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In 1949, the women of First Presbyterian Church Fort Worth established a lectureship in honor of their pastor, the Reverend Dr. Robert F. Jones. With great foresight, they determined that the lectures would be exclusively dedicated to the field of Christian education. In the 56 years since, the lectureship has played host to some of the most influential thinkers and practitioners in the field. C. Ellis Nelson, Sarah Little, John Westerhoff, Rachel Henderlite, James Fowler, Thomas Groom, Sharon Parks, Diana Garland, Dorothy Bass, and Craig Dykstra, to name a few. This year, we are honored to have as our speaker the Reverend Gordon McCoskey. Reverend McCoskey began teaching Christian education at Princeton Theological Seminary in 2003. He is a graduate of Whitworth College, Princeton Seminary, and is soon to be a graduate of Emory University, where he is completing his doctoral dissertation entitled Growing in the Doxological Life, Trinity, Anthropology, and Pedagogy in the Thought of Gregory of Nyssa and John Calvin. Prior to PhD studies, Reverend McCoskey served for nearly a decade as the pastor for education at Grosse Pointe Memorial Church in Grosse Pointe Farms, Michigan. During that time, he founded and served as president of the Lay Theological Academy,

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a Christian education initiative serving 12 local congregations, an initiative that is still going strong. Reverend McCoskey has designed and authored curriculum for the PCUSA and continues to resource the larger church in its ministry of education. The Reverend Gordon McCoskey is married to the Reverend Nancy McCoskey, herself a gifted pastor, and they have three children, Peter, Carissa, and Anna. The title of Reverend McCoskey's first lecture this morning is Baptizing and Teaching in the Triune Name. Please join me in welcoming our 2005 Robert F. Jones lecturer, Gordon McCoskey. I bring you greetings from the students, and faculty, and administration of Princeton Theological Seminary, and also from the Presbytery of New Brunswick, of which I am a member. I'd like to thank Austin Seminary and especially my friend Ted Wardlaw for the invitation to give the 2005 Robert F. Jones Lectures in Christian Education. Also, I'd like to thank the women of First Presbyterian Church Fort Worth for their vision and their commitment making these lectures possible. And also, I'd like to thank all of you who've gathered to hear what I might have to say. Let me begin by sharing with you that my interest in the topic of the relationship between the doctrine of the Trinity and Christian education grows out of both my service as a Presbyterian pastor working primarily in Christian education in a local church,

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and currently as part of the Christian Education faculty at Princeton Seminary. I find the work of integrating my commitments to the church's educational ministry and the newly revitalized doctrine of the Trinity a stimulating challenge. One of the books in the field of Christian education that has fueled my interest in these issues was written as the result of the 1953 Robert F. Jones Lectures in Christian Education here at Austin Seminary. The Jones Lectures that year were given by James D. Smart, a biblical scholar who became involved in Presbyterian Christian Education at the national level and made a number of enormously valuable contributions to the field. Smart's Jones Lectures result in the publication of his still important book, The Teaching Ministry of the Church, an examination of the basic principles of Christian education. I assigned it to my students last fall in ED 101, and they found it to be among the most helpful of all the books that we read. In the lectures and in the book, Smart sought to rethink the entirety of the church's educational ministry on the basis of the doctrine of the Trinity. In the forward to that book, he laid out his vision. I've made it my aim to consider not the theological bases of Presbyterian education, but rather the theological basis of Christian education in the most comprehensive sense. For that reason, I have taken the doctrine of the Trinity to which all Christian churches, Protestant and Roman Catholic,

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though he neglected to mention Orthodox, give adherence as my essential starting point, and have tried simply to show the character of the educational program that results when the doctrine is allowed to have its full force in our thinking and in our practices. It is my hope, and therefore, that this book may have significance in forwarding a more ecumenical approach to the problem of Christian education. Smart's approach to the Trinity and Christian education had a heavily Bartian cast to it. He was one of a number of Christian educators who, in the post-war period, attempted to bring new developments in theology to bear on the enterprise of Christian education. Among the leading Christian educators of the 1950s and 1960s, Smart stands out for having explicitly followed Bart's lead in making the doctrine of the Trinity the basis for the entire effort. I believe SMART was on the right track in attempting to relate the church's efforts in educational ministry to the doctrine of the Trinity. But we cannot simply return to SMART's program, because much has taken place in discussions about the doctrine of the Trinity, about the nature and purpose of Christian education, and about the challenges faced by the churches. over the course of the 50 years or so since the 1953 Jones Lectures. So in order to advance the effort to think about Christian education in relation to the doctrine of the Trinity, we must both affirm Smart's fundamental insight and take some account of the many changes that have taken place between his day and ours. So let me briefly comment on some of the changes that have occurred

