143 Christian Anthropology and the (W)Holistic Approach 3 It is fundamentally Reformed to not withdraw but to ‘turn to the world’, argued Wolterstorff (2004) in one of the essays (p. 104). He began by outlining an environment of secularisation and rapidly growing directional pluralism, stating that the Christian college needs to redefine itself in terms of its pedagogy, curriculum, community structure, relation between content and gospel, place and role of worship, and connection between ‘what we offer’ and practical life. He then took both globalisation and ‘mixed-pluralistic society in which the body of those committed to Jesus Christ is just one of the components in the pluralism’ into account, underlining the need for internationalisation, new ways of packaging and ‘fresh strategies for bridging theory and practice’ (Wolterstorff, 2004, p. 34). For students, he perceived the necessity not only of understanding society as it has become but also of being enabled to take their positions in it (Wolterstorff, 2004, p. 89). Therefore, the idea of shalom is fundamental: it combines epistemology and action. Wolterstorff’s (2004) shalom idea is not only recognised in the United States but also internationally. In the Netherlands, it led to a publication edited by Van Putten et al. (2017), who invited Wolterstorff to give a lecture at the presentation of their book. During this lecture, Wolterstorff (2017) acknowledged that ‘the idea of shalom’ had been a ‘fundamental component in the framework of much of my thinking and writing since the early 1980s’. Although the Hebrew word shalom from the Old Testament (and its Greek equivalent, Eirene) is most commonly translated as peace, a much better translation would be flourishing. Peace is a necessary component, although it can be understood as simply the absence of harmony. Shalom includes the positive side, wellbeing, embracing in the end two fundamental components: communal and individual shalom. These two are mutually correlated in terms of how the Biblical prophets and, later, the New Testament authors elaborated the idea (Wolterstorff, 2017): Individual shalom consists of being related to oneself and one’s surroundings in ways that are overall good for one and morally right, and finding satisfaction in being so related: to God, to the natural world, to oneself, to one’s fellow human beings, to institutions and cultural artifacts (…) Fundamental to the shalom understanding of social or communal flourishing is its affirmation of what I shall call the ‘each-and-every principle’: when determining the degree to which some community is flourishing, the flourishing of each individual in that community is to be taken into account; not only the rich but also the poor, not only the bright but also the not-so-bright, not only the healthy but also the sick and disabled.
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