What Does Academic Success Look Like?

What do you think of when you hear the term “academic success”? Do you imagine college graduation ceremonies or a college/university diploma framed on an office wall? In the United States, only one of every three adults has a college education, and only eight of every one hundred people (8 percent of population) have earned a master’s degree. Obviously, this is one way to think about the meaning of academic success.

Of course, a person can achieve academic success by earning degrees and still be a failure in life. I thought about this a few years ago when my wife Mary Ann and I had the opportunity to visit Cambodia, where our oldest daughter and her husband were working with a Christian development organization. You may remember what happened in Cambodia in the 1970s: 40 percent of the population was wiped out (teachers and church leaders were specifically targeted to be killed).

During our visit, we toured The Killing Fields Museum, where many of the killings took place. We saw a 30-foot high tower with nothing but human skulls inside and a large tree called the Infant Tree, where the leaders of the Khmer Rouge would take babies to kill. I was deeply disturbed to discover almost every one of those murderous leaders had been educated at top universities. They were brilliant people with plenty of degrees behind their names, yet they ended up being some of the most despotic individuals of the twentieth century.

Clearly, academic success cannot be measured by degrees alone and must include a person’s soul as well as mind. What is a Christian perspective of educational success? Consider Luke 2:52: “Jesus increased in wisdom, and in stature, and in favor with God and with people.” This short verse clarifies that Jesus had grown in every dimension of life, the intellectual, the physical, the social, and the spiritual. I suggest this might serve as a picture, a paradigm, for defining success in education. It provides the criteria for academic success in four dimensions.

First, we see the intellectual dimension: Jesus grew in wisdom. Education, of course, is about knowledge and the intellect. But wisdom is the ability to take knowledge we have received and apply it to every sphere of life. It's the ability to make good decisions amidst the complexities, and sometimes the competing ethical claims, of life.

Second, there is the physical dimension: Jesus increased in stature. It may seem rather odd that the gospel writer would mention Jesus' physical dimension. After all, when many people think about religion, they think of something rather nonphysical, far removed from the everyday routines of life. Scripture tells us our bodies are the temple of the Holy Spirit, and, thus, what we do within and through our physical dimension matters a great deal to God. We can do well with the mind, with intellect, and even with wisdom, but if we do not care for the body and the world around us, we will not have succeeded. The mind alone will never enable a flourishing life.

Many Christian schools and many Christian colleges are realizing that when you talk about Christian education, it includes the physical side, and, therefore, emphases on athletics, physical education programs, physical therapy programs, wilderness discovery programs, medical and health programs--the list could go on. The physical dimension extends to caring for the created world that God has made. That, too, was part of the mandate of the creator in Genesis.

A third dimension of education is learning how to relate to others, how to handle conflicts, how to communicate well, how to listen well. It is the social dimension: Jesus grew in favor with people. We must learn to live out our faith in a broken complex world as social beings. That means that we work hard at overcoming prejudice and racism, seeking justice for the downtrodden and the oppressed, caring for the poor and the disenfranchised, because we all share together the reality of being made in God's image. One day, in glory as believers in Christ, we will all gather around the throne of the lamb together.

Unlike some significant holy men and women in history, Jesus was not a hermit, disassociating himself from other people. Throughout his life, the social dimension of being human was vitally important. He was, as the theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer once put it, a man for others. After all, God made us to be social creatures. Genesis 2:18 says, “It is not good for the man to be alone.” We are created for interaction. We are created to be with people and for people, and sustained by people. We know this, not only biblically, but through various academic disciplines such as sociology, psychology, economics, history, education, business, and management studies. Others could be added to the list. All point to life lived together.

The fourth dimension is spiritual: Jesus grew in favor with God. Although Jesus was fully God, he entered into this world and gave attention to what we commonly call the spiritual disciplines. He prayed, not just when the going got tough, and it did for Jesus. He read and meditated on scripture. He frequently got up early in the morning and went alone to be in the presence of the Father. He engaged in service to others. He pointed others to the kingdom of God and to himself as Savior and Lord. If Jesus, being God's son divine, needed to engage in these spiritual disciplines, how much more do we need them? We're created as spiritual beings, beings intended to live with God, for God, enabled by God, to know him personally and to live out our lives out of that fundamental foundational relationship. We can have great intellect, great physical prowess, wonderful social skills, but if the spiritual dimension is missing, something foundational is missing in one's life.

We can imagine our livese as a wheel with four spokes: the intellectual, the physical, the social, and the spiritual. At the center of all of that is Christ. What we need to know about academic success is that a Christ-centered life means that you can play a sport, study math, literature, history, education, business, the sciences, that you can laugh and engage with friends, that you can play a musical instrument or sing, that you can create art, that you can work at a job--and it all has a higher purpose. The framework of our education must be Christ-centered and all for the glory of God. This is the genius of a Christian education, and it is unparalleled in the world.

Dr. Dennis Hollinger is President of Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary and a distinguished professor of Christian Ethics. During the 2016 National Hispanic Education Summit, he shared an insightful presentation on the value of a Christian education and the true measure of academic success.

[ This article is also available in español. ]