BY JAN PAULSEN
The following is the text of the keynote address at the North American
Division’s Teachers’ Convention in Dallas, Texas, on August 13, 2000.
ECENTLY AN EVENT BILLED AS THE world’s largest conference of preaching evangelists
was held in Amsterdam. On this occasion Billy Graham was to have passed on
the torch of evangelism to the next generation of evangelical preachers, but
he was too ill to attend. Ten thousand evangelists and church leaders from
185 countries were present. At that conference in one of Europe’s most secular
nations, George Carey, the archbishop of Canterbury, launched a courageous
attack on what he described as the alternative “saviours” of our time.
Carey identified the false gods that he felt had bewitched the
West, that enjoy no opposition and deserve to be dethroned. Describing Western
culture as beset by a “reign of sin,” he said that the West has an obsession
with an unholy “trinity” of false “gods”: wealth, education, and therapy;
and the greatest of these is therapy, in which “Christ the Saviour” is becoming
“Christ the Counselor.”
In some ways this is quite amazing! Carey, who would have
difficulty being perceived as following in the heroic tradition of Augustine,
Thomas à Becket, or Thomas Cranmer, is hailed in leading European newspapers
(commented on extensively in London’s Sunday Times) as being very courageous in
taking on these three idols of the modern world. What surprises me is that
George Carey, who is quite an ordinary man—he looks more like a country parish
priest, and is not known for being either overly eloquent or overly
courageous—is suddenly “overcome” with courage and has become quite eloquent.
In some ways he sounds like an Adventist preacher taking on the sinful reign of
this generation. Maybe we should not be so hesitant in being more public about
what we say!
These three (wealth, education, and therapy) are not
intrinsically evil. They have become culprits or targets because of what we
have made of them. Like so many good things, their intrinsic values are being
distorted by what we do with them. These three have largely become idols
because the modern world, particularly Western culture, has forgotten (1) God
and (2) why we are here, and so has turned elsewhere. We should remember that
we are here for reasons other than to buy digital gizmos or to occupy space at
the upper end of the market.
A full-scale attack on wealth is clearly misplaced. Many a
Christian would say, only half jokingly, that the only thing wrong with wealth
is that there is not enough of it. It becomes a false god when wealth, riches,
and possessions become the ultimate aims of life. When a young student makes
his or her choice of profession based primarily on income capacity, something
is wrong. Yes, some young professionals are being paid phenomenal salaries in a
highly competitive market, and it does something to them. Others from our
generation of young professionals have become minor celebrities whose
photographs appear in the newspapers, usually behaving badly. They drink too
much, swear too much, or wear hardly any clothes. And it is those, our modern
culture seems to be saying, who should be admired and emulated.
They may be feeding their bank balances and their egos, but
they are starving their souls.
The specifically contemporary and modern “idol” in this trinity
is, of course, therapy. And therapy is also the “odd one out,” for throughout
her history the church has always had her moments of courtship and
confrontation—a kind of love-hate relationship—with both wealth and education.
Both have been obstacles to and instruments of the church’s mission. But
therapy as an instrument is an invention of our times. In our society’s
fascination with the healing of the body and the mind, it has become an
unspoken assumption that if we can but keep in tune with the well-being of our
inner selves, all will be well. We read regularly in the gossip columns— if we
read them at all—of the obscene way silly rich people will run off to expensive
therapy hydros, often with their public relations people in tow, giving the
impression that two weeks of group confessions and having to clean communal
toilets will reverse a lifetime of sin and abuse. It will not.
There is nothing wrong with therapy as such, and I certainly do
not want to trivialize the fact that many people need professional therapy to
help them sort out their troubled lives. But what has happened to God, to
faith, to the reading of His Word, and to prayer? As a society we have developed
such an appetite for self-examination and the ensuing therapy that its very
vocabulary permeates our daily language and is made to account for (excuse?)
our behavior. (The well-known model Naomi Campbell excused her rudeness on
television by claiming to suffer from “low self-esteem.”) Somehow we are all
either so genetically predisposed, or we are victims in our own drama, and no
one is the author of their own fate; and responsibility for what is happening
belongs elsewhere.
But I want to come back to the second so-called idol in Carey’s
list: education. Education is of course this group’s professional home—this is
where you belong and function, individually and as a body. The attack on
education will be surprising to many, given Christianity’s historic role in
promoting, pursuing, and providing education as a main instrument of mission.
