The Christian in the University

a talk by Jon Schaff, a man about town

When it comes to the subject of the Christian in the University, I confess to a kind of ignorance.  My experience as a student was different, I suspect, than most of yours.   I was a student for, and you may want to be sitting for this, 25 years.  Obviously K-12 is thirteen years.  I was a college student for 11 years.   Now that includes time spent getting a master’s and a PhD.  I have some students who will be going 11 years to get a bachelors.  Still, that’s a lot of time in school.  25 years.  All but three of those years were spent in at least nominally Christian institutions.  I went to public school for kindergarten, and also for my two years in Wyoming getting an MA.  Thanks to the sacrifice of my parents, I know that tomorrow is the feast day of St. Francis of Assisi.  I know this because I spent grades 1-7 at St. Francis of Assisi School, and grades 1-12 were achieved at the patronage of the Franciscan Sisters of Rochester, MN.  I have been lucky to be in educational venues where the institution itself is, if only in name in a couple instances, committed to Christian truth. 

             Remember that exchange between Pilate and Christ in John’s Gospel?  Christ says, “It is you who say I am a king.  The reason I was born, the reason why I came into the world, is to testify to the truth.  Anyone committed to the truth hears my voice.”  And then Pilate says, “What is truth?”  Well Pontius Pilate could pass for a university level academic with that kind of question.  It seems to me that the role of Christians on campus is to witness passionately in favor of the truth.  John Paul II writes: The splendour of truth shines forth in all the works of the Creator and, in a special way, in man, created in the image and likeness of God (cf. Gen 1:26). Truth enlightens man's intelligence and shapes his freedom, leading him to know and love the Lord. Hence the Psalmist prays: "Let the light of your face shine on us, O Lord" (Ps 4:6).

But there has been a sea change in the attitudes on campuses starting about 100 years ago.  There is pathology, identified by political philosopher Leo Strauss.  This is known as the fact/value distinction.  What is this?  Simply put it’s the distinction between, well, facts and values.  How do we know the difference?  Well, the modern academic thinks that facts are things that are observable and measurable, using some mathematical method.  These are facts.  Everything else is merely a “value” and we can say nothing authoritative about values and they are not worthy of study.  This has profound implications for the study of what were once called the humanities, the very name of which suggests the study of humanity.  This includes my own discipline, which was once known as the discipline of “politics” or “government,” indeed my undergraduate degree is in government, but now it is almost universally known as political science.  What we do in political science, and indeed in all of the social sciences, is reduce human behavior to quantifiable data.  If it isn’t quantifiable it isn’t real.  Thus we work up sophisticated computer programs using the most complicated mathematical formulas to prove that, amazingly, Republicans tend to vote for Republicans and Democrats for Democrats. 

This fact/value distinction has, I think, rather profound implications.  We have reduced the study of man to a science, and a science based on the fact/value distinction.  What we study is human behavior, i.e. man as he is.  We do not bother asking the question of what man should be; what is his relation to God; what does he owe his fellow man.  You see, these are values, and nothing can be said about them.  But just as man has used his knowledge of hard sciences to dominate the physical world, what is to stop his knowledge of social science to dominate man?  As we divorce all study of humanity from all questions of right and wrong, of morality, how do we know when our copious knowledge is being used for good ends or bad ends?  Can’t knowledge of psychology lead to knowledge about how to spread vicious propaganda, a la Josef Goebbles?  Might our knowledge of human behavior tempt us to manipulate human behavior?  We see this all the time in that confluence of philosophy and hard science known as bio-ethics.  Accepting that “value distinctions” are not the business of the scientist, how do we argue about questions regarding stem cell research? Or human cloning?  As CS Lewis writes in The Abolition of Man,  “Many things in nature which were once our masters have become our servants.  Why not this? Why must our conquest of nature stop short, in stupid reverence, before this final and toughest bit of “nature” which has hitherto been called the conscience of man?”  Even the main theoretic advocate of the fact/value distinction, Max Weber, admitted that the world of the scientist would create “specialists without spirit or vision and voluptuaries without heart.”

Indeed, why not.  G.K. Chesterton famously said, “When man stops believing in God the fear is not that he’ll believe in nothing, but that he’ll believe anything.”  This was brought home to me recently when one of my colleagues informed me that there is a show on Animal Planet where a psychic talks to the souls of dead animals.  Now, Christians are often accused of being dupes.  Of believing in superstitious hocus-pocus.  Of, in short, being credulous.   But how credulous must a person be to believe that through some medium they can contact the souls of their dead cat.  I thought that “Crossing Over” with John Edwards was silly enough, but at least he claims to be talking to humans, not dearly departed ferrets. 

Art Marmorstein likes the syllogism that Knowledge is power, all power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.  This suggests that knowledge is absolutely corrupting.  Besides be pithy, there is a high degree of accuracy to that.  But it isn’t that knowledge in and of itself is bad.  No one in education can really believe that.  But it is knowledge detached from an idea of what is the proper use of knowledge that is a problem.  Take those pesky Pharisees.  The Pharisees were the academics of their day.  They knew the Judaic law backwards and forwards.  Now is that bad?  Isn’t it a good thing to know the law, just as we Christians would say it is important to know scripture and maybe know a little theology?  The problem with the Pharisees is that they knew the law, but had no clue what to do with it.  They had no idea what the purpose of the law was.  Remember, when Christ informs us that the highest laws are first, love God with all your heart, with all your mind and all your soul, and second, to love your neighbor as yourself, he is answering the question, “What is the most important commandment?”  It is good to know the law, jut as it is good to know how cells divide, why people vote the way the do, how does the mind operate, but this lower knowledge must be in service to something higher.  John Henry Newman, after whom the Newman Center is named, not by accident, writes in his work The Idea of the University that there is a distinction between instruction and education.  Instruction in concerned with external and mechanical rules.  Education, Newman writes, is an action on our nature, and the foundation of character. 

