I Lead Three Lives: Higher Education Vocations in a Biblical Perspective by Dale Goldsmith McPherson College Some years ago, I Lead Three Lives was a TV program whose popularity was no doubt enhanced by Cold War mentality. In the program, Richard Philbrick led the lives of (1) an ordinary citizen, (2) a spy, and (3) a counterspy. The viewer was at once awed and terrified by these three "lives" and with the problematic of how each was a necessary aspect of Philbrick's mission. For Christians, the Trinity is similar in the sense that we believe that one supreme being consists of three persons with whom we interact and we are awed by the puzzle of how the three persons relate to one another in the unity of God. Only the fact that it is God in various roles allows us to believe it to be possible. Less puzzling and more manageable is the fact that in the scripture, several different "offices" exist which are occupied by humans in the management of God's "economy". Among them: servant, king, disciple, teacher, evangelist. In some cases, the same person assumed two or more of these roles. These do not exhaust the number of "roles" available to Christians; in fact, there are three that are worth examining in relationship to our call/mission as persons with vocations in higher education. These are: prophet, priest and pastor. There has been a good deal of attention in Christian higher education circles directed at "faith and the disciplines"--the whole matter of how our Christian faith (its foundations, assumptions, implications) relates to and/or interacts with the professional academic disciplines (their assumptions, history, methods, epistemology, subject matter and implications). That concern must be continued and deepened. This paper addresses the broader, more generic issue of what might be labeled a "job description" for one working as a Christian in higher education. The twin purposes of this article are: (1) to invite the reader to explore the Christian scriptures for encouragement and direction with regard to increasing understanding of our vocations in higher education; and (2) to present some specific examples of such an exploration. First, however, there are two questions one might raise: why and how? The "Why" question does not always elicit a clear answer. In fact, the notion that uniquely and thoroughly Christian position descriptions in higher education would be a good idea in church- related colleges is not always clear. Although a similar notion occasionally surfaces with regard to the teaching disciplines, we seldom advance beyond the bland generalities when it comes to expressing how the Christian faith would substantively change or even form our various roles in higher education--roles that for the most part are predicated on secular models. When asked how being a Christian affected his teaching, a colleague in the sciences asked, "What do you want me to do, teach Christian biology?" In his mind, there was, of course, no such thing as Christian biology. Another biologist once retorted in much the same way, "There are no Catholic frogs." Bertelsen Pond, Jean L., "Catholic Frogs," Faculty Dialogue 18 (Fall, '92) 83-90, p.83.¯ There are, of course, no Catholic (or Protestant) frogs. But there are people who do things with frogs: experiment with them; race them; eat them. There are biologists and others whose perspectives on frogs differ because of their varying views of the world--what life is all about and how one should look at and understand it. We must get beyond the level of thinking about Christianity as a kind of value-added epiphenomenon and be bold about perceiving it as a reality which forms our entire world view. It is a world view which asserts the importance of all around us (e.g., what we as teachers study and teach about) and thus is formative if not definitive in our professional lives. Instead of adding something Christian to what is secular (a philosopher, a coach, an economist) what if one were to start with being Christian and add the secular vocation to that? We must remember that we serve in a profoundly secular (and even post-modern) environment; even those of us who might work in a college/university founded by and/or committed to some positive and supportive relationship to the church work in an environment that has been thoroughly penetrated and reformed (read: distorted) by secular values. A popular notion is that the academic disciplines that sprang from the Enlightenment see themselves as self-sufficient and the view of many is that Christianity has nothing to add but would only threaten the integrity of those disciplines. At best, Christianity is often viewed only as something personal for the improvement of one's character, something recreational for enhancing the family, something "interesting" to enrich the curriculum. But it is not central as we do most of our thinking about higher education. Others, however, have felt that the disciplines call for specific responses on the part of those Christians attempting to be faithful in their dispatch of these professional responsibilities- -note the series produced by the Coalition for Christian Colleges and Universities.Examples: Gallagher, Susan V. and Roger Lundin, Literature Through the Eyes of Faith, San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1989; Myers, David G. and Malcolm A. Jeeves, Psychology Through the Eyes of Faith, San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1987; Wells, Ronald A., History Through the Eyes of Faith: Western Civilization and the Kingdom of God, San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1989; Wright, Richard T., Biology Through the Eyes of Faith, San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1989. More recently, similar concerns were raised concerning the ways in which student services are designed and implemented in Christian