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in thinking about the doctrine of the Trinity in Christian education and in the churches in recent decades before laying out the beginning of my thinking about the doctrine of the Trinity in relation to Christian education. First, the doctrine of the Trinity. There have been fairly lively and creative discussions in recent decades on this subject, inspired by the creative work of both Reformed theologian Karl Barth and Roman Catholic theologian Karl Rahner, many contemporary theologians, like Jurgen Moltmann and the late Catherine LaCuna, Elizabeth Johnson, and a host of others have sought to recover the centrality of the doctrine of the Trinity in theology and for Christian life. More than that, they have attempted in various ways to bring out the practical character of the doctrine. Catherine LaCuna may have expressed it most succinctly when she wrote in the opening lines of her book, God for Us, The Trinity and Christian Life, these words. The doctrine of the Trinity is ultimately a practical doctrine with radical consequences for Christian life. The doctrine of the Trinity, which is the specifically Christian way of speaking about God, summarizes what it means to participate in the life of God through Jesus Christ in the Spirit. Unquote. For constructive efforts like Lacuna's and Moltmann's and others that I have mentioned, I feel an immense sense of gratitude for the ways in which their attempts to develop a practical Trinitarianism has made it possible for me to think afresh about educational ministry in Trinitarian terms. Yet, for all the promise and dynamism offered by contemporary reformulations of the doctrine of the Trinity,

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In terms of the Christian life, many, if not most, of those discussions seem to hover slightly above the ground. For all the talk about the practical nature of the doctrine of God as Trinity, these conversations often seem to lack a rigorous concern for the local, the bodily, and the pedagogical dimensions of human life implied by the term practical. Many of the so-called practical treatments of the doctrine of the Trinity operate on the tacit assumption that good theological theory will, in some inevitable way, lead to good practice. It seems that many Trinitarian theologians today have not taken adequate account of critiques of the notion based in Plato that to know the good is to do the good. It ain't necessarily so. While it may be the case that we always find a complex interplay between theory and practice, I've come to the conviction that we might best advance the conversation about the practical character of the doctrine of the Trinity by finding ways to link or even to ground the doctrine in concrete, local, bodily practices that are inherently pedagogical in character. But before fully explicating what I have in mind here, let me make a brief observation about the field of practical theology in relation to the doctrine of the Trinity. One might think that the field of practical theology would have something to offer systematic theologians wrestling with the practical.

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dimensions of the doctrine. I would have to say that the potential contributions of the practical theologians would be mixed at best. On the one hand, practical theologians offer tremendously valuable resources to trinitarians for thinking about the formation and transformation of individuals and communities. Their complex and sustained interface with the social sciences offers a great deal that might enrich the discussion about the practical character

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of the doctrine of the Trinity. But on the other hand, most contemporary practical theologians work with a doctrine of God that seems to be closer to the undifferentiated moral monotheism of Enlightenment deism, traditional liberal Protestantism, or even Islam, than with the historic Christian affirmation of God as Trinity. So even though the field of practical theology provides excellent insight into the complexities of human experience in theological reflection, it bothers me that the theological part of practical theology, in that part, one rarely finds a Trinitarian grammar at play. Now, thinking about the Trinity in Christian education must not only address changes and challenges in the field,

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of systematic theology and practical theology, but it must also grapple with changes that have taken place within the field of Christian education. This field has changed a good deal since Smart's Jones lectures. Several approaches to educational ministry have emerged onto the scene since 1953 and continue to enjoy some measure of usefulness. For instance, C.

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Ellis Nelson and John Westerhoff have helped us to think more carefully and more deeply about the ways in which the congregation as a social organism forms people into Christian faith and life. Thomas Groom and Charles Foster have prodded us to think about the need to put critical reflection on our social location at the center of the church's educational task. Developmental theorists like Jim Fowler have pushed us to think about the ways in which

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faith changes, grows, and is transformed across the life cycle. Maria Harris helped us to think about the aesthetic dimensions of educational ministry. And Jim Loader, my predecessor at Princeton Seminary, pushed us in the field to think about the dynamics of transformation by the strange logic of the Holy Spirit. And lately, Craig Dykstra and Dorothy Bass

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have enriched our thinking considerably about the critical role that participation in religious practices plays in fostering lively and robust faith in congregations. Yet for all the creativity in the field of Christian education in recent decades, I believe that Christian educators today as a whole need to work on deepening theological reflection on the content and processes germane to its activities, particularly with respect to the doctrine of God. It's worth pointing out that in the past 50 years, only one significant book has been published after Smarts on the doctrine of the Trinity in Christian education.

