November 24, 2008 by djackson.

Our island hosts a phantom piper. Whether ghost or demigod, woodwose or wild man I cannot say, but he haunts the borders of our sea-belted strand and wails out mysterious spells.

All right, it’s actually some unknown college student playing the bagpipes in front of the Performing Arts Center on Sunday afternoons, but let me have a little fun.

And there is a certain element of mystery here. My wife studies music at the university. She’s asked around in the fairly small community of music students. This guy isn’t in the department. And I’ve heard him playing in the predawn dark way out on the edge of our campus - the School of Christian Studies’ campus - by the marshes that fringe the Cayo del Oso. I’ve glimpsed him down on the little beach, that manufactured strand of sand bunkered by rocky breakwaters that face Corpus Christi Bay. Mostly, I hear him on Sunday afternoons as I walk back from the gym. When the wind whips from the proper quarter to whisk the sound toward me, I catch those distant, martial strains as they wail faintly across the blacktop.

Of course, I could just trot across the asphalt and ’round the front of the building and shake the guy’s hand and ask him his name. I could do that, but it would be so prosaic. The Holmesian reductionism that ruthlessly deconstructs all experience to fact may increase knowledge but it shrinks our wisdom. Maybe I’d just rather not know. Or maybe I somehow think I can know more by not knowing. Or maybe, as with Moses, God reveals himself to me most powerfully when he hides me from his face. Perhaps the fading notes of the divine retreat are as much as my spirit can stand. Arnold, for all his army of hired gumshepherds, would rather not collar the Scholar Gypsy. Keats doesn’t want to hit “play” on the frieze-frame of the Grecian urn. Really, he’d rather not know “What pipes and timbrels? What wild ecstasy?” I’m somehow determined not to look a gift piper in the mouthpiece.

Part of this must be the instrument itself. The marshal pulse of those pipes as they skirl a highland tune never fails to elevate my heart rate and put the paddles to my flat-lined imagination. To put it in the language of C. S. Lewis:

Once the emotional response is well aroused it begets imaginings. Dim ideas of inconsolable sorrows, brilliant revelry, or well-fought fields, arise. Increasingly it is these that we really enjoy. The very tune itself, let alone the use the composer makes of it and the quality of the performance, almost sinks out of hearing. As regards one instrument (the bagpipes) I am still in this condition. I can’t tell one piece from another, nor a good piper from a bad. It is all just “pipes”, all equally intoxicating, heartrending, orgiastic.

But some of it must also be the fortuitous elusiveness (for I have no indication he is trying to hide from me; no slouch hat and black cape or secret passageways through the PAC leading to some dark layer beneath the basement) of the piper himself. I revel in the opportunity to use this as a doorway into the world of one of my favorite books, Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows. In chapter seven, “The Piper at the Gates of Dawn,” the Mole and the Water Rat set out in their punt in response to an Amber Alert issued for the missing son of the Otter. They skull along by moonlight and row right into the thin place of mystical encounter. Rat hears it first and sits forward in the prow.

“It’s gone!” sighed the Rat, sinking back in his seat again. “So beautiful and strange and new! Since it was to end so soon, I almost wish I had never heard it. For it has roused a longing in me that is pain, and nothing seems worth while but just to hear that sound once more and go on listening to it for ever. No! There it is again!” he cried, alert once more. Entranced, he was silent for a long space, spell-bound. “Now it passes on and I begin to lose it,” he said presently. “O, Mole! the beauty of it! The merry bubble and joy, the thin, clear, happy call of the distant piping! Such music I never dreamed of, and the call of it is stronger even than the music is sweet!”

The two friends eventually meet the piper, and he turns out to be an embodiment of the author’s New Paganism. That fact could disturb a Christian reader, especially a fundamentalist-cum-Christian Mystic who still vaguely suspects this whole path to be a deception, the light at the end of the tunnel only a will-o-the-wisp, St. Elmo’s Fire drawing him into the bog of pantheism. But Peter Green, Grahame’s biographer, argues that this particular Pan “contains in his pagan body something of those Christian traits which Grahame sought for so long and never found.” Lewis, at any rate, could find in the passage an acceptable place to begin the Christian quest. In the “Introductory” to The Problem of Pain Lewis, a huge fan of The Wind in the Willows, cites this account as a good example of the combined love and terror toward the divine that inhabits all human hearts. He quotes a later snippet of dialogue:

“Rat,” he found breath to whisper, shaking, “Are you afraid?” “Afraid?” murmured the Rat, his eyes shining with unutterable love. “Afraid? of Him? O, never, never. And yet - and yet - O Mole, I am afraid.”