colleges. Thomas, D. Terry, "Church-Related Campus Culture," in Guthrie, David S. and Richard L. Noftzger, Jr., eds., Agendas for Church-Related Colleges and Universities, (New Directions for Higher Education, 79) San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1992) 55-63, especially pp.57,59,61. ¯ Should we simply let the secular academic community and/or secular business models design our "jobs"? The most powerful argument against this comes from our Christian call to be faithful where we are (e.g., I Cor 7). While St. Paul writes of each needing to be faithful in the context of relationships with spouse, parent, child, master or slave, we find ourselves enmeshed in the relationships of higher education in America in the last half of the last decade of the last century of our millennium. How are we to be faithful in the place where God has placed us? How are we to be faithful in the covenant we have from God with and for those whom God has given us (colleagues, students, other constituents)? The fact that there must be administrators has been interpreted by one analyst as due to the fact that in the university we lack a central, imaginative and compelling vision that unites all into one task. Instead, there are many tasks: departmental, athletic, public relations, fund-raising, enrollment management--and endless others. These many tasks demand many worker/experts. These many persons demand a coordinator (we can hardly dare say leader). In such a situation, the coordinator(/leader) had better have her own clear vision of call and position or the many tugs on one and the criteria used to guide and measure one's job can threaten to undermine one's mission. The King James Version's rendition of the obscure Hebrew of Proverbs 29:18a is, nonetheless, penetrating in its truth for our communities: "Without a vision the people perish." So too for us as individuals: without a clear vision, we know not where we go, so our getting there is impossible. Our purpose in this paper is not to pre-empt tasks as described or required by our employers, but to comprehend in concrete terms how our Christian vocation or calling as teachers might unfold in practical terms. A most important aspect of that vocation is in the realm of professional (or disciplinary) expertise and competence. As teachers we are equipped with certain tools and directed toward a subject matter. As Christian scholars we understand the use of those tools and the nature of our particular subject matter in certain distinctive ways. These distinctive ways include the use of our skills for the benefit of others and the understanding of our subject matter as God's creation. What follows are reflections on the teaching vocation in its wider context--one in which each particular position description might include any combination of a number of responsibilities. Our tendency might be to understand aspects of our position or job from a secular viewpoint--perhaps simply because we have not thought of doing so or because secular understandings seem adequate. However, once we recognize the importance of a faith-informed "job description", the second question is "How?". There are any number of possible approaches which may be considered. I once assayed a job description for myself relying on the distinctive characteristics of the religious tradition of the college where I worked. This can be a fruitful approach, but all too often denominational distinctives are so misunderstood, trivialized or feared, and personnel represent so many traditions, that the problems of following this course seem insurmountable. A more universally appealing approach would be the use of scripture--something all Christians regardless of their specific traditions might have and hold in common. It sounds rather simple to say that we should use the Bible to help us to answer life's questions. However, it is all too obvious that we resort more to the surrounding culture than to the Bible in making vocational decisions. If such a challenge is accepted, several possibilities exist--none of which are mutually exclusive. A first approach is that of asking if there are direct commands or verses which can tell us what a college president or professor ought to do. We would probably be disappointed with that approach. The Bible does not speak of schools in any sense that would be recognizable to us, nor is it concerned with what we would call vocational or technical training. Another approach is that of being formed by the stories of scripture--stories that formed and were to inform God's people. Such stories are of the characters and events in the Old and New Testaments. What do we find when we let those stories form the mind set, populate our vision and set the stage for our own work? What happens when we let God have our vocations and make of them what He will? We remember that Jesus took fishermen and made them fishers of people. In a too-overlooked work, Walter Brueggeman imaginatively employs the Old Testament canon as a model for our thinking about curriculum: the law as a model for the transmission of facts; the prophets as a model for critiquing ourselves and our teaching with the will of God; the wisdom writings as a model for the practical in education. Brueggemann, Walter, The Creative Word: Canon as a Model for Biblical Education, Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1982. While his work does not directly discuss educational vocations, his use of the canon to stimulate our thinking is noteworthy. In his analysis of the theological foundations of higher education in early America, George Williams writes of the prophetic "office" of Christ by which He sanctions the autonomy and authority of the (Christian) university. Williams, George H, Wilderness and Paradise in Christian Thought: The Biblical Experience of the Desert in the History of Christianity and the Paradise Theme in the