05. Chapter 5: His Aims

Chapter 5 His Aims A real teacher must have both strategy and tactics, that is, he must have both objectives and means for attaining them. Without strategy, tactics have no goal; without tactics, strategy has no means of attainment.

What were the objectives of the Great Teacher?

First, make a list of these for yourself, and then compare it with the one given below.

1. To do his Father’s will and work. “My meat is to do the will of him that sent me and to accomplish his work” (John 4:34).

2. To be accepted as the Messiah, “I that speak unto thee am he.” “Whom say ye that I am?”

3. To win learners and to train them as witnesses of his. So he called many, and chose a few to be apostles, and sent them forth two by two, and said to them: “Ye are my witnesses.”

4. To substitute vital for formal religion. This covers a great deal, including the prayer of the publican, the benevolence of the poor widow, fasting in secret, the elimination of the motives of murder and lust and hatred, perhaps even the destruction of the sacrificial system in the cleansing of the temple. “I desire mercy and not sacrifice.” “Pray to thy Father in secret.”

5. To fulfill the law in the new universal kingdom of social righteousness. “Think not that I am come to destroy the law or the prophets. I am not come to destroy but to fulfill.” Most of the parables were designed to make plain to discerning minds the nature of the Kingdom.

6. To show by example and to teach by precept the way of life. “I am come that they might have life, and that they might have it more abundantly.” Through seeking and saving the lost, he would prevent the ultimate miscarriage of life. He came to bear witness to the truth that by losing life we gain it. He gave his life as a ransom for many.

7. To quicken the faith and hope of men. He added to John the Baptist’s gospel of repentance the injunction: “Believe the gospel,” that is, accept as true the good news of God’s love and act accordingly. His concern was that at his coining again he should find faith on the earth.

8. To break the bonds of race prejudice. He talked with a Samaritan woman at high noon. He made a Samaritan the model neighbor of one of his stories. He healed the daughter of a Syrophoenician woman and the servant of a Roman centurion. He received Greeks and spoke to them of life through death, as Plato had done over three hundred years before. He talked of his “other sheep,” of the leavening of “the whole,” of the salt of “the earth,” of the light of the “world.”

9. To destroy the works of darkness. Thus by the finger of God he cast out demons, healed diseases, and relieved affliction of every kind, and gave his disciples power and authority over the demons.

How would you extend this list?

Note we have here read his aims in terms of his accomplishments. Is this justifiable? If so, why? If not, what were his aims in distinction from his accomplishments?

Which, of these aims are practicable for his followers today? In his aims as a teacher did Jesus place primary emphasis on the acting or the thinking of his pupils? The statement of aims given above is drawn from his own teachings. Suppose we approach the matter from another angle. If you are somewhat familiar with modern educational thought, make a list of the aims of education as a present-day thinker might formulate them. Then consider the extent to which these aims appear in the deeds and words of Jesus. Such a mode of procedure would apply a modern standard, the highest we have, to his work done nearly twenty centuries ago. The aims of education;

1. To develop a sound body.

2. To form a good character.

3. To refine feeling.

4. To inform and equip the intellect.

5. To make a good citizen.

6. To cultivate productive skill.

7. To relate life to its Source and Goal.

It is true that such a statement as this is synthetic. It probably would not be found in its entirety in the usual books today on educational theory. Points three and seven are very commonly omitted. But it is a fair composite picture of what educators hold today concerning the aims of education.

Now ask yourself the question: To what extent do these aims appear in the work of Jesus as teacher?

1. He healed the bodies of men and made them whole.

2. He lived and taught the highest standards of moral character.

3. He pointed out the beauties of nature.

4. He taught ethical and spiritual truths and trained the intelligence of his disciples.

5. He was a good citizen and taught obedience to civil authority.

6. He was a carpenter and taught the economic virtues.

7. He was the Son and spiritualized life.

We note then that Jesus practiced what modern educators preach, that complete education is sevenfold— namely, physical, moral, esthetic, intellectual, social, vocational, and spiritual. In both practice and theory the Master Teacher long ago set up the standards which are also those of our modern pedagogy.

What comments have you to make upon this showing?

G. Stanley Hall thinks that the great objective of Jesus was to bring men to attain, or at least to approximate, his own state of mind; that it was this objective which led him to become a teacher; that the difficulty of his task determined his methods of training a few, of reticence, and of healing. So men would be brought to recognize him for what he was without his open avowal of divine sonship, which some would regard as blasphemous and others as insane talk. And all this he was thinking through at the time of the Temptation.

“But now his thought must turn to the world of other men. What could be done with this great new insight so hard to grasp, so impossible to teach directly? . . . Thus he must probably always teach with reservations and with more or less veiled reticence, for to reveal all he had seen would spoil all. He must follow a program or curriculum, and must be a great teacher, for if others ever were to attain his state of mind or to get near it, and profit in proportion, it would never be by his method, viz., that of solitude, meditation, and prayer, but by objective demonstration. . . . A man conscious of his own essential divinity must give proof in object lesson form of his superiority over others whose souls had not realized their own consubstantiality with God.”^[1] [1] G. Stanley Hall, “Jesus, tire Christ, in the Light of Psychology,” Vol. I, p. 304.

What do you. think of Hall’s views? Would you say that one of the aims of Jesus was to establish religion as an ecclesiastical institution on the earth? Did Jesus intend to reform Judaism or to found Christianity?

Review his aims and ask in which he succeeded best. To what extent should his aims be ours?