In the end, the brave duo rescue their little friend and mercifully forget their brush with the divine. Moses veils his face because Israel cannot yet bear even reflected holiness. God molds; he does not blast. Maybe I don’t walk those few steps across the pavement and around the building because I fear that to come closer would be my death. Probably I don’t because I fear that it wouldn’t.

But I hope the piper keeps playing.

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November 17, 2008 by djackson.

Orthodoxy turns one hundred this year. Please note the italics.

“Orthodoxy” as in the name of the Eastern Church has a much longer pedigree - all the way back to Peter at Pentecost if not Jesus at the Jordan to hear my Greek friends tell it. Orthodoxy per se, as in core Christian doctrine, is also much longer in the tooth. No, I refer to the slim little volume by Gilbert Keith Chesterton, published by John Lane Press in 1908 and never out of print since.

I admit that I didn’t figure this out on my own but discovered it by reading an informative and insightful article by Ralph C. Wood in the current issue of First Things. Dr. Wood, University Professor of Theology and Literature at Baylor University, points out that Chesterton’s faith autobiography “prophesied the ailments of both modernism and postmodernism, while adeptly commending Christianity as their double cure.” I’ll leave Dr. Wood to make that case, which he does quite convincingly. But Wood’s article did what all good writing about good books does: made me want to read the book itself. Accordingly, I returned to my much-underlined copy for a fresh look. As the fruit of that blessing, and perhaps as a tribute to Dr. Wood, I want to take the far less systematic approach of simply pointing out a couple of random instances of GKC’s remarkable prescience. (I feel fairly justified in this approach. Chesterton himself in chapter nine, “Authority and the Adventurer,” commends just such a piecemeal epistemology. “It is,” Chesterton opines, “precisely such scrappy evidence that does convince the mind. I mean that a man may well be less convinced of a philosophy from four books, than from one book, one battle, one landscape, and one old friend.”)

Instance one: A recent notice in the New York Times tells me that fundamentalist atheist Richard Dawkins plans to write a children’s book designed to debunk fairy tales and teach children to see the world through a test tube instead of a magic mirror. (http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/31/arts/31arts-THEGODDELUSI_BRF.html) In a sentence worthy of our lame duck president Dawkins stammers, “I would like to know whether there’s any evidence that bringing children up to believe in spells and wizards and magic wands and things turning into other things - it is unscientific, I think it’s antiscientific. Whether that has a pernicious effect, I don’t know.”

Well, Chesterton replies from a century earlier that it does, indeed, have a pernicious effect: the effect of affirming a child’s sense that there is more to life, must be more to life, than the adults let on with all their babble about facts and laws of nature. They had, at least in Chesterton’s case, the pernicious effect of bringing him to Christ. “My first and last philosophy,” he recalls, “that which I believe in with unbroken certainty, I learnt in the nursery. . . .The things I believed most then, the things I believe most now, are the things called fairy tales.” The author goes on to argue that “The Ethics of Elfland” (chapter four of Orthodoxy) teach us that certain consequences follow certain actions because a magical mind insists upon it. By contrast, Chesterton believes, the “laws” of nature (so dear to Dawkins) are, left to themselves, the merest chance. “It is not argument for unalterable law (as Huxley fancied) that we count on the ordinary course of things. We do not count on it; we bet on it. We risk the remote possibility of a miracle as we do that of a poisoned pancake or a world-destroying comet.”

I do not claim here to give Chesterton’s full argument in favor of fairy tales over science. I merely point out that he foresaw a century ago what Dawkins has just now figured out: that the place to begin tearing down religion is not in the Sunday School but in the nursery, not by outlawing the King James but by outlawing the Brother’s Grimm.

I will toss in an observation of my own, though a stray one. It amuses me that Dawkins ponders the pernicious effect of teaching children about “things turning into other things.” That, after all, is the basis of his whole Darwinist world-view! In fact, Chesterton has addressed this elsewhere, writing in The Everlasting Man that, “nobody can imagine how nothing could turn into something. Nobody can get an inch nearer to it by explaining how something could turn into something else.” Thus fairy tales are fare more scientific than Dawkins’ science. If the fairy godmother turns three mice into coach horses, at least she has mice to work with. If God creates the world when he has nothing to start with, we at least can start with God when dealing with the fact of the world!

