16. Chapter 16: His Use Of The Concrete

Chapter 16 His Use Of The Concrete The term “concrete” is associated by contrast with the term “abstract.” What is not concrete is abstract, and what is concrete is not abstract. The table before you is concrete, but the quality of utility which it possesses in common with many other things is abstract.

It is easy to lay down a working line of distinction between the concrete and the abstract. What would you say it is? That which appeals to the senses is concrete, and that which does not appeal to the senses is abstract. Thus individual men are concrete, but the universal man is abstract. Yonder bluebird is concrete, but animal is abstract. A difficulty arises regarding states of consciousness or some element of a state of consciousness. Is the sensation red, received from looking at a red object, abstract or concrete? The object is, of course, concrete. The sensation is open to inner observation, it appeals to the Inner sense. As such it, too, is concrete. Any state of mind studied by introspection is concrete. So our principle holds—whatever appeals to the senses (outer or inner) is concrete.

Watch the following distinction carefully. We may have an idea of “animal” as a class in mind. In this case “animal” is the object of the idea. Now the idea in this case, being open to internal observation, is concrete, but “animal” the object of the idea, not being accessible to the senses, but only to thought, is abstract. Do you follow? If not, try again to get it.

Now, in the development of intelligence, which naturally comes first, the concrete or the abstract? The question means, Which naturally appeals more to children, sense reports or thought reports? A series of other questions will bring out the same idea. Which comes first, the particular or the general? the empirical or the rational? the percept or the concept?

Such being the case, let us ask whether we usually illustrate the concrete by the abstract or the abstract by the concrete. Do we use the visible to illustrate the invisible or the invisible to illustrate the visible? For your answer think of the concrete imagery like golden streets, palms, harps, crowns, with which our minds picture the abstract idea, heaven.

How important to the teacher of less mature minds than his own is the art of illustration? What does illustrating the abstract do for it? Does it make it more or less intelligible? vivid? clear? A great philosopher, Kant, once wrote: “Concepts without percepts are empty, percepts without concepts are blind.” Can you figure out what he meant? Why is it that a country boy may not be able to see the city for the houses? or a city boy the forest for the trees? The Swiss educational reformer Pestalozzi affirmed that there must be a sense-basis for all instruction. What did he mean by it? Do you agree with him?

Now in what region, abstract or concrete, are principles? axioms? theorems? maxims? proverbs? commands? laws? life alter death? all moral and religious truths? If these things are to be taught in a realizable way, how is it to be done? So we come to our question: Did Jesus make use of the concrete in teaching the abstract? As a moral and religious teacher his field was the abstract. His audiences showed various degrees of unfitness and fitness to follow him. How did he bring abstract truth down to the level of their intelligence? At this point make a list for yourself of all the illustrations of the concrete you can think of, or have time to find, in the teachings of Jesus.

Since the concrete is used to help convey the meaning of the abstract, make in a parallel column a corresponding 1st of the abstract lessons so taught. Do this for yourself first. In doing it you will find perhaps some difficulty in saying at just what the abstract lesson is, and you may differ from others in interpreting the abstract meaning of the concrete illustrations. This helps to reveal the difficulty of understanding the abstract world. By the way, heaven may be concrete enough to those who are there, but to us now it is, as a place at least, conceived and not perceived, and so is abstract.

We could easily become philosophical at this point and ask whether the abstract ideas have objective existence or not, or whether they exist only as features of similarity in particular things, or even whether they are only class names. Does the concrete alone exist? Look up realism, conceptualism, nominalism, in the dictionary or some general history of philosophy.

We might also draw another line of distinction between the concrete and the abstract, somewhat more philosophical, and say that the concrete is a whole, and the abstract is any part of that whole, as a tree is concrete and its leaf is abstract. On the first basis, as appealing to the senses, leaf would be concrete, too. This paragraph and the preceding will appeal to the abstract-minded. The following will illustrate the use Jesus made of the concrete in teaching the abstract.

Each, separate parable is a study in the concrete.

In, addition every miracle was concrete, but to what extent were the miracles performed to teach abstract lessons? For what purpose were they primarily performed? To relieve suffering or distress or embarrassment? To prove his Messiahship?

Further, every event of his life was concrete and has been used by others to teach the abstract, though not so used in every case by himself. What events in his life were used by himself as concrete illustrations of abstract truths? Is this one: “If they have called the master of the house Beelzebub, how much more they of his household”?

Fill in for yourself the abstract meaning for the question marks in the second column above.

What additional examples have you of the concrete used to make plain the abstract?

What now may we as teachers of moral and religious truth learn from the use Jesus made of the concrete?

Suppose you had to teach the lesson of obedience, how would you do it? How did Jesus do it? In teaching is it better to proceed from the concrete to the abstract, or from the abstract to the concrete? Which did Jesus do in Matthew 6:25-30? Is it from the abstract to the concrete back to the abstract again? How would this question be related to the intellectual attainment of the audience? Is it conceivable that before some audiences one might proceed from the abstract to the abstract? Would it be desirable? Which is the bigger mistake, to talk to children in terms of the abstract without the concrete, or to talk to adults in terms of the concrete without the abstract? In the preparation of the next lesson you have to teach, note its abstract and its concrete elements.

One big practical principle we derive from this study is this: Never try to teach the abstract without attaching it to the concrete. If you have to teach honesty to boys, tell true stories of boys who were honest when it was hard to be so, and so on. Is that teaching principle just given abstract or concrete? How would you make it the other?

We have now repeatedly seen how entirely in accord with the best we know today in educational theory is the practice of Jesus. How do you account for this? Would you describe Jesus as “a born teacher”? Do you think he may have imitated any of his own teachers in the Nazareth synagogue school, or elsewhere? Do you suppose he just taught properly in a natural way? Do you think he may ever have considered the methods of teaching in a conscious way? With what problems may he have occupied his mind during “the eighteen silent years”? Of course, our answers here have to be held tentatively.