Alastair's Adversaria - Teaching as Feeding

Starting point is 00:00:00 The following reflection is entitled Teaching as Feeding. It was first published on the Anchored Argosy. In evaluating Christian teaching, merely considering the truth value of isolated statements or the accuracy of certain teachings is not sufficient. Recognition of this reality will both make us more alert to forms of damaging teaching and wiser in our teaching of others. Christian teaching is often compared to food in Holy Scripture and elsewhere. As with food, there are errors that can be apparent within an individual's serving or teaching. However, many errors only become apparent when one considers a longer-term diet. There are teachers who serve teaching that, taken by itself, might be very worthwhile.

Starting point is 00:00:46 Yet as they keep serving the same narrow teaching and fail to serve other much-needed or counter-balancing teaching, they communicate a form of error and their heroes will be malnourished. You cannot say everything at once, nor should you try to. However, over time you should say a lot of things that help people properly to understand aspects of your teaching that, taken by themselves, are not balanced, yet may be important parts of a balanced diet. It may often be necessary to express a point in a more forceful and less qualified way, while providing qualifications in a sense of how it fits into a more balanced picture elsewhere. The analogy of teaching and feeding people also highlights the importance of taking responsibility for our hero's spiritual health and providing them with a good and balanced diet. One thing that has become more apparent to me over time is that many people, especially online, merely consume teachings according to their appetites, and so will selectively latch on to elements of teaching that appeal to them, while refusing the greens, those less appetising teachings that are nonetheless essential for about.

Starting point is 00:01:53 balanced diet. This is one reason why pastors are so important. Random teachers online can be like fast food restaurants. They can serve highly appetizing teachings, often because they take no responsibility for their customers' wider diet. There may be nothing inherently wrong with an individual serving of their teaching, yet if you were to start living off such teaching, it would soon prove very unhealthy. I have written about my own experience of severe spiritual malnutrition, through consuming far too much of certain non-essential elements of a Christian diet, while neglecting the essentials. Especially in the context of the religious marketplace,

Starting point is 00:02:34 created by maths and social media, it is very easy for teachers to gain prominence and large audiences through some special source of their own that they add to their teaching. Everything they teach will have that distinctive flavouring, often catering to an appetite for confirmation in some identitarian or ideological position. Teaching might consistently return to feminist or masculinist themes, for instance, so that it is more appealing to one sex or the other. In a restaurant, every individual typically gets to choose whatever dish seems most appetising to them. However, when eating at the family meal table, everyone needs to eat much the same thing.

Starting point is 00:03:14 The dishes cannot cater for individuals' food bads, and picky eaters are rightly judged. A pastor's teaching needs to feed the 70-year-old. grandmother in the congregation, not merely the 16-year-old boy. While each person may inhabit the teaching differently, according to their different needs and circumstances, the teaching itself should be Catholic, and as such, a source of unity and commonality. A further consideration beyond that of the diet of a family is its food culture, the way it practices and understands food production, preparation and eating, even where all the elements of a balanced diet may be present in a family, it is still possible to have a disordered relationship with food,

Starting point is 00:03:56 failure to eat together, hurried eating, anxieties and disorders around diet and weight, ingratitude, resistance to eating certain unfavoured foods, overeating and under-exercising, constant snacking, are all problems that might have analogies in relation to Christian teaching, perhaps especially in context where the ease of access to teachings for us so exceeds our involvement in context of practice. we can constantly snack on appetizing christian teachings on line while failing to metabolize them through practice when people have experienced contexts where despite broad orthodox teaching feeding on that teaching has been an unpleasant chore where the teaching has consistently been an occasion of division and fighting where it has not been put into practice or where the goodness of the food has not been matched with care and skill in its preparation presentation and the consuming of it

Starting point is 00:04:52 they can often react against the teaching itself for too many people their exposure to christian teaching has been to bland an unappetizing slop the required nutrients may be present but little joy is to be found in eating it as social media creates lots of alienating interactions with people who differ from us it also encourages a preoccupation with and teaching focused upon the errors of theological opponents however such medicinal teaching seeks to develop resistance to other group's errors, is seldom edifying in the way that Christian teaching ought to be. We are raised to be healthy and strong, chiefly by a full and balanced diet of solid food, rather than by lots of medicines designed to protect us from all diseases. Health requires more than the counteracting of disease.

Starting point is 00:05:43 There are occasions when we will need medicine, but such occasions are exceptional. Likewise, spiritual health comes chiefly, not from a diet of medicine against all errors that are circulating, but from regular servings of balanced Christian teaching. When people see some disease or error in the church at large or in wider society, they can get invested in crusades against it. In such situations, it is easy for the breadth of a healthy Christian diet to be abandoned.

Starting point is 00:06:12 The immediate perceived problem at hand becomes such a preoccupation that all teaching starts to be distorted in reaction to it. This problem is exacerbated as the people who become preoccupied with such diseases often end up addicted to the medicine. Repeatedly hearing about the evils of our opponents at the magnitude of their errors can give us a rush of self-righteousness and justified anger, but it is seldom good for us. Medicines, if they are to be of service to health, need to be carefully prescribed and also kept out of the hands of people who would abuse them. Once again, this is one of the challenges of an online context where audiences are vague and largely self-selecting. It is difficult to prescribe more medicinal truths effectively in such a context. It is also possible to take certain much-needed medicinal teachings and treat them as universal remedies

Starting point is 00:07:04 or viewing an increasing array of disorders as downstream of the problems that they are designed to address. The point can come when people who adopt such an approach have moved from overhyping a value, treatment to becoming akin to snake oil salesman. Likewise, as such medicinal teachings so often address dysfunction that are endemic in some opposing camp, a preoccupation with them can often come with a resistance to applying closely related medicinal teachings to one's own camp. I have remarked upon the dangers of this with the currently popular empathy critique, for instance. In its original form in Edwin Friedman's work, the critique has a much broader application than is currently given in the work of those who use it to focus upon the errors of those to their left,

Starting point is 00:07:51 with many natural and searching applications to dysfunctions on the right. While such a medicinal teaching may be appropriately prescribed to many people on the left, if health rather than partisanship is our primary concern, it will be extensively prescribed to characteristically right-leaning diseases. It will also be accompanied by an edifying balanced diet that produces health and resilience that reaches much deeper than partisan concerns. Christian teachers, especially pastors, have a calling to feed people a full and balanced diet of truth

Starting point is 00:08:25 in a form that encourages them to delight in it. They need to provide them with occasional well-prescribed medicinal teachings against widespread errors without being preoccupied about ill health, allowing such teachings to displace positive teaching or to prescribe according to the appetite of hearers. Recognising the value of faithful pastors and the distinctive role that they perform in this area should lead us to accord them special honour and to be more mindful of the dangers that can accompany

Starting point is 00:08:55 some other forms of Christian teaching, especially if we are engaged in it. And here I speak chiefly to myself. If you'd like to read this and other of my free reflections, you can do so on my substack, the anchored argosy. Like my material here, this material is free for all and is sort of. supported by generous donations. If you'd like to support my work, you can do so using my Patreon or PayPal accounts. The links are below. God bless and thank you very much for listening.

Alastair's Adversaria - Teaching as Feeding

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