My second random example comes from another newspaper article, headlined, “Hospices Use More Chaplains and New Path Toward Secular.” (http://www.capc.org/forums/chaplaincy/msg_1225728522/view) It seems that more atheists and agnostics are dying and are figuring out that atheism and agnosticism aren’t much help with the job. So they want a chaplain, but they want one who has had a theologectomy. Chesterton deals with this idea in the above-mentioned ninth chapter, “Authority and the Adventurer” where he takes up the argument, “If you see clearly the kernel of common-sense in the nut of Orthodoxy, why cannot you simply take the kernel and leave the nut?” I’ll leave the reader to chase down GKC’s argument for herself. My business here is with a specific line in the above-mentioned article. The writer speaks of these bold secular spiritual guides (a striking oxymoron!) and “their tenacious interaction with mortality, often without the shield of sacramental ritual.” In chapter five, “The Flag of the World,” Chesterton quotes a newspaper article that mentions “Christianity when stripped of its armor of dogma,” and tosses in a smirking aside: “as who should speak of a man stripped of his armour of bones.”)

The remark is entirely apt. The article pictures a spiritual advisor who denies the existence of the Holy Spirit as some sort of hero who eschews the coward’s “shield” of irrational belief. Well, a rationalist might disbelieve in dragons - fair enough. If, however, he distributes business cards and opens a website advertising his services as a dragon-slayer, his refusal to use a shield proves not his courage but his incompetence. Who would hire a plumber who boasted that he offered “a tenacious interaction with hair-clogs without the shield of a snake and monkey wrench”?

I’m going to stop there, hopefully having done what I said all good reviews do: made you want to read Chesterton’s book and Wood’s article about Chesterton’s book. That a century-old document could offer a preemptive strike against tomorrow’s headlines must be, I would think, recommendation enough. I will end with a quote from another great, unscientific corrupter of the youth of Athens, a man who wrote stories about talking moles and sculling rats and reckless driving toads, the great Kenneth Grahame. The author of The Wind in the Willows once wrote to a friend that, “a dragon, for instance, is a more enduring animal than a pterodactyl. I have never yet met anyone who really believed in a pterodactyl; but every honest person believes in dragons - down in the back-kitchen of his consciousness.”

And as long as I believe in dragons, I’m hanging onto my shield.

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November 11, 2008 by djackson.

Getting Ready for the End of the World: A Sermon for Sunday, November 16, 2008
Matthew 25.14-30

Introduction

It’s the end of the year. It’s also the end of the world. You might not have known that.

If you didn’t know, it’s probably because you regulate your life, including your church life, by the calendar of empire. We got our calendar from the Roman empire, and that’s how most of us in the free church mark time: New Year’s on January 1, all of that. Ironic that we calibrate ourselves according to the world system that once sought to destroy us, the arguable heavy of the book of Revelation, that great mystical melodrama that closes the curtain of our canon. In these latter days, empire has reasserted itself through the commercial calendar (made-for-Hallmark holidays like Valentine’s Day and Mother’s Day and the annual auto-de-fe of Christmas shopping), the political calendar (Fourth of July, Memorial Day), the educational calendar (Spring Break, summer holiday), and the financial calendar (the fiscal year begins in October; so do church budget cycles and stewardship campaigns). So we think the year ends on December 31. As to the world ending, well, we don’t really believe it will. We may talk about it but our computers - supplied, by the way, courtesy of the empire - come equipped with calendars that run far into a very calculable calendar. Wall Street and Madison Avenue hang their neon rainbows in the night time skyline to proclaim the promise, “While the industrial/military complex remains, investment and dividend, bear and bull markets, summer vacation and winter vacation, day-shift and night-shift shall not cease.”

