From the Director: Education and Formation
Craig G. Bartholomew
These are tumultuous times. Donald Trump has been re-elected as president of the USA, Russia is rattling its sabre again as Ukraine makes use of longer-distance western missiles, and today, as I write, the news came through that the International Criminal Court has issued arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Defence Minister Yoav Gallant, as well as Hamas military commander Mohammed Deif.
Doubtless, our readers will have a range of views about such matters, and it is not the mission of KLC to prescribe the views you should hold on such vital issues. What it is our mission to insist upon is that we think hard and carefully about them. Take the charges against Netanyahu, Gallant and Deif. It is an understatement to assert that they are desperately serious. Or reflect on what another term of a Trump presidency will mean for the USA and the world.
It is in this context that we publish this edition of TBP, focused on formation and education. It would be hard to stress these two entities too much. I learnt years ago in apartheid South Africa that while conversion is crucial – you must be born again! – by itself it is insufficient for the church to be salt and light. Far too many white South Africans were genuinely converted but remained racist. Conversion must be followed by ongoing formation and education, by what the Bible calls sanctification.
And formation is of the whole person, of heart and head. Biblically the heart is the centre of the human person and it is out of the heart that emotion and thought issue forth. The heart is the primary place of relationship to God, and as in Psalm 119:32, the heart needs to be expanded by the Spirit, so that we can run the way of God’s instruction. God’s instruction is found authoritatively in his Word but is also embedded in his world, and our minds need to be fully engaged as we explore both.
Scripture orients us authoritatively towards the world. Take politics, for example. As I have argued elsewhere,[1] the Bible has very important things to teach us about politics. However politics as we know it today has developed over thousands of years so that in many cases we err if we simply try and read the Bible straight into our political contexts today, in relation, for example, to the issues referred to above. For example, during apartheid many white South Africans invoked Romans 13:1-7 – the government is appointed by God – to justify all sorts of terrible abuses of power and racism. This was a dreadful mistake.
There is a complexity to relating the Bible to contemporary issues. Hence the need for education, for the formation of our minds so that in the light of God’s Word we can explore with rigour and depth his ways in our world and how to align ourselves with them. In this edition of TBP you will find a diverse range of articles primarily, but by no means exclusively, related to education and formation. May they invite us to explore these wonderful themes anew, with our hearts and heads fully engaged.
[1] See, for example, Old Testament Wisdom and Politics.