What is a Christian education? One reply to this question would say that a Christian education refers to the education that is proper for a Christian person to receive. On that definition, a Christian education would pertain to the education of Christians. The topic of a Christian education would inquire into the education of the baptized. One expansion of this interpretation might include the kind of education extended to non-Christians who freely wish to become Christians through baptism. After baptism, this education would be followed by the kind of Christian education proper to the baptized. By this logic, a Christian education would be judged according to its capacity to serve those who are present or future Christians. This type of a Christian education would be communicated through direct and indirect instruction, which would include liturgies and rituals among other things. I will refer to this definition as a catechetical sense of a Christian education because it shares many of the traits of catechesis and mystagogy.
Another reply to this question might be to respond that a Christian education refers to an education in Christianity. This reply lacks the immediate self-evidence of the prior one, but it is not entirely unimaginable. We can imagine a Christian, or someone who is neither a present nor future Christian, seeking a Christian education delivered in the catechetical sense for purely intellectual, rather than confessional, purposes. If we accept that everyone is welcome to attend a Christian liturgy or ritual, for example, with its mystagogical purposes and functions, then it seems reasonable to expect that anyone could avail themselves of a Christian education in the catechetical sense without any coercive need to be or eventually become a Christian. If this is true, then our understanding of a Christian education would modulate from the catechetical sense—i.e., a Christian education for a present or future Christian—into an education in Christianity for Christians and non-Christians alike. This hopefully suggests why it may be reasonable to interpret a Christian education as an education in Christianity. I will refer to this definition as an intellectual sense of a Christian education because it entails someone who is strictly interested in this kind of a Christian education—i.e., as an education in Christianity—for intellectual reasons and purposes, which seems different from the aims of the catechetical sense of a Christian education.
To be clear, these two senses of a Christian education are by no means mutually exclusive. I call them “senses” as opposed to categories because their differences are qualitative, not categorical. One could imagine a Christian seeking out the intellectual sense of a Christian education as a substitution for the catechetical one for any number of good and bad reasons or a non-Christian seeking out the catechetical sense after exposure to the intellectual one. One could even imagine a scenario where there are dimensions of each sense present. Indeed, these two senses of a Christian education vary according to the subjective experience of the one who undergoes a Christian education and are understood best phenomenologically. What these two senses of a Christian education share is this: they are both focused on the one who is educated by a Christian education, the one who receives a Christian education, whether it be a present or future Christian or a non-Christian.
There is another sense of a Christian education that refers less to the subjective experience of the one who is educated and focuses on the educator, the one who offers a Christian education. Under this emphasis, the question “What is a Christian education?” would not necessarily be determined according to its aim at the education of Christians (the catechetical sense) nor an education in Christianity (the intellectual sense). Instead, this reply would claim that a Christian education is an education that is offered by a Christian person or institution—by a Christian teacher, family, or Church, in other words. I will refer to this as a magisterial sense because it signals a teaching-function and also registers its ecclesial dimensions. (The magisterial sense is sometimes doubled by the reality that, in certain cases, such as the formation of professed Christian religious and clergy, there is also a magisterial Christian education proper to the Christian educator.)
A critic might point out that the magisterial sense of a Christian education remains actively present in the catechetical and intellectual senses and might further argue that this additional sense is simply a matter of emphasis and not a difference in kind or category. I would accept this criticism in the same way I accept the non-exclusivity of the two prior senses. To repeat: my purpose here is not to present a categorical taxonomy of a Christian education. Instead, I am simply trying to clarify and eventually test the range of possible meanings that are in play when we speak of a Christian education.
There is, of course, another important sense of a Christian education to consider that also emerges from a focus on the educator. This would be a Christian education offered by the non-Christian person or institution. Here we might expand the ecclesial understanding of institutions in the prior sense to include disciplines or fields of study and schools of thought and, also, non-Christian religious and cultural institutions which might include political states or schools and societies of various kinds. It is hopefully not difficult to think of numerous examples of this sense of a Christian education. The philosophical education for the Roman Catholic priesthood, a prerequisite to theological studies, would be but one example.