But in ancient times, the church rebelled against empire’s calendar. In the third and fourth centuries persecuted believers developed their own way of marking time, one that set its sextant according to the magi’s star and the blazing light of Easter’s empty tomb. According to that calendar, the year begins four weeks before Christmas in a season called Advent. In Advent, the church, a trifle battered by a long sojourn among the tents of Kedar, reorients herself along the twin poles of the past and the future. She remembers a time before Christ came, and enters again the yearning of captive Israel who yearns for Immanuel’s arrival. She also gazes to a time when Christ shall come again and gather all things to himself. From there, we’re off! At Christmas, we rejoice in Jesus’ birth. At Epiphany we kneel with the magi and recognize the world-wide nature of his kingdom. Through Lent we train in the ascesis of the desert because we know the cross is coming and that the flesh is weak. On Good Friday we gaze at the cross; Jesus takes our medicine without a spoonful of sugar and we watch without an anesthetic. On Holy Saturday we rest in benumbed bewilderment in the ache of an unanswered question. Easter bursts forth from the tomb and for fifty days we walk with our Lord in white. On Pentecost Sunday the fire falls. The Comforter cries havoc and lets slip the dogs of spiritual warfare. The church moves forward to win the world with weapons of love, looking every day for her Lord’s return: “Even so, Lord Jesus, come.”

And then, well, and then we’re looking at six months of what the liturgical calendar calls “Ordinary Time,” plain old time when we just have to be the church until Jesus comes. Then comes today, this Sunday, the final Sunday in Ordinary before next week starts the whole thing over. And you know what? Jesus hasn’t come. Again. For roughly the two thousandth time. It’s the end of the year and we’re out of time and no trumpet call splits the eastern sky. It’s the end of the world and we’re running ninety miles an hour into the concrete embankment of history with no time to put on the brakes.

So what do we do today, this Sunday, at the end of the year and the end of the world?

The Text

Jesus, of course, saw this one coming. In Matthew 24 he sits with his disciples on a hill outside Jerusalem and has a chat with them about what lies ahead. The whole scene has an eerie, Jonah-ish feel to it. Like that draftee prophet, Jesus belches out a one-liner sermon of judgment before he blows town to sit at his ease on a hill-side seat, a luxury skybox from which to watch the fireworks begin. Of course there are differences: Jonah would gladly roast weenies on the flaming wreckage of Nineveh while Jesus returns to ground zero to face in his own flesh the righteous rounds of the Father’s firing squad. Jonah would gladly pull the trigger. Jesus volunteers to be the bullet sponge. Jonah sparks repentance he wishes hadn’t happened. Jesus repents for sin he knows he didn’t commit. Jonah reached Nineveh after being shanghaied in the belly of a whale. Jesus entered our world from the womb of a woman. Still, the parallels intrigue me.

At any rate, Jesus lets loose with a wild, windmilling sermon about the ultimate end. He gives us false Christs and the Antichrist, televangelists and refugees. He likens the Second Coming to a killing field where the buzzard-count reveals the body-count, an appearance so powerful you could no more hide it than cover up the stench a ripe corpse on a hot day.

And then he tells five stories, parables that only Matthew records, though all three synoptic gospels contain the sermon itself. In the rest of chapter twenty-four and on through the end of twenty-five, we have the parable of the Home Security System, the parable of the Drunken Butler, the parable of the Wedding Crashers, the parable of the Venture Capitalist, and the parable of the Last Round-Up. None of them, interestingly enough, provides any sort of logarithm for calculating when the Lord will return. Not one chart for decoding the tea-leaves in your Lord’s Supper cup, not a single schematic of the Zion Zodiac to plot the horoscope of the eschaton.

That’s a little disappointing to most of us, so we press the text pretty hard. I’ve read arguments against torture as a means of interrogation because, the thinking goes, at some point a prisoner starts making stuff up, giving information he doesn’t actually possess, just to bring an end to the pain. This truth escapes the Guantanamo Bay school of hermeneutics that has, for a couple of millennia now, waterboarded Jesus’ words in order to force him to tell us what he said in the first place that he doesn’t know (Mt 24.36). Since the incarnation is not play-acting and Philippians Two is true, Jesus voluntarily entered our own limitations and told us from the inside how to live a life where we know the end is coming but don’t know when. The key, he says, is to focus less on how long we have to live, and more on how we live.

In the first story, the Parable of the Home Security System (Mt 24.42-44), Jesus offers the rather simple observation that it doesn’t do much good to put in a burglar alarm after you’ve already been robbed. In the Parable of the Last Round Up, he reminds us that behavior is a better barometer of belief than creeds or confessions. But I want to focus on those middle three stories, which I believe form an intentional trilogy. Jesus gives basically the same message but modifies and expands it each time. It is variations on a theme, slowly building to the finale.