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And that is Robert Pazmino's interesting but not wholly satisfying book of 2001, God Our Teacher: Theological Basics in Christian Education. For the most part, Rather than engaging in first-rate primary theological reflection as a core task of the discipline of Christian education, my colleagues in Christian education have largely engaged in retail sales with regard to theology. As a field, one is hard-pressed to find works in Christian education that take the doctrine of the Trinity seriously.

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James Smart and his work called upon theologians to become educators and educators to become theologians. I don't find much evidence that either group has paid all that much attention to his summons, and it stands today. Well, time does not permit to chronicle changes in the wider field of education that have been enormously helpful for the field of Christian education, things like Howard Gardner's work in multiple intelligences and the critical pedagogy of Paulo Freire and others.

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So let me pass on to the churches. Perhaps it would be stating the obvious to say that churches in North America have changed dramatically in five decades. When Smart wrote his book on the educational ministry of the churches, mainline Protestants were still mainline. Denominational identity meant something to church members, and patterns of volunteering and financial giving were markedly different then than now.

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The churches of today struggle for influence, for members' time and for money, and for ways to sustain denominational existence, let alone promoting brand identification. And the anguished battles that have ravaged our churches over sexuality and ordination have emerged only fairly recently in American life. And I want to highlight one problem that especially troubles me.

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I don't know the extent to which other denominations have this problem, but the Presbyterian Church USA has certainly struggled to retain its youth since the 1950s. We have lost huge numbers of young people who grew up in the church. And we've tended to lose them not so much to fundamentalist churches as to no church. Though there are several notable congregational exceptions, I think it would be fair to say that we Presbyterians, and my apologies to others who are with us, we, at least in the PCUSA, are in danger of providing Exhibit A for the old saw, the church is always only one generation away from extinction.

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But it's not only the churches that have changed, the environment in which the churches operate has changed, especially with regard to religion. Diana Eck in her recent work, A New Religious America, How A, quote, Christian Country Has Become the World's Most Religiously Diverse Nation, discusses in fascinating detail the many ways in which the religious landscape of this country has changed dramatically since at least the 1960s. Americans today are not only, as they were in the 1950s, Protestant, Catholic, and Jew. We are also Muslim, Buddhist, Hindu, New Age, Jain, Santerian, Wiccan, and Baha'i.

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The religious stranger no longer lives halfway around the world in some exotic place. No, she lives down the street and may even attend church with her family several Sundays a month. Well, with these two quick and very incomplete brushstrokes about the ways in which Trinitarian theology, the field of Christian education, and the situation of the churches has changed since the Jones lectures of 1953, let me now attempt to pick up where Smart left off. In the rest of this lecture and into the next, I will attempt to further the cause of thinking about Christian education in reference to the doctrine of the Trinity

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for today's churches in a radically pluralistic, democratic, and secularized American context. What I want to do is sketch the contours of a strategy for a dynamic trinitarian paideia, or comprehensive approach to formation. In brief, I will argue that renewed attention to the sacrament of baptism will provide the crucial element in the development of effective strategies for furthering the vision SMART first articulated by grounding Trinitarian reflection in a concrete bodily practice necessarily associated with the formation of Christian belief and practice.

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Contemporary rethinking about the educational ministry of the churches in relation to the doctrine of the Trinity will need to treat the sacrament of baptism as the starting point and orienting center for conversations about the faith formation of individuals and communities in relation to local church and in relation to seminary education. A truly practical doctrine of the Trinity would, it seems to me, need to interface deeply with the complexities of individual and corporate experience. It would need to engage in dynamic dialogue with practices of ecclesial pedagogy across the life cycle.

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And I believe that such work may best proceed by way of baptism. Let me share with you three reasons why I hold this particular conviction. First, the sacrament of baptism is a core constituting practice of the Christian Church. Baptism affords entrance into the church through an ongoing process of dying and rising with Jesus Christ into newness of life.

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In this sense, baptism provides the paradigm for the entirety of the Christian life. Further, baptism confers Christian identity and defines Christian vocation, broadly conceived. Through baptism, the triune God calls women and men, young people, and people of mature years to lives of grateful and obedient service to God and neighbor in all the arenas of life. In the introductory essay to a collection of articles on the implications of the recent religious practices discussion for theological education, Craig Dykstra and Dorothy Bass identified baptism as the core of the matter.

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They wrote, At its heart, baptism is not so much a distinct practice as it is the liturgical summation of all the Christian practices. In this rite, the grace to which the Christian life is a response is fully and finally presented, visibly, tangibly, and in words. Here,

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in baptism, all the practices are present in crystalline form, forgiveness and healing, singing and testimony, Sabbath keeping and community shaping, and all others. Unlike each particular practice, baptism does not address a specific need. Instead, it ritually sketches the contours of a whole new life, within which all human needs can be perceived in a different way. And so, part of the work of Christian theologians in every age is to reflect on the shape and character of the new way of life Christians enter when we rise from the watery death of baptism.

