141 Christian Anthropology and the (W)Holistic Approach 3 modern thought and education suffer from a fundamental neglect of the transcendental—and consequently of the human telos or destiny in the whole of creation. • The three famous Christian scholars showed remarkable agreement on the centrality of the human heart, not the physical organ per se, nor as a symbol of the emotional aspect of life (feelings), but as the core of undivided human existence. For Dooyeweerd, it is through the heart that the temporal and the supratemporal reality come together, while according to Augustine and Comenius, true renewal, happiness and flourishing are only possible when sinners return to their hearts, which represents a return to God and His eternal law. The five points that comprise this summarising synthesis are helpful for both endorsing WCD and criticising it from a Christian anthropological perspective. In particular, the latter two points show that not only is the lack of attention to spirituality in the original wholism a problem but also how the place it received in the WCD combination of holism and wholism, as described in Section 2.4, falls short. From a Christian perspective, the Anthropos cannot be understood without paying clear attention to its transcendental origin (from God), its transcendental ontology (through God) and its transcendental teleology (towards God). Augustine, Comenius and Dooyeweerd, as Christian scholars, cannot be understood without taking all of this into account and emphasising their focus on the heart as the (transcendental) root entity of the human being, coram Deo, before God. While endorsing the WCD approach, from a Christian perspective, a critical remark must be made that it lacks this ontology and teleology. This remark accords with what was written in Chapter 1, along the lines of MacIntyre’s (2007) and Taylor’s (1989) cultural critiques, on telos and ontology. To be able to make the WCD approach fruitful for the citizenship formation of trainee teachers from a Christian perspective its description must be enriched with these notions. This led me to formulate a definition of holistic Christian education that this chapter began with (9). It aligns with the more secular and general description of WCD elaborated by the NIVOZ Foundation, as quoted in Chapter 2.3.1 and in the introduction (NIVOZ Foundation, 2018), but adds both ontology and teleology: 9 This definition was developed and published in a peer-reviewed article in the International Journal of Christianity & Education, in which a summary of this chapter is also included (van Olst, 2023a).
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