The theme is clear enough: since you won’t have time to get ready, you need to stay ready. But the Lord offers us three groups of folks who fail in different ways. The Drunken Butler makes the mistake of thinking that a Second Coming delayed is a Second Coming denied. “My master is not coming for a long time.” The verb comes from the Greek chronos, as in chronloogy; we get it again in 25.5. It contrasts with the word kairos which refers to seasons or moments of time. This guy basically falls back on the conception of time shared by pagans and scientists - a closed system inevitably on its way to nowhere. He squanders his resources by ignoring time.

The Wedding Crashers make the mistake of assuming that a Second Coming is a Coming Soon. In an initial burst of enthusiasm they literally burn out, torching the oil of their spiritual fervor as a night-light for a late-night nap. When the groom finally shows at midnight (possibly he’d been delayed long enough to creep the house in the first of the parables), they find no fuel to strike even a spark of welcome. These women find themselves scurrying the streets in the dark, hampered by those ridiculous bridesmaids dresses, the puffy sleeves catching on display racks at the convenience store, the Scarlet O’Hara skirts stained black with grease from the parking lot. By the time they return their hair has collapsed into their faces and their makeup run like the Dutchmen at Chancellorsville until the bridegroom (they weren’t his friends in the first place; bunch of sorority sisters his future wife trucked in from out of town) didn’t recognize them; their own mothers probably couldn’t have given a positive ID. They exhaust their resources by trying to calculate time.

But then there’s the last parable in the trilogy, the one that gets the most press and the most preaching. And the problem here is one of trying to hang onto resources that should be invested. All three servants avoid the errors of the two previous parables: they never doubt the master will return, and they never try to guess how soon that will be. They know two things: they need a strategy for squaring the books when the boss calls for an accounting, and they need a strategy sufficiently long-term to allow for market fluctuations.

The first couple of junior execs go for maximum ROI. They sink their money into the marketplace. (Homiletics speculates that they sank their bundle into the oil market, selling marked-up lamp fuel to late-night bridesmaids!) They probably have to ride out a few bear markets, spend a few uncomfortable weeks waiting for the federal bailout, but they stay in for the long haul and come out way ahead. The third-stringer, of course, takes a different tack. His Depression-era parents taught him not to trust the market. He hides his cash in a hole and his head in the sand and fails even to keep up with the rate of inflation.

But what’s the real problem here? I mean, the boss promotes the first two - corner offices, stock options and a company car. He fires the second guy, and with extreme prejudice: casts him into the outer darkness of eternal unemployment with a promise that he’ll never work again. We might have expected something less harsh: withhold his Christmas bonus, maybe, or bust him down to the mailroom. But the problem here is not financial; it’s theological.

The two responses reveal two truths about the boss. Or rather, the first set of responses reveals two, while the second reveals only one. The guy is a tough CEO, no doubt about it. Even his successful employees are careful to act “immediately” (v.16), a clear sign that they know this dude means business. His response to the slacker shows that they didn’t get it wrong by much. Shoot, even the boss himself doesn’t try to deny his VP’s character sketch: “You knew I reap where I did not sow and gather where I scattered no seed.” Fear is a rational (and highly motivating) response to such a man. Both the good and the bad workers got this part of the picture right.

But the first two underlings realized something else. They saw the other side of the chief’s personality. Maybe he did reap where he didn’t sow, but in this case he’s sowing to the tune of some pretty big bucks. He may on occasion gather without scattering, but here we find him scattering like a madman. As David Ashley White’s hymn reminds us,

There’s a wideness in God’s mercy
like the wideness of the sea;
there’s a kindness in his justice,
which is more than liberty.

These guys find their fires fueled by the twin sources of fear and favor, expectation and extravagance. The second slave sees only half the truth. In theology, a half-truth is known as a heresy. As Homiletics phrases it, the first two servants love the master while fearing him, while the second fears without loving.

G. K. Chesterton points to this very practical aspect of Christianity. “Courage,” he wrote,

is almost a contradiction in terms. It means a strong desire to live taking the form of a readiness to die. ‘He that will lose his life, the same shall save it,’ is not a piece of mysticism for saints and heroes. It is a piece of everyday advice for sailors or mountaineers. It might be printed in an Alpine guide or a drill book. This paradox is the whole principle of courage; even of quite earthly or quite brutal courage. A man cut off by the sea may save his life if he will risk it on the precipice.

