REVERSALS

 

Meeting the Challenges of

 

Christian Higher Education

 

 

Prof. Stephen Palmquist, D.Phil. (Oxon)

Department of Religion and Philosophy

Hong Kong Baptist University

(stevepq@hkbu.edu.hk)

 

      What does it mean to have a "Christian Higher Education"?  Does it mean "getting a degree from a college which calls itself 'Christian'"?  I think not.  For many gradu­ates of so-called "Christian colleges" come away with an education which, in many re­spects, is less authentically Christian than the education they would get at some secular institutions!

 

      On the contrary, when I refer here to "Christian Higher Education", I am thinking of a way of approaching the challenges of higher education which follows the Way demonstrated by the life and death of Jesus Christ.  That means that a truly Christian ed­ucation is one that teaches the student to live by the Way of the Cross.  How can this be done in three short years, filled as they are with the pressures of readings, papers, tests and grades?

 

      Perhaps it cannot be done.  But at least a beginning can be made.  For a few short years of college education (whether or not they end up being "Christian") is enough to point most of us in the direction we will be headed for the rest of our life.  Far more im­portant than the facts we learn in college is the attitude we learn towards learning itself.  The attitude we take with us when we gradu­ate will determine whether we view the hard­ships of life as new adventures worth ex­plor­ing, or as a drudgeries to be endured.

 

      When our studies or our personal rela­tionships begin to present us with new chal­lenges, what is the attitude which character­izes the beginning of a truly Christian educa­tion?  One way of describing this attitude is as "openness to change".  Some Christians are reluctant to give young people the free­dom to have an open and inquisitive attitude towards their education, because they are afraid the "wrong" kind of influences might     cause some students to stray away from their Christian beliefs.

 

      Education does indeed often have this effect on Christians.  Why?  Why do some Christians lose their faith, or give up their commitment to live a Christian life, as a re­sult of their advanced learning?  I want to suggest that the root of this common prob­lem is a wrong attitude towards change.

 

      Some Christians are taught that God has certain clear-cut ways of doing things, and that if we learn those basic rules and regula­tions (e.g., the ones set out in the Bible and enforced by the Church), we will know the "mind of Christ".  Anyone who believes that God can only speak in one way, or that truth can only be expressed in one form, is un­likely to be able to endure the weight of con­trary evidence that is provided by a good higher education.

 

      Education that is worth the name special­izes in teaching us that we are in fact largely ignorant, even about those things we thought we knew.  Yes, surprisingly enough, it is ig­norance much more than knowledge which paves the way to a fruitful education.  Yet the willingness to recognize our ignorance seems to go directly against many people's under­standing of what it means to be religious, for all too often churches are filled with people who believe they already know all the answers.

 

      In my experience, the extent to which a Christian student remains faithful to his or her religious commitments after graduating from college is usually inversely proportional to the extent to which that student believes that God must always speak and act in ways that will seem consistent to us.  In other words,  students who cannot hold in their mind apparently contradictory beliefs about God (such as "God loves me and has a won­derful plan for my life" and "I don't even know for sure if God exists, to say nothing of what He is like!") are very unlikely to graduate with a Christian education.  They will either be educated into giving up their faith, or they will hold on to their faith so tightly that their "education" will never really make a difference in their life.

 

      By contrast, students who are able to live with a paradox are far more likely to succeed in receiving a Christian education.  This kind of success has nothing whatsoever to do with grades (indeed, too much attention to grades is often a way of protecting oneself from being effected by the challenges of what one is supposed to be learning).  Rather, it is the success of learning to live by the Way of the Cross, be­cause the cross is one of the most profound symbols of paradox.  The paradox of the cross requires us to be open to what I call the principle of "reversal".

 

      Let me illustrate this principle with a story from my own life. When I finished sec­ondary school, I had no clear idea of what I wanted to do with my life.  As I went off to college, I assumed I would be studying maths or one of the sciences (probably physics), since I was quite good in these subjects.  Being a Christian, I decided to attend a four-year, Christian liberal arts college in Santa Barbara, California, called Westmont.

