The Azusa Pacific Blog

One of the main reasons students like to see the end of the school year is that it means they will have no more writing projects for a few months. Professors often look forward to the end of the school year so they can get started on writing projects.

Go figure.

Blessings on your reprieve from libraries and rough drafts. As for me, there are a couple of book projects I need to kick a dent in—after finals are graded. See you in September.

My guess is that you came here expecting get the necessary tools to enter a profession. In other words, you anticipate becoming a professional. I hope you get there. My profession has been highly rewarding for me. That said, if becoming a professional is the goal of your time at APU, I think you have missed the point of Christian higher education. Instead, I would argue that your aim while here is to become (and remain forever) an amateur.

An “amateur” is “one who does something out of love.” Thus, what I have in mind as the goal of education is the discovery of some area of study that is so intriguing, compelling, and beautiful that you cannot help but love it. If you find such a subject, you have the raw materials for discovering in a new and deeper way the God who is the source of wonder and beauty. This, in turn, allows us move toward an understanding that we can worship through our scholarship and eventually through whatever profession God draws us into.

In the educational process, we talk a lot about the development of our minds and skills, as we should. Unfortunately, we generally do not think of education as an erotic process, but that is exactly what it is. While here, we should have our desires (eros) directed toward that which is truly desirable. Thus, if we rightly understand God as the Maker and Lover of all creation, it seems that our proper response is to love all that God makes and loves. For Jesus’ disciples, then, the first step toward becoming professionals is to achieve amateur status.

Did you ever wonder why the best movie villains are evil geniuses and not evil idiots? Probably not. One obvious reason is that evil idiot villains get taken down in the first ten minutes because, well, they’re idiots. It makes for a very short movie.

If we want to laugh at the potential prospects of evil, we feature the two bungling burglars of “Home Alone I.” If we are looking for enough tension and drama to make us wet ourselves, nothing less than an evil genius will do.

Evil geniuses frighten us because they have the cognitive capacities to produce weapons that can destroy the entire planet or droids that can out-maneuver and over-power any human army. They also have the strategic know-how to use these tools to peak advantage. In other words, evil geniuses possess, to a high degree, exactly the intellectual and technical skills taught in universities all over this country. What should frighten us is that the majority of universities profess to teach only these things. You want moral and spiritual guidance? Fine, but do it on your own time.

The only difference between an intelligent and technically skilled tyrant and an intelligent and technically skilled Great Commission Christian is what they value. But it’s an enormous difference. Despite the propaganda, Christian higher education is not a step down from what you find at other colleges. Instead, it is a bigger education. We happen to think that educating brains and hands is important, but not enough by itself. If education does not shape and transform our lives in a Godward direction, at best it leaves us incomplete and empty. At worst, it provides the raw ingredients for evil geniuses. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. put it quite well. The last thing our world needs is more guided missiles under the fingers of unguided people.

Postings on this blog generally don’t get much response, but I’d really like to hear from some of you because I need some help with a big question.

How would you respond if you passed a crime scene and saw an Amish man or woman surrounded by cops in handcuffs on the curb, or if you saw a story about a horrendous criminal act and discovered that the perp was Amish? It would likely be jolting—totally unexpected. But why? The Amish are certainly human, and humans have a tendency to make really bad choices. Why, then, are they far less inclined to make stupid and hurtful choices?

One of the major reasons has to be that Amish culture nurtures a set of values that makes activities like assault, murder, rape, and (perhaps for more obvious reasons) grand theft auto almost unthinkable to the members embraced within that community.

So here’s my question. How do we create an APU community that shapes us in ways that make certain very human, very common, and very destructive activities almost unimaginable to us? How do we get to the point that plagiarism or cheating never even cross our mind, or instances of broken commitments and dishonesty are shocking because we can’t remember the last time we experienced it? What would it look like if it became second nature (or a renewed nature) for our community members to love even the most annoying and grimy people around us?

The Amish have done a commendable job of birthing and sustaining a culture that nurtures some pretty healthy values. That’s a tough thing to do. However, what I’m thinking about is even tougher because it requires us to grow a Christian counterculture, not by moving out and creating separate communes, but while living smack dab in the middle of a culture that promotes very different values.

We have spent a lot of time this year talking about APU’s values and ethos. That’s a great discussion, if we take it as an opportunity to talk about how we might grow toward an ideal that makes us stand out like the Amish in New Orleans during Mardi Gras. Or like light in the middle of the darkness. How do we get there?

During Galileo’s trial, at which he stood accused of heresy for teaching a heliocentric planetary system, it was stated that “the Bible teaches us how to go to heaven, not how the heavens go.” Whatever we might think of this statement, most of us live as if the Bible does not directly address the question how the “heavens” of our own major go, and I think properly so. For example, we don’t look to Scripture to tell us whether to apply heat or ice to a sports injury, outline the direct and indirect causes of the Crimean War, explain Freud’s death drive and its therapeutic implications, map a seven-year-old’s brain to help us better teach second grade math, or offer the basics of photosynthesis. In short, the Bible apparently does not intend to instruct on these things, and a myriad of other topics we encounter in class.

If Scripture is not a suitable textbook for the contents of our class (unless we are in a biblical studies or theology course), where does that leave the majority of us? Faith integration is an expectation in every course at APU, and Scripture is the primary authority in matters of faith. So how do we draw Scripture into the classroom?

A full examination of this question goes well beyond the average length of a blog entry, but let me offer one quick idea in the brief space I have. If the statement, “the Bible teaches us how to go to heaven” means that Scripture proposes to address our ultimate concerns (e.g., purpose, separation from God, redemption), I believe we are on the right track. Thus, questions that can help us recognize how faith fits into our classes might be:
• “How does what I learn from this class fit into God’s creational purposes for the world?”
• “In what ways does this class assume our separation from God and others?”
• “How is salvation (by whatever name it goes) envisioned by those within this discipline?”

What this tells me is that, despite common stereotypes that Christian higher education is somehow constricted, APU actually offers a bigger education. Like secular institutions, we teach proper methods of treating hamstring pulls, Freudian psychoanalytic theory, and how the heavens go. However, our commitment to faith also requires that we place these and all other academic issues within the context of Scripture’s Story of creation, fall, and redemption. Anything less falls short of our mandate for Christian higher education.