139 Christian Anthropology and the (W)Holistic Approach 3 embodiment—thereby forgetting the ancient Christian sacramental wisdom carried in the historic practices of Christian worship and the embodied legacies of spiritual and monastic disciplines. Failing to appreciate this, we have neglected formational resources that are indigenous to the Christian tradition, as it were; as a result, we have too often pursued flawed models of discipleship and Christian formation that have focused on convincing the intellect rather than recruiting the imagination. (p. 39) According to Smith (2013), a holistic approach to education would activate and, finally, orientate concrete action. The whole world is God’s world, which is what Smith learned of Kuyper after he became a Christian. This corrected the Christianity that Smith (2017) knew from the ‘largely dualistic stream of North American evangelicalism, complete with a robust dispensational view of the end of times and a very narrow understanding of redemption’ in which ‘heaven-centric piety’ had ‘little, if anything, to say about how or why a Christian might care about urban planning or chemical engineering or securing clean water sources in developing nations’ (p. 85). Afterwards, Smith also explored the opposite—namely, a purely horizontal, world-focused interpretation of Christianity. The dialectical approach he finally chose entailed awaiting Christ’s Second Coming from heaven while serving expectantly on Earth. From Augustine’s De Civitate Dei (412/2008), Smith perceived the church in pluralistic society as a ‘habit-forming polis in which we gather to be shaped and (re)formed by the Spirit in ways that make us good neighbours, even to our enemies’ (Smith, 2017, p. 150). In Augustine’s teaching the heart represents the person’s deepest longing. There is no real fulfilment of it if it not comes to its religious telos. The human heart finds rest in coming to God and serving Him in the complex and diverse city of man. For education this means that teachers should aim at the child’s heart by habits that shape its longing in this religious sense of the word. 3.2 SYNTHESIS OF THE THREE CONTRIBUTIONS The fundamental ideas of Augustine, Comenius and Dooyeweerd, as described in Section 1, can now be brought together. Despite of their differences in time, approach and focus, these three historic Christian scholars showed a remarkable and significant overlap that can be helpful when evaluating WCD, as presented in Chapter 2, as a worldwide movement to correct reductionist inclinations in modern, fragmented education. Christian anthropology along the lines of Augustine’s interiority theology, Comenius’ optimistic pedagogy and Dooyeweerd’s cosmonomic and anthropocentric philosophy can likewise
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy MTk4NDMw