The reason for its being described as an “idol” has to do with an obsession
with education as an answer to the world’s problems. The getting of knowledge
does not confer virtue; and the pursuit of knowledge above all else is a
dangerous course. It is also a fact that in spite of the advanced education
systems in the Western world, crime, vandalism, and family breakdown are
endemic in our society.
So are they all bad? No, clearly not. The fact is, however,
that none of the three (wealth, education, therapy) can in and of themselves
provide lasting healing for our broken world and our broken lives. They become
idols only when what they present us with are alternatives to the gospel. Then
they introduce different saviors that, yes, may broaden and deepen our
knowledge; yes, they may sharpen our professional expertise, make us stronger
and more self-assured, and provide us with luxuries and securities with which
we line, decorate, and flavor our lives here and now; but they offer nothing
beyond.
You and I, and the spiritual community to which we belong,
cannot settle for that.
I am not a therapist, although occasionally I find myself
listening to people who struggle with matters that torment their lives. I have
also been spared the life of wealth and affluence, I suppose in part because I
grew up the son of a cobbler and whatever wealth there was was inside your
head, but probably also because the Lord saw that I would do better with less.
But education, the second so-called idol of the modern world, I feel at home
with.
Education: What’s good about it? You cannot be a functional
member of the modern society without a fair bit of it. Without it you would be
functionally crippled.
Education: What’s wrong with it? If education, at the end of
the day, has made you into an admirer of the autonomy of the mind, you are on a
slippery slope. Apart from the arrogance that often makes such an individual
socially intolerable, education establishes then its own savior and
increasingly comes to think that God has nothing of substance to add to life,
that life is fulfilling as it is. God becomes redundant to everyday life. At
that moment the idol has been erected.
Your ministry is twofold: to educate; and to combat idolatry!
As a church we have been given a wealth of material on what
constitutes the best of education. You could spend the rest of your convention
reading and reflecting on quotations, and that is clearly not what you have in
mind, nor is it what I intend to do tonight. Rather, I would pause with some
points that in my view are important to Seventh-day Adventist education—to why
we invest so heavily in it, why we value it as second to none of all that we do
as a church, and why we call teaching in one of our schools a ministry.
First, since “the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom”
(Ps. 111:10)* and “from his mouth come knowledge and understanding” (Prov.
2:6), we hold that no one is going to become wise merely by accumulating
data and acquiring some professional skill. Christian education remembers
the injunction “Submit to God and be at peace with him. . . . Accept
instruction from his mouth and lay up his words in your heart.” “In this way
prosperity will come to you” (Job 22:21, 22). Therefore, we hold that true
education will look first of all to God; students and teachers alike will turn
to Him and open their minds. This is the antidote to making education into an
idol.
That experience cannot happen merely as a 10-minute
introduction to the school day, although a moment for invocation is always in
order, nor as an appendix to the “more important” things, namely the
identifiable academic and professional subjects, but as the very environment in
which all education is pursued. It is then more a matter of tone, mind-set, and
ambience than it is of data, facts, and formula. The identity of this
experience lies first and foremost in the atmosphere and environment where the
education is offered. Before the labs and classrooms are opened and the data
are set free, your students will, through the first breaths they draw, sense
where they are and what life in your presence as teachers is going to be like.
Second, a school is an apprenticeship for life itself.
And then comes everyday life, sometimes gray and drab, sometimes exciting and
bright, but it is the arena where the goals that the schools help the students
identify are reached for and where the values that the schools help the student
select will find expression. The continuity between education and life is
comprehensive and unmistakable. Our youth may be genetically predisposed to
what they become in life, but when you look at their later lives, the
educational “gene” is often unmistakably detectable.
It has often struck me, as a student of Scripture, how the
Bible (or God) uses the line: “Since you know . . . consider what you should be
or how you should act.” Clearly everything one collects of data,
information, knowledge, and understanding finds its meaning only in the ensuing
life one lives. It goes without saying that the real object is to live, and God
is concerned with what happens to us and the lives we live. The object is not
just to know, to contain so much information and so many skills, but to live.
And the question is: How does that which we know impact the lives we live?