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Exploring this question involves us both in contemplating the deepest foundations of Christian faith and in figuring out the shape our living should take amidst the immediate concerns of each day. Now, while Craig Dijkstra and Dorothy Bass's assertion that baptism is a kind of foundational practice in relation to several Christian religious practices, while that needs further exploration and nuancing, I wholeheartedly agree with what they've said, especially that latter part about the crucial importance of thinking about the Christian life in relation to baptism. Dijkstra and Bass have rightly identified the locus for the dynamic intersection of fields, and concerns that will, when successfully negotiated, lead to advancements, I believe, both in Trinitarian theology and in Christian education.

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The religious practices discussion, sponsored by Dijkstra and Bass, awaits further exploration of possible interface with the doctrine of the Trinity and the shape and the character of Christian life, but they have given us clues about how to proceed. The second reason why I think baptism is the clue to moving forward and thinking about the doctrine of the Trinity in Christian education grows out of the first. Baptism in all its fullness is inescapably trinitarian in character. At the epicenter of the baptismal rite stands the economic doctrine of the Trinity in epitomized form.

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To explain baptism, Both the rite itself and the paradigmatic significance of baptism for the Christian life requires the use of a dynamic trinitarian grammar. Some of the Christian tradition's most insightful and creative minds have plumbed the depths of this relationship between baptism and the doctrine of the Trinity. Let me just comment briefly on two of those thinkers with whom I have worked of late, Gregory Abnissa and John Calvin.

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First, Gregory of Nyssa, who lived in the 4th century and carried on the work of defending Nicene orthodoxy after the death of his brother Basel, the great Basel of Caesarea, upon the latter's death in 379. Without doubt, one of the most fertile, creative, and deep minds ever produced by the Christian tradition, Gregory of Nyssa developed his doctrine of the Trinity partly on the basis of exegesis of the baptismal rite. Listen to this statement that he wrote about the nature of doctrine and practice. He said, What beyond this do they remain attached to paganism bring forward in disparagement of our creed?

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Do they not also make the majesty of the sacred names in which the faith is ratified, baptism, an occasion of laughter? Do not they deride the sacramental tokens and the customs which are observed by the initiated? And of whom is it so much a distinguishing peculiarity as of the pagans, to think that piety should consist of doctrines only? For Gregory of Nyssa, doctrines abstracted from concrete ecclesial practices marked not Christian thought, but that of the pagans.

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Gregory did not think it wise to talk about the doctrine of God as trinity, apart from the practice of baptism. In fact, he developed his doctrine partly on the basis of interpreting the rite. In a short work written against those who denied the full divinity of the Holy Spirit, Gregory explicated the doctrine of God as Trinity in a way that deeply resonates with the formula found at the center of the baptismal rite. He wrote, You see the revolving circle of glory moving from like to like.

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The Son is glorified by the Spirit. And the Father is glorified by the Son. Again, the Son has his glory from the Father. And the only begotten thus becomes the glory of the Spirit.

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For with what shall the Father be glorified, but with the true glory of the Son? And with what shall the Son be glorified, but with the majesty of the Spirit? In like manner again, faith completes the circle and glorifies the Son by means of the Spirit. and the Father by means of the Son.

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For Gregory of Nyssa, baptism into the one name, that is 3, initiates baptisans into participation into this circle of glory that is the mystery of God. Next, I would draw our attention to the great 16th century reformer, John Calvin. One of the central themes of Calvin's work in reforming the Western Christian tradition involved recovering and reconceiving the catechumenate of the early church.

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Calvin lamented the deplorable state into which the medieval church had fallen, in part due to serious neglect of effective and intentional Christian education. He realized that regular, systematic, and intentional education in the church was an absolutely crucial element in the ongoing effort to transform the church into greater faithfulness to God. He also realized that in order to recover the catechumenate of the early church, he would have to change it.

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The reason for this lay in the fact that while the catechumenate had been developed to prepare adult converts for baptism, the overwhelming majority of baptisans in his day were infants. Thus, rather than having ecclesial pedagogy precede baptismal initiation and Eucharistic participation, Calvin located Christian education between the sacraments of baptism and Eucharist. Interestingly, for our purposes, in the baptismal liturgy that Calvin wrote for the churches of Geneva, he included lengthy curricular instructions for parents, the chief instruction of which concerned the doctrine of the Trinity. Baptismally oriented Christian instruction in the home in Geneva was to have an unmistakably trinitarian cast to it.

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Calvin develops this connection further, in the 1559 edition of the Institutes, in Book 1, Chapter 13, on the doctrine of the Trinity, he wrote these things about the connection between Trinity and baptism. Our faith receives from baptism the advantage of its sure testimony to us that we are not only engrafted into the death and life of Christ, but we are so united with Christ himself that we become sharers in all his blessings.