We could not study Thomas Aquinas’s summative textbook written to provide a Christian education for priests without some understanding of the non-Christian Aristotle and the pre-Christian school of Athens more generally. Understanding the range of Aristotelian arguments of Aquinas’s time by studying Islamic and Jewish philosophy would undoubtably add to that knowledge while remaining well within the range of a meaningful understanding of a Christian education. Likewise, with the fruitful and essential study of Hebrew Scripture and so on. This sense of a Christian education would extend from classical sources to include the relevant knowledge a non-Christian brings to a Christian education in either the catechetical or intellectual senses. I will refer to this as the pedagogical sense of a Christian education because of its Greek etymology (contrasted from the Latinate magister) and also because of its symbolic gesture to the relative youth of Christianity amongst pre-Christian sources of wisdom. This is not to say that there are not helpful post-Christian sources as well, but it does honor the indisputable contributions of Athens and Jerusalem.
We have now considered four preliminary senses of a Christian education: catechetical, intellectual, magisterial, and pedagogical. The former two pertain to the one who is educated and the latter two pertain to the one who educates. I hope they are sufficiently clear to understand in a preliminary way and that they cover a non-trivial range of eligible meanings of a Christian education. I must reiterate that I do not wish to imply that these are necessarily, nor ideally, mutually exclusive from each other, and I will continue to insist that the descriptions they yield would be phenomenological at their best. Furthermore, these four senses of a Christian education are non-exhaustive, internally and externally; they do not cover the entire range of a Christian education and, likewise, do not disclose a complete understanding of the true purpose of a Christian life or the nature of education. Admitting these limitations, it may be worth considering a few scenes of a Christian education before a final theological test. The first scene is from the North African Early Church, which should be familiar to many; the second is from the sub-continent of India in the twentieth century, which may not be as familiar, but should hopefully be a productive scene to consider as well.
Scene One
In Augustine’s De Magistro, the Bishop of Hippo discusses the nature of teaching with his teenage son, Adeodatus. There is much to say about this dialogue, especially the paternal affection that Augustine shows his son—an affection we witness further in his Confessions—and the emergent theory of speech as inherently related to teaching and learning. For reasons of brevity, I will limit myself to two notable aspects and then consider them in light of the four senses of a Christian education I presented above.
Augustine’s dialogue bears a striking resemblance to Plato’s Meno, where Plato’s Socrates declares that “all learning and inquiry is recollection (anamnesis).” This Platonic theory of learning and inquiry begins as a question about the teaching of virtue (“Tell me Socrates, can virtue be taught or is it learned in some other way?”). This question leads to an empirical and pedagogical experiment questioning Meno’s slave on geometry. The dialogue could be read as ending (prior to the arrival of Anytus) with the spiritual doctrine of anamnesis that harmonizes with the Platonic theory of the immortal soul expounded in other dialogues.
In Augustine’s dialogue, the opening question is about the purpose of speech (“What do you say we are trying to do when we speak?) and the empirical experiment is embedded in the reality of the exchange between father and son. Like the Meno, De Magistro also can be read as ending with a spiritual doctrine: the doctrine of the inner person (the ensouled “inner man”) and the Inner Teacher. Augustine expresses that doctrine in this way to his son: “if the one who hears my words sees those things himself with that clear and inner eye of the soul, he knows the things whereof I speak by contemplating them himself, and not by my words.” Augustine insists further, “even when I say what is true, and he sees what is true, it is not I who teach him. For he is being taught, not by my words, but by the enlightening action of God from within.” Augustine’s doctrine, while not identical to Platonic anamnesis, does hammer home the absurdity of external theories of teaching that would oppose internalist accounts like Plato’s and his own. He exclaims, “What is more absurd than the notion that he is being taught by what I say, when he could explain those very things even before I spoke, if only he had been asked about them?” The first notable aspect of Augustine’s De Magistro, then, is its internalist account of teaching and learning.
