Agents
of the Great Commission
Keynote
address, Fall Faculty/Staff Conference,
Calvin College, Grand Rapids, Michigan, September 4, 2002
What a delight it
is, my dear friends and colleagues, to have this opportunity to address
you today. Perhaps the delight is mostly mine. After all, on this occasion
in the recent past, you have been able to hear from some of the best and
brightest in Christian intellectual discourse today, and now this. One
consolation, however, is that I come cheap.
The main reason I am addressing you today and not a distinguished guest
is that it is time for some reflection and envisioning from the current
administration. President Byker has been on the job for seven years, and
I have been here for six. Our community has been enormously productive
during these years. What are we to make of this record? Where are we headed
now? It is time to check the maps and get an overall sense of the mission.
As a historian, I get my bearings by looking backward, by seeing the course
we have taken. I don't want to take you very far back, just nine years,
to be exact. Nine years ago, on this occasion, the speech came from Nathan
Hatch of the University of Notre Dame, one of the nation's leading Reformed
and evangelical academics. Hatch, who as a member of a Christian Reformed
congregation knows this community quite well, laid out a stiff challenge.
He observed three things about Calvin College: first, that it is an internally
focused culture, one of the most introverted he has seen. He challenged
this community to work strategically to expand its realms of service and
influence. Second, Hatch declared that Calvin's culture was one of assumed
rather than publicly articulated values, which was limiting its ability,
in a time of great opportunity, to offer the American scene a "vibrant,
forceful and winsome Calvinism."
Third, Hatch observed that Calvin was a very cautious institution when
the times demanded some bold moves in faculty recruiting, in attracting
students from new sources, and in making a contribution to American intellectual
life. The college had just approved a new Expanded Statement of Mission,
which Hatch found to be "conventional rather than venturesome"
and "more a rationale for what exists than a mandate for action."
I was not working here then, but I felt the vibrations all the way out
in Philadelphia. Hatch's challenge was all the more sobering because it
came from a sincere and knowledgeable friend, who has pinned many of his
hopes for the Christian scholars movement on Calvin College.
Looking back over the past few years, what can we say that we have accomplished
since Hatch laid down this challenge? I would say that the change here
has been dramatic, not just in sheer activity and innovation, but in the
character of that activity.
We were challenged to work more strategically, to expand our realms of
service. We have been doing that. Look at the major building projects
now completed. Rather than simply feathering our own nests, we have been
building our capacity to serve and to strengthen external partnerships.
Our new science building was co-funded by a consortium of universities
and hospitals for medical education and research. Our Communications building
equips two outreach oriented departments and their institutes: The Paul
Henry Institute for Christianity and Politics and the soon-to-be started
Institute for Christianity and Communications. The new conference center
enables us to expand our nationally prominent academic conferences, festivals
and seminars, which are some of the very ventures that Hatch encouraged
us to take up.
A host of new programs also lifts our sights and lengthens our horizons.
New off-campus semester programs in China, France, Ghana, Honduras, and
far-off Washington, D.C. double our programs' capacity. Academically based
service learning now engages 2,000 enrollees in courses each year. Four
new educational and community-development partnerships have been started:
the Pathways pre-college program with nearby inner-city churches, a Ford
Foundation funded initiative to help other colleges replicate this program,
the Bridge Program for Students of color in the L.A. area, and the HUD-financed
community initiative in Burton Heights.
Hatch also challenged us to make our views more explicit. Calvin has founded
a variety of new centers, institutes and programs, such as the Henry Institute,
the Institute for Christian Worship, and the Faculty Summer Seminars to
convey our vision to the larger world. We have reinvigorated the Calvin
Center for Christian Scholarship, the Meeter Center for Calvin Studies
and the Center for Social Research. The Kuiper Seminars engage new faculty
with the Reformed vision, while summer seminars offer similar opportunities
for veteran faculty members.
Hatch challenged this community's cautiousness and conventionality, and
called us to a fresh grappling with change, pluralism, and excellence.
We have built a new core curriculum, based a vision of "education
for shalom," as Neal Plantinga articulates it. A variety of new majors
and minors have emerged, such as chemical engineering, biotechnology,
the study of the American West, gender studies, Asian studies, medieval
studies and management information systems. Several departments have overhauled
their major offerings as well, and more such efforts are underway.
