Wounded Prophet by Michael Ford

Author:Michael Ford [Ford, Michael]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-55324-9
Publisher: The Crown Publishing Group
Published: 2009-03-04T00:00:00+00:00

For Nouwen, the classroom, the prayer, and the lecture were all placed in the service of obedience to the truth. In a spiritual sense, this meant hearing how much God loves humanity and responding to that love in the freedom it creates. Obedience involves a movement to God in response to a divine, loving initiative toward humankind that fully expresses and embodies God's own being. Nouwen did not believe that intellectual formation could be separated from spiritual formation. No methods, skills, techniques, films, or field trips could replace the influence of the teacher, because the essence of all religious teaching was witness, proclaiming ‘something which has existed from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our own eyes, which we have watched and touched with our own hands, the Word of life—this is our theme’ (1 John 1:1–2). It was hardly a philosophy to endear him to traditional academic approaches in theology, but Nouwen did not waver in his conviction.

We are not asked to teach a discipline like mathematics, physics, history or languages, but we are called to make our own faith available to others as the source of learning. To be a teacher means indeed to lay down your life for your friends, to become a ‘martyr’ in the original sense of witness. To be a teacher means to offer your own faith experience, your loneliness and intimacy, your doubts and hopes, your failures and successes to your students as a context in which they can struggle with their own quest for meaning. To be a teacher means to have the same boldness as Paul, who said to the Corinthians: ‘Take me as a model as I take Christ’ (1 Corinthians 11:1). To be a teacher means to say as those who want to learn what Jesus said to his disciples: ‘Come and see’ (John 1:39).4

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