When we think about our status as Christians on the modern campus, we have to start thinking about what is education, especially what was once known as liberal education, as opposed to, say technical or vocational education.  Liberal education, which is ostensibly what we are supposed to be getting here at Northern, is the education in culture or toward culture.  This is what we mean by a “cultured” human being.  What is it to be cultured?  This is related to the word, “agriculture” which is cultivation of the soil.  This suggests that liberal education is the cultivation of the mind and the soul.  We don’t cultivate the soil in just any old way, for what we want is a healthy crop.  Similarly, we don’t educate in just any old way, because we want to cultivate a healthy, decent human being.  Leo Strauss writes, “Liberal education reminds those members of a mass democracy,” and that’s us, “who have ears to hear, of human greatness.”

This human greatness is, in great part, the capacity to know the truth.  In the words of Peter, we are made holy by "obedience to the truth."  Obedience, we should be reminded, is not easy.  While Christ is the "the true light that enlightens everyone" our souls are darkened by original sin.  Our will to resist falsehood is weakened and we are tempted towards relativism.  Yet as John Paul II writes, “Jesus Christ, the "light of the nations", shines upon the face of his Church, which he sends forth to the whole world to proclaim the Gospel to every creature (cf. Mk 16:15). Hence the Church, as the People of God among the nations, while attentive to the new challenges of history and to mankind's efforts to discover the meaning of life, offers to everyone the answer which comes from the truth about Jesus Christ and his Gospel.”  Ultimately the truth that needs to be proclaimed is the truth that Jesus Christ died for our sins and that on the third day he rose, giving to us eternal life. 

As a faculty member I am constrained as to how I give witness.  I am a state employee and so I need to be careful that I am not overstepping the boundaries and confusing my position as teacher for that of a preacher.  Ideally there would not be much of a boundary, but the realities of state sponsored education interfere with the ideal.  Thus I use outlets like IV and the Newman Center to share my faith with students.  But you students are not under such constraints.  Because of the unfortunate realities involving bad interpretations of law, it is extremely difficult for state universities to care for the soul.  And speaking as someone who has spent most of his adult life at Christian universities, I can guarantee you that the state of modern academia is such that even if allowed to care openly for student’s souls, few academics are inclined to do so in any positive way.  It is left largely to the students to spread the truth of Jesus Christ.  Without that truth, all the truths we learn about plants, and market economies, and social patterns, and so on are meaningless.  Divorced from the anchor that is Christ, the modern mind drifts from this intellectual fad to that, completely credulous in the face of the most horrifying ideologies. 

It will not be easy, as many of you have probably found out.  The world, particularly the academic world, presents many obstacles.  This is your challenge: to counter the culture.  In the words of St. Francis: “Lord, make me an instrument of your peace, Where there is hatred, let me sow love;...where there is injury, pardon;
...where there is doubt, faith;...where there is despair, hope;
...where there is darkness, light;...where there is sadness, joy”

Some of you may be familiar with the film Chariots of Fire.  If you’re not, you should be.  For one thing, it is the Academy Award winner for Best film for 1981, so it’s a pretty good movie.  But more to our purpose tonight, the movie tells the story of two men, Harold Arahams and Eric Liddle, who ran for Great Britain in the 1924 Olympics in Paris.  Eric Liddle was the son of Christian missionaries.  The conflict with Liddle is whether his love of running distracts from his more important job as a missionary.  He eventually concludes that God made him to run, saying, “When I run, I feel God’s pleasure.” He is to run the 100 meters at the Olympics, but when he finds out that the trials are to be held on Sunday, he refuses to run, saying that Sunday is for the Lord, not for running.  Eric Liddle’s actions provide inspiration for us, many years later.  Instead of running in the Olympics on Sunday, he goes to a Church and preaches a sermon.  In the face of what the world demanded, that he run for the glory of Britain, he chose to give witness to God.  When we feel that all is hopeless, that the world is too much against us, we should feel blessed, because the Lord provides no special rewards for those who have it easy.  But the persecuted, those who have to struggle, they are blessed. In an increasingly secular world, particularly that world of the university, it is even more important that the people here tonight give witness, in their words and actions, that there is a truth higher than any truth you’ll learn in class here at NSU.  Jesus told his disciples, "I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me" (John 14:6). He did not merely point the way to God. He himself claimed to be the only way to the Father and the source of eternal truth and life.

When Eric Liddle preaches his sermon in Chariots of Fire, he reads from the book of Isaiah.  Let me conclude by reading the same passage, because it is relevant to those of us who are called to bear witness in this age.  Here is what Isaiah says:

"Hast thou not known? hast thou not heard, that the everlasting God, the LORD, the Creator of the ends of the earth, fainteth not, neither is weary? there is no searching of his understanding. He giveth power to the faint; and to them that have no might he increaseth strength. Even the youths shall faint and be weary, and the young men shall utterly fall: But they that wait upon the LORD shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with wings as eagles; they shall run, and not be weary; and they shall walk, and not faint."

Back to "Man about town..." | My Homepage | NSU Home | Other Faculty Websites | Academic Programs

Northern State University