We have made good on the opportunity to build a first-rate faculty, with
113 new tenure-track recruits since 1995. We have added some brilliant
junior faculty members from outstanding graduate programs and high-achieving,
mid-career faculty as well. The Spoelhof Chair has brought us one outstanding
teacher-scholar after another, each of whom has become an important faculty
leader. An international search will commence this fall for a senior scholar
to fill the Byker Chair. And in our determination to grapple with change
and pluralism, we have not shied away from serious issues such as race
relations, gender concerns, and our mutual obligations as a Reformed confessional
community.
Calvin College is becoming better known across the nation. The news media
has been seeking out our professors as national authorities, and the college
is gaining notice as a leader in the national conversation about Christianity's
role in the life of the mind. Said James Turner in Commonweal, evangelical
scholars "have helped to nurture in the academy a heightened sensitivity
to Christian faith as a factor important in its own right. They have hardly
conquered the high citadels of academe, . . . but they have made their
presence felt." Turner was convinced that "the decisive influence
of the revival remains neo-Calvinism," and that Calvin College has
been its matrix.
So this community should report some good news back to Provost Hatch.
We have not attained perfection in these matters, but we are pressing
forward with our eyes on the prize. But my main purpose this morning is
not to bask in the light of our achievements, so let us move on to the
main question before us, which is, quite simply, "Now What?"
There is one direction that I fear we might take. It would be easy to
take the posture of "we've made it; we're doing enough; let's simply
maintain what we are doing, and try to make life a little more comfortable
around here." Don't get me wrong; sustainability is in fact a critical
issue. We have been drawing deeply from our reserves of faculty and staff
energy, pushing our modest resources to the limit, and holding little
to nothing in reserve. Some of us are feeling weary. For the deans and
me, sustainability is emerging as one of our most pressing concerns. Without
fresh resources, we cannot sustain our current level of activity. A sturdy
work ethic and an inspiring sense of purpose have taken us a long way,
and Calvin must remain a lean and driven sort of place. Even so, we seem
to be hitting the limits of what we can do with what we have. We need
to present this dilemma to our friends and supporters with fresh vision
and urgency.
Yet, I worry that self-satisfaction lurks around the edges of the idea
of sustainability. Calvinism has no place for complacency. At its best,
Reformed Christianity is an edgy, activist, present-participle faith;
it is predicated on the idea that things are not right in the church or
in the world, and that they need reforming. At its most vital, Calvinism
has been a faith of holy restlessness. This college needs to have larger-than-life
challenges before it, it needs a strategic world vision. To keep their
edge, Calvinists have to take their game out to the edge. We have moved
away from a settled and satisfied posture, and I pray we do not go back
there.
So now what? Hatch had us dead to rights with his critique of the Expanded
Statement of Mission. We are certainly not stalled in the water these
days when it comes to "engaging God's world." But what are our
terms of engagement? We are a tradition-revering community, but our tradition
lives only if we engage it to "ponder anew what the Almighty can
do" through us. We have been "strengthening the things which
remain" when the Lord also wants us to find open doors. Rather than
an expanded statement of mission, we need an expansive statement of mission.
My friends, I know that some of us might be suspicious of any call for
revisioning, for it might threaten our carefully negotiated consensus.
And those of us who want most of all to get on with the concrete work
at hand will be impatient with more theorizing and vision spinning. Yet
this community draws life from getting its prinziples straight, as the
founders would say. So for the scores of new community members who want
to own what we do, and in order to keep the tradition vibrant and engaged
in our generation, we need to go at it again.
Such conversations never start de novo; they ride on streams that flow
out of our past. So as we continue the converzation, as the old-timers
say it, we take our sightings from the course we have been following.
And where has our history taken us? I wish that I had the time to trace
our intellectual and academic inheritance a bit, but I do not. Read the
introduction to the new core curriculum instead. It leads us to the present
moment, when we at Calvin College continue to say that the ultimate goal
of a Christian liberal arts education is to prepare students for a life
of service in contemporary society, for the sake of God's coming reign.
But in recent years we have been seeking a more direct connection between
the education we offer and our stated goal of preparing agents of God's
shalom in the world. Students need to be introduced to the world in which
they are called to serve more than to the academic disciplines per se;
the disciplines are important as windows and vantage points for engaging
the world. So at the heart of a Christian college, Neal Plantinga insists,
should be this question: "How will the knowledge, skills, and values
of my Christian college education . . . be used to clear some part of
the human jungle, or restore some part of the lost loveliness of God's
world, or introduce some novel beauty into it? That is, how do my education
and work make for shalom?"
