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Chapter 4

God the Teacher

If I woke you up by shining a flashlight in your eyes, you probably wouldn’t thank me. If I tried to teach you differential calculus before you knew how to add and subtract, we probably wouldn’t get very far. If I chose to teach you a foreign language only by talking quickly in complex sentences in that language, you probably wouldn’t pick it up. Underlying these problems is an important principle: good teaching follows good order. You have to learn one thing before you can learn another. Start with the basics and proceed to more complex ideas. Turn the light up slowly.

Since he’s a teacher, God knows this principle. In fact, as the only omniscient being, he’s the best teacher. But if you think about what it would be like to be an infinite being trying to communicate with limited, finite, problematic beings like us, you can see that there’s a bit of a gap. Just imagine Albert Einstein trying to teach his theory of relativity to kindergarteners. For anything to stick, God has to teach us according to our capacity—and our capacity is very limited compared with his. Fortunately, God is not a disconnected college professor type. He’s not a mere subject-matter expert with quirky habits and lousy social skills; he’s perfect in every way. So he makes for a great expert and a great teacher, the best combination.

Gradualism

The central idea in God’s pedagogy is gradualism. The Catechism of the Catholic Church teaches, “The divine plan of Revelation…involves a specific divine pedagogy: God communicates himself to man gradually.”²² This may seem like a nobrainer—that education has to happen in stages—but when we reflect on the history of salvation, sometimes we would prefer for there to be no stages at all. Why didn’t Jesus come right after the Fall? Why did God put the Tree in the Garden of Eden in the first place? How come he let his people languish in sin and suffering for so long before he put the final stage of his rescue plan into effect? These questions all get at the nature of God’s teaching, his pedagogy. The Old Testament displays the divine pedagogy in action. God slowly, over the course of time, reveals more and more of who he is to humanity.

The central idea in God’s pedagogy is gradualism.

A lot of the Old Testament stories that perplex us as “dark” passages can be understood through the principle of the divine pedagogy. For example, the ten plagues, which the Lord sends against Pharaoh and the Egyptians, show his teaching style. The Exodus story is very familiar to us—God sends his servant Moses to Pharaoh to ask that the enslaved people of Israel be freed for a few days to go into the desert and worship the Lord (Ex 5:1). It is a simple enough request, but Pharaoh resists God and refuses to allow the people freedom to worship. In order to convince Pharaoh, the Lord sends a series of plagues against him and the Egyptians (Ex 7–12). The plagues start out as mere demonstrations: water turning to blood, annoying frogs. But as Pharaoh refuses after each plague to let the people of Israel go, the plagues get more and more severe. The livestock die, the people are afflicted with boils, and eventually, when Pharaoh persists in his obstinate refusal, the Lord sends the angel of death to wipe out the firstborn of Egypt. While there are a lot of interesting questions to probe in this story, the main point I want to focus on is that God is gradually punishing Pharaoh for his resistance. He does not send the angel of death right away, but slowly turns up the heat as Pharaoh refuses again and again to let the people of Israel go and worship.

Jesus, in the course of his own three-year ministry, uses the same method that the Holy Trinity uses throughout the Bible: teach gradually.

Lessons in Order

We see a similar teaching method in the life of Jesus. He doesn’t jump up right away as a baby and tell everyone, “I am the light of the world!” Instead, he waits until he is thirty years old to initiate his ministry, and even then he teaches much of the time in shrouded, mysterious parables. St. John Paul II spoke of this aspect of Jesus’ teaching:

In his preaching to the crowds he used parables to communicate his teaching in a way that suited the intelligence of his listeners. In teaching his disciples he proceeded gradually, taking into account the difficulty they had in understanding. So it was only in the second part of his public life that he expressly announced his sorrowful way and only at the end did he openly declare his identity not only as the Messiah, but as the “Son of God.” We note also that, in his most detailed dialogues, he communicated his revelation by answering the questions of his listeners and using language their mentality easily understood.²³

Jesus, in the course of his own three-year ministry, uses the same method that the Holy Trinity uses throughout the Bible: teach gradually. Just like any good teacher, God communicates truths in a particular, designed order. We’re not ready to hear about a Savior until we know we need saving. We’re not ready to hear about repentance until we know we’ve broken God’s law. We’re not ready to hear about God’s law until we know that there is a God and that he has authority over our lives.

As human teachers and learners, it is easy for us to miss steps along the way, to forget to present the truth in the proper order, but God knows the right way to do it. We might think that things would always proceed from easy to hard, or from less severe to more severe. In some ways this is true, but in others it is backward. What I mean is that, early on in the biblical story, God teaches simple lessons in simple ways. As salvation history proceeds, he teaches more and more difficult lessons in ways that are harder to understand. So, for example, to tell Adam and Eve not to eat from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil is a very simple lesson, but for Jesus to teach the apostles that they will be persecuted and need to remain faithful under torture and even death is a much harder and more complex lesson. We can grasp the meaning of these lessons by taking into account what Vatican II calls the “customary and characteristic styles of feeling, speaking and narrating which prevailed at the time.”²⁴ The infinite God, in his effort to teach finite beings, simplifies his message to be able to reach us within the limitations of our cultural circumstances. In the ancient world, this meant teaching people who lived in a relatively primitive culture. When we see biblical laws dealing with animal sacrifices, ox-goring, ritual purity, eating blood, taking vows, leprosy, and child sacrifice, we can get a sense for the kind of culture they lived in. Life was harsher, shorter, and involved a lot of messy things. War was frequent and involved personal combat with bronze swords, spears, and bare hands. Infant mortality was normal. Plagues and famines were common. Laws were simple because life was brutal.

