Who is the teacher when religion is taught? When Christianity
established the catechumenate, it was obviously assumed that initiating
people into Christian faith and life involved a learning process within
which human beings interact as teachers and pupils. Augustine, however,
named Christ the primordial teacher and the church his school, thus
suggesting that religion proper can only be taught by a divine teacher -
but, admittedly, not without human preachers and catechists. The paper
investigates this relationship between divine and human agency in texts
belonging to the late antique catechumenate, written by, among others,
Cyril of Jerusalem, John Chrysostom, and Augustine. It thus seeks to
clarify how earlier concepts of a divine pedagogy in, e.g., Clement of
Alexandria and Origen were adapted to the institutionalized
catechumenate of Late Antiquity and helped to develop a special didactic
of teaching (Christian) religion.
No comments:
Post a Comment