"Educating for Shalom" is a profoundly biblical and theologically
rich theme, and I hope it has some staying power for us. This vision,
of the biblical drama's denouement in the reconciliation of all things
under God's restored reign, and of the role in that culmination to which
we have been called, is one of the great and distinctive contributions
of Reformed theology. As an evangelical who has been grafted into the
Reformed tradition, I have found that this vision profoundly enlarges
my understanding of the Gospel. Often, evangelicals emphasize personal
salvation and personal spiritual growth, but they have trouble answering
the next questions: Saved, for what? Spiritual discipleship, for what?
The Reformed give answer: to be agents of shalom.
Even so, I find a link missing in the Reformed tradition's expression
of purpose. How does the Old Testament's prophetic vision of God's reign
connect with the New Testament's call to preach the Gospel, baptize and
make disciples? How does the Cultural Mandate of Genesis 1:28-30 relate
to the Great Commission of Matthew 28:18-20? This question is terribly
important for us at Calvin College. If we are going to fulfil our calling
and meet the challenges Nathan Hatch set before us, we need to make this
connection.
I have been taking a speech out on the road, trying, as an experiment,
to impress upon various evangelical audiences the virtues of a Reformed
vision for higher education. I have been using the Great Commission, a
biblical theme and text, and I try to avoid using Reformed jargon. What
this experiment has taught me is that the cultural mandate of Genesis
1:28-30 is inside of the Great Commission of Matthew 28:18-20. The Gospel
of Jesus Christ is the fulfillment of the prophet's vision of shalom.
We all know that, you might be inclined to say, to which I would respond:
then let us stop dichotemizing them. Let me reason with you a bit from
the scripture reading for this morning's service, Matthew 28:18-20: Christ's
great commission to his church is to "go and make disciples of all
nations, . . . teaching them all that I have commanded you . . . ."
When we read this text, we usually dwell on the part about proclaiming
the good news of personal salvation in Jesus Christ and baptizing people
into fellowship with him and each other, but what is this discipling the
nations? It seems like an odd thought, perhaps, and often it is ignored.
Let us look a bit more closely at this mandate and its implied tasks.
Too often American evangelicals have made God's plan of redemption seem
as though it involves only the saving of individuals, and too often we
Reformed have conceded them this text. Every person is precious to God,
and God does yearn for each to repent and be saved, but saved for what
purpose? We are saved to serve God's kingdom. And what is God's kingdom,
in which we become citizens when we profess faith in Christ and enter
the fellowship of believers? The Kingdom is God's full plan of redemption,
the prophets' vision of shalom, that state in which our world will enjoy
the reign of justice, peace and delight, when all has been restored. "Seek
ye first the Kingdom of God," Jesus commands us. That is the main
task of the Christian, to be a seeker of the Kingdom, an agent for the
Kingdom, a witness to the Kingdom. We are to be witnesses to God's promise
to reconcile all things under the lordship of Jesus Christ. That is the
work of discipleship in its fullest dimension: learning to give witness
to God's grand plan of personal, societal, global, and even cosmic redemption.
Discipleship at this grand scope, as in discipling the nations, is a daunting
task. "If a nation is to be discipled," says the mission historian
Andrew Walls, "the commanding heights of a nation's life have to
be opened to the influence of Christ; for Christ has redeemed human life
in its entirety. . . . Discipling a nation," Walls continues, "involves
Christ's entry into the nation's thought, the patterns of relationship
within that nation, the way the society hangs together, the way decisions
are made." There is no one cultural blueprint for how Jesus' salvation
and his lordly reign will be played out among the world's incredible variety
of cultures. So the task of cultural discipleship is ever so complex,
because humanity is so variegated. Says Walls: "the word of Christ
is accordingly forever meeting new situations, going into conditions that
Christians have never experienced before."
Clearly, then, the church of Jesus Christ has a very broad and grand teaching
task, and this task of teaching the nations, is central to its mission.
We Protestants have given serious emphasis to the ministry of teaching,
from the pulpit, from Sunday School classrooms, and from the living room
couches of our small group Bible studies. We need to ask, however, what
task does our congregational education accomplish for discipling the nations?
It can and should accomplish a strategic task by majoring in the basics.
But as presently constituted in our churches, congregational education
cannot go into much depth. It does not advance us very far according to
our Lord's mandate to "teach the nations." That is where we
come in, my friends. We are on the front lines of this great teaching
task of the church, as missionaries in the deepest sense, engaged in what
the Jesuits used to call the "intellectual apostolate."
I must resist the historian's itch at this point to show you how the story
of modern higher education worldwide draws on this missionary basis. For
several hundred years, Christians whose lineage is in the Western tradition
have considered higher education to be one of their most strategic tools
for cultural discipleship.
