Jesus Christ, Learning Teacher: Where Theology and Pedagogy Meet

Mark Chater is a former teacher and policy maker who presents a fascinating thesis for this book. He proposes that an educational perspective can help bring greater understanding and love of Jesus Christ. Chater asks, “can the Son of God be a learner?” (p. xix). Moreover, how did Jesus grow in his understanding of ideas, or how was he metacognitively aware of his own learning? By contrast, Jesus is held as the ultimate teacher exemplar. How does this relationship between teaching and learning combine into the life and teachings of Jesus? Perhaps a bigger challenge is that recounting Jesus’ many pedagogical acts results in “a record of a puzzling teacher who on occasion misleads and perturbs, and is not a uniformly useful or admirable example” (p. 106). The book addresses these questions in three parts: First born; Learning teacher; and How our hearts burned within us. In the first part, I appreciate that Chater begins autobiographically. He is a teacher observing the “dance of theology and pedagogy” (p. 20) within his own life, as well as the broader Christian history. Theology, and specifically Christological thought, can learn from pedagogy’s questions by asking “how are we breaking down knowledge? What do we expect learners to do?” (p. 32). These questions give life to our theological praxis. In part 2, several chapters are devoted to the exegetical and historical-critical explorations of Jesus as teacher. I was pleasantly surprised by some of the different chapter themes in this section. One chapter amusingly suggests a pedagogical dimension of Jesus as “trickster teacher” (p. 55). Another provocative chapter asks whether Matthew portrayed Jesus as a good teacher (p. 98). In Matthew’s gospel, we see how often Jesus’ followers fail to understand his parables (i.e. Matthew 13:36). Educators would rightfully critique such a teacher if their students continually misunderstand the lesson taught in class. Yet the resolution by theologians like Kierkegaard suggest that there is a “causal relationship between unsuccessful teacher and savior” (pp. 98–99) within the duties of Jesus as teacher versus Jesus as Savior. Instead of accepting such a binary, we are called in part 3 to engage the Christian pedagogical imagination with an “educationalization of theology” (p. 183). This last section is certainly imaginatively re-reading scripture International Journal of Christianity & Education