At my high school graduation, the commencement speaker drew laughs from the parents by pointing out that now that we seniors had our diplomas, we were more dangerous than ever. Now not only did we know everything there was to know, but we had a piece of paper to prove it!
His comment struck me because it was so completely on the mark. Many of us had parents who never even finished high school. We saw ourselves as 17-year-old whiz kids with bright futures before us. We prided ourselves that we wouldn't make the foolish mistakes our parents had. Our marriages would not end in divorce, our jobs would pay us terrific money, our names would make their mark.
Well, the whiz kids of the early fifties with whom I keep in touch are feeling pretty sober these days. In many cases their marriages have failed, and their careers are floundering. And they know the experience of falling behind their progeny. Their children are taking calculus, computer courses, and science classes that contain information completely unknown in the fifties. Those who graduate in these fields have starting salaries higher than the salaries their parents have worked a lifetime to achieve.
In such a rapidly changing society, only the most arrogant can fail to see that they do not and cannot know as much as they thought they did when they were young and ill-informed. Only the ignorant can think they are not ignorant. It is the genius of learning to sense how much further away omniscience really is.
One friend of mine, a few months away from completing his Ph.D., said, "The closer I get to it, the less I respect it."
Don't misunderstand me. A university degree is a wonderful achievement. But anyone who thinks that he ought to feel educated when he graduates has not been properly transformed by his educational experience.
This lesson, however, is not an easy one to learn. Some people with doctor ates have not experienced transformation. Amazingly, they marched through their education without becoming humble and teachable. They resist creative thought and change simply because they threaten their traditions. They brand those who disagree with them "perverters of the truth."
In his celebrated book On Being a Christian, Hans Kung points out that theological change occurs in very much the same way science has changed down through the centuries. In both cases, change usually comes, not because a new idea replaces the old by the sheer weight of its explanatory power, but when the defenders of the old view finally die.
Even Einstein went to his deathbed refusing to accept the puzzling, unpredictable consequences of Heisenberg's quantum theory, a theory now accepted as far more helpful than Einstein's own view of a completely predictable universe. Sometimes even our most celebrated intellects do not find it easy to be open and teachable.
In one of my graduate philosophy classes a statement was made that has never left me: "The distinguishing mark of the sincere seeker after truth is his willingness to give as much weight as possible to the evidence that disputes his own position."
For the brilliant and well trained, few temptations are more compelling than the temptation to acquire power by claiming to know that others do not know and that we do. By summoning us to listen attentively to those who dis agree with us, to respect the honesty of their quest for understanding as much as we respect our own, and to acknowledge the incompleteness of our own opinions, the words spoken in that class define the truly educated person. They are not meant to discourage us from being passionate about what we believe. Rather, they are meant to keep us humble and teachable.
Should we encourage dissent?
Sociologist David Riesman points out that the kind of student who makes the most favorable impression on faculty members is the slightly offbeat or "rebellious" student. He is the one who gets recommended for fellowships and jobs. Those who are yes-men, who consistently assent and have no critical dissent, ultimately do not contribute to either their company, their culture, or their religion.
On the other hand, every culture educates its young partly to ensure the continuation of its values. Democratic societies, however, have a problem in that no one can guarantee that the society's values are universally supported or that they can be easily stated.
What, then, should be the goal of education: to persuade students to agree with the basic assumptions of their culture or to teach them to disagree? Is the educated person essentially a conformist, a rebel, or some synthesis of the two?
We must learn what it means to know and not to know. Those who have not learned how to verify or falsify their ideas, how to assess the significance of the evidence that can be marshaled in favor of or in opposition to what they think or believe, are easy prey for dogmatism, which in this century alone has produced Fascism, Communism, and the various forms of religious fundamentalism. 1
Educators who wish to create flexible, supple minds open to newness must be courageous enough to expose them to important "and often uncomfortable, if not initially unacceptable, ideas." 2 Through this process, students will learn that knowing includes both assent and dissent, both certitude and tentativity. They will learn that questions with which they wrestle are the same questions that challenged Moses, Plato, Aristotle, and even Jesus. The universality and complexity of these questions do not always allow final answers, only a measure of wisdom.