He can only get away from death by continually stepping within an inch of it. A soldier surrounded by enemies, if he is to cut his way out, needs to combine a strong desire for living with a strange carelessness about dying. He must not merely cling to life, for then he will be a coward, and will not escape. He must not merely wait for death, for then he will be a suicide, and will not escape. He must seek his life in a spirit of furious indifference to it; he must desire life like water and yet drink death like wine.

Perhaps we see the ultimate example in the cross of Our Lord; perhaps even in the water and wine that gush from the gash of the brutal post-mortem of a Roman crime-scene investigator. He taught us to drink death in the wine that portrays his blood in order that we might quench our thirst for the living water.

The Lesson

So what does this parable say to the saints who stand once again at the end of the year and at the end of the world? Rather, let me take them in reverse order.

To return to where I began, we stand at the end of the world. We’ve relived the story one more time. We anticipated Jesus almost twelve months ago; we received him a month after that and waited for the wise men to wise up and worship alongside us. We watched and prayed as he won for us in the desert, then waited in agony as he went from that tune-up fight to the tri-mountain championship match: round one in the grotto of Gethsemane, round two at the Hill called Calvary, round three in a graveyard on the Mount of Olives. We walked with him for a season until his backward-cast fire fell at Pentecost. Then we went to work and waited as we worked and looked each day for his return.

And it hasn’t happened.

Sure, the world could end today, but what if it doesn’t? Sure, the Lord could return before this sermon ends, but what if that doesn’t happen?

Well, then - we gear up for the next go-round. We start it all over, we live another year, not trapped in a ceaseless cycle of certain doom, but shot forth into another opportunity to know God better. We live large on the largess of a lavish Lord who cares enough about winning to risk losing it all. We embrace a fear that is only the flip-side of love. We sit with Jesus for a breathing moment on the side of Olivet and gaze at a city doomed to fall. If it hasn’t fallen yet, we do not despair that our master won’t make good, but instead rejoice that we have more time to reap rewards from the reckless investments of his grace.

“The mass of men” (Chesterton again) “always look backwards . . . .the only corner where they in any sense look forwards is the little continent where Christ has His Church.” We look forwards because we have something - Someone - to look forward to. We look forward to his return and, if he doesn’t return, we look forward to his coming, birth, suffering, death, resurrection, ascension, sending of the Spirit - all over again.

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November 4, 2008 by djackson.

“But I am speaking to you who are Gentiles. Inasmuch then as I am an apostle of Gentiles, I magnify my ministry” - Romans 11.13

If I may dare to paraphrase (or, perhaps more accurately, to apply) Paul, I would say that in this blog, “I am speaking to those who are students. Inasmuch then as I am a teacher of students, I magnify my ministry.” Teaching, at least the kind I do, is a second-order ministry. I work for my spiritual superiors and future leaders. Pastors and churches appear in the New Testament; professors and seminaries do not. That doesn’t mean we aren’t allowed to exist, only that we should stay humble. I remember when I first took this job, a non-Christian friend congratulated me on my “promotion.” I gently corrected him: I had accepted a demotion.

Still, a humble calling remains a calling. God has given me this work to do and that means first of all, that it is worthy work with eternal consequences. It means, secondly, that I had better do it well. Marva Dawn regularly reminds congregations where she preaches that, “I can’t preach well if you don’t listen well.” Nor can’t I teach well if my students don’t learn well. So rather than continue to seek a bigger spoon, let me offer a plea for wider mouths. In place of a megaphone, I ask for open ears.

Why bother to defend theological education at all? Because you must understand that this apologia is not personal: I’m not attempting to establish that I, in particular, teach well. (That one’s very much in play at the moment. This evening I will hand one group of students two documents: their graded term papers and an anonymous faculty evaluation form. This amounts to a member of the French aristocracy kicking a peasant as he mounts the tumbril.) No, I am arguing the larger point that the teaching (and learning) of theology matters and matters greatly. So I must begin with the question of whether the discipline requires the defense.