Preachers often talk about how reading the New Testament is like reading someone else’s mail, but reading the Old Testament is like reading someone else’s storybook, prayer book, law book, and prophecy book. It is not easy to read because of the vast change in cultural circumstances from Old Testament times to our own. Imagine trying to explain how to use an iPhone to an ancient Israelite. Then imagine him explaining to you how his family and clan relationships work. It’s complicated. God enters into human history, but he does it on the sly. He knows our limits, our sins, the smallness of our perspectives, and he works with that. We often talk about “meeting people where they are at.” God does that. He knew where the ancients were and brought them closer to himself one step at a time.

The Law of Moses

St. Paul talks about how the Old Testament law of God, the law of Moses, was like a “schoolmaster to bring us unto Christ” (Gal 3:24. Sometimes the King James puts it best!). The Greek word he uses, paidagogos, could be translated as tutor, teacher, pedagogue, or even as a household slave who would bring a boy to and from school. The point is that the law of Moses plays a part in our moral education. It was the “text” of the divine pedagogy. The Catechism itself gets at this point: “This divine pedagogy appears especially in the gift of the Law. God gave the letter of the Law as a ‘pedagogue’ to lead his people towards Christ.”²⁵ The law of Moses, which has 613 commandments all told, was not meant to be God’s final revelation to his people or definitive for all time. Instead, the Old Testament law is a provisional, teaching measure. It sets the stage for what follows, but it is not the conclusion of the story.

The temporary quality of Old Testament law can make it a bit confusing to interpret. Part of it we as Catholics embrace, but part of it we don’t. For example, we still forbid murder (Ex 20:13), but we don’t forbid wearing a garment of mixed materials (Dt 22:11). What’s the rationale behind that? How come some of the law still applies—like the Ten Commandments—but some does not?

St. Thomas Aquinas can help us here. He breaks down the Old Testament laws into three categories: moral, ritual, and judicial.²⁶ Moral law has do with universal principles of right and wrong. Ritual or ceremonial law has to do with symbolic, religious cleanness and uncleanness in Old Testament religion. Judicial or civil law involves the structures for the administration of the law in the Old Testament. Remember that the law of Moses foresees not just a religion, but a state religion, even a theocracy. So certain features of that system don’t make sense in a non-theocratic government system. Aquinas teaches that the ritual and judicial laws have been abrogated, but that the moral law still holds. So we can eat bacon, but we can’t eat our neighbor. This three-way division of the old law is helpful, but then the interpretive trouble comes down to figuring out which of those 613 commandments fall in which category. Beyond that, we also have to ask what is the pedagogic purpose of laws that would eventually be eliminated.

The law of Moses, which has 613 commandments all told, was not meant to be God’s final revelation to his people or definitive for all time.

If we don’t make these distinctions, we can fall into problematic views—becoming either libertine (thinking that no laws apply to our behavior) or wannabe Jews (where we try to observe the ritual laws of the Old Testament without actually being Jewish). Because we don’t have space to sort through every law, let’s focus on the overall teaching purpose of the “schoolmaster” law. What is it that the law of Moses, especially the ritual laws which we no longer observe, teaches us about living for God? The ritual laws of the Old Testament cover the minute details of life. They show us that living for God permeates every aspect of our daily lives. Every choice we make brings us closer to him or pushes him farther away. The ancient ritual system of cleanness and uncleanness we find in the Old Testament has some similarities with the other religious systems of the ancient world, some measures directed toward health and hygiene (such as the rules about leprosy and mold spores), but the point of it all is to direct our gaze to God and show us our need for him. Many things could make a person unclean, and animal sacrifices were only partially helpful in helping a person attain ritual purity. This temporary law was a powerful teaching tool that God the Teacher uses to reveal to us our own impurity, inadequacy, and fundamental need for him to purify and cleanse us. It is one step in God’s pedagogical program to instruct us about who he really is.

This means that when we read the Old Testament, we have to be conscious of the gradualism of it all. The theology of Abraham is far more advanced than that of Adam, but the theology of Isaiah is far beyond even the theology of Moses. As time goes on and God reveals more and more of himself to his people, the picture fills out. Yet it is not until Jesus comes that the fullness of revelation is realized. The Catechism states: “Christ, the Son of God made man, is the Father’s one, perfect and unsurpassable Word. In him he has said everything; there will be no other word than this one.”²⁷ He is the high point and the final point of divine revelation. He is the last lesson of the divine pedagogy.