294 Chapter 9 together as enriching for our professional formation as Christian teachers and teacher trainers. The theology of disclosure presented in Section 2 is not a completely new theology. As indicated in the discussion at the end of Chapter 4.1, a really new theology was neither expected nor—from a Reformed Christian perspective— possible. In loyalty to both normative and formal theology (with the latter including the tradition of the church), however, new theological insights were developed to connect theology as we know it to new sociocultural circumstances. In our time and age, we witness and experience a diversity and complexity that, at the least in relation to the recent process of globalisation, is unprecedented. Analysing this new sociocultural reality with intentional openness and relating it to the Christian identity with intentional faithfulness, we developed insights that urged themselves on us as representatives of the (Reformed-)Christian faith community. Where it was (and is) our concern to prepare trainee teachers for Christian citizenship in a modern, fragmented society, we observed the need for a less cognitive and more relational epistemology, a less protective and more vulnerably serving attitude, and a less self-defensive and more justice-oriented behaviour on the part of, especially, Reformed Christians in Dutch society. As is clear from Section 1, the members of the conversational community were somewhat hesitant to criticise their more protective and sometimes antithetic colleagues and schools with (especially) closed admissions policies. I consider it a good thing that they caused me to bring more nuances into the text, for example, with regard to the legitimacy of protecting young children from confusion or the legitimacy of a more antithetical stand in life. This reflects the conversational community’s deliberations and does justice to the diversity within the Reformed Christian group. However, having added the necessary nuances, the need for the faith community to mirror itself in terms of the above-mentioned topics is firmly indicated. The shared theological insights gained by the conversational community call upon the broader faith community behind Reformed Christian education to determine whether we are doing things right with respect to sociocultural reality in the 21st century. After having emphasised this, I want to add just one more personal theological note. As the elements of the text presented above started to emerge from the conversational community’s deliberations, my personal vision of wholeness began to connect to my theological vision of God’s law. God’s ‘law’ appears three times in the text of the theology of disclosure and its meaning is, at least in two of those appearances, much broader than a reference to a certain set of norms or rules. It refers to the whole of God’s teaching and the
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