“To understand why the negative prejudice [with regard to the claim that God is Creator and Sustainer of all] is so strong now, just reflect on how the entire system of human expertise, as represented by our many-tiered structure of certification and accreditation, has a tremendous vested interest in ruling God out of consideration.  For, if it cannot do that, it is simply wrong about what it presents as knowledge and reality–of which God is no part….God currently forms no part of recognized human competence in any field of knowledge or practice.  But if this actually is God’s universe, the current lords of knowledge have made what is surely the greatest mistake in human history.  Believing the world is flat or the moon is cheese would be nothing in comparison to their mistake.”

Back to the point, namely why money won (unearned) isn’t sweeter than money earned and why the project of educating towards a virtuous citizenry matters now more than ever: Lottery studies have shown that money won is negatively correlated with long-term happiness about life in general (see Brooks, pp 75-81).   If this is true, then the current generation of college students is being sold a bill of goods about how this economic mess will get fixed once and for all.  Brooks argues that “If money without earned success does not bring happiness, then redistributing money won’t make for a happier America” (81).  I agree with him.  But redistribution has been the underlying (although often an unspoken term by its advocates) strategy to counteract the recent evils of Wall Street.  So what?  What bearing does all this have on educating the millennial generation? Brooks points out that a majority of late teens to early thirty-somethings tend to be quite comfortable with socialist policies.  A 2010 Gallup poll proves it.

I’m simultaneously concerned and not concerned about these stats.  Not concerned because it won’t take long for millennials to understand the hollow promises of an increasingly socialist-leaning government.  Concerned, because once we start down this road as a country, it’s really hard to right the ship.  Earned success increases overall happiness about one’s life, unearned success doesn’t, and those of us who have been in the working world for longer than a few years know it.  If higher education has anything to do with helping young bearers of the imago dei to flourish in the deepest sense, then can we really afford to continue educating on this issue in the smorgasbord-kind-of-way that has become the norm?

The point of the graveyard exercise was to remind these young leaders that, in one sense we’re all destined to become part of the earth once again and that our days in this life are just a few handbreadths (Ps. 39:5).  Given that fact, how do we hope our epitaphs will read?   What legacy will we leave?  There was another point to the activity, however, namely to crystallize in their souls a hope-informed understanding of human existence that flows out of God’s plan to redeem the created order itself and make all things new and to remind them that the degree to which they live with an eternal perspective in this short life is the degree to which they will be participating as God’s vice-regents in restoring all aspects of his original design—of living in this world coram deo, before the face of God through a deep awareness of creation, fall, redemption and finally, yes, consummation.

This coed really knew more than what she realized.  As we discussed her question in greater depth, she began to see how all the worldview studies and related ethical issues we had covered last year in the formal classroom ethos as well as service to others outside the classroom has eternal value.  The nature of learning itself for creatures made in God’s image is such that studies and practice in the various disciplines, whether the humanities, music, art, business, or the helping professions, will change us, literally forever. Our formal college studies as image-bearers ought to so shape us that we gain new depth of insight about how we should treat each other at the beginning of life, how we do or don’t love God and neighbor inside the covenant of marriage or in the workplace, how we care for the elderly in their frailty.  How we think and act in these spheres of life will necessarily change us in such a way that will affect how we live out the rest of our days on earth as well as affecting our souls’ capacities to glorify Him fully in the new heaven and earth.  The redeemed human disposition to learn and serve others as a response to what we learn isn’t something that passes away because our physical bodies are mortal.  What we learn in this world and how we live that out in this brief life will have implications for both the scope and depth with which we glorify God when we are resurrected in the next.

The inquisitive coed student would agree with N.T. Wright that the Christian “mission must urgently recover from its long-term schizophrenia. The split between saving souls and doing good in the world is not a product of the Bible or the gospel, but of the cultural captivity of both.”  Seems to me that unlike evangelical boomers and x’ers who have demonstrated more susceptibility to the residual effects of the fundamentalist-modernist controversy, millennials are less willing than their predecessors to settle for Dwight Moody’s “sinking ship” understanding of the culture and the rather thin view of hope that corresponds to it (“God has given me a lifeboat and has said ‘Moody, save all you can’”).  They are far more likely, once made aware of it, to embrace C.S. Lewis’s paradigm:  “Hope…means…a continual looking forward to the eternal world….It does not mean that we are to leave the present world as it is.  If you read history you will find that the Christians who did most for the present world were just those who thought most of the next.”  So may it be for those of us who are called to teach and mentor this millennial generation of Christ-followers.

John Calvin once said that “the Lord enjoins every one of us, in all the actions of life, to have respect to our own calling. He knows the boiling restlessness of the human mind, the fickleness with which it is borne hither and thither, its eagerness to hold opposites at one time in its grasp, its ambition. Therefore, lest all things should be thrown into confusion by our folly and rashness, he has assigned distinct duties to each in the different modes of life. And that no one may presume to overstep his proper limits, he has distinguished the different modes of life by the name of callings. Every man’s mode of life, therefore, is a kind of station assigned him by the Lord, that he may not be always driven about at random” (Institutes, Book III, ch. 10, section 6).

