The Ecumenical Institute: Chicago Spring, 1971

In the early days of our training, the pedagogical style that was needed was just the overpowering style. Then the emphasis began to shift to what I would call intellectual preciseness. We began to get all the unclarity and fog out of our lectures and seminars and inject clear theological preciseness into every aspect of what we were doing. Then, in relationship to the shift in the times, we talked about gracious presence. It seems to me now, however, that the issue is a million times deeper than gracious presence. The present situation demands the transparent style.

Some of my colleagues have helped me out here in talking about powerful weakness as a way of getting hold of transparent style. The pedagogue who has power is the pedagogue who has clay feet. He is the pedagogue who doesn't pretend before that group of people to be invincible, omnipotent, omniscient, and omnipresent, but dares to have clay feet, and yet to stand there and be the pedagogue as one who has clay feet. It's as if when your clay feet are broken and shattered, you dare to be the one who stands there on the stumps of your legs and keep being the pedagogue. You do not try to hide the fact that you struggle the same struggle. In fact, it's precisely the fact that you struggle that struggle which gives permission to participants to struggle their struggle. You dare to be the one who stands there with clay feet, but you stand there. It's that kind of powerful weakness that we would point to there.

The pedagogue is also the passionate guru. It seems to me crucial in terms of cutting over against the stoicism, the overly detached stance, to develop the spirit tools and prowess in what Kierkegaard's Training in Christianity and study of the Jesus method have helped us to see as indirection, where in a seminar or a conversation you don't hit someone right between the eyes, but you have the spirit prowess to both passionately care, and yet to use the tools of indirection which enable them to have a whole new way of appropriating the life that they have on their hands.

The pedagogue is also a symbol of structural promise. What is true in every man's experience today is that he sees no possibility, precisely because he sees that every structure has collapsed, that there is finally no structure that enables one to be sustained in the situation that we have today, and that the only way he can relate to life without adequate structures is to say that life is meaningless. Yet he sees in the pedagogue one who is a structural human being, who is sustained as a structural human being; and he sees the possibility of structures that will sustain him as well.

Finally, the style of the pedagogue has to release people from cynicism. It has to be what we have pointed to as the resurrected man who just stands as a symbol of life. I sense that what it means to teach RS­I is to be like Jesus standing outside Lazarus' tomb. He stands there, and he says, " I am the Resurrection and the Life.'' It is that kind of stance. The pedagogue is the one who stands in the midst of the course, and says, "I am the Resurrection and the Life." He be's the Resurrection, he be's the Life; he calls forth, ''Come on out, come on out and live."

That is the transparent style that is needed.