The same problem that confronts education confronts the church. The members may be in basic agreement about values and theology, but the Judeo-Christian tradition posits too much freedom for us to assume we can agree on everything. In fact, that kind of agreement would be desirable only if we could know with certainty that all our values and ideas are infallibly correct. If we cannot affirm that, then we must say that even in the church, education is not simply for assent, but also for dissent. It cannot be limited to one or the other.
Ideally, both should ultimately merge in a new enterprise enquiry. 3 The moment we accept the principle of intellectual freedom, we commit our selves to fearless questioning. And if we assent to the additional Protestant principle of the sacredness of the individual, we commit ourselves to respecting, as much as we can, the importance of personal judgment. 4
Education, therefore, has a dual role to play. On the one hand, it educates for assent to those values that undergird a democratic society or church. On the other hand, it educates to dissent. The two together, what we just called enquiry, bring everything out into the open for investigation, reformulation, and reapplication.
Assenters rejected Jesus
Christian education should particularly value this approach, for it was the lack of a spirit of enquiry that led to J esus' crucifixion.
One of the purposes of John's Gospel is to answer the question as to why so many of the Jews rejected Jesus as the Messiah--what made some believers and some unbelievers. As John tells the story, one's acceptance or rejection of Jesus is not tied to one's education or class.
In Jesus' clashes with the Jews over the meaning of the Sabbath, it is clear that the leadership rejected Him because His actions challenged their view of orthodoxy. He cited evidence from the Bible to justify His teachings, but their minds were closed. Tradition ruled their thinking. They read the same Bible Jesus read, but they saw it very differently. In effect, they were saying, "Our traditional interpretation of Moses won't allow us to see you as the Messiah; therefore, your claims are false."
This is always an issue. Do we see in the Bible only what our present view point allows us to see, or can we read it in a vital, living way that allows it if necessary to shatter our present formulations?
John implies that these hearers of Jesus did not want to understand Him because they knew that what He had to say was a threat to their opinions. Whether or not they believed in Him was not simply a matter of whether or not they under stood Him, for the disciples did not understand Jesus either. Not until the very end of His life on earth. But the disciples desperately wanted to understand--whatever the consequences to their beliefs--and that made all the difference. In John's Gospel people are not judged for not understanding, but for not wanting to understand.
By chapter 12 of his Gospel, John has made his case. That some did not believe was not Jesus' fault. He gave them an abundance of evidence, more than any open mind would need. But they chose not to believe. They were determined not to accept the evidence. Proof of their stubbornness lies in the fact that they would not rest until Jesus was dead.
Modem psychology calls this attitude "closure," a phenomenon in which people find a change of thinking so threatening that they cling to their views and feelings no matter how false or silly they might be.
All those who challenge accepted views pay a price; it makes little difference what culture produces the dissenters. Their names are legion: Isaiah, Socrates, John the Baptist, John Huss, Mahatma Gandhi, and Martin Luther King, Jr. They all respected their traditions but did not regard them as sacrosanct. "We should assent to what we can," they said, "and dissent from what we must." That is the spirit of enquiry, and it is fueled by the conviction that truth itself is always infinitely more important than our ideas of it.
One of the essays formative to my thinking was Jacob Bronowski's "The Principle of Tolerance" (published in his Ascent of Man). In it he points out that the twentieth century has brought us to an epistemological impasse. We now realize that we cannot get precision in our understanding of matter, that at best we have understanding within tolerable limits. Because the components of matter either are too small to be directly observed through microscopes or cannot be pinpointed at the same moment their velocity is being measured, our theories cannot be verified or falsified in every instance by direct observation. We must, therefore, be content with under standings that are like blurred pictures. We see the outlines, but they are fuzzy.
The same is true in religion and in the other disciplines of the liberal arts. Truth and reality are seldom clear. At best our knowledge can only approximate them. They always seem to be richer and more complex than our ideas of them. That is why simply thinking about truth or reality is not enough. We must also feel, intuit, take leaps of the imagination that gamble on a fundamentally different way of seeing things.
It was the lack of the courage to do this—or to allow others to do it—that led the masses to condemn some of the greatest people in history, people who understood that each answer to a ques tion is a doorway to a dozen new questions never before asked, that a locked mind imprisons both the intellect and the spirit, and that openness and humility will always characterize the truly educated person, especially if he calls himself a Christian.
