基督徒能動性的培育：亞洲公民社會崛起中的教育反思

Nurturing of Christian Agency: Christian Education in the Midst of the Rise of Asian Civil Society

LIM Teck Peng

The rise of civil society has witnessed not only the government becoming the target of advocacy by the activists but also the proliferation of rival views among the people. How does such social development impact the church and her responsibility in equipping the saints? How should the church re-orientate her teaching ministry so that she as a witnessing community for Christ can engage the “new normal”? What are the opportunities, challenges and threats facing Christian teachers in an emerging culture of advocacy? This paper does not seek to answer all these questions, what it intends to do is providing an orientation by first of all clarifying the relationship between Christian education and agency.

Treating acts of advocacy as instantiations of agency, the present author seeks to first of all move beyond the false dichotomy between privatisation and politicisation of faith by explicating the reflexive dimension of agency through the works of the British sociologist Antony Giddens. Focusing on the reflexive knowledge embedded in human action, this paper seeks to remind the readers the significance of retrieving and examining Christian self- and contextual-knowledge behind any social action. As the rise of civil society brings forth a greater opportunity for social participation and advocacy, it is all the more pivotal that Christian agency is nurtured through an educational process that allows critical reflection, clarification and continuing growth of Christian self-understanding and contextual discernment. In this respect, the restrictive view of Christian agency as political advocacy is vulnerable to a false dichotomy between privatised and politicised faith; such reductionism also runs the risk of denying the educational need and possibility to reflect and reform one’s self- and contextual-knowledge as both witness for Christ and citizen.

Against a prevailing pragmatic and reductionist view of social action, the present paper argues for the need to construe Christian education as a reflective process that nurtures Christian agency. Piecing together Donald A. Schön’s notion of “reflection-in-action,” John H. Yoder’s concepts of “body politics” and “revolutionary subordination,” and the idea of the church as “a diacritical community” proposed by Robert E. Webber and Rodney R. Clapp, the agential dimension of Christian education is further elaborated.