to this anthropology is the term ‘embodied intentionality’, by which Smith (2013) meant that desires become visible in the activities of the bodily existence, in visible practices that, in turn, are formative for the desires driving them. He based this claim on the work of phenomenologist Merleau-Ponty and sociologist Bourdieu, who both considered and assigned meaning to ‘embodied intentionality’. Merleau-Ponty did so with the term praktognosia, while Bourdieu used the term habitus. Praktognosia concerns knowledge and insight that is not acquired
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