Got a nice link from Bill Harris on an article about why clear communication isn’t always the best for learning. That link then led me to a good youtube link that talks about why students don’t learn from very clear science videos.

The first thing I thought of in reading the article was what Spud Snapper taught us in our education class at Calvin Seminary that you must first raise dissonance in the mind of the listener if you want them to learn something. Spud was a life long teacher who taught elementary, secondary, college and post-graduate levels of formal education. He was an amazing man who probably taught me more about preaching and teaching than anyone else. His point was that unless there is dissonance very little is often retained. This is a very similar point to the article linked.

The YouTube piece on effective science videos goes further. It applies some of this understanding to the study of students learning science. The video makes the point that their observation and application is specific to science but I think it is very germane to religious instruction as well. Why would learning science and learning religious have so much in common? Because (unlike conventional wisdom that asserts the occupy two different spaces in reality or at least knowability) in both cases the “student” has a wealth of first hand perceptions and formed ideas about the way things are and are confident in their positions on this subject. This is illustrated nicely by the video regarding the physics of a ball traveling through space.

The author of the video pretty clearly goes through why it is that students don’t learn and don’t assimilate what is being taught by the science video:

1. Students think they know it
2. They don’t pay utmost attention
3. They don’t recognize that what was presented differs from what they were already thinking
4. They don’t learn a thing.
5. They get more confident in the ideas they were thinking before.

I can’t tell you how true I have found this to be in church work. I won’t name names or tell stories but this is very much the way it is.

In a post recently I was working on the question of Jesus’ trial and what Jesus’ options were. Both Jesus’ disciples and Jesus’ enemies simply could not believe anything Jesus was telling them. The distance between his assertions and the plausibility structure they were all living in was simply too vast. What could change that?

The Easter morning story in Luke is brief and to the point. The women who went to the tomb to perform the embalming of Jesus’ body get told by two men in dazzling clothes that Jesus is risen just like he said. They go back to the disciples and they are immediately disregarded because they are women and their story is dismissed as an “idle tale”. Again, there is nothing in the plausibility structure that will allow the disciples to believe what the women are asserting.

It will take multiple appearances of Jesus doing a variety of things to rework their plausibility structure. The dissonance will be incredible. He will have to prove to them they are not dreaming. How? We don’t dream together, we dream alone. He will have to prove to them that he is not a ghost. They will have to touch him. He will have to prove to them that he is their friend, Jesus of Nazareth. Thomas will have to place his fingers in the nail holes he saw made on Good Friday and his hand into the wound in Jesus’ side. He will have to redo some miracles and he will have to spend a lot of time going over material from the Hebrew Scriptures. He will have to make food for them and break bread with them. He’s going to have to be with people who knew him intimately as well as be with large crowds of people at one time.

What will happen is that this new piece of information will need to be worked into their present plausibility structure regarding a number of elements about their world view. Their ideas about a general resurrection of the dead (not some gnostic soul/spirit escape into ethereal realms) will be employed and worked through theologically to yield Pauline passages like 1 Corinthians 15, Colossians 1 and Romans 8 where this resurrected body of Jesus is not simply some isolated event but the beginnings of a process that will culminate in the renovation of the cosmos. With this reworked plausibility structure what was remembered from the words of Jesus gets understood in a radically new way to live and an ability to love that appears reckless and inappropriate for people trying to save their own lives and make their “you only live once” life “count”.

One of the best witnesses to the fact of the resurrection is in fact the change in plausibility structures. Prior to Easter the assertions that Jesus had been making all along were unthinkable. Only the insane claim to be the creator God. They are immediately disproved by prison walls or the restraints we use for the dangerously insane.

One of the most ironic elements of the Good Friday narrative is that the demand to execute Jesus pursued by the religious authorities actually validates the fact that Jesus was speaking clearly and claiming to be Yhwh come to rescue and judge his people. The religious leaders conducted what was the most logical and conclusive test for such a claimant, kill him. God of course cannot be bound by our chains or held by our walls. The best way to demonstrate Jesus to be a dangerous lunatic was to kill him.

Jesus’ disciples were actually a bit less sane. They lived in the nether world of kind of embracing some of it while not fully thinking the matter through. Judas was likely the smartest of the group.

What changed all of the math on who this Jesus was is the resurrection. Even smart lunatics can get free of chains and prisons, but none can break the power of death. Everyone in the world has always known that only God can do such a thing. We also know that only God can also raise someone not simply to die at a more advanced age of the common things that take us, but to give him flesh not subject to the age of decay, flesh that doesn’t have a shelf life, flesh that is of creation 2.0, flesh that isn’t winding down starting from zero hour of the big bang. Only God can create a new heavens and a new earth out of a corpse of a Jewish bastard.

The difficulty we face in church is exactly what this little video details. Our plausibility structures have been sufficiently altered to allow us to furnish new answers to old questions. “Could Jesus be God?” “sure” but then we go about our business like it doesn’t matter.

We share the same problem as the disciples living in the nether land of kind of believing Jesus and kind of not. Most of us find ourselves so deeply steeped in today’s baseline religious assumption, moralistic therapeutic deism that church raises exactly zero dissonance for us. The defeater dynamic of anything new:

1. Students think they know it
2. They don’t pay utmost attention
3. They don’t recognize that what was presented differs from what they were already thinking
4. They don’t learn a thing.
5. They get more confident in the ideas they were thinking before.

Has us in its box.

It’s a miracle we believe even half of the gospel. Good thing miracles happen.