246 Chapter 7 At this point, it can be concluded that the espoused theology of the practitioners of Christian education in a context of religious and cultural diversity is to be faithful, however, they feel that this cannot be accomplished in a way of imposition and negating the child’s own background, religion and culture or the convictions that are based on it. When thinking about this feeling, the conversational community started to discover pedagogically and theologically driven motivations for combining openness with faithfulness, not only strategically but also substantially. To respect the child, to be humble truth seekers themselves, to not judge or condemn others and to depend on God for the results of their personal truth sharing are all values that the participants start to combine with the Biblical core value of love. At an unconscious level, this was clear at the start of the 11th meeting, which began with the issue of what should be the basic attitude of Christian teachers in a fragmented world but ended with the emerging topic of handling absolute truth, when a member of the insider group stated that in God’s kingdom ‘serving proves to be more important than knowledge’ and that ‘this is also true in teaching and dealing with children: Christian education is not just about passing on certain knowledge but is also characterised by service’. 7.2.4 The voice of formal theology As indicated at the start of Section 2, the voice of formal (scholarly) theology did not play a major role in the conversational community’s deliberations on epistemology and absolute truth. Rather, the conversation moved from the Bible and practice to a scholarly approach. Crucial moments occurred during the discussions on several occasions when Biblical truth was denoted as not merely a system or ideology but as something that flourishes in a personal relationship with Christ, which can be located at the interface of normative and formal theology. All of the participants agreed that it is not they, as Christian teachers, who are truth holders, but that Christ—as a person—is the truth Himself, as He claimed in John’s gospel (14:6). Christ was mentioned three times in the crucial 13th meeting: first, in the opening devotion as ‘the unnegotiable core of Christian faith’; second, in one subgroup’s summary of the affirmations, which stated that ‘there is an absolute truth, it is Christ, and that counts for everybody’; and, third, in another subgroup’s statement that ‘promoting respect for otherwise religious believers’ means that ‘we do not try to convince’ the other to abandon his or her belief system but ‘to gain the other for Christ’ ‘and there we noted: conversation’. Approximating the truth not as a system but as a person, and knowledge as not just cognitive but also personal, spiritual and relational knowledge, brought the conversational community close to the ideas of Geoff Beech
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