(The following is an extract from an essay published in Crossings, an intellectual journal on the Dordt campus.)
How shall I describe education—the process of obtaining access to a tradition and power to extend it?
Imagine the tradition one desires to be educated into as a huge, over-populated city—at Dordt, a tradition of Christian humanism, as well as the under-traditions of one’s particular discipline. The only real entry to the city is by way of portals which are actually constructed from the literary corpses of former students. We encounter these corpses as “great thinkers” or representative figures, and by a self-reproducing fragmentation our own psyches we inhabit these corpses and necromantically re-present them to ourselves as living interlocutors. We pass through them to access the tradition.
But a warning should be issued about education. It is access to a marvelous city, but it is also one-way access. A peculiar feature of a tradition is that one cannot get out of it: like hell, it becomes the location that is oneself. When students turn themselves from the difficult task of accessing a tradition, they find the walls that used to bar their way perpetually receding before them as they try to get out. If they disapprove of this condition, they may intensify their efforts to escape, to glimpse once more the horizon outside the now prisoning tradition. Such malcontents of a tradition usually only become in their turn the outlying corpses that provide access to future students. This is education.
In some ways this characterization of education only repeats at a larger scale the failure of all human attempts to make the kingdom of God come the way we want it to. Just as surely as our learning must begin, God-fearingly, with a no! In every direction, so it ends with the learner having originated his or her own special brand of idolatry, having discovered and pursued his or her own special method of immanentizing the eschaton. As Ecclesiastes informs us, the making of books will never end and much study will chiefly just wear us out.
Some theorizers about intellectual life might find this truth pessimistic. Without Progress, the beau ideal of human kingdom-bringing, life in the world seems useless to them. Yet it is precisely the idea of Progress, the notion that we have any idea how to make permanent improvements to the world or its thinking, that creates the possibility for despair at the endlessness of books and weariness at much study.
Instead of progress, the Christian hope is in redemption. One of the most important lessons for Dordt College to learn is the difference between them.
On the one hand is progress. But progress always proves itself to be ultimately a servant of death rather than of the new life in Christ. The lawyer-theologian William Stringfellow expressed this well in his book Free In Obedience:
Men look to and serve first one and then some other power of ideology and institution—on and on, over and over again—in order to find the City of Salvation, but each one turns our to be itself consigned to death, a witness to death’s power and reign. It is through these idols which are themselves acolytes of death that death tempts men with the hope of their own salvation. Death tempts men by promising to save them from death; that is how cruel and vain and filled with guile death is.
Consequently faith, an allegiance of will and thought and action to the promise of redemption in Christ, is a kind of restless imagination. Even Christians can serve death in their minds and hearts by hitching their wagon to false visions of the kingdom of God. Faith pursues life in the world despite this danger (I would almost say this inevitability), because it is confident in the power of Christ to transform the brokenness of human striving—even the hideous failure of education, its never-ending book-making, its wearing perpetual studies—into the very stuff of his kingdom in ways we could never have realized in the doing. We stand in relation to our own lives much as the disciples stood in relation to Christ’s life: utterly uncomprehending and deluded as to the way in which our lives will be a part of God’s triumphing redemption, but convinced that this is the case even so. As the theologian Helmut Thielicke would say, faith dwells in the Nevertheless.