The second notable aspect is a bit simpler and follows from the doctrine of the inner person and Inner Teacher. Upon reading and understanding the full meaning of the dialogue, it becomes clear that “The Teacher” of De Magistro is Christ. On this account of teaching, we find the seed for an idea like John Henry Newman’s account of conscience in The Grammar of Assent as “the aboriginal vicar of Christ in the soul.” In Joseph Ratzinger’s two lectures on conscience, published together as On Conscience, Ratzinger reaches back to the original Platonic notion of anamnesis (as opposed to the Thomistic focus on synderesis) to affirm Newman’s teaching on the priority of conscience. This aspect hopefully clarifies the particular and even radical relevance of this textual example to our understanding of what a Christian education is. On this understanding, a Christian education would simply describe the inner workings of the human soul within the domain of teaching, learning, and moral judgement. Attractive as this account of a Christian education might be, I will opt for the more modest quartet of possible meanings I suggested above.
When we look at De Magistro through the lens of the four senses of a Christian education, we can identify their presence in different ways and to varying dimensions and degrees. However, as I have already suggested, when we use the doctrine of the inner person and Inner Teacher to reconsider the four senses of a Christian education, we find that it helpfully constrains the magisterial and pedagogical senses with none other than the Inner Teacher who is Christ—what could be more Christian than this? This constraint does not eliminate the Christian person or institution who offers a Christian education anymore than it would eliminate the non-Christian educator, but it does suggest that the most crucial element of a Christian education is perhaps better placed within the catechetical and intellectual senses of a Christian education on the condition that they capture and respect the interiority of the inner person to whom the Inner Teacher speaks.
When we investigate the justification for this argument in De Magistro, according to the catechetical and intellectual senses of a Christian education, we find a further methodological constraint which amplifies the intellectual sense from the exclusive domain of explicitly Christian-oriented instruction, viewed through an interest in Christianity rather than in being or becoming a Christian, to an anterior, fundamental primacy upon which the Christian orientation emerges as such. The two constraints that emerge from my portrait of Augustine’s paternal lesson significantly limit the common-sense usage of the four senses of a Christian education I have shared, but these limitations, I believe, amplify their range of application without losing anything I would miss.
Scene Two
In the introduction to Mario D’Souza’s A Catholic Philosophy of Education, published in 2016, the author describes his own experience of a Christian education that took place in the Catholic schools of Karachi, a city in the Islamic country of Pakistan, during the 1960s. He describes the strong Muslim esteem and support for urban and rural Catholic schools in Pakistan and goes into detail on this scene of “Catholic education in a non-Christian land.” I will quote from his description at some length:
The school day was broken up into the usual subjects: English, history, physics, geography, mathematics, Urdu (the national language of Pakistan), chemistry, biology, civics, etc. All the students in the school, most of whom were non-Christian and mainly Muslims, studied together. . . . While teachers were, by and large, Catholic, it was not unusual to have a non-Catholic teacher. However, what I think was the most distinctive feature of this model . . . was that we studied everything together, the one exception being religion: Catholics went to their class in catechism . . . and the Muslims went to study the Koran. . . . What was extraordinary is that the state allowed Catholic schools to flourish, and, further, that it allowed Muslim students to attend such schools.
As we all know, Christian Scripture shows us that Christians have taken questions of religious and cultural reconciliation seriously since at least the Council of Jerusalem. The Gospels feature characters like the Magi, the good Samaritan, the Samaritan woman, and the Roman centurion for these same reasons, and the Pauline speeches and writings to Hebrews, Greeks, and Romans add to that testimony. From the Early Church through the Middle Ages, there were serious questions raised about the moral and political status of Christians living with non-Christians and vice-versa. In the writing of Aquinas, the harshest treatment is reserved for the heretic, not the infidel.
However, all this seriousness did not yield a social doctrine or practice that reflected the established theological and philosophical admonitions against the moral and political coercion of anyone, including non-Christians. By the sixteenth century, as Christianity began to spread in a very different political economy from its spread during the Early Church, questions of religious and cultural reconciliation regressed into arguments for the very personhood of non-Christians. Voices like Bartolome de las Casas deployed the resources of the Christian tradition but won precious few, if any, lasting political victories in their lifetime.
