Conviction and truth in Adventist education

When Tony Campolo, the well-known preacher-professor, flies home after speaking appointments, his response to questioning seatmates depends on whether he feels like talking or not.

He explains that "when someone asks what I do, and I want to talk, I say I'm a sociologist." The person perks up—"Oh, that's interesting!" and wants to know more. "But if I really want to shut someone up," he goes on, "I say I'm a Baptist evangelist. That generally does it."

Our society, in large measure, is afraid of conviction, especially religious conviction. And the well-educated (who often ride air planes) tend to dismiss "Baptist evangelists" as pushy and closed-minded. So Campolo's self-deprecating story rings true. It's funny because people really have those attitudes.

One reason for our society's fear of conviction is that conventional educators think schools should be non-committal about religion and morality. As for the stereotype about "Baptist evangelists," that reflects a weakness for closed-mindedness that really does exist among believers.

I have led Adventist colleges, and I think the best education is partisan education, education that builds religious conviction. I also think the best education opens minds to growth. If the first point goes against the grain of worldly wisdom, the second, I'm afraid, goes against the grain of some churchly piety. But those who have taught us best in the church agree with both these points, and so should we.

It's clear that the Bible writers believed the education of the young should build religious conviction. According to Deuteronomy 6, for example, God expected Israel to teach the divine commands and stories to every generation; these things, after all, had to be "upon your heart." ¹ Ellen White declared that the education of the young should be "consistent with our faith." The "work of true education," she says further, is training students to "possess .. . the courage of their convictions."²

Opposition to teaching particular truth and conviction

The heirs of the Enlightenment, who shaped the worldly wisdom of today, disagree with this view of education. At his inauguration to the presidency of Harvard in 1869, Charles Eliot mocked teaching that instills in students some particular set of beliefs about what is good and true. That may be "logical and appropriate in a convent, or a seminary for priests," he said in his speech that day, but it is "intolerable" in universities.³ A Harvard student under Eliot, DeWitt Hyde, who became president of Bowdoin College, thought the "narrowness" of church colleges "utterly incompatible" with responsible high er education. "A church university," he declaimed, "is a contradiction in terms."⁴

Similar attitudes—we may call them "liberal" attitudes—are still commonplace. The famous Columbia University professor, Jacque Barzun, wrote in 1991 that trying to inculcate "any set of personal, social, or political virtues" in the classroom is "either indoctrination or foolery." ⁵ John Mearscheimer, a political scientist at the University of Chicago, told colleagues in his 1997 address on "The Aims of Education" that the university's job is to produce thinkers who are skilled, knowledgeable, and independent. It has no business defending a particular truth or implanting a particular morality. He says, proudly indeed, that his university is "a fundamentally amoral institution."⁶

It's not just people connected with biblical religion, however, who disagree with these attitudes. Some five centuries before Christ, the Greek writer Aristophanes wrote a play called Clouds. He meant it a as a criticism of Socrates, the philosopher of that same period whose thinking did much to form the ideals of "liberal education."

The play is about a young man, a spendthrift and idler who has hardly any conscience at all. His desperate father, having heard about the school in Athens where Socrates is teaching, decides to enroll his son there. He hopes education under renowned teachers will transform him. But the school, it turns out, puts all the focus on raising questions. Although the son hears defenders of traditional values, the overall emphasis is criticism of traditional thinking and morality. As Aristophanes tells the story, even Socrates has nothing positive to teach about how to live. He ridicules inherited wisdom, yet offers no substitute for it. He says nothing about what a person should aim for in life, nothing about the standards and convictions that should prevail.

Develop convictions or drift

How does Aristophanes voice his disagreement with all this? In the play he has the son finish school—and leave as selfish as when he came. He has not been transformed. He still lacks a conscience; he is still a spendthrift and idler.⁷

The point is the very one I am making: unless education builds conviction, students (and in the end, societies) drift to the path of least resistance. You stay with what you think and feel already, or move toward what the dominant surrounding culture thinks and feels. In the early twentieth century, the poet William Butler Yeats noted that the exceptions to the rule—the persons who steer a course, not just drift with the wind—are, all too often, perpetrators of evil. "The best lack all conviction," he complained, "while the worst are full of passionate intensity." The effect, as our violent century shows, is the loosing of "the blood-dimmed tide."⁸

And people educated in the Enlightenment tradition played a key role in loosing the blood-dimmed tide. On January 20, 1942, fourteen men, all officials in the Nazi government, gathered for what history remembers as the Wannsee Conference. These men completed a Holocaust strategy, a plan for elimination of the Jews from Europe. Not only did they agree on the murder of Jews. They agreed that their mouths would be mines for gold, their hair a textile for clothing, their fat a source of soap, their bones raw material for fertilizer! And of these fourteen monsters, eight had doctoral degrees!⁹

It's no wonder that a Holocaust survivor who became a school principal in Massachusetts remarked one day to his teachers that he was "suspicious of education." In a note he left in their mailboxes at the start of school one year, he said he had seen "what no one should witness": gas chambers built by learned engineers, children killed by highly educated physicians and nurses. So he could not trust learning for its own sake, and he appealed to his teachers to help their students become better people. "Your efforts," he said, "must never produce learned monsters, skilled psychopaths, educated Eichmanns. Reading, writing, and arithmetic are important only if they serve to make our children more humane." ¹⁰

Growth, honesty, and authentic spirit

True education builds conviction, including religious conviction; by making us more authentic in spirit, it makes us more humane in our dealings with others.