Theological Idea of the University, New York: Harper & Brothers, 1962, p.157. The following is a simple approach using, as Brueggeman and Williams did, the scriptures to stimulate our thinking. While Williams wrote of Christ's roles, we write about our own, cognizant of the need to remain clear about the fact that we are not Christ and we are not called to replicate Him but rather to "bear our own crosses". Our approach is to look at three of the roles played in scripture and speculate on how they might help us reflect on and formulate our own academic vocations. Let us begin with the office (or "job") of priest. This is surely one of the oldest professions in the world, and one that had a great history in the Old Testament. The priest is primarily one who maintains the systems and structures within which people are enabled to live out their lives. The priest celebrates the regular events in life--birth, death. The priest oversees the systems which define a stable society. The priest provides the mechanisms for helping people who become alienated for one reason or another to return to full life within the community. The priest today--I in my role in higher education--is to provide and maintain a system within which individuals and community operate. That is particularly important in a time when the secular is overwhelming the educational enterprise and the individuals with it and when secular systems are accepted as the defining and sustaining framework for our lives. The application will be different depending on the extent to which the institution within which one serves is--as an institution--truly in the service of Christ himself. In reality no institution is fully faithful in that role; in practice, those responsible for leading and doing the institution's work can be more or less faithful in their dispatch of their offices. We fulfill a priestly function when we provide stable structures within which students and colleagues can study, learn and develop. On a campus committed self-consciously to a faithful Christian ministry in education, the priest might establish and maintain the systematic embodiment of the Christian faith--the celebrations of Advent, Lent, Passion Week, Easter, Pentecost. These stand in contrast to the rhythm of the secular society which is governed by secular holidays and the various rhythms and structures imposed by athletic seasons, social events, term papers and exams. Where the deconstructive forces of post- modernism have corroded any sense of the transcendent this is a particularly crucial role for the priest. In the secular university or secular/independent college, the general environment is dictated by the larger, secular society; it is a mission field from the point of view of the Christian. There the role of priest is somewhat the same as it has been for ministers and priests serving in places like communist Russia-- underground and in the service of a community forced to be clandestine or at least marginalized by the larger society and its forces. But today the "priest" may have an even more elementary responsibility--that of simply identifying the spiritual, the sacred and the transcendent. Since recognition of the sacred in today's one-dimensional, pragmatic (e.g., vocational/training) environment may be difficult for many. Finally, there is a need for examples or models of personal holiness and discipline. This is admittedly tricky ground because the priest is at once set aside for a special and sacred task, but still is "only human" and not necessarily called to extraordinary feats of virtue or, worse, to the hypocrisy that might be necessary to mask the absence of virtue. The danger for the priest is that he will be too enamored of the system and turn into an idol. The priest in us must remember that God is always beyond our own gods. Another danger is in the administrative road map where the rules and regulations, the allocation of resources, the committee system all have filled the vacuum created when vision and mission no longer control. A final danger is that the priest might wind up serving Baal by baptizing whatever is found in the secular arena. The New Testament has made major modifications in the traditional Jewish office of priest. While Jesus himself resisted identification with the temple and many of its activities (e.g., Mk 2:27), the New Testament writers use the office or title to explain the richness of Jesus' work. He perfectly filled the role of priest according to Hebrews. There, his (the priest's) unique contribution is that he sacrificed himself--not the usual work of a priest. While Jesus redefined these traditional roles for us, we are reminded that we are not Jesus nor is our vocation a calling to be an think ourselves in his image. Yoder, John Howard, The Politics of Jesus: Vicit Agnus Noster, Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, Second edition, 1994, pp.130-132.¯ The prophet is one who "speaks for" God. In the Old Testament, prophets were uniquely characterized as persons who criticized God's people for abandoning God. These were the folks whose main task seemed to be to keep the priests (and other authority figures and maintainers of the status quo) in line--keep them in their maintenance role without letting them veer off toward dependence on other gods or make idols of the systems they were given to use for the people's benefit. The role of prophet is the "bad cop" role--the one who says "no" when everyone else says "yes". In education that can be difficult- -even on the campus of a church-related or Christian college. What drives/tempts students, faculty, parents, administrators, faculty and trustees tend to be the values and goals accepted by secular institutions as they define their purposes and measure their successes. The prophet is needed to call the community, and especially its leaders, back to the voice and will of