Sanctification is when God educates us to better resemble his holy
character. What conception can we have of how God does this? One
possibility would be to think that all-knowing, almighty, transcendent
God has a plan of 1000+ steps for each individual’s character
transformation, and executes it step by step. There would be a big heap
of mutual dependencies between people, as God would use other people in
many cases for an individuals’s education. So this would result in an
awfully compley full linear upfront project decomposition, only
possible for the almighty. But is sanctification really that way?
The other extreme would be to think that God simply exposes
individuals to the truth. And everytime the truth touches somebody, it
changes something or removes some dirt from his life. It would not be
important in what order things are changed or the dirt is removed. I
favor this alternative, and I would compare it to a brush: everytime
the brush is moved over dirty clothing, the clothing is touched and
some of the dirt is removed. It is totally of no interest in what order
the dirt grains are removed, but that everything’s clean in the end.
How about a real world analogy? A friend of mine is a gifted special
school teacher (in preparation service), and some days ago we discussed
a project she introduced in her math class. She calls it the “Zählwerk”
(that’s “mechanical counter”, but actually the name of a depicted
house, so better “counting station”). Regarding the concept, she
explained to me that the pupils work through a set of worksheets,
independently, and that they should train work practices while doing
that. For example, to deal correctly with sorting work sheet templates
away, handling reference material like a math lexicons, giving mutual
support when difficulties arise, etc.. I’d like to see that as a good
example for, say, “brush-style education”: it’s not about executing
steps, but about training in good practices, again and again and again.
You may see from her nice example that “brush-style education” has no
regard for any “order of steps” for learning the work practices,
rather, many things are taught in parallel. Interesting enough,
teachers are generally held to have a set goals for each individual
lesson, and a set of goals to reach these goals. But bush-style
education is so much simpler, and, I think, more effective.
Start date: 2007-10-01
Post date: 2007-12-02
Version date: 2007-12-02 (for last meaningful change)
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