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For he dedicated and sanctified baptism in his own body, in order that he might have it in common with us the firmest bond of the union and fellowship which he has deigned to form with us. Hence, Paul approves that we are children of God from the fact that we put on Christ in baptism, in Galatians 3. Thus we see that the fulfillment of baptism is in Christ. whom also for this reason we call the proper object of baptism.

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Consequently, it's not strange that the apostles are reported to have baptized in the name of Jesus, although they had also been bidden to baptize in the name of the Father and of the Spirit. And this is Calvin's attempt to reconcile the Acts text with Matthew 28. For all the gifts of God proffered in baptism are found in Christ alone.

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Yet, this cannot take place unless he who baptizes in Christ invokes also the names of Father and the Holy Spirit. For we are cleansed by Christ's blood because of our merciful Father, wishing to receive us into grace in accordance with his incomparable kindness, had sent this mediator among us to gain favor for us in his sight. But we obtain regeneration by Christ's death and resurrection only if we are sanctified by the Spirit and imbued with a new and spiritual nature. For this reason, we obtain, and so to speak, clearly discern in the Father the cause, in the Son the matter, and in the Spirit the effect of our purgation and our regeneration coming to us in baptism.

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Philip Buton, in his book on the importance of the doctrine of the Trinity in Calvin's thought, points out how Calvin's trinitarian grammar of baptism functions paradigmatically for the Christian life and also for the interpretation of religious practices. Buton writes, as a means of grace and a sacrament, baptism, with its explicitly trinitarian basis, pattern, and dynamic, makes the triune grace of God visible and tangible as the basis, pattern, and dynamic of the divine-human relationship. At the same time, baptism renders the comprehensiveness of God's trinitarian grace visible in the Christian life.

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The implication of baptism for the divine-human relationship, in Calvin's thought, is thus that the visible outworking of God's trinitarian grace in the life of believers implies the comprehensive integration of Christian belief, worship, and practice. To my ears, that last sentence sounds like a blueprint for Christian education. The comprehensive integration of Christian belief, worship, and practice.

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That's the outcome of Calvin's Trinitarian way of thinking about the divine-human relationship as epitomized in baptism. And if, as Buten claims, it is true that Calvin researchers have historically tended to underestimate the pervasive trinitarianism that runs throughout Calvin's thought, such is doubly the case with respect to the role of baptism and its connection with educational ministry in Calvin's thought. By my readings of Gregory and John Calvin through the lens of baptism, I've come to see how privileging the baptismal rite makes possible a way of holding together in creative tension the doctrine of the Trinity and Christian education.

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My third and final reason for advocating the centralization of baptism in Christian education that has to do with the doctrine of the Trinity concerns the way in which baptism is bodily, local, and contextual. If it is true that the doctrine of the Trinity, properly conceived, is a thoroughly practical doctrine, then it must relate in some real and significant way to the embodiedness of our lives. The practice of baptism inescapably involves the body.

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And it always takes place in a particular time and a specific place. There just isn't any such thing as abstract baptism. It involves applying something as earthy and elemental as water to human bodies. Since baptism belongs to the church, it is not only bodily and concrete and contextual, it's also intensely ecclesial.

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Baptism has to do with the life and the character of the church and a vision for the Christian life. So if the doctrine of the Trinity is truly practical with radical implications for the Christian life, then it needs in some meaningful way to come down to the level of cold water and fussing babies. So for these three reasons, baptism is a core constituting practice of the church, Baptism is inescapably trinitarian in character, and it deals with the body and with the contextual and the ecclesial.

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I would submit that the best way to advance conversations about the practical character of the doctrine of the Trinity and the trinitarian character of the church's educational ministry must pass through the waters of baptism. In the few moments that I have left, let me share with you a few thoughts that I have about what this might mean for the practice of Christian education in our churches. Last spring, I was being examined by the Committee on Ministry of the Presbytery of New Brunswick as part of the process of transferring my membership from the Presbytery of Greater Atlanta, and a committee member posed a question to me as to how I might go about teaching the doctrine of the Trinity to ordinary church members. They don't ask that question to everybody.

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They asked it to me because of my interests. I responded that I would begin simply by explaining the baptismal rite in relation to the experience of the Christian life, which I find to be a much more effective approach than using old modalistic analogies like the three states of water and the egg and whatever other inane analogies we come up with. Much better to talk about baptism and work out from there. Then I said I would proceed to unpack and reflect on other Christian practices like prayer and scripture reading, acts of love and service, as ways to unpack the working of God and our encounter with the triune mystery in ordinary life.