That question must haunt all of us, including our children and
our youth. It is a question that teachers must ask of their students. Students
must see the life that lies ahead in the world “out there” as packed with
wonderful opportunities to be entered into with enthusiasm and drive. Do not
teach your youth to be afraid of the world and be intimidated by its worst
excesses. Teach them to be strong, secure, sure, and proud of who they are. If
you are young and you are afraid of your identity, you face a difficult future
unless your fear can be resolved.
It is a mistake to teach our children to become spiritual
recluses, loners in society. Beware of constructing an overly protective environment
that creates a long-term, unnatural secluded world-within-the-world.
The world may well be a hostile environment, but it is our only
functional environment. It is where God wants us to be. It is where God wants
us to discharge His mission. God loved the smelly, cantankerous, selfish, and
sometimes violent men and women of the world. And that is the only world He
offers us to reside in today. It is not a good idea to run away from it.
I am reminded of the disciples with Jesus on the Mount of
Transfiguration. Sensing the otherworldly environment of Moses and Elijah,
Peter shouts out: “Wow! Let’s stay here. Let’s get hold of some useful real
estate and stay here for good!” But Jesus says: “No, that is not a good idea.
Let us go down from the mountain and meet the people.”
And that is where God always takes our youth and young
professionals. It is for us through our educational systems to equip them,
professionally and spiritually, to live there and to know what God expects of
them, and to feel good about it—that it is a good life to live. If Jesus Christ
is a living reality, current in their lives and plans, neither wealth nor
education nor therapy will become an idol. Rather, they will be what God wants
them to be—instruments of mission; and those who carry them will find
fulfillment moving about among all kinds of interesting people.
Third, our schools are there to teach Adventist children and
youth not just who they are and why, but to teach and train them to feel
good, strong, open, and free as they walk into the secular world. Committed
believers, of all, should feel good about themselves and the values they
represent. There are so many out there, of their peers, who wish that they had
the same sense of assurance and inner worth that a young committed believer
carries.
Fourth, you, teachers, are my fellow ministers. But what
makes your task so special is that you have a very trusted role because of the
special material placed in your hands. You are involved with God in an act of
creation. God has placed in your hands some very tender and pliable material.
And you have been trusted with the task of forming it. You are to make it both
dextrous and tough—dextrous so it can roll with the punches, and tough so it
can withstand the worst of them. And you are to give the material its
character. That is what God trusts you to do. You are to help it discover both
its value and its usefulness.
I was for many years a teacher (in Africa and Europe), and as I
look back on those wonderful years I am amazed at the risks God took with me.
He placed in my hands the delicate material of a young mind to be trained
professionally, in the context of Christian values, to function effectively in
the world as a believer! There is probably no better or higher calling than to
know that you are partners with God in the developing of a young mind.
These words come to mind from the pen of inspiration:
“Since man cost heaven so much, the price of God’s dear Son,
how carefully should ministers, teachers, and parents deal with the souls of
those brought under their influence. It is nice work to deal with minds, and it
should be entered upon with fear and trembling” (Testimonies, vol. 4, p. 419).
So I say to you, ministers of education, working in highly
respected institutions of public recognition and highly accredited: You have
a charter from God to train men and women to become useful to Him! You are
to educate
- youth who are strong to think and to act, who know who they
are and why they are, instead of being educated weaklings who are confused and
unsure of themselves;
- youth who are masters rather than slaves of circumstances, who
take charge of their lives rather than being victims of passing events, who are
able to make decisions for their lives recognizing that if they won’t, someone
else will;
- youth who possess breadth of mind and clarity of thought to be
able to tell the difference between wealth and value; and who have the courage
of their convictions (see Education, p. 18);
- youth who are service-motivated.
Paul reminds us: “For God, who said, ‘Let light shine out of
darkness,’ made his light shine in our hearts to give us the light of the
knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Christ. But we have this treasure
in jars of clay to show that this all-surpassing power is from God and not from
us” (2 Corinthians 4:6, 7).
We have been given this message of God. Our mission is to share
it, though we are the jars of clay that carry this priceless treasure.
This is a privilege that God gives to us!
It is my privilege to work with you in this ministry. The
church needs you, and we depend on you. And I will do my very best to make your
environment a secure one and your service a fulfilling one. I have great
confidence in our educational institutions and our teachers. You represent the
finest we have.
*Bible quotations in this article are from the New
International Version.
_________________________
Jan Paulsen is
president of the worldwide Seventh-day Adventist Church.
