Assignments:

August 20 - September 17, 2007: MSWord or PDF

Course Description

      Over the last ten years this Theology 1 course has evolved slowly, always taking shape around one central idea: If we are to be genuinely Christian, we must recover the real meaning of Tradition¹. The word has fallen on very confusing times as the mainline denominations of western Christianity have departed from their original moorings and reconfigured themselves into ever increasing polarization over matters of authority and accountability. The difficulties imposed by the shifting sands of late 20th and early 21st century American Christianity demand that the sources for this course give us the clearest possible window on Christian thought prior to the reformation, reaching back to the early Church, yet rendered relevant to the student of our time. Eastern Orthodox Christian sources have a unique and powerful capacity to do this, being largely unfamiliar to most of our students. This is why I have chosen Bishop Kallistos Ware's

The Orthodox Way for our introduction to classical doctrine and Fr. John Breck's

Scripture in Tradition for our introduction to biblical interpretation. Christians of all backgrounds will glean a wealth of useful information and concepts from these books.

     And then there is Dante's The Divine Comedy: Inferno, Purgatory and Paradise. Writing almost 200 years prior to the protestant reformation, Dante anticipates many of the issues of corruption in Church and State that finally led to the 16th upheaval in northwestern Europe. His three-part story of the pilgrim's journey to learn the devastating effects of sin, the power of divine grace to heal and the glorious purpose for which man was created gathers up the vast learning of both Eastern and Western Christianity prior to the reformation and renders it into a dramatic epic. As Mark Musa, the translator and commentator of the edition of we use for this class points out in his notes following Inferno IX, Dante's extensive use of pre-Christian sources, Holy Scripture, the Latin literary tradition and medieval theology converges to embrace all of time. Fifteen years ago, when I first taught The Divine Comedy to a senior level English class, two of my best students, who were also top students in AP Calculus and AP Physics, pulled me aside after class to make this observation: "We think the reality to which Dante is pointing at the end of the Paradise is the same reality to which the

_______________________

1.  T. S. Eliot: "Tradition is a matter of much wider significance. It cannot be inherited, and if you want it you must obtain it by great labour. It involves, in the first place, the historical sense, which we may call nearly indispensable to anyone who would continue to be a poet beyond his twenty-fifth year; and the historical sense involves a perception, not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence; the historical sense compels a man to write not merely with his own generation in his bones, but with a feeling that the whole of the literature of Europe from Homer and within it the whole of the literature of his own country has a simultaneous existence and composes a simultaneous order. This historical sense, which is a sense of the timeless as well as of the temporal and of the timeless and of the temporal together, is what makes a writer traditional. And it is at the same time what makes a writer most acutely conscious of his place in time, of his contemporaneity."

Calculus and the Physics point, something beyond the scope of the philosophy or the math or the science, but the same reality none-theless. Does this make sense?" I thought about it and responded: "Gentlemen, I think you've got it!"

      Ever since my first reading of this great text (at the age of 40) while on a motorcycle trip in 1992, Dante has made demands on both my mind and my heart. Every time I read and teach it again, I rediscover it for the first time, and I cannot say this of many things. Denis Donaghue cites T. S. Eliot's words on Dante: "The majority of poems one outgrows and outlives, as one outgrows and outlives the majority of human passions. Dante's is one of those that one can only just hope to grow up to at the end of life." Had someone put this in front of me when I was in boarding school during my last two years of high school in 1968-70, I think it would have made a real difference, a much needed one. I hope I can grow up into Dante's vision; my students are helping me do this; I pray I am helping them.

     Our biblical texts for Theology 1 are Genesis, Exodus, St. Paul's Epistle to the Romans and The Gospel according to St. John. Between the Eastern Orthodox writers and Dante, these biblical texts light up in a way that we would never see apart from the mind of the ancient Church through which the Bible was transmitted to us. I know this Holy Tradition to be living and true, the cutting edge of God the Holy Spirit reaching into our hearts and enlightening our minds.

     Sometimes people ask: Why don't you teach a comparative religion course? In The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald's narrator Nick Carraway makes the observation that the most limited of all creatures is "the well rounded man." In this matter of religion, I do not wish to produce students who have had a shallow encounter with many things but know nothing substantive about anything. Insofar as it is possible, I want them to see deeply into this one reality that I am convinced is the truest thing of all: the world as it is in its fallen condition confronting the reality of the hope offered to us through Jesus Christ such that we, who are so terribly fallen, may by grace ascend to the heights of heaven for which God has made us. If we will look deeply into this one thing, we will thereby be able to finally see all things as they truly are--some day.

     As an educator, my first responsibility must be teaching what I am convinced is true. One need not agree with me to make an A in the course, but for even the most ardent skeptic an encounter with these teachings will be an invitation "to taste and see that the Lord is good."

Bert Harrell

August 25, 2007