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So I would start with the most basic practices of the Christian life and work outward with a rich trinitarian grammar toward an exposition of what it means to know and participate in the triune God who is at work in our lives and in our world today. That strategy of starting with ordinary practices and reflecting and exegeting them, reflecting upon them and exegeting them, leads me to think more systematically about the relationship between worship and Christian education. We need in the church and in theological schools, I believe, to more intentionally and explicitly bring together worship and education.

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We need to work for greater intentionality in highlighting the educational dimensions of worship. Conversely, we need to increase efforts to develop the liturgical aspects of Christian education. Let me comment just briefly on these two points. From Calvin, I learned that we ought always to pay attention to the pedagogical dimensions of worship.

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And those who emphasize an enculturation approach to Christian education rightly emphasize the many ways in which participation in the worshiping life of the gathered community powerfully shapes Christian faith. Participation funds reflection and understanding. And this has particular relevance and urgency with respect to the presence of children in worship, and also... I'll spare you my sermon about how important it is, I think, for children to be in worship from the earliest possible age, except for age two.

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But mere participation in worship does not do the entire job of faith formation. When appropriate, and without turning the sanctuary into a classroom, worship leaders should interpret briefly and well the meaning of liturgical actions and gestures. Even though Calvin got a bit wordy and excessive with the teaching dimensions of worship, in my view-- that made sense for his time-- he generally had the right idea. Liturgical acts require appropriate interpretation in order both to maximize participation in them and to help worshippers make crucial connections between the one hour in the sanctuary and the activities that fill up the other 167 hours of their week.

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A celebration of the sacrament of baptism provides many golden opportunities for teaching crucial things about practical trinitarian living. We have to find as many ways as we can to make baptism more central to the life of the whole congregation. Last night, we worshipped at University Presbyterian Church, and I was especially impressed with the centrality of the baptismal font and what that signifies for the meaning of the Christian life. in that congregation.

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Treating baptism as merely a punctiliar event for babies runs the risk of missing the deep connections about the way in which baptism gives us the guidance and vision for the entirety of the Christian life and opens up possibilities for understanding something of the mystery of God as Trinity. Working from the other side of the relationship between worship and education, I want to make a case for conceptualizing Christian education as a paraliturgical practice. By paraliturgical, I mean simply that set of formative activities which surround, derive from, and stand next to the worship life of the church. In order for the full formative potential of worship to come to fruition,

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Some regular pattern of participation in education is required. And here I'm pushing against partly my friends who are liturgical theologians. Education is required, I believe, in order for liturgical experience to come to full expression. Christian education should and must not function, or should and must function as the critical linkage

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between liturgy and life. And tomorrow, I'll speak some about Nazi Germany and apartheid in South Africa, and how it is that people went to worship regularly in all those places, but still engaged in and tacitly supported such terrible activities. Education, in my view, is the missing piece, not baptism. Barth argued that baptism shouldn't be thought of as a sacrament.

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growing out of his reflection on what happened in Nazi Germany. I think it's not a mistake to think baptism is a sacrament. It's the mistake, rather, had to do with ineffective Christian education. But I'll leave that for tomorrow.

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Well, we Presbyterians have been especially effective in developing educational patterns and models based on the word of God. And this must continue. but our efforts in education should also involve more than the promulgation of knowledge about the word. I think we would strengthen Christian education in our churches today by keying off both word and sacraments.

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This would have implications both in terms of the content of what the churches teach and in terms of the ways in which we teach what we teach. Bringing the sacraments, especially baptism, into parity with the word and conceiving of Christian education would open up enormously rich possibilities for forming faith in terms of engagement in religious practices. And it would also enrich and further our thinking about the use of multiple intelligence theory, the arts, and the symbolic dimensions of human life.

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It would also help us to develop a rich or foster a rich developmental trinitarian grammar among people in our pews. Finally, the task of Christian education in today's churches cannot be accomplished, I believe, only by the churches. Even if we have rich worship, and even if we organize the educational ministry of the churches along the lines I've been suggesting, it won't be enough. Somehow, we need to help parents reclaim their vocation

00:43:42.180 - 00:44:06.660

as the primary religious educators of their children. I've been struck by the baptismal liturgy Calvin wrote for Geneva in 1542, particularly his instructions for parents. In the middle of the baptismal service, Calvin laid out very clear and detailed instructions for them with regard to the teaching that they were expected to engage in at home.

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They were to teach the basic beliefs and practices of the Christian faith, including, and especially, the rudiments of the doctrine of the Trinity and Christology. Today, in the baptismal liturgy that we use generally in the PCUSA, we do ask parents to renounce evil and sin in their lives, We ask them to adhere to Jesus Christ and to teach the faith to their children by word and deed. But we don't ask them to commit to anything specific with regard to what they should teach at home.