I believe that it does, at least among evangelicals, at least among those I regularly encounter. To be fair, we Baptists have always had a troubled relationship with higher education. I tell my Methodist friends that of course they are smarter than we are: their founders graduated from Oxford while ours were expelled or denied entrance to begin with. Bunyan patched pots. Carey mended soles long before he saved souls. Spurgeon briefly considered applying to Cambridge but when a snafu prevented his meeting with the tutor from Regent’s Park College he junked the idea. He did pretty well without a diploma. So there’s this sort of pre-fab, off-the-rack anti-intellectualism in Baptist life. I don’t decry it; it has often served us well. Intellectualism should be regarded, like all “isms,” with a hermeneutic of suspicion. But it is an easy step from doubting intellectualism to denying the need for intellectuals - or even intellect.

And then there’s that whole priesthood-of-the-believer thing. We rejected any sort of magisterium early in our history. Indeed, more accurately, our rejection of the magisterium began our history. For four hundred years we drove along the Christian road with a Sola Scriptura bumper sticker displayed both fore and aft. Many Baptists abandoned that custom with the dawn of the new millennium, but some of us still cling to it faithfully. And it is such an easy step from, “Everyone stands equal before God” to “Everyone has an equal knowledge of God,” from “Every believer can read the Bible for herself” to “Every believer can understand her Bible as well as any other.” This is really a sort of bizarro democracy. It claims that everyone is equally well-informed so no one has the responsibility to learn. Real democracy, of course, says that everyone is equally responsible, and therefore required to become well-informed.

So what do I, a poor professor who struts and frets his hour upon the stage and then is heard from no more (if, indeed, he was heard in the first place) have to offer as a counter-weight to this kind of populism? I’d like to propose a couple of responses: the first has to do with the spiritual value of scholarship, the second with its ministerial value.

As to scholarship’s spiritual value, I believe that study matters because God created both heart and head and demands a stewardship of both, and because the head, if not more trustworthy than the heart, is at least more consistent.

When God turned clay into Adam, he didn’t stop the transformation at the neck. He could have made a handsome dead-head with a killer physique but he went the final eight inches. So it matters to God what we think - and also that we think. R. Wayne Stacy, dean of the M. Christopher White School of Divinity at Gardner-Webb University, tells the story of his English teacher at Palm Beach Atlantic College, Dr. Ruth Whitford. Dr. Whitford did post-doctoral study under C. S. Lewis at Cambridge and taught the canon with passion. One particular semester, young Wayne performed poorly in her class. He explained that he had been so preoccupied with youth revivals and other ministry that his studies suffered. Dr. Ruth replied,

You know, Wayne, there’s more than one way to love God. We’re commanded to love God not just with our hearts, but with our minds too. What we do in classroom no less than sanctuary is an expression of our faith in God. When Jesus was asked one day to sum it all up, he quoted Israel’s creed, the Shema, and said, “You are to love the LORD your God with all your heart and soul and strength and mind.” But look it up. The Shema doesn’t say that we’re to love God with our minds. That’s not in there. Jesus added that. Must have thought it was pretty important, huh?

When a well-schooled first-century Jewish kid goes splicing body parts into the Bible (especially when he happens to be the Son of God), we’d do well to pay attention. Seems to me that Our Lord lays on us a mandate to see that our love is intelligent as well as passionate, wise as well as warm. Enthusiasm may be the motive force of faith but the difference between an explosion and an internal combustion engine is thoughtful direction. Why should an information-saturated world trust a willfully ignorant church? Is saving grace an invitation into a lifetime discipline or a free pass out of the hard work required in every other field of endeavor?

According to the Oxford International Dictionary of the English Language, ministry (or “divinity”) is one of the three classic professions of the western world, along with medicine and law. The military eventually made a fourth in this European poker game. Each profession gained entrance into this exclusive club by virtue of holding title to a “dangerous knowledge,” a set of truths, practices and skills that, in untrained hands, could lead to disaster but, properly handled, provided the very means of human existence. Without medicine, diseases kill us. Without laws, we kill each other. Without armies, someone else kills us. And without theology, well, I suppose God kills us - or else nobody kills us, because we remain dead in our sins in the first place. On the other hand, medicine mishandled diminishes life. Law misused increases conflict. Unjust war launders murder. And bad theology drugs dying souls to mask the pain of their lost condition. In short: a bad lawyer can cost you your stuff; a bad doctor can cost you your life; a bad soldier can cost you your liberty . . . but a bad theologian can cost you your eternity!