God. So even on the Christian or church-related campus, the voice of the prophet is necessary. As in the Old Testament, the prophet's task is not to criticize the outsider but to remind those who have chosen to be God's people exactly that means--especially when it calls them to point out the particularity of God's people's sin. Two dangers lie in wait for the unsuspecting prophet. One is that the prophet might drift off and away from her community and develop an "Elijah complex" in which she sees only herself in God's service. Another danger is that the prophet will say what everyone wants said--exactly what the popular, false prophets of the past have done. The prophet knows that God is not in one place (say, that of his own people) any more than God is in an another. (That priest may not know this, but the prophet must.) One of the problems that the prophet helps us avoid is the danger of thinking that her Christian college is somehow closer to God and better than other, secular places. The prophet warns the church that the secular school is not abandoned by God but is the object of the divine love and mercy and can be the place of revelation. just as Babylon was for the Jews and Golgotha was for the Christians. Finally the pastor. In the New Testament this image comes from the role of the shepherd, the one who tenderly cares for the sheep. Again, a caution must be sounded: with this sheep-herding metaphor, it is always much safer for us to identify ourselves with the sheep rather than the shepherd. The sheep are the ones that are in need; they are not very bright; they are herd animals who will follow willy-nilly into trouble; they are in need of rescue. The shepherd, the good shepherd, Jesus, is the one who rescues. He is the one who has invested himself in the care of the sheep. He is the one who is broken-hearted by the loss of the sheep. Only by extension and with great caution, the good shepherd provides us a model for pastoral care. Used in this way it suggests the need to provide constant care, patience, protection, support and vigilance on behalf of those entrusted to us. The pastoral role is the one in which our own human sorrows and griefs play a role; the shepherd has lost sheep and knows the sorrow of the experience of separation and loss. As such, the pastor/shepherd can feel for and feel with those in pain and not simply (and coldly) prescribe cures for the ills of others. In the large communities and contexts in which we live and study, the individual care and nurture implicit in the pastoral role is necessary. But care of the whole flock is also necessary. Pastoral care for the group and pastoral care for the individual must both be practiced and the concern for one cannot override concern for the other. At this point, Paul's image of the church as the Body of Christ is helpful for an understanding of how both individual and group find fulfillment. In a day when we experience rampant individualism and monolithic, almost mindless, group behavior, such pastoral care is especially welcome. Nor should our pastoral care be confined to the boundaries and skills of secular counseling. The latter definitely has its place and should be used as one of the treatments which we can bring to a broken world. But we should be wary not to separate our pastoring from the foundation and frame of reference provided by the Good Shepherd who was not just a "pastor" but also a crucified savior. Christian care must always be care of the whole person/community on behalf of God, not simply the technical/professional treatments provided by "the world". Conclusion: Faculty, staff and administrators might consider these models in forming their own "job descriptions" as Christians in higher education. As God's love was expressed so richly in Jesus that it took over two dozen Christological titles in the New Testament alone to express it, and our own response needs many dimensions to begin to reflect the richness of the faith. And as Jesus allowed his ministry to form itself in so varied a way to all the needs about him, we can submit our vocations and become channels of God's will. For those readers who whom these may be totally new ideas--they might ask themselves if they are so influenced by the secular that they have not sought God's will in their vocation. For others for whom this task of Biblical reflection may be old hat-- good; perhaps there has been something here that has struck a new or off-key note and sent them back to the scriptures for further reflection. There is a commonplace about war that, "There are no atheists in foxholes." We are far from war in the relatively protected environment of our campuses, struggling with many wonderful, competing ideas. But even here in the "ivory tower" it can be terribly difficult to believe in God. It is intellectually and socially so civil a place to earn one's living that it is hard to believe that we must be wary not to allow the secular position descriptions that define our jobs to pass as Christian and shut out the visionary call that faith opens to us. There are no rules to guide us clearly in this task of forging large Christian "job descriptions" to overlay upon our secularly defined tasks--"job descriptions" that might give some assurance that we are at least struggling with the challenge to bring all things under the lordship of Jesus Christ. As Matthew implied in his demanding and in some ways legalistic gospel, we are ®MDIT¯called®MDNM¯ to be faithful, but not told specifically how to be faithful. The parable of the talents, the great judgment of the sheep and the goats, and the parable of the wedding feast all challenge us to be faithful in heretofore unfamiliar territory. Though we have not been given a road map for faithfulness in higher education, we have ample resources in scripture to guide us in a faithful working out of those secular assignments.