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Calvin laid it all out, goes on for a page. What we ask today pales in comparison. Did he know something that we don't? Or perhaps was he just more bold about asking for high commitment from parents?

00:44:58.420 - 00:45:46.340

with regard to the religious education of children. In any case, there might be some value in rethinking what it is that we expect of parents in our congregations. And I think we ought to challenge and equip parents to engage in regular reflection with their children at home on the meaning of baptismal grace and the activities of the triune God in the midst of ordinary life and in our society. there are many objections about parental time and so on, but it seems to me that we need to talk in Christian education more seriously about how to help parents reclaim their vocation as baptismal teachers of their children.

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When James Smart, 50 years ago, wrote his book and gave these lectures, he could assume an ecology of formation between the church school, the worshiping congregation, and the home. Today, most children in our churches receive religious instruction only through one leg of Smart's three-legged stool. And even that, only on a sporadic basis, all too often.

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Well, much has changed in 50 years, in conversations about the doctrine of the Trinity, in ways of thinking about Christian education and in the life of the churches and the social context in which American churches function. To pick up where Smart left off and to conceive of Christian education in relation to the doctrine of the Trinity requires, in my view, that we attend with vigor and creativity to the singular importance of baptism in all of its fullness. In so doing,

00:46:48.020 - 00:47:28.100

we may well develop an effective way to put these words into practice. Go, therefore, and make disciples, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you. Thank you very much. I think we have five minutes if anybody wants to engage in some conversation.

00:47:28.100 - 00:48:25.940

Yeah. That's a good question. I actually see myself as a practical-- first, as a Christian educator, but secondarily, as a practical theologian. And there, I'm having conversations with my colleagues across the country who are practical theologians.

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tend usually to see practical theology as the application of theology, but more theological reflection in close proximity to human experience. Having said that, in a very vague sort of way, I just worked on a project, actually, with Craig Dykstra and Dorothy Bass mapping the field of practical theology. And there are at least 10 different answers to the question, what is practical theology? And there's some confusion.

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Practical theology is a little bit like herding cats. And so part of what I was saying there was that the predominant voice-- most of the predominant voices in practical theology today, like Don Browning and his disciples, or his students, and Hans Von der Ven in the Netherlands, sort of the Dean of Practical Theologians in Europe, they use a doctrine of God. which is more akin to undifferentiated moral monotheism, similar to the way in which Kant talks about the doctrine of God.

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The doctrine of Trinity, in terms of rational reflection, didn't make a lot of sense to Kant. He says, you know, it can be a matter of faith in the church, but in terms of reason, don't know what to make out of it. And so, The field of practical theology is heavily conditioned by Kantian moral monotheism of an undifferentiated character.

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It's difficult to find practical theologians who use an explicitly trinitarian grammar. There are a few. Jim Fowler and Jim Loder, though they disagreed on the nature of faith and many other things, actually came to some convergence, not explicitly, but if you look at their work, you see that they both began to work towards the doctrine of the Trinity as a grammar for practical theology.

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And my colleague at Princeton Seminary, Rick Osmer, and I both worked to try to push those issues. But it's a bit of an uphill battle because undifferentiated monotheism, like deism and like Islam, actually, is predominant. And Islam is an interesting example because there you have one undifferentiated person, transcendent, and Jesus, who is a kind of prophet or even a moral exemplar.

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And that actually resonates fairly well with a lot of the discourse in practical theology. You have a, Rachel Richard Niebuhr is the key example, I would say, a transcendent God. This is moral, radical monotheism in Western culture. And then you have Jesus, who is

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an exemplar. So there's a lot more to that conversation, but... There needs to be a instruction exactly what parents should teach their children. We have classes before your marriage, you know, in the church.

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Ministers independently do that. We have classes. If you become a member of a church, What form could we get moving in the church to get this as a requirement?

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Would we say requirement or not an encouragement? It has to be specific, as you said, to go along. Should they be educated before the child is baptized because we have infant baptism? That's a good question.

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The place that I would start, and the place actually we did start at Gross Point Memorial Church in the suburb of Detroit was with conversations with the session about the nature of baptism and what it entails in terms of parental responsibility. And we tried to generate a study conversation over a period of time with the session, which resulted in adopting a policy, a baptismal policy that stated in essence, that if you wanted to have your child baptized in the church, you had to go through baptismal preparation courses, or six weeks is what we laid out.

00:52:52.820 - 00:53:09.460

And so the pastors didn't just cook it up and impose it. We brought the session along and talked about what all is involved in that. And we tried to get at the issue of cultural baptism, where people wanted just to have their kid done. And

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so we tried to discuss and reflect on what was at stake in that, what was problematic about that, and what does scripture have to say in the tradition about the meaning of it. So that the session was able to come along and we established a policy. So that once we got that in place, then we were able to run waves of parents through baptismal education classes for six weeks and we could talk about what baptism means, about the Christian life, about modeling and teaching at home, a whole range of things.

