Fides Quaerens Intellectum

Last week at IMPACT 360 (www.impact360.net) we had the privilege of hosting our first guest professor for the year, Dr. JP Moreland (http://www.talbot.edu/faculty/faculty_profiles/profile.cfm?n=jp_moreland).  A Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the Talbot School of Theology (Biola University, CA;), Moreland taught and mentored none other than yours truly during the years 1997-1999.  Those two years were a critically formative time for me with respect to my own worldview as well as in my new marriage, and his three-day teaching session last week reminded just how influential he was on me.  Watching him in action with our students in class reminded me of the awesome responsbility we teachers have (James 3:1).  He is one of the few teachers I’ve ever had who actually intentionally seeks to educate holistically.  Like I told him on the ride back to the Atlanta airport, because he and other Talbot faculty members invested in me in that way during my time in the MA philosophy program at Biola U, I can’t NOT do that with my students.  And because I as well as other colleagues of mine who graduated from the MA philosophy program do do that inside and outside the classroom with our own students, Moreland and the other Talbot faculty members have already succeeded in mentoring through the generations.  So what is it that he and most of the other faculty members at the Talbot School of Theology do, exactly?

The old educational triad–head, heart, hands–comes home to roost here.  For IMPACT 360, we use “Know, Be, Live.”  Ok, great.  Many teachers affirm the value of educating holistically, but in my experience, most of them seek to educate the head only.  That’s where their comfort zone is.  That is what their laser-focused Ph.D. programs taught them to do.  Now, don’t misunderstand…I’m all for specialization where that is appropriate.  What I’m against is the kind of two-spheres philosophy of teaching that says “Ph.D.’s are to teach course content.  Character issues and spiritual life?  Oh, well that’s what the student life folks and the campus minister are paid to do.”  No, let’s try something a bit different.  In fact let’s try something that American higher education abandoned during the years 1880-1930 when the research university was born in this country.  Namely, let’s consider the possibility that teaching is mentoring. 

To my way of thinking, one thing that puts daylight between the good teachers and the truly great teachers like Moreland is a willingness to help an 18 year-old student connect the course content with his fallen and self-absorbed character in the effort to help him flourish–to live life well.  As Moreland pointed out during his time at IMPACT 360, done properly such teaching helps us to live life as Jesus himself lived it during his 33 years on this earth.

So to answer the “what” question, consider this example.  The first day he was with us, Moreland showed the students how we are all products of the fall in a very specific way, namely that we all construct some sort of false self that we show to the world but in reality is a coping mechanism to cover up our own insecurities.  “What did Adam and Eve do after they sinned?” he asked us.  “They covered themselves up and they sought to hide from God.  We do the exact same thing.  As we grow up and become teenagers, we learn to construct a false self that will be accepted by our peer group.  For many of us, this continues well into our twenties and thirties to the point that our main purpose in living is to feed and satisfy the false self we have constructed in the attempt to hide ourselves from the One who created us for relationship with Him.”  Oh, man, here it comes.  “Is it really any mystery then, that so many of us who call ourselves followers of Jesus end up wondering why we struggle our whole lives with insecurities and addictions that cripple us, as well as ambitions that miss the calling that He has for us?”

To be sure, that same day he launched into some pretty heavy philosophy that related specifically to building a biblical worldview, and he connected that heavy academic content with what he had introduced earlier that addressed their characters and the importance of virtue–something that teachers used to do in the old-time college in the 19th century.  The point is simply this:  connecting head, heart and hands–that is, tying together the KNOW, BE and LIVE–is the essence of a truly holistic education, and Moreland gets it.  He not only gets it, he demonstrates it in the way he mentors his students.  I was one of the beneficiaries of that kind of mentoring, and for that I am forever grateful.