Space Enough, and Time

One of the things that I like most about Stanley Hauerwas’s letter to Christians starting college is that he takes a few paragraphs to think ahead to the time when a student moves from core curriculum to major and minor concentrations.

Eventually, you will no longer be a freshman, and American undergraduate education will force you to begin to specialize. This will present dangers as well as opportunities. You will be tempted to choose a major that will give you a sense of coherence. But be careful your major does not narrow you in the wrong way.

I think one of the best things that happened to me in college was moving beyond just a major in Bible to a second major in English.  They kept one another in check even while they pushed each other along.  Hauerwas continues.

The argument Hauerwas presents encourages the student to treat the history of one’s chosen discipline with care because it can inform one’s understanding of the big picture.  It also helps to understand the evolution of unspoken “agendas” for a given field:

Too often, though, students have no idea how and why the scientific fields’ research agendas developed into their current form of practice. To go back and read Isaac Newton can be a bit of a shock, because he interwove his scientific analysis with theological arguments. You shouldn’t take this as a mandate for doing the same thing in the twenty-first century. It should, however, make you realize that modern science has profound metaphysical and theological dimensions that have to be cordoned off, perhaps for good reasons. Or perhaps not. The point is that knowing the history of your discipline will, inevitably, broaden the kinds of questions you ask and force you to read to be an intellectual rather than just a specialist.

Hauerwas goes on to say that writers like Dante shouldn’t be “kept” by English departments alone, that he has much to offer in areas beyond the land of literary criticism.

In the end, Hauerwas promotes a kind of “theological interrogation” that I think is appropriate (if not grossly under-practiced on multiple levels, high school included).

I emphasize broadening your major with historical questions and challenges to set categories because your calling is to be a Christian student, not a physics student or an English student. Again, I do not want to make every Christian in the university into a theologian, but it is important for you to interrogate theologically what you are learning. For example, you may major in economics, a discipline currently dominated by mathematical models and rational-choice theories. Those theories may have some utility (to use an economic expression), but they also may entail anthropological assumptions that a Christian cannot accept. You will not be in a position even to see the problem, much less address it, if you let your intellectual life be defined by your discipline.

In the end, it’s really a way of thinking about thinking that involves the Spirit.  And it’s just as particular as any other perspective or form of “criticism.”  There is some real wisdom, I think, in what Hauerwas asserts.

(image from sju.edu)

The church, particularly the evangelical Protestant kind, often has a strange relationship between faith and learning.  It as if one must necessarily cancel out the other.  And while I got more of a sense of that when heading off to seminary, I imagine it is also true for college, particularly in light of the myths/realities one hears about coming form campuses today.  In his letter to Christian college freshmen, Hauerwas will have none of it.

Don’t underestimate how much the Church needs your mind. Remember your Bible-study class? Christians read Isaiah’s prophecy of a suffering servant as pointing to Christ. That seems obvious, but it’s not; or at least it wasn’t obvious to the Ethiopian eunuch to whom the Lord sent Philip to explain things. Christ is written everywhere, not only in the prophecies of the Old Testament but also in the pages of history and in the book of nature. The Church has been explaining, interpreting, and illuminating ever since it began. It takes an educated mind to do the Church’s work of thinking about and interpreting the world in light of Christ. Physics, sociology, French literary theory: All these and more—in fact, everything you study in college—is bathed in the light of Christ. It takes the eyes of faith to see that light, and it takes an educated mind to understand and articulate it.

It really is saddening (and maddening) to hear people of faith compartmentalize their beliefs in a way that ultimately rejects the lordship of Christ over all of His creation.

It is, though, too easy to go too far in the other direction: where learning is more of a distraction than an in-road for what God has done and is doing.  And, as everyone since Paul’s time (and probably before) knew: knowledge tends to puff up.  As Hauerwas states, though, learning is good for many things in the church, including a sense of defense for the faith.  Even still, there is something else to keep in mind:

So, yes, to be a student is to be called to serve the Church and the world. But always remember who serves what. Colleges focus on learning; as they do so, they can create the illusion that being smart and well educated is the be-all and end-all of life. You do not need to be educated to be a Christian. That’s obvious. After all, Christ is most visible to the world in the person who responds to his call of “Come, follow me.” I daresay St. Francis of Assisi was more important to the medieval Church than any intellectual. One of the most brilliant men in the history of the Church, St. Bonaventure, a Franciscan, said as much. But the Church needs some Christians to be educated, as St. Bonaventure also knew; this is why he taught at the University of Paris and ensured that, in their enthusiasm for the example of St. Francis, his brother Franciscans didn’t give up on education.

(image from yourquizmaster.com)

“The Christian religion,” wrote Robert Louis Wilken, “is inescapably ritualistic (one is received into the Church by a solemn washing with water), uncompromisingly moral (‘be ye perfect as your Father in heaven is perfect,’ said Jesus), and unapologetically intellectual (be ready to give a ‘reason for the hope that is in you,’ in the words of 1 Peter). Like all the major religions of the world, Christianity is more than a set of devotional practices and a moral code: it is also a way of thinking about God, about human beings, about the world and history.”

So begins “Go With God,” an “open letter” from Stanley Hauerwas to up-and-coming Christian college freshmen that was posted to First Things back in 2010.  I didn’t know that it existed until last week, when the site re-upped the letter on its Twitter feed.  It’s a great read that I thought I’d work through over the course of a few days.

It is interesting to reflect on “Christian thinking,” particularly in a culture that has (overly?) emphasized feeling as the prime faith disposition.  And while I would ultimately argue that its a false distinction, I do think it’s good to think about “thinking Christianly” as a particular muscle that needs exercise for many of us.  Hauerwas does a great job of helping us see that.

The Christian fact is very straightforward: To be a student is a calling. . .

It is an extraordinary gift. In a world of deep injustice and violence, a people exists that thinks some can be given time to study. We need you to take seriously the calling that is yours by virtue of going to college. You may well be thinking, “What is he thinking? I’m just beginning my freshman year. I’m not being called to be a student. None of my peers thinks he or she is called to be a student. They’re going to college because it prepares you for life. I’m going to college so I can get a better job and have a better life than I’d have if I didn’t go to college. It’s not a calling.”

But you are a Christian. This means you cannot go to college just to get a better job. These days, people talk about college as an investment because they think of education as a bank account: You deposit the knowledge and expertise you’ve earned, and when it comes time to get a job, you make a withdrawal, putting all that stuff on a résumé and making money off the investment of your four years. Christians need jobs just like anybody else, but the years you spend as an undergraduate are like everything else in your life. They’re not yours to do with as you please. They’re Christ’s.

Hauerwas is correct: it’s an odd thing to think of going to college as a “calling.”  It is an assumption for many high school students today, a necessary step to getting reach certain employment goals in a decent time-frame.  It is good to be reminded, though, that there is something special and humbling about getting to set aside a chunk of time to get the chance to think and read and learn and explore God’s creation and mankind’s interaction with it.  And then to say that, like everything else, those years belong to Christ?  Brilliant.

Christ’s call on you as a student is a calling to meet the needs of the Church, both for its own life and the life of the world. The Resurrection of Jesus, Wilken suggests, is not only the central fact of Christian worship but also the ground of all Christian thinking “about God, about human beings, about the world and history.” Somebody needs to do that thinking—and that means you.

You can read the whole letter here.  Next time we’ll look at what Hauerwas says about the intellectual life and the church.

(image from vipjackson.com)