295 Theology of Disclosure for Christian Citizenship Formation 9 order it establishes. This is the pregiven order that presents the good life— life as it has to be lived to really flourish in the blessing of God the Creator. To experiment for myself as a teacher trainer with this idea of wholeness as related to the whole of creation, which I learned to see more sharply in the conversational community, halfway through the research project I wrote a Bible study on Psalm 119. In this booklet, which was published under the title Hoe lief heb ik Uw wet (van Olst, 2022a), I approached the psalm as a work of art that could be directly connected to actual Christian citizenship in a diverse world. The interesting thing about the psalm is that it uses a variety of words for law that, in the end, are all connected to the Hebrew word ‘Torah’, which has a much broader connotation than the English word ‘law’ and refers to the whole of Biblical teaching. The cover text of the book, which I was able to study with several student groups and youth groups, reads: How do you live today, in a secular society, as a Bible-believing Christian? And how do you contribute to good citizenship from there? From an awesome love of God’s Law, Psalm 119 points the way. The psalm is a work of art that wants to take you with it to walk God’s way through life with steady steps. The Bible studies, written to accompany each of the 22 stanzas of the psalm, are contemporary and accessible to young and old, Christians and non-Christians. They aim to promote conversation about living a good and serviceable life. They are therefore suitable for personal use, Bible circles and for Christian citizenship education. (van Olst, 2022a) My experience over the last year and a half, in terms of young Christians studying this Biblical text in relation to their own standpoint in life and society, is that a more broad and, therefore, positive approach on the part of the law helps them to understand the above-mentioned combination of faithfulness and openness within a servant attitude. Enabling them to approach the law as the whole of Biblical teaching, including both the morality for the good life and the promise of grace to live it, somehow frees them of the, as described in Chapter 7, cramp of modernist truth holding and defending. It teaches them a way of serving in society without immediately feeling threatened by its cultural, ethnic, directional or religious diversity. The whole of the Torah is not lurking around them to punish them for not being completely faithful; rather, it shows them how grace makes it possible to be both faithful and open. This, for me, new insight does not in any way remove or alienate me or other Reformed Christians from their faith tradition; instead, it reconnects us all with the insights of its founder, John Calvin. As is clear from his quotation at the start of this chapter, in his Institutes (Calvin, 1559/2008) he treats God’s
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