Andy Crouch
Andy Crouch is a columnist for Christianity Today, and is a member of the editorial board for Books and Culture. He is the author of "Life After Postmodernity," in The Church in Emerging Culture: Five Perspectives (Zondervan, 2003). Crouch resides in Swarthmore, Pennsylvania.
Editor's note: Andy Crouch delivered a version of this essay as a lecture at the Christian Study Center of Gainesville (Florida) where Crouch was addressing an audience of the Summer Institute on Faith and the University. It originally appeared in the April 2004 edition of Reconsiderations, the quarterly publication of the Christian Study Center (www.christianstudycenter.org).
Last year the Cornell Christian Fellowship, which was my own undergraduate fellowship in the late 1980s, and the Christian Study Center in Gainesville, Florida both asked me to speak on "what I wish I had known my freshman year."Rather than offering advice on, say, study habits or spiritual disciplines or social life or (my favorite topic) the value of a good night's sleep, I decided to dig a bit more deeply into two passages of the Bible that I barely knew existed, and certainly didn't know were relevant, when I started college. One, the story of Daniel and his friends in Nebuchadnezzar's court, is such an obvious parallel for college education that it's been much used in talks like this. The other, the brief story Luke tells of Jesus' three-day sojourn in the Jerusalem Temple at age twelve, is less often noted. But as I explored these two stories, not only did I find more in common between them than meets the eye, but I became convinced that these stories still bring to life some of the essential challenges of higher education, even in our very different time and place. They are stories all college students should ponder—or as Luke might say, treasure in their hearts. If I had known them, I might have known how to make more sense of those four years that flew by so fast.
Readers might want to pause here and take a look at Daniel 1 and Luke 2:41-51, because these stories—and the stories that can be found just below their surface—are what I wish I had known my freshman year.
I wish I had known that today, just as in Daniel's time, the vessels of the house of God have been mixed into the treasury of the world's gods. In Babylon, Israel's sacred vessels become one more piece of religious furniture. In the postmodern university, too, faith in Daniel's God is a valued addition to the institution's texture of diversity. Our problem is not that faith in God is not welcome—it is all too welcome as one more sign that the grand project of assimilation is working. So at Cornell University, where I went to college, the "non-sectarian" Sage Chapel happily mixes and matches Christian architectural forms and texts from the Hebrew and Christian scriptures with a life-size depiction of the Greek muses. Needless to say, this is an environment where only a "non-sectarian"—certainly not a traditional Christian, Jew, or Muslim—could truly be at home.
I wish I had known that I was in college partly because of privilege. Nebuchadnezzar selected young men "of the royal family and of the nobility, young men without physical defect and handsome." Perhaps not many students today would have made it into Nebuchadnezzar's highly selective honors program, but access to university education still goes to those who are smart, good-looking, or both. With our ever-expanding definition of the middle class, it is hard for American students to remember that anyone who attends college is privileged. Only twenty-seven percent of Americans over twenty-five years old have a bachelor's degree. The Greek word schole, from which we get the word "school," means leisure. Anyone who is a full-time student is part of the leisure class.
I wish I had known that I was going to be overfed. For Daniel and his friends, it was "the king's rations"—for American students, it is the lavish buffet spread by universities desperately competing to fill increasingly luxurious dormitories. University education has long been the gateway not just to professional income levels, but also to professional tastes. In college we learn to enjoy a new standard of living. We redefine "normal" upwards.
I wish I had known that I was going to be stationed in the king's court. Despite the sheen of progressive politics that pervades most college campuses, higher education, just as in Nebuchadnezzar's time, prepares students to serve the powerful, and in time to acquire significant power of their own. At least Daniel's tuition costs were covered—the rising cost of education is driving more and more students to maximize the return on their college investment. This requires college graduates to serve those who can pay a premium for our services. Over half of entering students at Harvard Law School say that they want to do public-interest law when they graduate. But three years later, ninety-five percent take positions with firms that practice corporate law.
Yet all of this is just a prelude to the most fundamental change that education was designed to confer upon Daniel, and still confers upon students today. I wish I had known, as I arrived on campus my freshman year, that I would be given a new name and a new language. Language is the basic unit of culture, and the name is the basic unit of personhood. Nebuchadnezzar understood this, so he changed the name Daniel ("God is my judge") to Belteshazzar ("Baal protects my life") and instructed him and his fellow students in "the literature and language of the Chaldeans." Contemporary practitioners of cultural imperialism do the same—for instance, in Turkey today it is forbidden to instruct children in the Kurdish language or give them a Kurdish name.
At the university, we acquire fluency in a new culture, a new language, and are thereby cut off from our past. Just try maintaining a regional accent, such as that of the American South or of Appalachia, through four years of higher education—even in the South or in Appalachia itself. The university wants to change your name, too—stay the course through advanced training, and you will no longer be Miss Cardozo, you will be Doctor Cardozo. The university (and the educated world of denominational religion) encourages me to sign my name as "Andy Crouch, M.Div." (Academic adepts reading this article have just mentally adjusted their expectations upon discovering that my name does not include a "Ph.D.")
The university insists on yet another change of language for the student of faith. It requires that the student learn to shift from first-order language (self-identifying believer) to second-order language (disinterested observer), to deprecate the concrete in favor of the abstract. In the context of the university, what is prized, as far as religion goes, is not to be religious (though that is tolerated in individual cases), but to study religion. To study religion is to acquire a second-order language, quite remote from the actual language of religious practice. The greatest sin a student can commit in a religion course—let alone elsewhere in the curriculum—is to write a paper in the primary language of their own faith.