 

     In some ways Westmont was like Baptist College.  But there was one big dif­ference, for which I will always be thankful:  the college respected students enough to al­low them to make many of their own choices in designing their education.  For example, we could choose our classes from a wide range of alternatives, for both major and non-major subjects.  Moreover, we were not required to make our final decision as to which major we would choose until the end of the second of four years (i.e., half way through our entire college education!).  Without that freedom, I may never have been able to hear God calling me to be a teacher of philosophy.  Let me explain why.

 

      In my first year of college the most common question we would ask our class­mates was:  What are you planning to choose as your major?  I would always answer such a question by saying I was undecided:  "All I know is that I won't major in Music, PE, or Religious Studies."  Well, to make a long story short, I ended up four years later gradu­ating with a Religious Studies major and a Music minor.  And in my final year I was even a coach for a girls' football team!

 

      This is a simple example of a reversal, but it made a big impression on me.  This was one of many reversals which together have taught me not to be too confi­dent in my own understanding of who I am or why I believe the things I do.  More impor­tantly, these reversals have taught me to allow God to say one thing to me this year, but some­thing quite different next year.

 

      Unfortunately, the kind of reversal I just described is nearly impossible for students in colleges where the administration makes most of the choices for the students. I am deeply disturbed whenever Baptist College students tell me that, although they now realize they chose the wrong major, there is simply nothing they can do about it at this point.  Fortunately, though, there are many other ways in which the principle of reversal can show itself in the educational process, even for those who feel they are forced to study things they never would have chosen for themselves.

 

      Among the many other reversals that took place during my college years was the following.  I found myself giving up much of the child­hood religion my parents had worked so hard to teach me.  In its place came a succession of "better" ideas.  Soon I realized that some of my own ideas them­selves needed to be "reversed".  Although it often hurts while we are experiencing it--we feel as if we have been a fool--it is a sign of true Christian education when we can allow such reversals to happen, because they require us to trust God more than we trust ourself.

 

      I spent a long time studying "love" and "spirituality", only to discover later that my natural interest in these subjects was due more to my own weakness in these areas, than to the vast store of wisdom I once thought I had.  I have noticed, in fact, that in many cases scholars unknowingly choose their topics of study as a way of compensat­ing for what they lack in their own personal life.  (As an example we need only think of Socrates, who spent years studying wisdom, only to discover he was himself a fool.)  This can be an unhealthy tendency, until we realize it is happening.  Then we can rejoice in anticipation of the reversals which our studies will be bringing about in our own life situation.

 

      When a Christian attitude towards educa­tion really becomes rooted in our hearts, we can allow God to "fool" us (i.e., to make us aware of the foolishness of our former ways of thinking and acting), without losing our desire to learn more.  I can testify that with each new reversal, painful as it often is, the fire of scholarship burns brighter and brighter in my heart:  with the reversals come new insights, and I long to share with others what I have seen.

 

      Christian education means learning to
recognize and honour God as the God of re­versals.  If our God is a God of reversals, then Christian "conversion" (which itself means "turning around") must be viewed not just as a momentary, life-changing experi­ence, but also as a life-long process.  Each time our inquisitiveness causes us to overturn one of our most cherished beliefs, we can rejoice in the conviction that God is in the pro­cess of manifesting Himself to us.  The dark­est point can itself then be a witness to the presence of the Light which is to come.

 

      In spite of our ignorance of how it is to happen, we can trust that this Light will bring with it a new insight into how we can conform our own life to the model set by Christ himself.  The life of Jesus is the model of openness to God's reversals, for Jesus was willing to believe that death itself can be reversed.  In so doing he demonstrated that the Way of the Cross is the true begin­ning of the higher education of mankind.  Following this example, we who call ourselves Christians must learn that being open to such rever­sals plays an essential role in the process of becoming truly Christian.

 

 

 

 

 

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This etext is based on a prepublication draft of the published version of this essay.

 

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