A Preacher in Wonderland

A while ago I went back to college with my daughter. Aside from some summer in-service training in the Theological Seminary at Princeton in buildings and under conditions which change little and which her graduates remember with nostalgia, I had not seen what goes on inside present-day higher education.

“Hey, Daddy-o,” said the red-headed light of my life, “how about going to biology with me?”

So promptly at the scheduled hour—although in a large university no one cares whether you come or sleep in—I was seated beside her in an amphitheater that she casually told me could hold between seven and eight hundred. As in most universities, it is full on the first day of each semester and then the intellectual death rate begins to take its toll. This day there were probably no more than six hundred, which is still larger than most congregations on Sunday morning. The bell, however, was still tolling for them. We sat at long tables that struck us in the chest at the proper height to compel us to stay awake and take notes.

The lecturer, a Ph.D. in biological science, was a woman who is rather a favorite of the students because she relates her material to everyday life. On this first day of classes after the Thanksgiving holiday, the lecture happened to be on the complicated process of digestion. The lecturer reminded the class of the yet undigested cold turkey within them and then plunged immediately into the task at hand, which, like the legendary question to the centipede—“How do you manage with all those legs?”—was calculated to make us so amazed with what was going on inside us that we wouldn’t be able to function properly.

The lecturer had a microphone about her neck; control of the lights in the room and the projector was at the tip of her toes; instead of a blackboard she had in front of her an illuminated writing pad that threw the important words on a screen behind her. But as I sat there, my memory took me back to biology as I had studied it some thirty years before, and I marveled not only at the technology that made the modern classroom itself such an amazing place but also at the amount of detail gathered by biology since I studied it. The list of enzymes in the pancreas alone would drive you mad.

As the lecturer talked rapidly on toward that deadline beyond which no professor dares go lest feet shuffle and books be dropped, two sentences appeared for me on the classroom wall, behind her writings, superimposed on a full-color drawing of the stomach and intestines. They were from Luke 12:55, 56:

And when ye see the south wind blow, ye say, There will be heat; and it cometh to pass. Ye hypocrites, ye can discern the face of the sky and of the earth; but how is it that ye do not discern this time?

The teacher was giving the most convincing testimony to the fact of and the power of and the intent of God I had ever heard. After describing the breakdown of the protein we eat into amino acids and mentioning five or six steps which she said were chemically unfathomable at points, she stated that the food comes to a chemical composition that is “the only composition which would enable the cells to absorb it.” And I wanted to stand up in the midst of a class dedicated to the proposition that evolution makes all things equal and shout that the hand of God was right there in their midst.

Again and again in tracing the biological process the lecturer would arrive at the mysterious end by which all things worked out for good for the turkey dinner and the class. And I thought that even if she could not have shown us a cross section of the soul, she could at least have written across her diagram of the liver, “the work of God.” For the liver, by means of the marvelous ATP, changes glucose into the “only” substance (glucose phosphate) into which it can be transformed and still be used by the body. And parenthetically, it struck me that there is a high degree of correlation between the abuse of the liver, the abuse of the human spirit, and the wages of sin.

But as I looked at the sleepy young faces I knew that they did not see the handwriting. Moreover, I realized that unless the prophet pointed with the eternal pointer to the sovereign God and wrote on the projected cellulose page, “In the beginning God,” they would not know. And it’s a fact, dear reader, that when the lecturer turned off the flow of scientific fact and shut off the lights, I looked at the clock on the back wall and it said five minutes to twelve.

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