I wish I had known all this before I started my university education. Daniel had the advantage of having been forcibly marched into exile—today we students of faith find ourselves in college as a result of our own ambition and achievements. For Daniel, Nebuchadnezzar's university was a palpably tragic interruption—for us, higher education is the natural culmination of dreams that have been set in motion, from the very beginning, by something other than the gospel of Christ.
Yet, for us as for Daniel, there is something else we ought to know as we proceed through the university: this is all happening because of the sovereignty of God. "The Lord let King Jehoiakim of Judah fall into [Nebuchadnezzar's] power." For Daniel, and for us, the arrival of people of faith in a foreign land is a necessary historical development that is ultimately for the good of God's people and God's purposes in the world. The Babylonian exile is a sign of judgment—Israel, as generations of prophets had warned, had forgotten God and become entangled in the machinations of the world. Yet the exile is also a sign of hope. God's people are placed in the midst of the religion-assimilating, privilege-seeking, royal-food-serving, power-serving, name-changing kingdoms of the world to bear witness to those kingdoms that they are not the last word. They are placed there because God loves the world, including Babylon, and wants his ways to be known everywhere, not just within a religious enclave.
So, too, we who find our way into these places are here partly as a sign of judgment on earlier generations of Christians who failed the university, whether as prime movers of its assimilation to the world of wealth, power, and privilege on the one hand, or as suppressors of genuine inquiry and truth on the other hand. We are here, with all our contradictions and mixed motives, as part of God's plan.
At first glance, the story of Jesus in the Jerusalem Temple looks very different from that of Daniel. Rather than being in a foreign land, Jesus is smack in the center of Jewish identity. Rather than learning a foreign language, he is listening to and asking questions of Hebrew teachers. Far from being out of place, he's right at home—as he puts it, "in my Father's house."
However, this is not such a different story as we might think. For one thing, Jesus was a Galilean, and as we learn when Peter cowers in the courtyard during Jesus' trial, Galileans spoke with a pronounced rural accent. Artisans from Nazareth probably felt no more at home in Jerusalem than farm kids feel in New York City today. Nazarenes didn't confidently sit down and start asking questions in the Temple.
The Temple itself was not the sort of place where a faithful Israelite could feel fully at home. This Temple, of course, was not the one built by King Solomon at the height of Israel's political power and religious unity; it was the Temple built by Herod the Great, a substantial expansion of the rudimentary Temple built after some Jews returned from exile in the time of Ezra and Nehemiah. Herod undertook to rebuild the Temple in grand style—he was desperately in need of ways to legitimate his wholly illegitimate claim to be King of the Jews. The style was grand indeed—because Herod, ever loyal to Rome, built the Temple using Roman architectural features, including a Roman-style double colonnade. To the Jewish residents of Palestine, surely any Temple, even one built by a Roman vassal in Roman style, was better than none. Yet dissatisfaction with the Temple was endemic in Jesus' day.
And for a faithful Jew, Jerusalem was a confusing place—full of memories of a glorious past, but full of reminders of just how far Israel had fallen. Jerusalem itself was a city in exile, a city of compromises. The religious teachers of whom Jesus was asking such intelligent questions had in one way or another made their peace with Herod's own Sage Chapel.
All this helps us to recover the proper sense of shock when Jesus says that he is at home, notwithstanding the signs of exile all around him. Jesus is at home in the midst of this garish, Greco-Roman, syncretistic Temple where the wealthy get lots of attention and the widows are ignored. He's at home in this place where the noise of commerce drowns out the voices of prayer. He is at home where religion serves as a handmaid to the world's most powerful empire. Because he perceives that hidden under the layers of every conceivable form of human rebellion and distortion, this is a place where people still want to know God.
And because he's at home, he has the best questions. At age twelve, on the edge of adulthood, Jesus is not here to teach. When he returns in his thirties, he will indeed teach, with authority, and he will take action against the worst of the Temple's compromises. But here—as a freshman of sorts—we see him asking questions, astonishing questions. Wise questions.
The university began as an attempt to understand God's world, with theology as the queen of sciences. From that origin it has become something very different, but there is something about its original purpose that still makes sense to the people of God. The university, with all its doubts about truth, still seeks truth. Well, we follow someone who claimed to be the Truth, so we too care about seeking truth. The university, with all its arrogance and self-centeredness, still is regularly humbled by how much there is to know and how little we really understand. Well, we are in the business of laying aside our pretensions to understand, admitting that we don't know, and asking our maker to show himself to us.
So we can sit down in the university and say, I'm at home here. And I have some questions. With my Galilean accent, with all my strange religious particularity, with my odd lack of concern about getting my own piece of the economic pie, with my hard-to-pronounce name that says that I belong to an apparently defeated god, with my unusual diet that doesn't bother with the king's royal rations, with my foolish insistence that a crucified and failed Messiah from two thousand years ago holds the key to my identity, I settle down for a few days (while my family desperately worries about me, calls my cell phone every few hours, and hopes I'm eventually coming home). I raise my hand and say, "Can I just ask one thing?"
I wish I had known, the summer before my freshman year, that I belonged here, and that even if I didn't have all the answers, my Father had given me the right questions.
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