I offer this rather historical excursus as an appendix to D’Souza’s scene to avoid two false impressions. First, I wish to avoid the impression that the concern for religious and cultural reconciliation that he describes is, somehow, unprecedented in Christian history. In fact, I would imagine that it is recognizable in our Christian schools today in places such as my own home, Vancouver, Canada. Secondly, I want to show an awareness of the historical conditions of Portuguese and British colonialism that make D’Souza’s rather romantic scene possible, a factor he does allude to, albeit lightly, in his book.
A critic of this scene’s selective account of “Catholic education in a non-Christian land” might justly point out that, in Canada, that description is more fitting for the Canadian Indian Residential Schools, where a Christian education was undoubtably brought to a non-Christian land. This astute critic might further point out that among the eligible senses of a Christian education today in Canada, these particular scenes of coercion and abuse must be accounted for above all. This criticism chastens and sharpens D’Souza’s account as not only a description of a Christian education but, perhaps just as importantly, a description of a post-colonial Christian education. This description amplifies the value of the internalist understanding of education. After all, the Inner Teacher does not fail to speak or even protest injustice and moral injury to the inner person. Those who claim that times of acceptable social injustice must be understood in their context never seem to include the context of victims of injustice, their inner personhood, in that so-called “historical” context, nor the documented criticisms such as those of Las Casas and many others.
The same conscience that understood that a Christian education demanded not only a respect for Muslim students and society, but also made a special place in a Christian education for the Islamic study of the Koran, would also understand the moral harms and injuries of the many unconscionable forms of a Christian education, including the corrupt and coercive premises of the Spanish Encomienda system that Las Casas castigated or the Canadian Indian Residential Schools that our late Pope Francis made penance for. In addition, we might press D’Souza’s account even further by suggesting that it falls short of the conciliar function of reconciliation since Catholics and Muslims “counciled” separately for their religious instruction. A more radical scene of reconciliation, another critic might suggest, would be one where a Christian education not only offered Catholics and Muslims a catechetical experience proper to their confessional identities, but also offered them an intellectual experience in the study of Christianity and Islam, respectively. Here we find a constructive deployment of the four senses of a Christian education alongside a further critique of the limitations of D’Souza’s autobiographical disclosures.
When we consider the four senses of a Christian education in light of this post-colonial scene, in its best and worst light, we are confronted with the moral responsibilities that presently emerge for having ignored the available insights into a Christian education—yielding an untested or poorly tested sense of a Christian education—and the real promise of a Christian education understood in the widest tested range of its possible meaning. In fact, we may recognize that, among the other sinful harms to be considered, the failure to respect and defer to the Inner Teacher within the soul of every person is a violation of the catechetical and intellectual sense of a Christian education, along with an inflated and disordered understanding of the constrained scope of magisterial and pedagogical authority. These sins and failures carry obligations and even temporal punishments that are just, but the real scale will be measured not only by the corrective initiative but also by the conciliar invitation, the invitation to reconcile, to return to council, and plan to return again in every season.
In these two scenes, I have put the four senses of a Christian education under the scrutiny of a few real examples of a Christian education from different places and times. In my final section I will test these four senses of a Christian education further under the theological weight of the Gospel: Sic Deus dilexit mundum—For God so loved the world.
Dilexit Mundum
John’s gospel teaches Christians that Christ was given by God out of God’s love of the world. In other words, the givenness of the Christ proceeds from the world’s divine belovedness. I would like to consider two elements in this passage: the givenness of Christ and the world’s divine belovedness. I will ask two questions: First, what kind of gift is Christ? And, second, what is a world loved by God? After a brief consideration of these questions, I will close by submitting whatever remains of the four senses of a Christian education to you, and to God, in the light of the Christian gospel.
We might begin by considering different types of gifts. Some gifts can be conditional and others are unconditional. It would seem strange to think of Christ as a conditional gift because of the unconditional love of God. However, John does say that the givenness of Christ born of the world’s belovedness by God is so “that whoever believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life.” In other words, while the givenness of Christ, God’s only Son, may be understood as an unconditional gift, the gift of eternal life seems to be conditional to “whoever believes in him.” This interpretation relies on an intuitive transactional understanding of gifts and, by extension, givenness. However, if we consider givenness under the non-transactional logic of the offering, we may find a different and, to my mind, richer available meaning of not only the passage, but also the good news of Christian gospel.
