Shortt, John. Bible-Shaped Teaching. Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2014.

Lately I have been contemplating the act of remembering. Not just as related to memory, but as it applies to reassembling the “members” that make up human beings—the attributes of our physical, mental, and spiritual selves—into a coherent and flourishing wholeness that we bring to the act of teaching and learning. In many ways, this aligns well with the essence of John Shortt’s small but powerful text. It needs to be read more than once. It returns the mind and heart to the entire landscape of teaching.

The key thesis of the text is that the Bible plays a significant role in the shaping of teachers who desire to unite their faith and their work into “faith-full” practice. The Bible is a living ecology from which we “lean into life.”

In ten short chapters, the reader is taken on a journey through the “lifelong and life-wide” view of not only the biblical narrative, but also how life and teaching are empowered by the metaphors from which we teach. It reminds us that various modes and principles emerge in our teaching. These are not content-based, such as in a beginning pedagogical or disciplinary strategy, but are based in emanating the character and truths of Jesus.

This book causes me to ponder how an individual’s personal metaphor for teaching can reflect, or fail to reflect, a fully embodied metanarrative, that as a “big story,” makes sense of life by securing a past, present, and future direction that beckons a teacher to model teaching that is “faith-full.”

This text portrays all of life as a faith journey, where the desired outcome permeates the mind of the teacher. This thought is beautifully and simply written in the premise with the words “please join me in thinking of the Bible as being like a new environment in which we find ourselves, a new ecology in which we live and move and have our being” (8).

Some strategies are provided on how this can occur. One is a call to work “against pictures that dehumanize humanity” and to “use biblical metaphors in discussions surrounding education” (34). In an age when we are seeing the evidence of Neil Postman’s prophecy in The End of Education (1995) of becoming a people who think with our eyes, this is timely. But for me, in my act of remembering, this passage spoke loudly to my soul:

Jesus is the great teacher . . . the Torah teacher who teaches us who we are, the prophetic teacher who teaches us to think and ask questions, and the teacher of wisdom who teaches us to live wisely and justly in the world with other people (42).

It speaks to my soul not only because it says truthfully what is, but because it continues to say what is not:

If we only teach people what to believe, we make them secure but self-satisfied, or we turn them off and alienate them. If we only teach them to ask questions, then they never know what to believe—always questions and never answers, no security. If we only teach them practical life lessons, they never get to see the big picture of God’s world and never explore beyond the limits of their present knowledge (43).

In an age of technological saturation, the question raised after reading this insightful text could be: How can educators more fully open the window on God’s world, while balancing that with an awareness of the world as it is, warts and all? While I would like to have seen a link to our present educational world included in this text, it is nonetheless useful. It gives teachers an awareness that we live in a cultural ecology of fragmentation and reminds us that we can counter that with a biblical ecology.

As referenced again by Neil Postman, the massive technological changes in our world function as their own sort of belief system:

Important distinctions are made among different meanings of “belief,” but at some point it becomes far from asinine to speak of the god of Technology—in the sense that people believe technology works, that they rely on it, that it makes promises, that they are bereft when denied access to it, that they are delighted when they are in its presence, that for most people it works in mysterious ways, that they condemn people who speak against it, that they stand in awe of it, and that, in the born-again mode, they will alter their lifestyles, their schedules, their habits, and their relationships to accommodate it. If this is not a form of religious belief, what is? (19)

This small book by John Shortt, enhances my “re-membering,” to consider my own educational story even more intentionally. From it, I embody truth about the purpose of education. I do not need to surrender culture to technology; but to call culture beyond technology and its Faustian bargain. The ecological battle technology poses is a battle for attention of the mind from two different stories that are faith-based. Posing a Bible-based ecological narrative and probing questions of faith will lead to an exploration of an ecology where faith is the core fabric of what it means to flourish.

Thank you John Shortt, for “remembering”—in all of its definitions.

And thank you even more for writing it down.

Christina Belcher is professor of education at Redeemer University College in Ancaster, Ontario.