Much is often made of the role of the college years in enabling students to ask important questions about what they have been brought up to believe. College is a time for inquiry and exploration, and for many this includes a skepticism, real or provisional, about received views and commitments. Many professors take great pride in leading students in this practice of dispossession, believing that only by such practiced doubt can the rising generation think for itself, make up its own mind, and learn to live by its own convictions.

In a recent essay in the New York Times, David Brooks questions this practice and its underlying assumptions about who we are as human beings.

A few years ago, a faculty committee at Harvard produced a report on the purpose of education. “The aim of a liberal education” the report declared, “is to unsettle presumptions, to defamiliarize the familiar, to reveal what is going on beneath and behind appearances, to disorient young people and to help them to find ways to reorient themselves.”

The report implied an entire way of living. Individuals should learn to think for themselves. They should be skeptical of pre-existing arrangements. They should break free from the way they were raised, examine life from the outside and discover their own values.

This approach is deeply consistent with the individualism of modern culture, with its emphasis on personal inquiry, personal self-discovery and personal happiness. But there is another, older way of living….

Referencing Hugh Heclo’s book On Thinking Institutionally, Brooks contends that this “older way of living” grounds personal existence in the structures and institutions into which people are born and within which they find their identity. These institutions – family, church, community, profession – serve to define who we are and what our obligations will be. “In the process of absorbing the rules of the institutions we inhabit, we become who we are.”

Think of a craft, for example, carpentry. While there is room for creativity and individuality, the craft itself carries certain expectations and obligations which define competence and excellence for carpenters. The process of becoming a fine carpenter does not primarily involve skepticism regarding the rules of carpentry in order to make the rules one’s own, but rather initiation and relentless practice under those very rules. Only after such rigorous and intentional preparation does creativity have a genuine hope of producing worthwhile woodwork which honors the craft itself.

It’s the same for poetry or painting: learn the rules and the techniques, practice the art, take instruction from master teachers, become a true craftsman with words or brush.

The rules of a profession or an institution are not like traffic regulations. They are deeply woven into the identity of the people who practice them. A teacher’s relationship to the craft of teaching, an athlete’s relationship to her sport, a farmer’s relation to her land is not an individual choice that can be easily reversed when psychic losses exceed psychic profits. Her social function defines who she is. The connection is more like a covenant. There will be many long periods when you put more into your institutions than you get out.

(Don’t miss Brooks’ quotations from Ryne Sandberg’s speech when he was inducted into the baseball Hall of Fame. You don’t have to be a Cubs fan to appreciate it – but it helps!)

It’s interesting to note that Brooks uses the word “covenant” to describe the relationship between a person and the institutions of which he or she is a part. This rings especially true for those of us in the Reformed theological stream, for our covenantal identity as the people of God across the generations serves to define who we are and what the rules and obligations of our lives will be. We set that identity aside, even for provisional educational purposes, to our own peril.

This is especially important to remember during a time when, as Brooks puts it,

…institutional thinking is eroding. Faith in all institutions, including charities, has declined precipitously over the past generation, not only in the U.S. but around the world. Lack of institutional awareness has bred cynicism and undermined habits of behavior.

People’s lives and behavior, adrift from the rules and obligations of the “craftsmanship” of the institutions to which they belong, increasingly display the dreadful consequences of “breaking free”: bank fraud, skyrocketing divorce rates, redefinition of marriage, sloppy scholarship, deconstructing or quitting church, silly “art,” and on and on.

It is not surprising that the yield of the college years, under the practice of “unsettling presumptions, defamiliarizing the familiar, and disorienting young people,” has been increasing dislocation, loneliness, transiency in relationships, and relativism.

Even some professors at Christian colleges seem to believe that their Christian students are in need of such training in skepticism, assuming that these students enter their classrooms as wound-tight, fundamentalist, unthinking drones of their overbearing, indoctrinating parents. The fact is that today’s Christian college students have been shaped just as much, if not more, by relativizing and anti-institutional forces as they have by their Christian homes and churches. Very, very few have to be encouraged to question what they were earlier taught and to consider alternative viewpoints.

The challenge today, particularly for Christian teachers, is to rebuild the ruins of the kind of institutional thinking and living of which Brooks writes, and to do so specifically and intentionally as the covenant people of God, whose identity was defined for them long before they were born, in the purposes and providence of their Creator.

At Covenant we have the opportunity to lean hard against the deinstitutionalizing and disorienting project that characterizes so much of higher education, promoting instead the gracious gift of our received covenantal identity and heritage, informed by the Scriptures and displayed in the lives of the faithful ones who have gone before us. This includes academic work that honors the historic scholarly craft with its rules and expectations. But it includes even more basically the fervent embrace of our theological convictions and godly heritage, our covenantal partnership with families and the church, and our passion for the gospel of Jesus Christ. We choose to be measured not by how well we unsettle our students, but by how faithfully we help to induct them into the covenantal family of God. And we expect to be held accountable to this measure.

Do we refuse to ask hard questions or to encourage our students to examine carefully what they believe? Of course not. Do we avoid exposing our students to the very best intellectual challenges to their faith and Christian thought? Again, no – consider as one example the recent visit to our campus of Hendrik Hertzberg, senior editor of the New Yorker magazine and a committed and articulate atheist, who spent over four hours one evening in a dynamic, back-and-forth, challenging discussion with over two hundred students.

(Here are some comments from Hertzberg’s blog posting about his visit to Covenant; his words give a very accurate sense of the tone and content of our discussions:

Covenant is no Bob Jones University—dancing is permitted, the dress code is relaxed, and check out the school Drama Association’s latest production!—but it is a stronghold of evangelical Christianity. (Motto: “In All Things Christ Pre-Eminent”.) Judging from a show of hands I asked for, the people who came to my talk all pretty much unanimously believe in a personal God who has opinions about which human sexual practices are naughty, and which are nice. Be that as it may, I liked them all—students, faculty, and the college president, Niel Nielson—very much. They were polite, serious, gracious, and un-self-righteous. I don’t know how typical the students I talked with were, but they were eager to discuss every question from “Is there a God?” to “At what point does the moral value of a human fetus exceed that of a live chimpanzee?”
….
These students live in a bubble, and they know it. But then, people like me live in a bubble, too, and, on the whole, we don’t know it. From my angle, of course, our bubble looks bigger and better. Theirs: a constricted, six-thousand-year-old world ruled by an incorrigibly small-minded God, the secrets of which are to be found in a black-bound anthology of unreliably translated old tribal stories, poems, directives, and tracts. Ours: an unimaginably immense, unimaginably ancient universe ruled by no one, the wonders and beauties of which are continually being revealed to us through our senses and our minds. The more frank and friendly conversation there is between the two bubbles, the better.)

So — do we want our students to learn to “think for themselves?” Yes – but I have to add “sort of.” Covenant students are creative, inventive, wide-thinking; they are continually coming up with new ideas and novel approaches. We happily encourage and celebrate all this.

But we don’t do so as a means of helping students dis-identify from their theological and institutional roots so that they can (hopefully) “find ways to reorient themselves.” We do it in the hope that they won’t be disoriented and will become more deeply grounded in their gospel identity and calling in Jesus Christ and his church.

Ironically, the higher education guild that patronizingly treats students like hapless victims of their parents is itself an “institution” that often demands obedience to its own rules and expectations. It’s time to provide students with the opportunity and resources to practice skepticism toward the skeptics and to reconnect with older, proven, and trustworthy pathways. That’s our mission at Covenant, and we delight in it.