An offering is distinguished from a gift not because of its lack of givenness or donation, but, instead, because of the sufficiency of its givenness regardless of the transactional result or exchange. Imagine that someone gives you something. If you accept it freely and it is freely given, with or without conditions, then this poses no serious objections. However, the givenness of the gift is destroyed by a passive or active refusal. The offering, by contrast, retains its givenness regardless of the transactional exchange because what is truly offered does not require acceptance to remain an offering. There is a place for offerings to yearn for acceptance, but they retain a certain humility with respect to their destination. We can observe this yearning in words like the Roman Catholic Eucharistic prayer that says “Accept, O Lord, these humble gifts” and in many other human postures before the Divine that offer thanksgiving or praise and ask that they be accepted and counted by God. The humble intentionality of the offering, then, differs substantially from the transaction intentionality of the gift.
When we return to John 3:16 with a hermeneutic of the offering, we may observe that there are no conditions within it. God so loved the world that he sent his only Son, Christ Jesus, to offer eternal life to whoever is willing to believe. An unwillingness or inability to believe here would not destroy the free gift of Christ or the gift of eternal life if it is truly offered according to the givenness of the offering. When we add Augustine’s internalist insight of the dignity and inviolability of the inner person, we discover that the Inner Teacher who is Christ makes this offering as a true teacher, the True Rabbi, who cannot conceit to teach what the person already knows and this knowledge might include the knowledge of Christ Jesus. For this reason, we might consider an eligible response to the question “What kind of gift is Christ?” to be something like the following: Christ is God’s offering to the world. This response, of course, raises the next question: What is a world loved by God?
In the Euthyphro, Plato’s Socrates asks whether something that is loved by god is good because of its godliness or whether its very goodness is what god loves. In other words, is the value of goodness something intrinsic to itself or something else? We might bring this philosopher’s dilemma into the gospel of John and wonder whether we should love the world because of God’s esteem for it or, perhaps, whether the gospel is teaching us that the world itself is Godly in the sense that God’s love for it is an expression of his very being which, scripture tells us, is love. Philosophers may not appreciate the tautological form of this suggestion, but I find it impossible to express it otherwise and would respond to the question “What is a world beloved by God?” by, again, turning to the internalist addition of the inner category to say that a world loved by God is a world that God inhabits, a world where we find the Spirit of God. That God sends his only Son to inhabit that world to offer eternal life does not entail an absence of God in that world anymore than it would suggest an externalized form of Divine affection. The world that God loves is the world that God made in love because God is love.
When we consider the four senses of a Catholic education, limited as they surely remain, in this rather speculative light of the gospel, as I have tried to imagine it, I believe that we find something like a normative principle where the catechetical, intellectual, magisterial, and pedagogical senses of a Christian education are measured according to their ability to not only love the world because God loved it, but, more deeply still, to love the world in the way that God has loved it, which brought Christ—the light that enlightens all people—into it and offers eternal life through the continued indwelling presence and power of the Holy Spirit.
I cannot promise that what I said here will pass this test, and I do recognize the absurdity of suggesting a test I have in some ways written and in other ways would struggle to pass, but my aim has been to simply, and hopefully sensibly, not leave a Christian education untested or tested by measures that fall short of the very gospel that animates it. In that spirit, we should perhaps remember to pray, and seek what is true. We might invoke a prayer to the Holy Spirit that seems instructive and salutary to this project. Let us pray then: “Come, Holy Spirit, fill the hearts of your faithful and kindle in them the fire of your love. Send forth your Spirit and they shall be created, and you shall renew the face of the earth.”
EDITORIAL NOTE: A version of this lecture was delivered on May 2, 2025 at “The Promise of Christian Education, Past, Present, and Future,” a conference sponsored by The Centre for Christian Engagement at St. Mark’s College in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada,