Doctors go to college, where they must make top grades in order to qualify for three years of medical school and a year of residency - and they mess around with our body. Lawyers go to college then three years of law school then take the massive and comprehensive bar exam - and they mess around with your money. Soldiers devote a lifetime of training, either at one of the military academies or in an endless cycle of retraining - and they mess around with your borders. What should we require of preachers before we unleash them on the church and the world to mess around with people’s souls?

I’m not arguing for elite academic standards for biblical studies. I’ve noticed that C- students often go on to become A+ pastors. I am arguing for intense commitment to task. I’ve noticed that lazy students go on to become ex-pastors, as well they should. Study, hard theological reading and reflection, give the minister something to fall back on when raw energy fades like a mirage in a ministerial desert. William James, in his classic Varieties of Religious Experience, writes eloquently of the “inhibition quenching fury” of great saints. I once expressed admiration to a mentor and fellow-pastor for this quality as I perceived it in him, he replied that ultimately that tide goes out and one must wade forward on raw discipline until the waves come flowing back. Theological surfer-dudes who think they can coast on the curl of energy eventually discover that those who last are more scholarly galley slaves than adrenaline beach bums.

So much for the spiritual value of scholarship. Now let’s talk about it’s ministerial value. And here I want to be very practical. I am convinced that one of the greatest gifts a student can give to his congregation, both present and future, both actual and potential, is a four year college degree. Problem is, it is a gift that doesn’t pay off until the long run, and the connection between the price and the product can be hard to spot. Here’s what I mean.

The current edition of The Christian Century contains an article by Tim Stafford entitled, “Educated for Marriage: The Difference College Makes.” Stafford begins with the standard (and entirely valid) breast-beating over the high divorce rate in this nation. He adds, again pro forma and properly, that Evangelicals post higher statistics in this regard than non-believers. He then points to the one group that defies this statistic: college graduates. Those who graduate from college divorce at well below the national average. They marry later and have fewer children outside of marriage. Also, they have fewer financial problems and their children get into serious trouble less than other children. Mind you, these aren’t graduates of Christian colleges, or those who major in Bible. The numbers include poly-sci majors from Berkley and art history majors from Harvard. Faith matters: Christians with college diplomas divorce less often than non-Christians with college degrees and a saved high school drop-out has a better shot at marriage than an agnostic drop-out. But the key ingredient seems to be college more than Christianity.

Stark speculates as to the reasons for this. For one thing, students in college get older as time passes. Of course, so do those who skip higher education but many students delay marriage until after graduation. Thus they are more mature when they marry and so more likely to make a go of it. Also, they learn to stick with something, be it sociology or computer science or English literature. They learn to plan ahead and to put off pleasure. All of these skills translate nicely when one attempts to build a successful marriage.

Now here’s my point. Paul repeatedly harps on two qualifications for Christian pastors: marital fidelity and financial integrity. 1 Timothy 3.2 insists on the former, and v.3 adds the latter. You get the same combo in Titus 1.6-7. Both passages, by the way, mention children as well. Think about that. In my experience, most ministers don’t wash out because they can’t preach or they have a secret drug addiction or they deny the Trinity. Most ministers wash out because they lack the self-discipline to work hard when nobody is watching, because their marriages tank or because they embrangle themselves in a financial knot, perhaps bad debt or maybe embezzlement from the church funds. And Stark’s statistics indicate that the future pastor can defend against all three of these weaknesses by finishing college.

I think that’s a pretty powerful point. Because I know it must be hard to set aside present ministry for future gain, to say “no” to the opportunity to plan a big event or lead an exciting conference in favor of sitting at home to learn the various conjugations of the mi- verb in the pluperfect. A student in that moment needs the assurance of being able to say, “I’m not simply memorizing Barth’s theology of revelation. I’m divorce-proofing a marriage, disciplining a child, and freeing the church from worry about my financial security. I am honing a life that can reflect Christ to those who have a far greater need to see Him in me than to hear about him from me.” I don’t worry much about Christopher Hitchens’ atheist outbursts against Christianity or Bill Maher’s silly movies. The deadliest torpedoes ever aimed at the faith of the average believer are fired from the marital and financial infidelity of those who claimed to be God’s chosen shepherds. Those torpedoes hole the hull below the waterline and sink more ships than the firecrackers of the infidels.

So study hard and save the faith. That seems like reason enough.

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