The Marks of an Educated Person: Minds Touched by Greatness

A look around shows that colleges create both men and monsters—and perhaps worse, a middle group without the initiative to be either: graduates who mindlessly live out lives feverish over incidentals or placid before enormities.

But of course such people didn’t go to colleges that were Christian. Or did they?

It would seem that attending a Christian college—even with its strong emphasis on the humanities—is no more an automatic ticket to educated adulthood than attending the Olympics is an automatic ticket to athletic prowess. Every field has its potbellied bystanders.

What does it really mean to be “educated”? Suppose a student in a Christian college genuinely wants to be a 100 percent participant. Toward what goals should he stretch?

One goal, or cluster of goals, that calls for special attention concerns the intellect. While for convenience this will be discussed in the context of a Christian college, the Christian student (or teacher) in the secular college should find that the same ideas fit his own situation.

A problem immediately arises. Can we justifiably consider goals related to the intellect? Are they even fitting for the obedient Christian? Some say scholarship and piety are mutually exclusive, and many evangelicals find themselves distrusting the academic life. Often this is because we know professors who are such cold fish—bland rationalists miles away from the warm and generous spirit of Paul or Jesus. They may even use their icy knowledge to attack biblical truth. Such academics seem to force us to make a severe decision: Choose you this day whom you will serve—scholarship or devotion.

We may even find ourselves calling on Scripture to support such a decision. “Knowledge puffs up, but love builds up” (1 Cor. 8:1). The passage seems to say that if we choose the scholarly goal of knowledge, we will walk the road of pride and arrogance. Love, on the other hand, seems to go quietly about its concern for the welfare of others.

But is Paul teaching this? Does he mean that being informed about our cultural heritage and aware of important issues will undermine godliness? We find a clue in modern versions that place the word “knowledge” in quotation marks. Paul was not speaking about genuine knowledge; he was rebuking the Corinthian liberals for their inflated self-complacency. It was not genuine knowledge that was “puffing up,” but a pseudo-wisdom many felt they had received by special revelation. They had fallen victim to the prevailing temptation of the Greek mind that confused character with knowledge.

Overbearing pride and arrogance unfortunately often characterize the so-called educated person—but not because his knowledge by its nature is antagonistic to spiritual growth. It all depends on his attitude; if a student couples knowledge with biblical humility, he will not parade his information. He will not seek an advantage by clever use of esoteric vocabulary. Superficial learning is proud that it has mastered so much, but true wisdom is humble both because there is so much yet to learn, and because God is so much more than a computer-stocked answer man.

So the college student who wishes to become educated need not fight shy of knowledge if he keeps his eye on the Jesus who was perfect yet humble, omniscient yet a servant. A student who is wholly given to Christ is under no necessity of choosing between the “unscrupulous genius and the virtuous ignoramus,” to borrow words from Horace Mann.

If the Bible fails to place a premium on ignorance, by contrast it places us under obligation to use our minds for God’s glory. In answer to the lawyer’s question, “Teacher, which commandment is first of all?” Jesus answered, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength, and with all your mind” (Luke 10:27). Do we, while acknowledging God’s claim to our heart, soul, and strength, refuse him lordship over our mind? The Greek word for “mind,” dianoia, means “the process or faculty of rational thought.” The greatest commandment is to love God with every power we possess—emotional, volitional, and intellectual. We have an obligation to think! God does, of course, give us varying abilities, but the command to “love the Lord … with all your mind” binds us all to the searching use of whatever mental capacity he has given us.

The history of Christian thought convinces us that precisely where scholarship and devotion have been properly blended, theological greatness has been born. Bernard Ramm has said that true greatness results when the spirit of free inquiry joins in harmony with a profound saturation with the Word of God.

Philip Melanchthon, the famous Lutheran theologian, demonstrates this harmony of free inquiry and scriptural insight, scholarship, and devotion. As Ramm notes, in his first year of teaching at Wittenberg “he taught Hebrew and Greek, translated one of Lucian’s works, published his work on Titus with a lexicon, completed a treatise on Athenagoras, one on Plato’s Symposium, and wrote three volumes on rhetoric!” Philip Melanchthon was an educated man.

Or consider the classical and biblical insights of men such as John Calvin. At only 27, he wrote the first edition of his famous Institutes of the Christian Religion—a work that after 200 years still stands as the finest expression of Reformed theology. John Calvin was an educated man.

We usually think of John Wesley as an ardent evangelist. Traveling 5,000 miles a year on horseback he preached over 42,000 sermons—an average of three a day. But in addition, he wrote more than 200 books and edited over 450 publications. He could quote the Greek New Testament more exactly than the English Bible. As a don at Lincoln College, Oxford, he taught logic and also the classics in the original Greek and Latin. John Wesley was an educated man.

So knowledge and piety are not mutually exclusive! Every student who seeks to become educated must pursue the high goal of scholarship. Professor Ebeling has said it well: “The faith that is afraid to think is unbelief in the mask of piety.”

