Peter van Olst

148 Chapter 3 were identified and investigated with regard to the question of how to foster a shalom community: inclusive learning; diversity conversations; racism; cultural awareness; lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender experiences, and so on. In a final summary, Lee and Kaak (2017) concluded that building a shalom community entails nothing less than the essence of Christian teaching. For them, a pedagogy of shalom provides direction to all their efforts as teachers, which lends an almost missional teleology to their practice: The beautiful world that God created was marred due to human sin and God sent His own Son to redeem the relationship. Therefore, Christian education is missional in its efforts to restore the world to the original status that God created (…) This intervention should be established and implemented through two ways: individual and communal dimensions. However, this intervention should not be finished instantaneously; rather, it is implemented gradually until Jesus’s second coming (Lee & Kaak, 2017, p. 210). 3.4 CONCLUSION This chapter’s reflection on the anthropology of three influential scholars from the broad Christian tradition—namely, Augustine, Comenius and Dooyeweerd—leads to the conclusion that the worldwide movement for WCD, as described in Chapter 2, certainly has a point. Fragmented education within a fragmented society needs to recognise this point as a fundamental correction of its reductionistic tendencies. Christian schools and educators, which are involuntarily part of the modern, fragmented culture, can learn from their own tradition in order to start supporting this fundamental correction. Their way has been cleared by the above-mentioned contemporary advocates of Augustine, Comenius and Dooyeweerd—that is, James K.A. Smith, Jan Hábl and André Troost—and others, who have expressed a clear plea for a more holistic approach. A synthesis of the anthropology of Augustine, Comenius and Dooyeweerd fills the gap in the WCD approach which I observed in the final conclusion of Chapter 2, when I approached WCD from the fragmentation thesis as built in Chapter 1. Their joint Christian perspective makes it impossible to overlook the transcendent aspect of human ontology and its corresponding teleology. The coherent unity within the person as well as of the person with others and with the whole of creation starts with God as the Creator, besides Whom no real human restoration of broken relationships or flourishing can be expected. Such notions are included in a definition of holistic Christian education, together

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