Finding Christ in College
You might think that going to college is all about gaining knowledge about things, but it isn’t. You have already picked up some knowledge in high school, and hopefully, your parents, or more probably your friends, have taught you a thing or two. In any case, you can pick up knowledge anywhere and anytime. Knowledge is cheap and easy and more plentiful by the hour. Google is your door to knowledge, not college. Knowledge is about web searching, not soul searching. You need to know more than you do right now, sure, but that is not something you should worry about. Instead, you should worry about learning how to think. That is why you are going to college.
Put in more grandiose terms, you are going to college in order to initiate a lifelong quest for wisdom. More precisely put still, you are going to learn how to think about what knowledge is. If knowledge is your relationship to things in the world, wisdom is your relationship to your knowledge of those things. Wisdom involves self-reflection, and thinking about your self is a lot harder than thinking about anything else. You are a moving target, so close to yourself that you can hardly see yourself. It is much easier to think about things than to think about how and why you think about things. It is really easy to miss thinking about yourself in the midst of everything you are supposed to know. That’s why the founders of Wabash College put it in a small town on the Midwestern frontier and made it a single-sex institution. They wanted to make you choose between being bored and thinking about yourself.
So don’t be fooled about knowledge. Knowledge is powerful, but knowledge has its limits. Knowledge is not necessarily good for you or for the world. People can know a lot and still do evil things with that knowledge. People can know a lot about the world and know little or nothing about themselves. People can also know a lot of stuff without knowing how that stuff fits together in a broader picture. You will learn a lot of things in college, but you will face the much harder (and much more rewarding) task of learning how to think about what thinking is.
All thinking begins with two movements of your will that we can call questioning and loving. Why a movement of your will? Because you must take ownership over your knowing if it is to have any meaning for you. You must decide to be a knower, rather than being a passive recipient of what somebody else knows. That is such a crucial claim that we can say you don’t really become a free person until you decide that you want to think about how and why you know things. Why questioning? Because questioning is what thinking is. The world will open up to you only if you ask it to. But you have to learn how, which you can only learn, by the way, by asking questions about everything, including the act of questioning. Why desire? Because questioning without a desire to know the truth quickly degenerates into triviality and skepticism. You have to love the world if you really want to know it deeply. We only really know that which we love, because knowing is about being grasped as well as grasping. Knowing is a reaching out of the mind that is based on trust and fueled by passion. Knowledge and love are as closely connected, in fact, as ignorance and hate.
Which brings us to Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ is the truth, the life, and the way, the full disclosure of the identity of God, the source of all truth and the longing of all desire. I know that to be truer than I know anything else in this world. If you are a Christian, you know this too, and thus you know that your quest for wisdom is nothing more than a journey into the heart of Christ.
But you should also know that the world hates Christ, and no part of our world these days hates Christ more than higher education. The world hates Christ because the world does not know Christ. Ignorance and hate are intimately connected, remember? The world thinks that Christ represents ignorance, intolerance, hypocrisy, and falsity of every kind. Even many, probably most, Christians in the world of higher education think that Christ has nothing to do with what you need to learn in college. Churches, too, can mislead you by portraying Christ as love without emphasizing that Christ too is knowledge. To know the Son is to know the Father, and you cannot know the things of this world properly without knowing their creator and sustainer. God is love, and Jesus is the physical presence of that love, which means that God is not only the inspiration of our knowing (through the Holy Spirit) but also the object of our knowledge. To know anything at all, no matter how partially, is to know something about God.
This is all very obvious to anyone who has thought about it even briefly. Yet nobody will tell you this in college. If you mention it to any of your professors, they will think you are crazy.
Your task in college will thus be to play a game of spiritual hide and seek. You might think that I am suggesting that Christ is hiding at Wabash College, and your job is to find him. Of course, I could never think of such a thing. Jesus Christ is the most real being in this world and the next. We can know things because He first knew us. The world is knowable because a divine intelligence ordered it through Him and He gave it to us to be known. We can put knowledge to good use because there is a moral law in us, which is itself the most sublime form of this-worldly knowledge.
God is not hidden from us. We are hidden from ourselves.
Nonetheless, all or nearly all of your professors will try to convince you that you can learn about the world and even learn about yourself without knowing or loving God. This is not the result of a liberal conspiracy, by the way. Professors are specialists. They have been trained to divide the world of knowable things into the smallest possible parts, and then to focus on one of these parts to the exclusion of all the other parts. Even devout Christian professors have been trained to do this.
Indeed, the professors who will be your greatest obstacles to wisdom will probably be Christian professors. Christians in the world of higher education have learned, at great personal and spiritual cost, not to take their religious beliefs to the office. They have learned how to sacrifice the demands of God in order to excel in the academy, and thus they will want you to make the same sacrifice. If you don’t, you will make them very nervous. If you show them, by your own efforts to integrate faith and learning, that God is the source and inspiration for knowing, you will inadvertently remind them of what they have neglected, and you are liable to make them feel guilty for the compromises and exclusions that have enabled them to succeed in their profession. They are likely to punish you for this.
Most of these Christian professors are politically liberal for a very good reason. As they have learned to eliminate God from their pursuit of knowledge, they have not turned their backs on religion altogether. Instead, they have come to the logical conclusion that religion, if it is not about knowledge, must be about morality. Their premise, that religion is not about knowledge, is wrong, but if you start with that premise, it is logical to conclude that religion must be all about what you do, not what you believe. This is called the social gospel movement or the social justice interpretation of Christianity. President Obama has revived it as a way of trying to expand his outreach to Christians. The idea is that being a Christian is a matter of doing good works like helping the poor and the oppressed. This is not a bad idea. It is just not a complete account of Christianity.
More importantly, the idea that Christianity is all about good works is a bad idea for college students. You will have plenty of time to do good works in your life. College is a special time set apart for you to learn how and why to think. Christianity should make a difference, indeed it should make all the difference, in how you learn to think. Christian Professors who try to make you think that your faith should issue in good works rather than in good questions are trying to prevent you from learning to think. They want you to learn stuff in the classroom and then channel your faith in social justice projects outside the classroom. Whether they know it or not, they are trying to teach you that God is not the source and inspiration for all knowledge. They will be a greater danger to you than atheist professors who are simply indifferent to religion. If you cannot avoid these professors, at least learn what it is they are trying to teach you. The devil you know is better than the devil who pretends to know what is best for you.
Above all, you will learn that these professors who believe that doing good works is what it means to be a Christian will not tolerate any questioning about their beliefs. They think it is so obvious that Christians should keep their religious beliefs to themselves in their classrooms that they will accuse you of the worse kinds of intolerance and ignorance if you let on that you are seeking the wisdom of God. If you put God above good works you will be given of every kind of ugly political epithet.
Here is your charge: Your task is to find ways of learning how to think about knowing without giving yourself away to your professors. That sounds strange, I know, but these are strange times. You must be smart enough to keep your motives and your goals hidden in order to grow at wisdom during your college education. You must learn to question everything while loving the one true thing, and you must do this while pretending not to question the things that are most questionable about higher education. You will have to be as wise as the serpent and as peaceful as the dove in order to succeed in your spiritual journey. This must have been, now that I think about it, the exact same situation the early Christians face in the Roman Empire. They had to go along even as they were subverting the powers that be, picking their battles carefully and being willing, in the end, to be martyrs for their faith.
So if you don’t have a crisis or two, don’t think at some point of dropping out of school, don’t get in trouble with your dean, don’t stir up the hatred of some faculty or fellow students, you will know that you have lost your way. And there will be plenty of opportunities to lose your way.
Good luck, and my prayers go with you. You will need them.
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