Through it all they–and we as staff–have learned time and again that achieving the kind of discernment necessary for hearing God’s call is seemingly thwarted by a restlessness of heart and mind that Calvin describes, namely one that is a symptom of a less than fully integrated character. The battleground is one where the the vices and affections of the old, empty self (Eph. 4:22) have less and less power over the ability of the Christ-follower to choose the good, and yet it is still a battleground where the Christ-follower is all too aware of the stranglehold that certain vices still have in the depths of the soul. Citing C.S. Lewis, one of our coed students drove this point home as well as I’ve heard in recent memory: “Surely what a man does when he is taken off his guard is the best evidence for what sort of a man he is.” She went on to say “My reaction to situations, and how I treat the people involved, shows me how sinful I really am. I do bad things because I am a bad person.”

Still, this alumnae from Illinois and indeed the entire class now know that one of the means of God’s grace in the midst of this restlessness was their life together as believers at this “station” called IMPACT 360. Their call to Christian community was (to use Calvin’s verbiage) a station that none of them would have guessed would be so crucial for their future, and yet none of them on this side of the experience would now trade that in for anything. They leave us understanding that God’s presence in their lives means that the “bad person” is redeemed and is constantly being refashioned into the image of Christ, and they leave realizing that the evidence of that redemption and its corresponding image is far more visible and tangible than it was nine months ago when they began this past September. And they leave with an eagerness to serve each other, and to serve those brothers and sisters who will comprise their next station for the next four years of their lives.

Several days after that conversation it occurred to me that perhaps this student was trying to dig down deeper than what I had realized at the time. This week in reading the last chapter of University of Southern California philosopher Dallas Willard’s book The Spirit of the Disciplines (HarperCollins, 1991), I paused to contemplate an old ’60′s slogan he poses: “suppose they gave a war and nobody came?” He goes on to explain that “in the case of a complex phenomenon such as war, the righteous must reach must deeper than resistance or noninvolvement.” Here Willard is referring to authentic Christ-followers to are seeking to make a difference in the world. He concludes that Christ-followers “must reach into the dispositions that make war seem a plausible course of action and make people come when the battle cry is sounded. War is not an isolated phenomenon but rides upon the coattails of cultural, economic, racial, and even religious practices, ideas, and attitudes that have their life in the social context. These are the sparks that kindle the raging holocaust of war” (231). The point here is not to determine whether or not Willard is a pacifist or an Augustinian just-war theorist. Rather, his point is simply this: that the world’s seemingly impersonal power structures, independent of any one single person’s will though they may be, are “dependent for their force upon the general readiness of normal people to do evil.”

Further reflection on Willard’s claim regarding our readiness to do evil brings up questions that atheists, agnostics, and even theological liberals are challenged to answer with any degree of intellectual satisfaction. Here’s one: If human nature is basically “good,” then how do we explain atrocities such as those committed by Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge, and, more recently, the horrendous events in Darfur? The atheist is challenged with the very concepts of good and evil anyway. If he is intellectually honest, he’ll have to say that since there is nothing transcendent we simply make up what is good and evil and then create laws around what we make up. Those laws could and should perhaps change over time, because in the end there is only behavior and survival of the fittest, plain and simple. The theist who tilts to the left theologically of course is in better shape (arguably), but still misses the mark. She acknowledges God’s reality and perhaps even his active involvement in the world. But her assumptions about the nature of humanity–that people are basically good–cause her to explain away such human atrocities as resulting from a lack of education, scarcity of resources, or even psychological disorders caused by brain physiology gone haywire. Not that these cannot be factors, BUT, isn’t the problem running a bit deeper? Is it possible for normal people, as Willard suggests, to have a general readiness to do evil? Could it be that human perversity cannot just be explained away by faulty hard-wiring or improper schooling, but rather is the result of faulty character that actually prefers to immerse itself in the tempting subtleties of a culture deeply pervaded by evil itself? Why is it, Willard asks, that we want to live vicariously through the personalities of “Miami Vice?” (A quick aside to the mosaics out there–if you haven’t seen this show, just check TV Guide for reruns on TBN.) Why is that title met with intrigue deep within us, whereas a title such as “Miami Virtue” probably strikes us as hopelessly dry, dull, and boring?

The Spirit of the Disciplines is Willard’s attempt to encourage Christ-followers to recapture an understanding and regular practice of the spiritual disciplines, which he defines as “nothing but an activity undertaken to bring us into more effective cooperation with Christ and his Kingdom” (156). Pacifism on its own is an inadequate solution to war in that it merely solves the crisis of conscience of some via active non-participation. What about this instead: Recapturing the spiritual disciplines can assist us in improving our ability to see evil for what it is in all its cultural subtleties. What if community, national, and world leaders actually believed this? Perhaps that could go a long way in actually addressing the root causes of war itself.

Here is the real-life case study I brought to Thursday’s roundtable. A social work student I met several years ago at a large state university said this to me in a follow-up email to a conversation she and I had about the merits of the Federal Marriage Ammendment (2004), which would have outlawed (by way of Constitutional amendment) same-sex marriages:

“I think I was most troubled by the concept of an objective moral reality. How can you prove that it exists? If everyone were to follow certain steps, would they each come to the same conclusion about this moral reality? Morality is certainly not inherent in each of us ? we are taught the morals of our culture. Similarities between cultures regarding taboos and mores indicate that certain activities or practices contribute to survival or well?being. I allowed your argument that nobody would agree with torturing babies as a premise in our discussion on Tuesday night, but I’d even like to retract that. Maybe some people think it’s okay. Female genital mutilation is still practiced. How do we know it’s okay to eat animals? How do we “know” it’s not okay to eat people? Or is it? Our knowledge is not innate. From research, I can say that we are social creatures, and without society we do not develop.”

Responses, anyone?