Your national mail-order book and curriculum supplier 2112 W. Laburnum Ave. N.J. In recent years the question of the purpose, content and reform of theological education has been widely discussed. While Hodgson's book is related to this discussion, it has a broader concern. Its primary focus is not theological education, or even religious studies, but the educational process itself. According to Hodgson, who is the Charles G. Finney Professor of Theology at Vanderbilt Divinity School, there is a religious dimension in all education, whether we recognize it or not.
All education is essentially religious because it aims at the transformation of human beings.
After tracking the understandings of God as teacher in both ancient Greek philosophy and the biblical writings, Hodgson points to the confluence of these traditions in the patristic theologians. For Christian thinkers like Clement of Alexandria, Irenaeus and Origen, the way of redemption is the way of God's paideia. The divine instruction, decisively manifest in Christ, is marked by benevolence, friendship and persuasion rather than by threat and coercion. Hodgson finds numerous variations on this theme of God's pedagogical activity in the world in thinkers as diverse as Augustine, Thomas, Calvin, Lessing, Kierkegaard and Hegel. While crediting Christian faith for helping to radicalize the meaning of education, Hodgson argues that modern and postmodern theories of pedagogy also see education as far more than mere recollection of rote learning.