A Path of Self-Discovery: An Ode to the Impractical
Many freshmen come here with a general idea about what they want to study at college. The sciences and social sciences seem to come out on top in this early contest amongst the departments. Rarely have I met an incoming freshman who came here on a quest to become a theologian, classicist, or theorist, but I have met future doctors and lawyers ad nauseam and so many future governors of Indiana as to fill the seat at the state house from now until the Second Coming. Your vocation is your vocation. Only you can correctly discern it, and its nature is none of my concern or business. However, I might suggest that you look to fields beyond your major to broaden your education and intellect, thereby furthering your growth during your college years. I would like to particularly direct your gaze towards religion, an apparently impractical subject that might lead you on a wide-ranging path of self-discovery.
College is a time of experimentation, and you have a very broad and wide list of choices to make. Some of the more obvious experiments associated with college are obviously negative. You have the option of trying various drugs (e.g. marijuana) or alcohol underage, and in the process you can hasten the deadening of your brain cells and act in otherwise stupid and obnoxious manners and perhaps suffer the consequences. Unfortunately that is the path that many otherwise bright people take here and at other colleges. However, there is another path of experimentation offered to you—a straight and narrow path that leads to many manifold blessings. This college and its liberal arts education offer you the opportunity to expand your mind in many directions. By sampling from the intellectual buffet presented before you in our curriculum, you learn more about yourself. Chances are that much of what you sample and devour will not necessarily be integral to your profession, and therefore the world might deem it “impractical.” However, I would argue that much that is “impractical” constitutes the most important benefits you can possibly derive from your Wabash education.
Who are you? Starting with your name, work your way on down through your identity. How much of that have you chosen for yourself, and how much of it have you simply accepted as a given from your parents? Who exactly are you? As wishy-washy a question as that is, to some extent it is the question of your college experience. If you have never before thought about who you are, you will not be able to avoid it over the next four years of your life. Indeed, your time here will be foundational in forming answers to those questions. Your friends, your professors, and your interaction with the great minds of the past and present will force you to think about everything you ever thought you were.
There are two approaches that you can take towards this intense questioning and investigation. You can transform yourself into a flamingo, putting your head in the sand so as to avoid the storm. Reading or hearing opposing viewpoints troubles you so much that you just cannot take it anymore. You prefer your basic understanding of yourself, politics, theology, etc. and so seek to avoid further complication. This approach is many things, but an education it is not. If you avoid opposition and graduate from college in the exact same intellectual state you were in four years prior, you have not grown in your knowledge of life or yourself. Only if we follow a second approach can we look back upon our Wabash education and see four years well-spent. To borrow a concept from negative theology, we know ourselves best by knowing who we are not. The best way to achieve this viewpoint is to engage with the ideas we encounter and then pass judgment upon them. However, you cannot pass judgment properly without having at least taken a look at it.
Religion is an interesting field in which to discuss this matter because it is one of the most purely subjective subjects taught at the College. How am I to test religious claims? I can apply social theory or other litmus tests to religion, but it can only take me so far into the realm of the divine. Therefore, while I am certainly not claiming that there is no objective truth in this area, I cannot necessarily prove to you that your theology is wrong in the same way that a mathematician can show me that my calculations are completely off. However, we all come to the table with our preconceived dogmatic notions. Most of us were raised within a religious tradition, and until we left home there probably has been little opportunity (or reason) to question it or explore outside of it. How much do you know about your faith tradition? Where did it come from? What does it mean for you to be a member of your communion? Does it ring true to you because you were raised in it, or it is true for you because you have claimed it as your own? While some might not think there is a difference, I think there is. I might possess something that I’ve inherited from my family, but until I have sought to understand and appreciate it, is it really mine in anything other than a superficial, shallow sense?
Religion has a human aspect to it. While those of us who are religious in some form or another recognize a divine spark at the core of our faith, we must realize that whatever we have has been communicated by humans who are not much different than us. Hopefully that does not weaken your faith, as it shouldn’t. If we look at the core doctrines of nearly any faith tradition, we see definitions and distinctions that have arisen with a purpose. There is a reason that the doctrines concerning the nature of God have been explicated with such precision, and that is because arguments arose within the early Christian church about his nature. Church theologians saw a doctrine that they believed to be aberrant and heretical, and so a reaction was required. Ideally, they knew what they were doing. In other words, they knew what they were rejecting and why they were rejecting it. If they did it right, they would have sought to understand the heresy and how it was a threat to their theological perspective. By encountering and understanding foreign ideas, the church did not proceed towards a wishy-washy, tolerant open-mindedness, but instead inched its way towards a precise and stable theological precision. Few things come directly straight down from God to man in the form of angelic vision. There is a process of reaction and development that occurs in the history of religion, and it is quite applicable for individuals as well. If it works for church bodies, why wouldn’t you like to give it a shot?
We come to college to be educated – not brainwashed (hopefully). One of the reasons that I’ve been thankful that I did not attend an explicitly denominational college with a particular theological axe to grind is that it has allowed me to more fully explore the world around me and develop my theological perspective based upon my diverse studies. I don’t know if I would be the same person had I gone to a different college, but I can say with full honesty that my faculty mentors have not individually pushed me in one way or another – a credit to Wabash College. The College provides you with the opportunity to explore your faith in a productive way. Crawfordsville provides a wide assortment of churches and inviting, friendly clergy willing to answer questions and help you think them through. We have faculty that rightly balances social theory and theology, which allows you to properly analyze your religious experiences and put them in context. Campus ministries are very active, as Andrew Forrester has written about in this issue, and can help you on your faith journey. Please do take advantage of these things.
Also, please recognize that you do not need to change your faith. Developing is not the same thing as changing or switching. Think of it more along the lines of adolescence. You are the same person, only your self-understanding has increased. Knowing where your faith tradition comes from shows you where, to an extent, you have come from. Knowing the theology of your church and others forces you to think about what you actually believe. Perhaps you will become more enamored with the faith of your fathers and become more devoted to it. Your investigations perhaps will drive you deeper into your faith, and in the process you will be more entrenched against future problems. You will not be blindsided later in life by arguments, doctrines, theories, and histories that might shatter your faith. Education – properly done – should not harm one’s religion. It will only strengthen it, given the divine source of all true intelligence.
We all came to college in varied intellectual states. However, it would be a crying shame if we did not progress at all during our time here. Wabash offers so many opportunities to grow intellectually and otherwise that, to some extent, it is almost impossible to avoid them. Even if you do not take certain classes due to their “impracticality,” you cannot avoid the dinner conversations or interactions with professors that force you to think and reevaluate. It is the wonderful thing about Wabash. Education is all around you. All you have to do is simply embrace it and allow yourself to go on a journey. You will not regret it, because you will know yourself all the better.
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