Well, that is all very interesting, you might say, but if we have already
begun to work on the idea of "education for shalom," what do
we really gain by seeing Christian higher education as part of the Great
Commission, or teaching the nations? The concept of "educating for
shalom" itself should suffice; it is theologically rich and suggestive
enough. I think it is important to add this Great Commission theme for
two major reasons.
First, for the health of this community. Fairly regularly, members of
this community put the Cultural Mandate and the Great Commission into
separate, even opposing categories. That is a false dichotemy. Much of
the Reformed outlook, especially in the American situation, seems to be
a via media, or perhaps a third way; we major in "both-ands,"
rather than "either-ors," holding two apparently contradictory
beliefs or approaches in creative tension. Yet, this particular tension
should disappear. Too often, instead of challenging the typical American
Protestant dualism that separates Law and Gospel, church and world, piety
and intellect, and evangelism and social justice, we Kuyperian Calvinists,
for all of our protestations against such dualism, tend to abet it. If
the evangelicals and Anabaptists lead with the New Testament, we will
stress the Old Testament. If Lutherans want to emphasize the Gospel's
radical departure from the Law, we will push hard on the Law side. If
evangelical colleges stress piety as the locus of their Christian identity,
we who are Reformed will stress intellect, sometimes to the point of disparaging
piety. By putting the cultural mandate inside of the Great Commission,
by consciously re-linking Gospel and Kingdom, telling and doing, proclamation
and service, word and deed, evangelization and justice, we will move against
these unhealthy reactions that can keep us from the arms of the Savior,
the fellowship of the saints, the joy of working for the Kingdom in its
fullness, and the power of the Holy Spirit. We will forcefully remind
ourselves, as one wise Black preacher put it: "You can't have the
shade without the Tree."
Second, for our work
in the world. The Great Commission turns the prophets' yearning for shalom
into a mandate, one that pushes its agents out into the world. As Hatch
reminded us, this community has needed some pushing. We are moving outward
now, but what are our marching orders? Here they are: "teach the
nations all I have commanded you." We need this "Jesus told
us to do it" urgency, my friends. Not only is it perennially tempting
to build little Zions and take our ease in them, but there are open doors,
new vistas for the Gospel of the Kingdom and its agents. Let me conclude
by naming one of the grandest of them all.
We are living at the beginning of a new dispensation in the world history
of the faith. The whole pattern of Christian habitation and witness on
this planet has been radically altered. At the beginning of the twentieth
century, 80 percent of the world's Christians lived in Europe and North
America. Who among them would have imagined that in less than a century,
60 percent of the world's Christians would live outside of that region?
The world's Christian heartlands have shifted from the North Atlantic
region to the South and the East, and we are already seeing harbingers
of a corresponding shift in ecclesiastical power and agenda setting for
theology and ministry.
The major implication behind this shift, said the West African theologian,
Tite Tiénou, in his conference address here last fall, is that
"the future of Christianity no longer depends on developments in
the North." It does depend, to an increasing extent, on what is happening
all over the Global South. Leaders of revival-fired Christian movements
are now saying, in effect, "we've been saved, sanctified, and filled
with the Holy Ghost, but Jesus has not come back yet. So now what?"
The major issue now is whether Christianity can take deep root in the
many cultures where it has been planted, and bring the Gospel to bear
on the most deeply felt hopes, fears and needs within each of them. If
the quality of Christian thinking and teaching about such things is good,
says Andrew Walls, "we may see . . . a great creative development
of Christian theology; . . . mature, discriminating standards of Christian
living; . . . [and] a long-term Christ-shaped imprint on the thinking"
of these emerging heartlands of the faith. "If the quality is poor,"
Walls warns, "we shall see distortion, confusion, uncertainty and,
almost certainly, hypocrisy on a large scale."
So that is a critical mandate for Christian scholarship in this new century,
and a compelling agenda for Christian scholars and Christian colleges
worldwide. As agents of the Great Commission, we must become more strategic
and missionary in our outlook and program if we are going to respond to
the open doors the Lord has set before us. In the world in which we are
called to engage as a Christian community of learning, all of the old
categories about mission, Christendom, and heathen territory are being
overturned. Yet this is the world where Jesus shall reign, in which his
Kingdom stretches in ways and by means beyond our imagining. It is the
world that we are equipping our students to serve, as agents of the Great
Commission. It is a surprising new world, fraught with threat and opportunity,
and it will demand from us wit and strength beyond our own supply. But
we have the Lord's promise that he will be with us always, even to the
end of the age.
Joel Carpenter
Provost (1996-2006)
Calvin College