00:53:43.060 - 00:54:39.460

We had to fight for time to talk about things with parents so that they would be able to have a richer understanding and hopefully claim some of their vocation as teachers. Yeah. The other thing is I think pastors can do a lot from the pulpit in terms of moving baptism not just to the periphery and bringing it over to the center every once in a while, but making baptism the centerpiece of understanding the entirety of the Christian life and preaching and when baptism is celebrated. But also when new members come in, confirmation times, there are a number of times when baptismal renewal can be celebrated.

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So through preaching and liturgy, baptism can become more central to the whole life of the church. That begins to condition the environment so that more things are possible. One last question. This is not a question, but it's an observation.

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I come from a county in Northwest Arkansas that has three Presbyterian congregations in it. The median age, I imagine, is about 65. So these are congregations that don't get a chance to participate as congregations in baptisms or meditate on them or reflect on them.

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You partially answered this, but I don't think that pastors in churches give focus to this whole aspect of a sacrament that gets missed. Well, let me just comment on that by going back to Calvin. I think when I read Calvin, I see two things going on with regard to word and sacraments.

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In some places, Calvin has word and sacraments in juxtapositional parody, and they interpret grace through different means. At other points, because Calvin is thinking about the excesses of medieval sacramentalism and so on, he subordinates the sacraments to the word. And I think it's that latter approach, that latter theme in Calvin that has become predominant in the reformed tradition and in theological education. Mainly, we teach in reference to the word.

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study of scripture and preaching and so on, which I think is really crucial. That's one of the best things that the Reformed tradition offers the wider ecumenical church in many ways. But it's done us some disservice to view the sacraments in a subordinate way, and we become sort of functionally Zwinglian that they're audiovisual aids and that's it. They just illustrate, if you didn't get it by hearing it, well, it'll show it to you.

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And I think that the other part of Calvin where baptism and the Eucharist are in some ways on par with the word, they're sacramental in that sense. Calvin has a complex view of the sacraments, but anyway, I think that part of Calvin should be recovered in the local church and in theological education. Thank you for that, Gordon, because I resonate with this question. I think sometimes there is the sense that if there's not a baptism performed on a given day, that we may not even need to have the font in view.

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It's just such a functional piece of furniture in a lot of churches. But it seems to me that even when there's not a baptism, to have the font in view and to have it in some way a part of the liturgy For example, in a lot of churches, the pastors call people to worship by dipping their hands into the font and calling the baptismal identity of the people. But it still can function, and it can still root us in the kind of ethic of being baptized people.

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I also think it's kind of neat the way in various commissioning ceremonies in churches, say when you're sending off a mission trip group or when you're sending off a pastor or whatever the occasion might be, to do that in the context of kind of a baptismal renewal service enables us to kind of unpack the richness of the font. Seminary chapels here and there have had arguments about whether we should have a font in the chapel since we're not a church and we don't do baptisms, which I think is kind of a silly argument. Could you tell that to the people at Princeton Seminary?

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The font is there, whether there's a baptism or not, to remind us of our identity. Yeah, exactly. Just the symbolic, aesthetic dimension of having the font says something symbolic and important. Right along with this, we have a granddaughter who's going to the University of Texas, and she asked us the question at dinner table one time.

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Well, grandma, she's in a kind of a new group, and can't you be saved without being baptized? What's the importance of baptism? And we thought that in our family, this had gotten across to her in our Presbyterian church, and it did not. And so we did additional verbal research, and we gave her material to do additional reading.

00:59:31.580 - 00:59:41.820

to justify this. And this shows how inadequate the education has been. And that's where, and many of them, come to Christ. And of course, the thief on the cross was not baptized either, but.

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Well, and Calvin says, if you really want to get serious about it biblically, it's not absolutely essential that you be baptized to be saved. The thief on the cross and extraordinary, but ordinarily, that's the way. grace comes to us. And so Calvin says it's the blood of Christ that saves us, shed on the cross.

01:00:04.460 - 01:00:27.340

So he wants to not thingify grace too much, like in the medieval period, in the early church. But then he comes back and says, nevertheless, because God makes promises to us related to baptism, and we know that God is faithful in carrying out God's promises, when we baptize, something actually does happen. with regard to grace. So that's why I say it's a complex view.

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It's not absolutely essential, but it is sacramental. It's not just, as Bart says, the first human response to grace. It's more than that. Something actually does happen.

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One sign of a good lecture is the nature of the discussion it provokes. So thank you so much, Gordon, for being with us. We look forward to more. We will adjourn now to lunch and I invite you to be back here at 2:30 when we will hear once again from Beth Johnson.