If then the intellect can serve the glory of God, toward what goals in terms of scholarship should the ordinary Christian student stretch? What characterizes the “educated man” he seeks to be? We will focus on three factors, and try to show the relation of both Christian student and teacher to each.

First, the educated person has developed the habit of inquiry. Many years ago Plato said that the mark of a philosopher was “wonder.” James Watt wondered about a kettle; Newton about an apple; Archimedes about a bath—and in each case science leaped forward. The life of the mind is basically curiosity overcoming inertia.

To help a student develop an inquiring mind is perhaps the major obligation of the teacher. There is no place in a Christian college for a professor who views himself as a vast repository of knowledge to be dispensed in manageable segments on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday at 11 o’clock. A teacher worth his salt views himself as a stimulant to the student’s intellectual maturity. If all we want from college is information, public libraries are adequate. But when we personally interact with and synthesize some portion of that knowledge, we are engaging in the process properly called “education.” An evangelical Scottish schoolmaster, James Stalker, summed this up: “A teacher has done nothing unless he has awakened the mind to independent activity.”

How does this habit of inquiry affect the student? To be a student one must ask questions. Not questions that simply invite authoritative answers, but questions that constantly test the validity of all proposed answers. The goal is not skepticism but careful and unhurried progress from premise to conclusion and back to premise again. The heart of the intellectual discipline is the constant asking for evidence—whether in mechanics and medicine, or philosophy and religion.

An educated person has also developed the power of discernment. We live out our lives in an atmosphere where truth and error constantly intermingle. If we are searchers after truth we accept the obligation to discern, to evaluate, to choose. There is an urgency about life because the larger issues that shape our destiny cannot be learned by trial and error. Discernment in these areas is our most critical need.

To develop the student’s capacity for rational judgment is one of the college’s supreme responsibilities. This means that the student may well be exposed to a bewildering array of ideologies. Even his faith must sometimes pass through the traumatic experience of doubt before he can possess it as his own. At times the teacher must be a troubler of the water, not simply a beacon giving direction.

I am not advocating a sink-or-swim policy. I am not suggesting that the ideal academic situation is characterized by some sort of neutrality free from all presuppositions. Historian Carl Becker has said that a genuinely detached mind would lie among the facts of history like unmagnetized steel among iron filings—no synthesis ever resulting. Rather, the role of the college is to open up the various possibilities, allow the student the conflict of personal engagement, yet stand by for guidance and direction. Neither a protected indoctrination nor an undisciplined tolerance is the friend of truth. The one creates an automaton; the other turns a running stream into a stagnant marsh.

If true discernment is our goal, we cannot sacrifice intellectual honesty for a biased presentation of the major alternatives, nor can we set the student adrift on the sea of possibilities without direction.

The educated person possesses what Alfred North Whitehead has called The Habitual Vision of Greatness. There must be constant exposure to great ideas. The student must enter into the heroic exploits of the mind of man as it has journeyed into the unknown to return with reports of the promised land. These are the transforming experiences that lie at the center of effective education. It is psychologically sound that, as C.L. Rose has written, “when we walk with great men we seek almost unconsciously to match their stride.”

The habitual vision of greatness provides the inquiring mind with a criterion for excellence and a constant source of motivation for maximum growth. It exposes the trivial and the mediocre as the real enemies of life. A college must bring its students into contact with greatness at as many points as possible, and the student must seek to face greatness wherever possible.

It would seem to me that here is the place where Christian higher education has its greatest opportunity. According to the biblical view, man is the special creation of a personal and all-powerful God. He is not a fortuitous arrangement of matter whose uniqueness lies in a remarkable central nervous system, but he is the climax of God’s creative activity that reflects the very image of God.

If an educated person is the one who has been molded by the habitual vision of greatness, then the Christian college has the finest conceivable opportunity to educate. Only eyes opened by faith can recognize true greatness as the reflection of God in human achievement.

It is no exaggeration to say that we have entered into a new era of human history qualitatively distinct from all ages past. Its uniqueness lies in the very rapidity with which it is becoming something else. According to J. Lewis Powell, if all earth’s history were compressed into fifty years, then two years ago Christ arose from the dead, five months ago the printing press was invented, ten days ago electricity was discovered, yesterday the Wright brothers lifted off the surface of the earth in controlled flight. And almost everything from inside plumbing to Saturn I was invented within the last 24 hours. This tremendous acceleration in acquiring knowledge and applying it to technology characterizes the twentieth century.

With the fund of available knowledge doubling every ten years, it is peculiarly true that “what’s past is prologue.” How will the evangelical student or educator respond to this? We say we believe moral education must keep pace with technological progress; our greatest need is to be, not simply to do or to have.

Will we be forced into the future against our will, or will we turn and lead the way, taking the intellectual initiative?

G. Douglas Young is founder and president of the Institute of Holy Land Studies in Jerusalem. He has lived there since 1963.

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