But true education also imparts a readiness to test inherited under standing: to analyze it and improve upon it. It gives learners both the ability and the eagerness to advance in knowledge and insight, making them, as Ellen White said, into "thinkers, and not mere reflectors of other men=s thoughts." They become persons who have both "breadth of mind" and "clearness of thought." ¹¹

In a word, true education opens minds to growth. But this point really does go, all too often, against the grain of churchly piety. When I was a boy, a family came to my congregation convinced that, from duty to God, all women and girls had to wear long pants under their dresses. I was familiar with nonconformity; against convention, my family kept the Sabbath. But to me this new family's nonconformity was just weird: I saw no good "reasons" for it, nor any readiness, on their part, to entertain change.

This was my first awareness that religion could unite with folly, or what I thought was folly. Later I became aware of the endless stream of bad typing (it's hardly writing) that zealots with similarly narrow preoccupations send to whomever they feel should receive it. Usually, it's marked by silly, dangerous certitude: all answers and no questions.

When I first heard about the incident in Waco involving Branch Davidians and their leader, David Koresh, I was in my church with someone whose brother was inside the compound. Later, after the madness concluded in a fatal fire, I sat in the same church one day not far from two children who were now father less from that fire. Clearly, what had happened was "close to home." And now my heart, not just my head, was confronting what had happened. It was confronting the fact that the main characters inside the compound had been schooled in Adventism, even if they had drawn away from it in their devotion to Koresh and his wild, apocalyptic speculations. Their backgrounds somehow made them vulnerable to his intoxicating certitude, his many answers, his few questions. But in this case the damage was far graver than the embarrassment of young girls forbidden by their family to wear dresses without long pants.

Having an eagerness to learn and grow

These stories show that religious people—Adventist people—face, and sometimes acquiesce to the temptation of self-satisfaction and closed mindedness.

It's just not automatic that we love the Lord, as we are commanded, with our minds. The stories show, too, the hazards of giving in to this temptation. And stories from mainstream Adventism underscore the point. During World War II the leadership of the church in Germany again and again expressed its support, even its praise, for Hitler. The church kept proclaiming its message, insensible to the Holocaust's unfolding evil.¹²

Had I been in Germany then, I might have been as numb to the "blood-dimmed tide" as anyone else. It's not easy, after all, to acquire the "breadth of mind" and "clearness of thought" that is called for if we are to live properly in this world. But the fact that it's not easy by no means excuses us from trying.

When the Bible pictures Jesus as a child, He is an eager learner, "sitting among his teachers, listening to them and asking questions." When it pictures Him as a teacher in His own right, He is pushing boundaries. Against the conventions of His age, He rescues the Sabbath from legalism. Against these same conventions, He opens the learning circle to Mary, whom others would have excluded because she was a woman. Then, in the atmosphere of danger and uncertainty just before His arrest in Jerusalem, Jesus told His disciples that the coming Spirit would deepen their understanding even after He was gone. ¹³

The ideal for us, Christ's followers, is obvious: we should grow in wisdom all our lives. As the poet says in the famous hymn: "They must upward still and onward, Who would keep abreast of truth." ¹⁴

Embracing the difficulty

Perhaps, then, the mature religious community will not only expect and learn to live with the difficulty that goes along with learning; it will actually embrace that difficulty. Ellen White embraces it. She challenges the Church to fore swear the conservatism that seeks to "avoid discussion." Without "new questions" or "difference of opinion," she says, we veer toward the ignorant "self-confidence" that feels "no necessity for more truth and greater light." ¹⁵

Against those who think any acknowledgment of "error" will lead others to doubt, or cause "dissension and disunion," she declaims: "We cannot hold that a position once taken, an idea once advocated, is not, under any circumstances, to be relinquished. Those who allow prejudice to bar the mind against the reception of truth cannot receive the divine enlightenment." ¹⁶

Striving for harmony

But if mature believers embrace the difficulty that goes along with learning, they at the same time strive for harmony. Our passion to learn must be driven always by love for one another and by concern for the Church and the Church's mission. When Paul dealt with a quarreling community in Corinth, he reminded the members that if differences of outlook decline into petulance and pride, they cannot be constructive. "Knowledge puffs up," he said, "but love builds up." ¹⁷

The idea of discipleship also puts learning in perspective, by connecting it with shared mission. The case of Bartimaeus, the blind man Jesus healed outside of Jericho, illuminates the matter perfectly. As the context in Mark's Gospel suggests, the man wanted not only to see, but also to understand. And when Jesus granted his wish, he immediately "followed him" on the road to Jerusalem. ¹⁸ He became a learner, engaged in his master's mission. That mission, of course, was just the love, the radical generosity, that Paul upheld in his letter to the Corinthians. But the point now is that Bartimaeus wedded learning in the school of Christ with enlistment in the cause of Christ, and thus became, according to James William McClendon, "the paradigmatic Christian scholar." ¹⁹

The story of Bartimaeus puts the church's vision of learning in the con text of conviction. True education builds religious conviction—puts learners into the alliance with Christ that Bartimaeus joined so eagerly. True education also opens minds to growth—what Bartimaeus also wanted—so this magnificent alliance can grow stronger and more effective through deeper understanding.

Conviction? Yes! It must be central in education.

Minds open to growth? Yes! This, too, must be central.

If the marriage of conviction and learning isn't easy, it's still worth preserving. For when conviction and openness to growth join hands, the partnership helps the whole body of Christ reach toward the greater faithfulness, and the greater abundance of life, that is, after all, the essence of being a Christian.