Liberal Arts for the Christian Life (eBook)

THE STUDENT’S CALLING

Leland Ryken

“Education is not a preparation for life—it is life.” So claims a headline in one college’s promotional brochure.

College was once a time of preparation in which young adults could search for truth, broaden their intellectual and cultural horizons in multiple directions, and decide what vocation best suited their talents. Today many of you are pressured to regulate your college years around the job you think you have the best chance of landing upon graduation. In the process, you may be tempted to turn your back on the very subjects that interest you most, which may be the areas where your greatest potential contributions to church and to society lie.

Today’s college students are caught in an identity crisis. Your instincts as learners pull you in one direction, while voices of activism and preoccupation with landing a job pull you in other directions. It was once an axiom that education was a preparation for something in the future. Today young people are made to feel guilty about being in a preparation phase.

The time has come to revive an idea that once seemed natural: the student’s life as a Christian calling. By calling I mean vocation—the occupation of being a student. It is an idea that you students and your parents need to hear.

When we begin to describe the ingredients of the student’s life as a calling, we quickly start to formulate a theory of education as well. Some methods of education measure up to the description of that calling, while others do not. This should not surprise us, for, as T. S. Eliot once noted, “we must derive our theory of education from our philosophy of life. The problem turns out to be a religious problem.”1

WHAT IS EDUCATION FOR?

In one important way, a Christian student’s calling is the same as it is for a Christian in any situation of life. Its central focus is the individual’s relationship to God. Loving and serving God should be the foundation for everything else that you do at college. It is a requirement, not an elective.

When the Puritans founded Harvard College just six years after arriving in Massachusetts, one of the rules at the new college was this: “Let every student be plainly instructed, and earnestly pressed to consider well, [that] the main end of his life and studies is, to know God and Jesus Christ . . . and therefore to lay Christ in the bottom, as the only foundation of all sound knowledge and learning.”2 When Thomas Shepard’s son entered the college, Shephard wrote to his son, “Remember the end of your life, which is coming back again to God, and fellowship with him.”3

And in the noblest of all educational treatises, John Milton’s Of Education, Milton gave this definition of Christian education: “The end then of learning is to repair the ruins of our first parents by regaining to know God aright, and out of that knowledge to love him, to imitate him, to be like him.”4 Contrary to trends in our own century, Milton here defines education in terms of its end or goal. There may be many ways to achieve a Christian education, but in the meantime we must not lose sight of what it is for. What it is for is to produce Christian growth.

Albert Einstein once remarked that we live in a day of perfect means and confused goals. When we obscure the goals of education, we trivialize it. It is no wonder that students today so easily reduce education to completing the required number of courses and obtaining a degree (but often not an education). Too often our vision is limited—in that most irritating of all student clichés—to getting a requirement “out of the way.”

Our whole milieu has conditioned you to conceive of your education in measurable quantities, with grades and jobs upon graduation topping the list. But to conceive of the student’s calling in Christian terms—to view it (as Milton did) as a process of redemption and sanctification—is to substitute an entirely different agenda of concerns. Here the crucial question is not how many requirements you meet or even how much you know, but rather what kind of person you are in the “process of becoming” during your college years.

The nurture of your soul is finally a more important part of your calling than obtaining marketable skills. I said at the outset that my description of the Christian student’s calling would be at the same time a theory of education. Education governed by a goal of Christian maturity certainly implies Christian education, however it might be achieved.

You who are new to college may think that in a Christian atmosphere the spiritual aspect of your calling will automatically take care of itself. This is not true. It has sadly become a regular part of my life to hear about former students who two, five, or ten years after graduation have repudiated the Christian faith. The casualties include people who, as they sat in my office or accompanied me to England or greeted me at church, were the last people in the world I would have expected to drift away from the faith.

So consider the matter well: there is ultimately one indispensable thing during your education. Be diligent “in season and out of season” to make your calling as a Christian believer sure. Do not close the chapter on this formative era of your life having neglected your spiritual health.

ALL OF LIFE IS GOD’S

A second cornerstone of the Christian student’s calling is the premise that all of life is God’s. There is no division of life into sacred and secular. For a Christian, all of life is sacred.

What goes on in chapel is not more glorifying to God than what goes on in the classroom. What goes on in the classroom is not more important to God than what goes on in the dorm room or the dining hall. We have no basis for viewing some academic courses as sacred and others as secular. Nor are some academic majors holier than others. God calls Christians to make his will prevail in every area of life.

As a variation on that theme, we should be convinced that all truth is God’s truth. In the New Testament, Paul several times quotes with approval from pagan Greek poets whom he apparently knew by heart. In his commentary on one of these passages, John Calvin wrote, “For since all truth is of God, if any ungodly man has said anything true, we should not reject it, for it also has come from God.”5 Thomas Shepard wrote to his son at college, “Remember that not only heavenly and spiritual and supernatural knowledge descends from God, but also all natural and human learning and abilities; and therefore pray much, not only for the one but also for the other.”6

The integration of every academic discipline with the Christian faith is an essential part of the Christian student’s calling. It is the distinguishing feature of Christian education. A college is not Christian simply by virtue of having chapel services. By the same token, a weekly meeting with a Christian student group on a university campus is not the same as an education in which the very curriculum is structured to help us view human knowledge from a Christian perspective.

LIBERAL ARTS EDUCATION

It is an easy step—I would say an inevitable step—from the idea that all of life is God’s to the idea of a liberal arts education. What is a liberal arts education? I recall sitting as a freshman in a history course where that question was directed to one of the “lesser lights” in the class. His reply was, “Isn’t that where you know a little about everything but not much about anything?” The definition was seriously intended, but it nearly sent the professor laughing hysterically out of the room.

Liberal arts education is comprehensive education. Martin Luther wrote to the councilmen at Germany, “If I had children and could manage it, I would have them study not only languages and history, but also singing and music together with the whole of mathematics. . . . The ancient Greeks trained their children in these disciplines. . . . They grew up to be people of wondrous ability, subsequently fit for everything.”7

“Fit for everything”: that has always been the goal of liberal arts education, as distinct from vocational training in a specific field. Milton’s definition is even more famous. He defined “a complete and generous education” as one that “fits a man to perform . . . all the offices, both private and public, of peace and war.”8 The heart of Milton’s definition is that a complete education frees a person to perform “all the offices” of life. A liberal education prepares people to do well in all that they might be called to do in life.

May I add that such an education is possible only as you realize that all education is ultimately self-education. Education is learning, and someone else cannot learn for you. The most perfect educational climate in the world will not make you an educated person. Moreover, an adequate education does not stop after one’s college years. To be generously educated is to have acquired the lifelong habit of self-education.

What are the “private and public” roles that Milton had in view when he defined liberal education? Education in our day is obsessed with a single public role, getting a job, which is increasingly defined in terms of one’s income. But the public roles that a person fills cover much more than that. They include being a good church member, a good board member or...